“Belief leads to Behavior”
Posted: September 30, 2015
Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite radio shows (Dave Ramsey) when I happened to hear a guest interview with noted author, Max Lucado. He has hundreds of books in print, with over 82 million sold. Some estimates are as high as 100 million books. He’s that good.
While it’s always nice to hear authors tell the story behind their books, I especially like hearing Max Lucado, because he’s a gifted pastor and speaker too. So I was pretty excited to hear from him directly.
Like other noted authors and speakers, Max has the ability to take big ideas and simply them into just a couple of words that speak volumes. This time, he was talking about his new book when he made a simple statement that I just had to write down: “Belief leads to behavior.”
That’s right, isn’t it? Belief takes you a long way. If you believe that following a certain diet regimen and exercise program will help you lose weight, you’re likely to stay with it. But if you don’t see any results after a reasonable time, you’ll probably get discouraged and stop.
So the obvious question is: How can we get people to believe? Just about everyone knows they need to eat better and exercise. But I think many don’t believe they can do it. Especially if they’ve tried and tried, but never seem to get there.
One of the keys is to get around other people that believe what you want to believe. If you’re wanting to lose weight, hang around someone who’s done it, or helped lots of other people do it. They’ll believe for you, for a little while. Pretty soon, you’ll catch a little bit of that vision yourself.
Once you start to believe, things start to fall into place. A few small successes will go a long way to helping you believe you can achieve. Belief will lead to the behaviors you’re needing. Pretty soon, you’ll catch fire, because you’ll know you can do it.
So go ahead and set goals, but make sure your big goals have smaller, more easily achievable goals within them. Next week, we’ll take a look at how to do that.
Right now, I’ve got to go. There’s this little project I’ve been working on… I broke it down into smaller steps, and I’m almost there!