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Step 5: Change Your Actions
Actions encompass how you treat your body, spiritual life, relationships, work, and community-from heroic deeds to daily habits. Our brains crave familiarity and equate predictable with "safe," which is why changing actions is so difficult. To create real change, we must disrupt these patterns and take drastic action, even when it feels uncomfortable.
Most people fail at change because they focus on goals rather than identity. To truly change your actions, first decide who you want to become. Instead of saying "I want to lose weight," decide "I am a person who honors my body so I can think clearly, play with my kids, and serve my community." After establishing your new identity, focus on small wins-the specific, detailed actions that move you toward who you want to become.
You can't be well by yourself. Look at any successful person-LeBron James has a nutritionist, coaches, and trainers; Dave Ramsey has his Eagles Group and Operating Board. Community provides both support and accountability. When changing your actions, leverage connection: join a gym with friends for exercise accountability, work with a specialist for trauma healing, or find a prayer group to deepen your spiritual practice.
The secret to lasting change is consistency: little steps, taken repeatedly, for the rest of your life. It's hard at first but usually gets easier, though new challenges will arise. You won't lose sixty-five pounds tomorrow or heal childhood trauma in a month, but you can take the first step, then the next. Go slow, give yourself grace, and keep working. Eventually, you'll feel lighter inside. You'll have peace, kindness, self-control, joy, love, and patience-even when life is difficult.
What we're doing isn't working. Despite adding hundreds of thousands of mental health workers, writing millions of psychotropic prescriptions, and creating endless diagnostic manuals, mental health challenges are skyrocketing. We've outsourced the fundamentals of life-our bodies, food, time, relationships, emotions-to companies, technology, and medications.
The answer-owning your stories, acknowledging reality, getting connected, changing thoughts and actions-will hurt, but you're worth getting well, being treated well, and living a joyful, free life. You can't change old sentences with periods at the end, but you can write something new.
Now that you've emptied your backpack of bricks-the trauma, abuse, loss, hatred, racism, pain-you're healing, making friends, changing thoughts and actions, reducing addictions, setting boundaries, meditating, seeing counselors, exercising, and finding your purpose. But what do you do with all these scattered bricks? You redeem them. Your pain will not be wasted.
Your bricks become part of the great old brick road, formed from the challenges and triumphs of millions before you. This is legacy-the road your children, neighbors, community, and future generations will walk on to get to work, visit loved ones, go to school, and find their way home when lost. Their lives will be better because you did the work and said "no more." This road is peace, kindness, patience, gentleness, self-control, ownership, discipline, responsibility-and ultimately, freedom.
The road to wellness isn't a destination but an ongoing direction-a legacy that impacts future generations. Wellness means having peace amidst chaos, choosing patience in traffic, forgiving those who hurt you, and balancing strength with tenderness. It means weeping bitterly while still honoring your body, engaging authentically with politics and religion, and holding life loosely. Despite life's inevitable challenges, there remains hope for humanity's future as we continue our wellness journey together.
