I’m going through 31 Days to Build a Better Blog with 60+ other bloggers.  Today is Day 6.  The e-book lesson includes 27 articles of blogging tips and tutorials, which we’re supposed to read, digest, and discuss.

It’s a bit much, in my opinion.  As I wrote in a comment, it’s a bit like drinking from a fire hose.

Generally speaking, I’m not big on memorizing a lot of little things.  I much prefer to learn some general principles and then apply those principles to specific situations.  So, as I was reading through all these tips, certain underlying principles started to emerge.

What’s more, I noticed that a lot of the general principles for blogging well are actually derived from even broader principles for living well.  Here are 7 general principles that apply to blogging as well as life in general.

1) Be yourself. People are sick of spin, sick of sales pitches, sick of phonies, sick of people who act one way with one group of people and another way with another group of people.  It’s great to learn from other bloggers, but don’t try to act like someone else.  Be honest and authentic.

2) Serve others first. The best bloggers write to help their readers.  If you’re primary reason for blogging is to make money, promote your own agenda, become popular, or express yourself it’s probably not going to work.  That means blogging posts that help your readers, responding to comments & emails, and answering questions.  This principle is true in most areas of life.  If your motives for starting a business, getting into a relationship, or even volunteering are selfish, you are much more likely to fail and be disappointed.

3) Think from perspective of the people you’re serving. As a blogger, it’s important to imagine things from the perspective of your readers.  Understand your readers’ backgrounds, education, spiritual beliefs, and politics may be different from yours.  Don’t use insider language.  Don’t talk down to your audience.  Understand that they’re busy and reading & discussing your blog posts are a very, very low priority.  Make it as easy as possible for them to engage.  Same is true with your business, church, non-profit, neighborhood organization.  In any situation where you are serving others, it’s important to understand the perspective of the people you’re serving.

4) Build relationships. Blogging really is all about building relationships – with your readers, with other bloggers in your niche, with people you can collaborate with.  Everything else is life is primarily about relationships too.  Great businesses build great relationships with their customers, their vendors, and their partners.  Great churches facilitate great relationships among their members.  And obviously great marriages, families, and friendships are all about building relationships.

5) Read a lot. As a blogger, it’s important to read other blogs.  This helps you learn from others, get to know others in your niche, provides new ideas for blog articles, and enables you to stay informed on the latest developments and issues.  Same is true in life in general.  Reading helps you learn, challenges you to grow, and often provides opportunities to develop relationships with others who are reading the same things.

6) Commit & do the work. You can’t develop a great blog if you write when you feel like or when you find the time.  You’ve got to be intentional about keeping a scheduled and writing a certain number of posts each week.  You’ll have to sacrifice some other things to meet your commitment.  Same is true in business, marriage, raising kids, volunteering, even playing golf.  If you want to do well, you have to commit to it.

7) Take risks. Bloggers that never take risk are boring, fail to connect with others, and fail to take steps to get to the next level.  Some risks you may be challenged to take:

• Reveal some personal, painful, or embarrassing things about yourself in order to help people who are facing similar circumstances.
• Write an opinion on something you know a lot of your readers will disagree with.
• Criticize someone or something you disagree with.
• Write about a topic that is taboo.
• Ask someone to guest post on your blog. They could turn you down.
• Try to raise money for a charity.  Your readers may not respond, you could fail miserably, and look like an idiot in the process.

Same is true in life in general.  You have to take risks to be successful, some of the same risks – authenticity, sharing an opinion, speaking up about something taboo, asking for help, going public with big goals.

Do you see a lot of similarities between what makes for a great life and what makes for a great blog?

Which of these principles resonates with you most?

Yesterday, we kicked off a 5 part series based on the book Worldliness by C.J. Mahaney.  With each post, we’re giving away a copy of Worldliness.  Congrats to Lee Buford who is the winner of the first copy.  We’re giving away another copy today, with details at the end of the post.

To recap… Worldliness challenges Christians with the words of Jesus found in John 2:15, “Do not love the world or anything in the world.” The world is full of things that attempt to seduce and distract us from our primary calling to love and serve God. Surveys show the lives of American Christians are not noticeably different from those who are not Christians. Whether that’s true for you or not, it’s clear that all of us battle the temptations of this world on a daily basis.

Two areas the book examines are media and music, which we’re going to take on together today.

Media is Everywhere

In today’s modern world, media constantly surrounds us from the clock radio that wakes us up, to the radio in the car, the billboards along the street, magazines, newspapers, and MP3 players.  For the last 50 years TV has been the most influential medium.  In the last few years, the Internet has surpassed TV for many people.  Now we are on the cusp of a media revolution.  Broadband mobile devices will ensure that the entire Internet is always at the tip of our fingers.

Media is Powerful

Our culture has conflicting views on the power of media.  Most people say TV, music, and commercials have little impact on them.

But our actions say otherwise.  Advertisers spend $215 billion a year just on TV commercials – because they work.  When we make presentations at work, we usually include video or Powerpoint.  Most medium and larger churches have media teams.  When we want to have a romantic evening with that special someone we carefully select the right music to set the mood.

Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system, government or church. – Kent Hughes

The Old Battle with Media

Christians have been battling media for decades.  However, the focus has been rather one-dimensional.  It’s been primarily about trying to stay away from offensive material.  How many times have we been warned of the evils of sex and violence on TV, in the movies, and in music lyrics?

I’ve heard the warnings so many times, that as soon as I even think someone’s headed down that road my instinct is to think, “Here we go again” and tune them out.  (That’s probably a warning sign in and of itself.)

The New Battle

But the temptation of worldliness is not primarily the temptation to choose evil over good, but rather to choose that which is temporary and meaningless over God.  This is true for our media consumption as well.

6 Ways Media Moves Us

I invite you to join me in examining how the media we consume moves us in these 6 ways.

1) Values. Does the media you consume support or insult your values?  Do the shows you watch make gossip, lying, and insulting people look cool?  Does it make fun of people of faith, chastity, fathers, or stay-at-home moms.  Does it glorify self-centeredness or independence?

2) Time. Is your media consumption keeping your from doing more important things?  Do you spend lots of time watching TV or online but struggle to consistently spend time alone with God?  Are you serving others?  Helping the poor?  Spending consistent time with your spouse and kids?  Or is your media consumption getting in the way of that?

3) Heart. Does the media you consume help you focus your thoughts on God?  Or do the ads and commercials cause you to daydream about what you’d like buy?  Does that TV show or website ignite lustful thoughts?  Do those love songs or romance novels stir fantasies?

4) Focus. Does having radio, TV, or computer on keep you from being able to fully focus on your work, listening to the people in the same room with you, or hearing from God?  Are there times, when you just need to turn everything off?

5) State of mind. Does your desire to keep up with your TV shows, Facebook, or Twitter stress you out?  Do you feel anxious if you don’t have your mobile phone on you?  Do you feel like you have to play Farmville, or Webkinz, or Twitter or blog every day?  Do you agonize over how others might perceive a Facebook update or tweet?

6) Pride/Humility. When you’re posting to Facebook or Twitter are you doing so just to get attention?  Are you being disingenuous in order to make yourself look good.

Discussion

Revising the poorly drawn diagram from yesterday what direction is your media consumption taking you?

Of the 6 ways media moves us mentioned above, which is the greatest struggle?  Where are you seeing the most success?

Action

Reflection and discussion are important, but they won’t change your life or redirect you more towards God . What if any changes are you going to make to your media consumption?

Get a Free Book

If you’d like a free copy of Worldliness, all you have to do is

1. Retweet this post or share it on Facebook, and
2. Post a comment to this post.

One person will be randomly selected to receive a free copy of Worldliness.  If you don’t win today, don’t worry, there are 3 more posts yet to come. If you  tweeted/shared/commented yesterday, yes, you need to tweet/share/comment today to have a chance to win the book today.

[image by oddharmonic]

EDIT 2/25 9:40 AM: I’m going to wait until tomorrow (Friday) morning to post the next article in this series (on Worldliness and money/materialism) and draw the winner of the second of 5 books.  So, anyone who shares/retweets & comments today and before 8 AM tomorrow can still win.

Thanks to Crossway Books, I’m giving away 5 copies of Worldliness over the next two weeks.  Keep reading for details on how you can get a copy.

Worldliness by C.J. Mahaney is a book written to challenge Christians with the words of Jesus in John 2:15 – “Do not love the world or anything in the world.”  Mahaney defines worldliness as “to gratify and exalt oneself to the exclusion of God.”  And the book delves into how that verse applies in 21st century American life.

Specifically, Worldliness focuses on four areas where American Christians

• Media consumption
• Music
• Consumerism
• Modesty

It then wraps up with a chapter about how Christians should love the world.

Mahaney goes to great lengths to make it clear that he is not promoting legalistic guidelines nor is he advocating Christians separate, hate, or hide from 21st century American culture, though I’m sure many will accuse him of those things anyway.

Instead, Worldliness challenges Christians who genuinely want to follow Jesus by asking soul-searching questions and providing practical suggestions for how to live lives that more resemble that of Jesus than the world today.

Favorite quotes from the book:

• If we are honest, we too may have to admit that we have a Bible of our own making – a metaphorical one, perhaps, but a cut-and-paste job just the same. (p15)
• Today, the greatest challenge facing American evangelism is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world. (p22)
• Do you relate to God as if he exists to further your selfish ambitions or are you convinced that you exist to glorify him? (p28)
• The evil in our desires often lies not in what we want, but in the fact that we want it too much.- David Powlison (p30)
• What should consume our thoughts and affections is not resisting worldliness but the glory and grace of God revealed at the cross. (p35)

There are lots of other good quotes from later in the book which I’ll include later in this 5 part series of posts.

Personal Thoughts

Surveys show that the lives of Americans who claim to be Christians are not noticeably different from those say they are not Christians.  American Christians are just as likely to divorce, lie, get even with someone, and help the poor as someone who is not a Christian.  Additionally, the spending habits, media consumption, and time-usage of American Christians are not noticeably different from general population either.

If you are a Christian, let me ask you one of the question C.J. Mahaney asks in this book: is your lifestyle obviously different from that of your non-Christian friends, neighbors, and co-workers?

It’s a question I just can’t get past.

In some ways I know my life is different.  But many times as I go through my week it seems just like any other American’s week… 5 days a week getting up at the crack of dawn, working my butt off all day at week to meet goals and expectations, come home, eat, help the kids with their homework, ball games, and extra curricular activities, then watch some TV before bed.  I get more and more tired as the week goes on, and then on the weekends I just want to have rest or have fun until it’s time to do it all over again.

Forward or upward?

The thing is that most of the things of this world that we fall in love with are not necessarily bad.  There’s nothing wrong with watching TV, buying stuff, working hard to be successful, or being admired by our friends.  Those things aren’t inherently bad like murder or stealing.  The problem is when worldly things begin to crowd out the godly things in our hearts and our lives.

As Christians, our goals should be higher than pursuing our own success or pleasure while “not doing anything wrong.” Our goals should be to follow Jesus and live a life that exemplifies His love towards others.

Let’s say you’re in Nashville, TN and you want to get to Chicago.  There’s nothing wrong with driving due east to Knoxville.  You’d still be about the same 8-hour drive away from Chicago.  But in the process you would have wasted 3 hours and about $20 of gas, and you’d be that much more tired than when you started.

That is how many of us live their lives, putting most of our time, energy, and resources into pursuits that aren’t evil but don’t take us any closer to the goal.

Mahaney challenges us with this question:

What are your goals? Do the drive you forward – to financial security, more friends, successful kids, a certain position at work, learning a craft or trade? Or do they drive you upward- to obeying and glorifying God above all else?

Upward or forward?

Maybe you give some money to church and help others, and you volunteer here and there.  On the diagram above you’re not going straight horizontal towards worldliness but perhaps a 10-degree north of that.  Are you content with putting 10% of your time, energy, and resources towards the goal while squandering 90% on worldliness?

Worldliness is not about legalistic rules or trying to shut yourself out from the world.  If you genuinely love God and want to honor Him with a life that is noticeably different the world, this book can challenge you and help you do that.

Get a free copy

If you’d like a free copy of Worldliness, all you have to do is

1. Retweet this post or share it on Facebook.
2. Post a comment about worldliness or your own struggles with worldliness.

One person will be randomly selected to receive a free copy of Worldliness.  If you don’t win today, don’t worry.  I’ll be doing 4 more posts on topics addressed in the book – media & music, consumerism, modesty, and how to love the world – and giving away a copy of the book with each post.

Earlier this week Brad Ruggles posted this funny video, How to Report the News, to his blog.  In it, Charlie Brooker describes and takes shots at the formula a lot of TV news stories follow.  Have a look.  (Pardon the F-bomb at the 25-second mark).

The video is hilarious.  But it is also eye-opening for me.

I never thought about the elements of a TV news story before.  But now that I’ve seen the formula, it makes TV news seem so disingenuous, so calculated, so boring.

I hardly ever watch TV news anymore, and this is probably at least part of the reason why.

Formulas are amazing and seductive…

We love to take things that are successful, analyze them, and condense them down into simple steps that we can follow to repeat those successes over and over without thinking.   I know I do.

I’m guessing you love formulas, too.  You clicked to read this post, didn’t you?

That’s cool, because in many situations formulas are great.  It’s hard to find fault with 12 step programs, cookbooks, and instructions for assembling a kid’s bike.  (Though, my appreciation for the latter has been known to wane on Christmas morning.)

But in other areas of life formulas can get us in trouble.  The financial formula that worked so well for someone else can bankrupt us.  Copying someone else’s formula when it comes to things like music, web design, leadership style can make us look like cheap imitations.  Using a formula or “standard procedure” can leave other people feeling like nothing more than a number.

Repeating the same formula in your church service or business meetings can start to feel like watching an episode of Scooby Doo, where the plot is predictably the same in every episode and they “would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.”

So, when is it good to use a formula, system, or process and when is it not?  How do you decide?

Happy New Year!

My apologies to those of you who may have read about this in my post on Christian Web Trends yesterday, but I think it’s too good and too applicable not to write about here…

As you would probably guess just by the name of this blog, Live Intentionally, I’m a big proponent of setting goals, that includes annual goals or resolutions.

Michael Hyatt had a fantastic post last week titled How to Make New Year’s Resolutions Stick in which he pointed out the difference between good resolutions and bad resolutions using a nifty little acronym.  It’s so good I’m just going to pilfer it for your benefit.

Good resolutions are S.M.A.R.T.:

• Specific – Goals should identify exactly what you want to accomplish.
• Measurable – Goals should be able to be evaluated with a yes/no or a numerical evaluation.
• Actionable – Every resolution should start with a verb (e.g. “Create,” “Run,” “Eliminate,” “Read”)
• Realistic – A good resolution should stretch you, but still be attainable.
• Time-bound – Every resolution should have a completion date associated with it.

Have you created New Year’s Resolutions or annual goals for 2010?  Are they S.M.A.R.T. resolutions?

If not, I hope you’ll make the time to set SMART goals for 2010.  It’s one of the most important things you can do to make 2010 your best year yet!

[image by chanc]

The world we live in is rapidly changing.  We have more choices than ever before.  We have more options for how we spend our time, how we spend our money, the media we consume, and the people we interact with.  We are also more connected than ever before through Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and smart phones.

In many ways, these are good developments.

But they can also make it very difficult to live the kind of life we want to live.  A life that’s productive.  A life full of rich relationships and experiences.

Our Hyperconnected World

Earlier today I posted a review of the book, The Church of Facebook.  In it author Jesse Rice talks about Continuous Partial Attention – This is the impulse to constantly check Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  It’s motivated by the desire to not miss anything.  It creates an artificial sense of crisis.  It can cause a person to become over stimulated and unable to focus on what’s right in front of him.

Know anyone like that?

Ever stop what you’re doing for just a second to check phone, text, or email messages and then find yourself still there 20 minutes later?

Ever login to Facebook, look up, and realize you’ve been there for an hour and have no idea where the time went?

You’re not alone.  I struggle to live well in this hyperconnected world too.  See my post from last month – Help! I’m Drowning in the Stream.

The Flash Flood

Twenty years ago people had to guard against wasting too much time in front of the TV and from telephone interruptions.  Ten years ago email started to suck away at our time and attention.  But those are a drop in the bucket compared to today’s continual stream of Facebook updates, Tweets, texts that come into our computers and now follow us everywhere we go on our smart phones.

Later Rice writes that in our hyperconnected society “life can all to often feel like little more than a knee-jerk reaction to urgent emails, phone calls, meetings, and decisions.”

Sound familiar?

If you don’t know what is most important to you, if you don’t know what you want to accomplish in 2010, and if you don’t have a plan to get there the odds are overwhelming that you’re just going to float down the stream of endless messages.

How are you dealing with the new reality of hyperconnection?  Drowning? Staying afloat?

Do you have goals for 2010 and a plan to live intentionally rather than reactively?

I’ve been doing a lot of work and experimentation in the last month with time management and social media management plans.  It’s made a huge difference in my productivity and emotional well-being.  I’ll be blogging more about that soon.

Earlier this week I had the great opportunity to fly to Chicago and participate in Cultivate, a conference that I would describe as a series of “organized conversations” for participants to discuss issues related to church communications.  I couldn’t stay for the Story conference, but was drawn to the tweets and blogs like a moth to a flame.

Cultivate was a tremendous experience.  I learned some new things.  I was inspired and challenged by the speakers.  I met and had wonderful conversations with a lot of people who share my passion for helping the church communicate more effectively, some of them people I’ve known online for years and finally got to meet in person.

But, let’s get to the bottom line… what’s changed?

If you were at Cultivate and/or Story, how is your life going to be different because of the experience?

Here’s the truth about me…

I love conferences.  I love books.  I love reading blogs.  I love connecting with people who have similar passions.  But when they’re finished there is so much work to catch up on. It’s so easy for me to jump back into  just go back to life as usual.

Knowledge is important, but knowledge alone doesn’t change lives.

Inspiration is important, but inspiration alone doesn’t change lives.

Connections to other people are important, but connections alone don’t change lives.

Unless I actually do something different – take some sort of action – nothing has changed.  Agree or disagree?

Here’s what I’m going to do

• Continue to build on the relationships I developed with people at Cultivate in order to continue the conversations about how to use technology to connect and communicate more effectively.
• Check out what Gabe Taviano is doing at DigitalDisciples.net.
• Press the issue at my church: how can we better use the tools at our disposal (website, email, facebook, twitter, texting, etc) to get better at evangelism, getting people connected, discipleship, and serving in the community?
• Reflect on the question: how can my church and the churches OurChurch.Com serves better connect, communicate, and serve people through their mobile phones?
• Reflect on the question: in what ways can we move away from the old “command and control” style of church leadership and move towards empowering people in our churches to be evangelists, disciplers, and servants within their sphere’s of influence?

How about you?  What are you going to do differently because of your experience at Cultivate or Story?

From time to time every leader has to deal with people on his or her team that are not performing up to expectations.  Someone is dropping the ball and forgetting to do things.  Someone is not getting tasks done on time.  Someone’s work is not up to standard.  It could be a number of things.  Then you’ve got to have one of those difficult conversations bringing the issue to their attention, trying to find out what the underlying problem is, and then making changes so performance improves.

But what if the person under performing is you?

What if you are the one who is keeping your team from meeting its goals?

That’s the situation I find myself in now.

As my company, OurChurch.Com, has grown, we’ve added staff to do member support, sales, graphic design, web design, and search engine optimization.  But I still wear two hats, that of CEO and primary software developer.  As we’ve grown as a company, both of those roles have continued to grow.

As CEO, I do weekly meetings with each of our senior staff.  As we’ve added staff, I’ve added meetings.  Several years ago I began leading semi-annual strategic planning meetings (and implementing those plans).  Three plus years ago I started writing the Christian Web Trends blog.  Last year I began doing weekly marketing meetings and exhibiting and speaking at conferences.

As my CEO responsibilities have grown, they’ve squeezed more and more time away from development.  Deadlines have been missed.  Projects have sat on my to do list for months.  When we would gather as a team for those strategic planning meetings and assess our progress, it was obvious I was not getting my stuff done.  It’s been frustrating and embarrassing.

How can I hold the other members of my team accountable, when I am missing more deadlines than I’m making?

So, what do you do when you’re the person hindering your team?

Here’s what I think:

1. Admit it to yourself. You know there’s a problem.  Your team is not meeting its goals.  The longer you live in denial about what the primary problem is, the longer the problem will continue to plague your team.  It’s time to be honest with yourself.
2. Humbly take responsibility for your failings. Chances are other people on the team have already known you’ve been holding things up but didn’t want to say anything.  Blaming others, not saying anything, or creating a double standard for yourself will destroy your team’s trust in you.
3. Develop a plan. Some possible solutions might include restructuring your schedule to put more time or more of your most productive time into the area that needs it, delegating to/training another staff member on some of your responsibilities, or hiring someone who can do the work better than you can.
4. Stick to the plan. Restructuring your schedule, training others, and hiring all take time and effort.  The challenge with implementing the plan is that it will initially call for even more from you at a time when you feel like you have the least to give.  Find a way to do it.  If you don’t, in 6 months you’ll find yourself in exactly the same situation, except you and your team will be even more frustrated.

I’m in the process of doing this now.  We’ve hired a new software developer to take most of the development work off my plate.  She starts Tuesday.  It took a lot of time to review resumes and conduct interviews.  It will take even more time to get her up to speed on our development projects.  But I am making the time because it’s the only way to move forward.

Have you ever felt like you were the biggest impediment to your team meeting its goals?  How did you handle it?

[image by eqqman]

Yesterday sucked!

Some of it was circumstances – lunch went long, an interview went long. And then there was the technical problem I was trying to resolve.

After spending 2 hours implementing a solution, I realized it would only fix half the problem.  I had scheduled 45 minutes for it. It was going to be done by 11:45 AM. Now it was 5 PM. I was way behind schedule, tired, and frustrated. So, what did I do?  I wasted more time playing games. (BTW, if you’ve never played Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, don’t. It’s totally addictive.)

I ended up only getting about half the work done I had planned yesterday.  Maybe I could blame the events of the day, but the truth is I was mostly to blame. I didn’t manage my time or frustration well.

So, here I am today…

I already had a full plate today – 2 interviews, development work, a blog article to write. Then at 5:15 I leave work for a 4-5 hour church elders meeting.  Now I have to figure out what to do with the half day of work I didn’t get done yesterday.

And I’m still upset with myself about yesterday.

(By the way, if you’re thinking, “If he’s so busy and behind schedule, why is he writing a blog article?”  That’s a good question.  I’m processing. I work through my frustrations and bring them into perspective by writing.)

Yesterday is gone. It was a bad day, but there is nothing I can do to change it.  Staying upset with myself is not going to make today better.  Allowing negative self-talk to go on in my head is only going to make things worse.

I pray that God would forgive me for not being a good steward of the precious time He gave me yesterday. And I pray for a fresh start today. We are so blessed to have a merciful God who is so willing to forgive and give us a fresh start! And does not hold my failures against me, neither should I.

Of course, it doesn’t mean I don’t have to deal with the consequences of what I did yesterday. I am going to have to reprioritize my schedule for the day. I will probably have to give up something fun in order to get done those things I didn’t do yesterday. But now I can do it with a good attitude.

So, how about you?

Do you need a fresh start today?

Maybe for you it wasn’t poor time management, but something else you’re upset with yourself for doing. Perhaps it was an outburst of anger. Or maybe you lied or let lust get the better of you. Perhaps you’re struggling with an addiction or a bad habit.

Put yesterday behind you. Start today with a fresh slate. Even if you’ve told yourself that a thousand times and you’ve fallen short a thousand other days, God will still forgive you if you ask. And you can give yourself another chance.

Today is a new day. Let’s make the most of it!

[img by suvcougar]

I spent last week with my extended family in Helen, GA – my two brothers, their families, and my parents.  If you’re counting along at home, that’s 8 adults and 7 children under the age of 10 all sharing one house for a week.

There was really nothing normal about the week.

We were in a different state with different climate. We stayed up late and got up late. We ate different foods at odd times.  We shared bathrooms.  Our kids shared bedrooms.

And no one tried to kill each other.  Crazy, I know.

(It also gave me lots of material to blog about, so stay tuned.)

Whenever you take a trip of this magnitude you’re bound to forget something, and we forgot the worst of all possible things. The one thing that absent would make our entire trip miserable…

Aryn’s “passie.”  That’s toddler for pacifier.

Aryn is now 2 ½.  We cut her older sister and brother off on their second birthday.  But for reasons I won’t go into here, we decided not to tackle that issue with Aryn at that time.

In retrospect, I’m not sure that was the best idea. You see she started out going to bed with one passie.  Then a few months ago she started grabbing a second passie to hold in her hand.  Then in the last few weeks she was demanding a 3rd passie. It was getting out of control! We were starting to consider paciholics anonymous.

So, you can imagine the horror when we arrived at our rental house, got the kids ready for bed and realized… we had forgotten to pack any pacifiers.

The interesting thing about it, though, is that Aryn only asked for her passie once that night, and then not again the rest of the week.  The oddity of sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in a strange room of a strange house helped her break her passie addiction. I’m happy to say she’s been passie free for 12 days now.

I found that breaking routine doesn’t only work for 2 year olds. I’ve gotten into the habit of drinking coffee throughout the day while working. But with all the stuff we did during the trip, being in and out of the house, I only ended up drinking a half cup of coffee a day. And I didn’t even miss it.

If you want to break a bad habit, it helps to put yourself in a different setting and keep yourself off balance with different activities.

On the downside, however, I also neglected a lot of my good habits.  During our 9-day trip I didn’t exercise at all, I didn’t read the Bible, I forgot to take my multi-vitamin, and I didn’t journal or blog.

The trick is to keep the bad habits broken, while re-establishing the good habits.

How about you? Have you broken a bad habit by getting out of a familiar setting and routine? Do you have a bad habit you’re trying to break?  Are you changing your setting/routine to help do that?