Listen to episode 227 of the Inspirational Living podcast: New Year’s Resolutions | How to Keep Them. Edited and Adapted from The Mind & Its Education by George Herbert Betts, published in 1906.
Motivational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. I’m launching today’s podcast a day early to welcome in the New Year. I’m sure many of you have made set goals for 2018 and made New Year’s resolutions to live in ways that are healthier to the mind, body, and spirit. To do this successfully is all about changing our habits — getting rid of the bad ones and creating positive new ones.
So, habit formation is the subject of today’s reading, which I’ve pulled from the archive. It is edited and adapted from The Mind & Its Education by George Herbert Betts, published in 1906.
Habit is our "best friend or worst enemy." We are "walking bundles of habits." Habit is a "cable which we cannot break." Such are the popular expressions linked with habitual behavior. In other words, let me know your habits of life, and you have revealed your moral standards and conduct. Let me discover your intellectual habits, and I understand your type of mind and methods of thought.
In short, our lives are largely a daily round of activities dictated by our habits in this line or that. Most of our movements and acts are habitual; we think as we have formed the habit of thinking; we decide as we are in the habit of deciding; we sleep, or eat, or speak as we have grown into the habit of doing these things. But while habit may be considered a tyrant, its potential benefits far exceed the bad.