I’ve spent a lot of time lately feeling sorry for myself.

Because at the rate I’m going, given the amount of time and energy I have to spend here and on my other creative projects–I’m unlikely ever to make the kind of impact on the world I’ve always dreamed of.

Of course, I’m even less likely to make that impact if I never write, never post, never create.

See, I’ve spent a fair bit of time this year studying habits, learning how they work and building a few of my own. It turns out habits are more powerful than self-discipline, because once a habit is set, it requires very little self-discipline to maintain.

So here I am, with three simple steps that came to me today. Three steps I can take every day to build my courage habit. If you’re interested, you can try them as well.

Habit #1: Give myself five minutes.
No matter how busy I am, I can find five minutes for myself: five minutes of quiet with no phone and no distractions, five minutes to center myself and intentionally consider my priorities for the day. For me, this needs to be as close to the beginning of the day as I can make it. As I’m building this habit, I might have to do this more than once a day.

Habit #2: Make one hard choice.
I’ve talked about this one before. The choices I avoid tend to pile up until they form a mountain only a goat could ever hope to get over, and that’s before I ever even get to the new hard choices that come up in the course of my day. By intentionally seizing one each day, I not only whittle away at the pile, I train my brain and heart not to shy away when a new one comes up. Today, that choice was logging in to this site to post this.

Habit #3: Forgive one person.
What does forgiveness have to do with courage? More than we might think. It takes a toll on my health, holding on to a grudge: I’ve heard it described as drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. That said, it’s hard to do, and it requires me to intentionally let go of a source of anger my brain would just as soon keep around, thank you very much. Today, I forgave someone who said something careless to me a few days ago. It didn’t require speaking to them about it, although sometimes it might–forgiveness is about how I feel, and it’s for my benefit, not theirs.

As I take these actions day after day, making them intentional and thoughtful and deliberate, eventually my brain will rewire itself to crave them. That’s when I’ll know they have become habits. And that’s when the real change starts, because if they’re habits for me, if I’m doing them automatically every day, I don’t have to expend energy to make them happen. Which means I can start focusing my energy on some other way I can change the world.

With a little luck, you may have found something helpful in these three habits. If so, take it with my blessing. Use it to build your own courage habits. And with a little practice, we can start changing the world together.