Being Intentional About Moral Growth

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We can't always predict when opportunities to manifest compassion, love, generosity, etc., will arise. But why settle for randomness in moral growth? Why not plan for it instead? Try structuring your life around moral improvement. After all, both virtue and the recipients of our virtuous actions matter. Here are some small ways to weave moral growth into your life:

• Pick a virtue of the week (or the month). Here are some good ones: patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, generosity, gratitude, compassion, and bravery. Make one of these your focus for the week, mediating on it during your ride to work or while you're eating breakfast. Imagine ordinary situations throughout your day where you might be called upon to manifest it. Look up short videos or articles about people who manifest the virtue. And so on. 
• Read about the lives of moral exemplars (or watch documentaries about them). Damon and Colby's excellent book, The Power of Ideals, has nice, short summaries of different moral exemplars, their struggles, sacrifices and inspiring lives. 
• Expose yourself to information about injustices and harms facing others (e.g., see We Live Here Podcast for insight into the ongoing impact of racial segregation). 
• Do things in community. Make new years resolutions or moral resolutions with community. Collectivize with your friends to sponsor a child through World Vision, to donate to a reputable charity (see givewell.org), to meet or talk regularly and keep each other accountable to one's moral convictions. Get wisdom from them about how to lead a more fruitful life. I recently met with a friend to get feedback about my yearly budget, hoping I had calculated things right so as to have ample space for charity (I was so neglectful of this last year. Argh!). Thanks to his feedback, I had to rework a lot of what I had planned. I and my budget are better for it. 
• Increase the amount you give each year to charity or tithing. This will include being thoughtful about your budget and how much you spend on luxuries. 
• Find routines for blessing those in your life. Regularly write notes of encouragement to friends and family. Or, more simply, send encouraging texts or messages on a regularly basis. Recently, I've decided to focus on one of my friends or family members every week to think about, pray and encourage them.  
• Practice affirming the achievements and "gold" (i.e., the potential, good qualities, virtue) of others when it would be easy to fixate on their failures, vices or on how they pose a threat to your own success. I'm a PhD candidate in a competitive program working on a degree for which there is a poor market. It's easy to fixate on my own successes, to see the successes of others as a threat to my own career or as an occasion to display my own competence. Celebrating the good in other people's lives––especially when there is a competitive or strained dynamic between me and them––is challenging...and it's formative. It softens my heart and helps me live from a place of generosity
• Get to know people who are different than you (whether different in age, ethnicity, belief, etc.).
• In addition to random acts of kindness, add calculated, planned-for acts of kindness. Plan ahead each month and determine how you're going to bless someone else (a colleague, a friend, a family member, and so on).  
• Practice responding in "the opposite spirit." When you're approached in a critical, condescending, or accusatory way, take a deep breath and respond in a gracious, charitable and honoring way. What I like about this is that it communicates to your critic that your identity doesn't rest in their approval nor in your own moral ego. Think about that last one. My identity can't be in my own moral uprightness or else I'll crumble anytime someone criticizes my character. I'll get defensive. I'll lash back. If my identity is in my own moral uprightness, confrontation is a threat to who I am rather than an opportunity to become more. When my identity is secure, I take it better. Confrontation is painful, but I won't be paralyzed by it. 
• Last one: keep a yearly journal of your personal challenges and successes. It's immensely rewarding to look back on a year of my life and see how I've grown. It's also an opportunity to see where I've atrophied in my character or failed to live up to my ideals.

Plan for a life of moral growth. It's worth it. "When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.” – Martin Luther King