Failed Your Bible Reading Plan? Here's How to Make Christian Habits Stick

Lessons from Tiny Experiments by Ann-Laure Le Cunff

Last time, I started a Tiny Experiment to read the Bible every day for 30 days:

I have already failed.

“Failure” might be too strong. I missed a day. Then forgot about it for a week. Now I’m back into it, and learning that it takes more than hope to create something new.

Today, we’ll discuss how to make your Tiny Experiment work, despite all the headwinds you’ll face. We can make our tiny experiment happen.

Here are five principles that help us stick with our new habits:

Make It TINY

In your tiny experiment, make it easy to succeed and hard to fail.

For my Bible reading experiment, I was aiming to read four chapters every single day.

Then came a day when I left home at 3:30 am and got back after 1 am the next day. So I didn’t get my reading done.

Now I’m adjusting my process so the goal is four chapters, but the minimum is just to open the Bible and do some reading. If I miss a day, it’s not a ‘failure’, I’ll just get back to it the next day.

Make it Salient

Your mind is constantly filtering out almost everything in your environment to point out what you should pay attention to. It automatically discards everything it deems irrelevant and directs your attention to what is salient.

Salience is the degree to which something grabs your attention. It reflects what’s most important to you. To succeed in your experiment, make it salient.

Create cues for your experiment, like putting your running shoes by the door when you wake up. Remind yourself of your ‘why’ for your experiment, and write out the reasons it’s important to you.

Remove anything else that might be salient and pull your attention away from what’s most important. For example, as I write this, my phone is in another room, so it can’t seize my attention. I also have a website blocker running, preventing distracting websites from being salient.

Make It Inevitable

Your Tiny Experiment should be as automatic as brushing your teeth. It should be impossible to avoid making it happen.

This takes some planning. For example, I put my Bible somewhere I can’t avoid it. It’s on top of my laptop every day to remind me to read Scripture before I open the screen.

To win at doing something new, it has to become your number one priority. If you make it a requirement, you’ll make it happen. If you put it off until you ‘get around to it’, you never will.

If you find yourself procrastinating on the task, Anne recommends you answer three questions and adjust the plan to make sure all of the answers are positive:

• Is the task appropriate? (Make sure it aligns with your goals and skills)

• Is the task exciting? (Make it fun and interesting)

• Is the task doable? (Make it less daunting)

Connect With Community

Succeeding with a new practice is made way easier when you have people doing the same challenge with you.

When I first completed 75HARD (a 75-day challenge requiring two workouts per day), I only made it because I had a group of people holding me accountable to completing the challenge. I’m starting that challenge again tomorrow, and I’ll find a group to help me through it once more.

Having people by your side makes the experience more fun and makes you more likely to finish what you started.

Practice in Public

Especially with creative habits, making your challenge public gives you more motivation and encouragement to succeed.

With my writing, knowing people will read it forces me to hold myself to a higher standard of excellence with each article. It also prevents me from giving up, because then I would let down the people I could encourage, guide, and motivate.

It’s Your Turn

Have you started a Tiny Experiment yet? If not, give the last article a read and figure out what you want to start.

Then, ask yourself the following:

• How can you make it TINY?

• How can you make it salient?

• How can you make it inevitable?

• What community can hold you accountable?

• Where can you share your results publicly?

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