MFP 320: Super Habits for the Family

Summary

Have you ever wanted to stop yelling at your kids?  Be more courteous to your spouse?  Or be more orderly at home?  Enter Super Habits!  These are not just new things for you to learn to do, these are life-changing actions that will make you happier, healthier and more successful in many areas.  In this interview, we spoke to Dr. Andrew Abela, author of the book Super Habits and his wife Kathleen who explained to us how to apply this book to family life.  They gave us some great insights and showed us how Super Habits can be the answer to what we all need in our parenting and marriages.  And the best part is that these habits are already present in us, we just need to activate them.  Listen in! 

 

Key Takeaways

• Every virtue is a habit anyone can cultivate, not just a characteristic or personality trait.  We can all grow and change. 

• All new habits create new neurological pathways in our brains, but the advantage of Super Habits is that these are pathways that are native to us already, we already have the “muscles”; we just need to use them. 

• Super habits do three things - they make us happier, healthier, and they have a positive effect on multiple areas of our lives.   

• St. Thomas Aquinas has the best system of organizing the virtues! We all need fluency in the language of virtues. 

• All growth in Super Habits is slow and steady so keep going! 

• Virtue happens when we channel our desires correctly - not squash them. 

• Growth in Super Habits is the answer to “helicopter” or “bulldozer” parenting 

• We need to be aware of the full range of virtues for the full flourishing of the human person. 

 

Couple Discussion Questions

• In what ways have we already developed some Super Habits?  How did we do that? 

• What Super Habit will help us in our parenting?  How can we support each other in cultivating it?  

Resources

• Superhabits Book, Sophia Press: sophiainstitute.com/product/super-habits/

• Andrew Abela on Linked In: www.linkedin.com/in/deanabela

• Superhabits on Substack: superhabit.substack.com/

• Cana90 - messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

Beloved Event - arrayofhope.regfox.com/beloved