Seven Tips For Improvement

“Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you, and is able to save your souls, be doers of the word, and not hearers only deluding yourself”, be doers of the word.  With all that’s going on today, we often feel discouraged and feel helpless to change so many things. So, there is a lot that we can’t change, but it’s good to concentrate on what we can change. There’s a lot that we can change. And we can work on that to be doers of the word that the reading today speaks of the commandments, which are clear guides that the Lord gives as to how we can act, what we should do. And so today, I want to give you seven tips, seven tips, a lot of these are taken from traditional Catholic practices, but which are also not just Catholic.  It’s like a toolbox of a number of different things, different practices that you can use. And so, you’re not going to be able to remember all of this today, but maybe just focus on one or two things that you could begin to put into practice. And it is a lot, seven is a lot. But that’s one of the reasons we record these homilies, so that it can be a reference so that you and other people can come back because oftentimes when people speak with me in confession about certain problems, I’d like to give them these tips. But there’s not a lot of time in confession. So, this is a little something to reference. So, the seven tips are: one is Focus, focus on one thing.  Think of a wedge, why is a wedge so effective? It’s because it’s focusing all the force on one line. Or we know how a magnifying glass when you focus it, it can burn, because it’s focusing all that energy from the light. So, we’re often feeling overwhelmed by so many things to do, and we don’t know where to start. And so, we feel like paralyzed. And so, it can be helpful to ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, and then choose one thing, get started on one thing, focus on one thing.  For example, maybe taking a regular time, making a regular time to pray each day, or maybe correcting certain things that I say. And this, for instance, this can be helpful for a person when you’re preparing for confession. And you don’t have any mortal sins, maybe to focus on maybe three or four of what you think after praying about it, what are the most important ones. So instead of doing a long list, you focus on what are the most important so that you can become more aware of those. So that’s the first point, focus. The second point is then to set a clear goal.  A clear goal like clear, specific, like say maybe if you want to become more humble, maybe the goal you say is to make 40 acts of humility. So that’s specific because becoming more humble is rather vague. But making 40 acts of humility is much more specific. Or if you want to get to know Jesus better, maybe when you make a goal to read one of the Gospels. So, a specific goal. And to make it specific, it’s often helpful to set a certain length of time. For instance, that’s what Lent is, every Lent. It’s we know it a certain time, a certain 40 days. And so, we can focus on an effort because we know it’s going to be 40 days or like a novena and a novena of prayers is a certain we know that there’s a certain number, nine days, or like there’s Marian consecrations, which are 33 days. So, the fact that it’s specific makes that goal much more encouraging for us. So that’s the second point goal. The third is to make it easy. make them easy steps. Think of a staircase. You know we don’t really think about it, but a staircase is a great invention. Because think if you didn’t have a staircase and you had to jump up to the floor above. That would be really hard, right? Maybe you couldn’t do it. But a staircase makes it much easier. It makes it doable. Maybe it’s still kind of tiring, but it’s doable. And so, making the steps easy, is very helpful. For instance, if we’re trying to get started, if we’re trying to begin praying each day, maybe instead of saying I’m going to do it for an hour, maybe we just, say 10 minutes. Or if 10 minutes is too long, just five minutes, that’s so easy that you can say to yourself, well, that’s not too hard, I can do that. Because if you make it too hard, you might do it once or twice, but then you get discouraged.  Make it easy. Or, for instance, say a person wants to work on custody of the eyes, which is not easy. And so, one thing we can do is start, say a guy likes motorcycles. And so, he could say, he can start with something easier. Like when I see a motorcycle that I like, I’m going to turn away, just practice on something easy, make it easy. And one of the things that makes it easy is when we prepare in advance, like if a certain thought comes to my mind, like I’m struggling with anxiety. So, I decided that whenever a thought of anxiety, temptation to fear comes, I’m going to say, Jesus, I trust in you.  By preparing in advance what we’re going to do, it’s makes it easier when we face that situation, we don’t have to figure out when it happens, we already know what we’re going to do. And so, the value of making it, the importance of making it easy, is because it’s so important to get started. If making it easy, makes it much easier to get started, and when we get started, then we can begin to build momentum. And begin makes it much easier to persevere. Once you begin it’ like the wedge, then it can gradually get wider and wider. But the important thing is to begin and in making it easy does so. And so, the fourth point is a routine. To have this like if you’re trying to begin a new habit. Just make it part of your routine. Don’t just say like I’m going to start praying each day, but decide, I’m going to start praying at this time. Like, maybe make it part of your morning routine. Like after I take a shower, I’m going to take 10 minutes to pray or before I go to bed, I’m going to take 10 minutes to pray, make it part so that you fit it into your routine. Because when you do that, you don’t have to figure out each day, when am I going to do that, that adds a lot of stress to it, you already know. And pretty soon, it just becomes part of your routine, like the Sunday Mass. You don’t have to think now when am I going to go to Mass this week, you know, it’s Sunday morning. Or like there’s many of you are familiar with the Liturgy of the hours, those prayers were charged for a certain time of the day, morning, noon, evening, night. And so that makes it much easier to pray when it’s part of our routine. A lot of productivity experts and personal coaches and therapists have began speaking about the importance, how helpful it is to have rituals in our life. And of course, the Catholic Church has known for millennia, the importance of rituals, how helpful they can be that the whole Mass is a ritual.  We don’t have to decide every Sunday. Okay, now, when are we going to sing the Gloria? And when should we, you know, when did we have communion today. So, it’s part of a ritual, we don’t have to make that up each time. So, the fifth point is awareness, awareness to help us when we’re focusing, we want to become more aware of a certain thing. And so that’s why it’s helpful to have reminders, you know, simple reminders, like you say, if we want to work again, on maybe humility or patience, maybe we make a special prayer in the morning, every morning, having a special prayer asking the Lord to help us grow in that particular way, in humility or in patience. And so that morning prayer can help us be a reminder each morning of what I’m going to focus on that day. And other things like maybe if there’s an image, or a cross, or maybe some words, maybe a passage from scripture that help remind you of the effort that you’re making. You can maybe put that on your mirror or put that on your bedside or maybe put it in your car.  Like if you’re wanting to try to become more patient, in your driving, you could put it on your steering wheel, so you see it when you get in. So, those are very simple things, right? This is not anything that none of us could do, all of us could do these things, these simple reminders and of course, having a phone or a watch.  You know, what makes too many watches today, you can set reminders or phones, you can set all sorts of reminders with phones, and like a lot of people like to try to help remember, the three o’clock hour, they set a reminder on their phone. So those reminders are simple way to become aware of this point that we’re focusing on. And so, the point six, is to track our progress to evaluate how we’re doing. There’s, you know, there’s a traditional Catholic practice of an examination of conscience at the end of the day. And so that’s a very helpful moment to look back on the day. And perhaps especially on this point that I was focusing on, how did I do on this particular point? So in the morning, we reminded ourselves of it. And in the evening, an examination of conscience, we evaluate, how did I do? How am I doing?  Like St. Faustina, she gives examples where she gives even in her diary, or she gives examples where she has a chart, and when she has what she’s working on, and she charts the number of how many times she did it, like two times a day, and four times, the next day, and so forth. So, if we’re trying to improve our prayer, we can’t easily measure the quality of our prayer. Prayer that may seem to us worthless may be very different in Lord’s eyes, and we can’t easily measure that. But what we can keep track of is the time that we spent, that’s not a perfect measure of it, but it’s helpful. For instance, we can’t measure how well you’re participating in Mass. There’s no score, how well did you participate at Mass today, but you can know that you at least came, at least made the effort to come and that’s already a lot. I mean, think of the rosary, the rosary that our Blessed Mother gives us. It’s a very, so that the point is union with letting Mary help us be united to Jesus, as Saint John Paul pointed out in his document where he said “the goal is union with Jesus.” But that’s a very challenging goal, how do we go about it?  So, she gives us a very simple thing that we can do with a very clear goal. If the goal is to pray the rosary, you know, when you pray the rosary, I mean, you can pray it better, you can pray it worse. But you know, when you’ve prayed it, right, you can even see where you are, how many, what mystery you’re in, and how many Hail Mary’s is even something you can hold in your hand. And that helps us, right, something that we can hold in our hand. And it even has images like that has a crucifix and it has maybe a metal on it. Because all those things help us to track how we’re doing. Okay, we know, I pray the rosary today. Or I prayed two mysteries of the Rosary. Right now, I’m beginning the third mystery. We know where we are, we can track easily that very simple, simple help our Blessed Mother gives us, makes it very simple to track how, where we are. And so there’s many different ways you can track an effort, you can track it on a calendar or a sheet of paper. If you’re trying to do the 40 acts of humility, you can note them down on a sheet of paper. There’s a lot of apps right now, the sophisticated apps to track habit. But I like some time to use something like a stone. Get marbles or little stones, to get nice stones that you can buy. You can buy really nice stones very cheap, nice, polished stones that look pretty, you can get very cheap. And you can just see how long it is going to take me to fill up this jar with those stones. And you can track it that way. And so, we can track that if we can track the times that we fail, so we want to try to diminish that. But it can also be very helpful to track our victories. So often we focus way too much on our say afraid we’re struggling with some temptation to often we struggle way too much with our failings and not enough on the victories. Because all the times that you resist the temptation, all the time you turn to the Lord. That’s not only not a failure, but it’s something positive. It’s a victory, a victory you’ve gained for the Lord. So, you know, for instance we’re having temptation about a certain thing, we can also check how many times when a temptation comes, do I remember to turn to the Lord maybe say a little prayer. And so, we’re tracking then the victories that we can say, how long is it going to take me to get maybe 40 of those victories? Or how many of those victories can I get this week. And so that way, instead of dreading the temptation, you see it as an opportunity to win a victory. And so that’s tracking the sixth point of tracking. And the last point seven is consequences, having consequences. When I was in the Brothers of St. John, we had it when we were in our Mass in a different monastic prayers, we celebrate together where there is about 100 of us there was a was a big, big group there in the chapel. And if you came in late, at the entrance to the choir where all the monks were, you had to kneel down and next to the pryor, you couldn’t just go right to your place, you had to kneel down next to your prior. And wait, till he tapped you on the shoulder. And so it’s not a big deal. I mean, we could maybe we could start that for Mass, right? We could, uh, whenever you come, we won’t do that for Mass. But, um, but it wasn’t a big deal. But it was a little consequence. And which was a little, a little help to inspire you, because it was reminding you that if I get there late, that’s disruptive for the others, because you have to go all the way up to your place. And, and so it’s a little consequence that reminds you to make an effort. And so, for instance, if we say, if we have trouble cursing out people when we’re driving. And so, one thing we could do is decide, okay, if that if I do that, I’m gonna pray a Hail Mary for the person, right, because we don’t want to curse a person out, we don’t maybe think of praying for them. But if we decide in advance, I’m going to pray for them, I’m going to pray Hail Mary, right away for that person. After I curse. I mean, when I when if the curse gets out, then I’m going to pray the Hail Mary.  There’s two things that that does, it makes us more aware of that. It makes us more aware of what we’re trying to change. And secondly, it’s an opportunity to repair that, at least make some spiritual reparation. And so instead of just you’re not only angry at that person, but also disappointed with myself, we have an opportunity right away, to do something positive for that person and it’s also helping us. So that’s an example of a consequence. And one thing that can help with the consequences, for instance, to have a partner and accountability partner, someone who’s helping us, we’re sharing the effort that we’re making. And even confession does that to some degree, it can be helpful that that’s just the fact that we know that we’re going to need to confess something can be, that’s a consequence, and that can help us make a change.  And so just tracking something is already a motivation. I mean, think of the games, think of all the games in which we’re motivated, because we keep score, right? I mean if two teams played, and nobody kept score, there wouldn’t be quite the same motivation, right?  If we had a Super Bowl, and they played, you know, for an hour, and then that was it, nobody, there’s no score, there wouldn’t be as much motivation, right. And so just keeping score is motivating for us to see how we’re doing. I did better this week, I tried harder, and I can see that I did better. That’s one of the reasons the games are so attractive, because we can see how well we’re doing. And we could say to ourselves, if I get to the certain score, I’m going to celebrate, you can choose however you want to celebrate, but the celebrated as part of the motivation are given. And so those are the seven points I wanted to share with you today. The seven tips though, I’ll just go over those again, one, focus, two, a goal, three, easy, make it easy steps, four, make it a routine, a set time, five, awareness, have reminders to help, six, to track and evaluate that, and seven, to have consequences that you give yourself. And again, that’s a lot of points, but this will be recorded, so that you can go back if you want to listen to it again. So just remembering that this passage we began with, “humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls, being doers of the word and not hearers only.”  And so, with our Blessed Mother, let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us see simple ways that we can also become more and more doers of His word.  Amen.