(See also: Starting Your Virtue Strengthening Team)
To be fluent in a virtue means to practice it habitually. To establish a new habit, especially one that doesn’t feel easy or natural at first, is difficult. The buddy system helps us accomplish this in two important ways:
- A buddy may have insights where we have blind spots.
- A buddy helps us by being someone to whom we are accountable for making progress toward our goals.
By helping our buddy we get to learn from their experiences as they become more fluent in their virtue. And the process of helping our buddy is a good way of incidentally working on virtues like cooperation, curiosity, and sympathy.
Choosing a Buddy¶
- Your buddy should be someone you think you can get along with and feel comfortable sharing details about your personal growth path with.
- Your buddy should be committed to working on the virtues and to helping you to also do so.
- You should be able to meet regularly with your buddy, in person or by some sort of remote chat (phone, etc.)
Objectives for Your First Meeting¶
- Get to know each other and establish a friendly working relationship.
- Choose the specific virtue each of you will work on, or at least begin this process.
- Set a time and method for your next check-in, and some goals to accomplish between now and then.
A Possible Outline for Your First Meeting¶
- Introductions — Get to know each other, and describe what you hope to get out of the Society of the Free and Easy process.
- Choose Your Virtues — It can be tricky to choose which virtue to work on first. Take your time. You may find that as you think over and talk over a virtue, you’ll come to realize that there’s some other related virtue that you might want to work on first. For example, if the virtue you want is trust but what’s holding you back is fear then maybe courage is a more fundamental virtue that would make a better starting point. Or if you want serenity but find that most of the turbulence in your life comes from anger then maybe forgiveness or good temper is a more precise way to get what you want.
- Create a Curriculum — How will you gain fluency in your chosen virtue? For some virtues, this will be fairly straightforward. For example, if fitness is the virtue you have chosen, an exercise regimen of some sort is probably in order, or maybe you need to quit smoking. For other virtues, this may be much more difficult to imagine. You may need to do some outside research, or ask for advice from people outside of your team. Rather than trying to work on the virtue itself, you may need to identify some of the obstacles that are getting in the way of you practicing it and work on those instead. The best sort of curriculum will be one in which you regularly and frequently practice the virtue itself or some important component(s) of it. The goal is to make the virtue habitual through practice so you become confidently competent and it becomes a part of your character.
- Choose Your Initial Goals — What will you start doing immediately? Make this as precise as you can. For example, don’t say “I’m going to try to feel more gratitude next week” but rather “next week I’m going to write a personal thank you card to someone I feel grateful to” or “every day next week I’m going to write down five things I’m grateful for in my journal.”
- Decide How & When to Check In Next — Pick a time and place/method for your next meeting. You may need to use that meeting to reassess your virtue and your curriculum, or you may report how you did in meeting your goals and choose new goals to meet by the next meeting. These check-ins keep you accountable to your goals and enable you to get feedback and advice on how to overcome obstacles.
