I'm reading Donald Norman's fascinating Psychology of Everyday Things, based on a recommendation from the weblog that Dan Bricklin writes (linguistic aside: though it would have been more natural to write "Dan Bricklin's weblog", since "Dan Bricklin's" is trademarked [check the bottom of the page], i didn't want to infringe!).

I'm especially interested in the implications of cognitive science and behavioral psychology for helping train people in Christian behavior. We'd like to think this is all completely rational, but as Norman points out

much human behavior is done subconsciously, without conscious awareness and not available to inspection (p. 125)

A great many of the difficulties i have with other people, where i say something wrong, or fail to do something i should, are like this, not the result of conscious deliberation but an accidental consequence of inattention, or a different perspective, or perhaps most often, failing to take something as seriously as i should.

You can find many web sources for "character" and "training", but most refer to Sunday school curricula for children: that's important, but i'm no less in need of training as an adult. Though we sometimes use athletic metaphors for Christian training And even though Paul uses the metaphors of athletics, this isn't really how we learn new character behaviors: motor skills training is in many ways a simpler task.