Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin

I read this book three years ago, right after it came out, and I remembered it being good. Good enough that I decided to use it as our inaugural book club book for the book club I'm starting in our ward here! I am so excited about it and so hopeful that people will want to join. And I think this was a great choice for a book club pick. I have three pages of quotes and notes and questions of things I want to discuss with the group after reading it through again. You definitely don't need to read the whole thing to get a lot of the benefit of it, but I thought it was really motivating. I don't actually have a lot of habits I want to change right now (off the top of my head), but she gives specific techniques and strategies that we can use to make new habits a part of our lives. I love thinking about how we have control over our habits. I wrote this on my document for discussion in our book club, because I think this is the main point I get out of this book: "Sometimes we talk about habits as though they’re things that we can’t stop or control. Especially bad habits. But I love the perspective in this book that we absolutely can control them. We can deliberately look at our values and our goals and what we want to become, and decide what things we need or want to do each day that will reflect those values or future selves. Richard G. Scott said, “We become who we want to be by consistently being who we want to become each day.” At a very basic level, our daily habits are who we are. It doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but there are specific strategies that we can use to incorporate those specific habits we’ve chosen into our everyday routines. This is the main message of hope that I get out of this book: we get to choose who we are and what we do every day."

I can't wait to get our group together to discuss it. I am crossing my fingers we will get a good showing!