How to Practice Virtue: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Practice Virtue, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: choose one virtue to practice this week
Pick one virtue you want more of, write one way you'll practice it, and name when you'll do it.
Write the virtue, how you'll practice it, and when.
Practices that may help
- Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
Virtue ethics, developed by Aristotle and extended by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, holds that ethics is primarily about who you are rather than which rules you follow or which outcomes you produce. The practical core: identify the virtues a flourishing human being needs, and train them through deliberate habitual action — because character is what you repeatedly do, not what you occasionally decide. - Identify the virtues you most need to cultivate
Name the three character traits whose absence most limits you — those are your practice targets.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Cultivate virtue through deliberate habituation
Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Embed your virtues in a practice community
The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Practice virtues as interconnected, not separate
When a virtue feels absent, look for which related virtue is also being neglected.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - The virtue audit
Ask which of the four Stoic virtues you exercised — and which you neglected — today.
The Stoic Daily Review - Building character through deliberate repetition
Choose one character quality you want to embody and perform one specific act of it daily until it no longer requires effort.
Aristotelian Eudaimonia: Flourishing Through Virtue - Learning through exemplar study
Study the conduct of a person you consider exemplary and identify one specific behaviour you can emulate.
Confucian Self-Cultivation: The Mencius Approach - Choose and study role models deliberately
Select a specific person whose character in a specific domain you want to internalize, and study how they act — not just what they say.
Virtue Ethics, Made Practical - Name and wrestle with your besetting weakness
Identify the one recurring moral failure and choose a practice that confronts it daily.
The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I want to become a better person but "be better" is too vague to act on
- I keep waiting until I feel brave or patient or generous before I act that way, and the feeling never reliably shows up
- I work on my character all in my own head, by my own standards, and it stays abstract and unproven
- I keep trying to fix one trait
- I want to actually become a better person, not just vaguely intend to, but "be better" is so fuzzy I never know what I’m working on
Related concerns
- Embodiment Of The Five Virtues
When a virtue feels absent, look for which related virtue is also being neglected.
Practice virtues as interconnected, not separate
- Hbitos Basados En Virtudes
Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
Cultivate virtue through deliberate habituation
- How To Become Virtuous
Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
- How To Develop A Virtue
Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
- Least Practiced Virtue
Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
- Virtue By Repetition
Choose one character quality you want to embody and perform one specific act of it daily until it no longer requires effort.
Building character through deliberate repetition
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