Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Self-reflection is one of Groeschel’s most advised habits for future growth. As a writer of self-help books, Groeschel assumes that his readers come to the book with a desire to understand the workings of their inner lives, and that they will be motivated to improve them. In Groeschel’s words, we need to be able “to think about what [we] think about” (21).

While Groeschel assumes that readers can reflect upon themselves, he does not assume that they are experts at introspection and offers significant guidance along the way. Most of the end-of-chapter exercises are based on the principle of self-reflection. This is especially true near the book’s beginning. Chapter 1’s exercises delve into self-reflection, which Groeschel refers to as a “thought audit” (20). He begins with a simple log of the kinds of thoughts we think about, and then moves on in Chapter 2 to an exercise in analyzing those thoughts to discern if there are any unhealthy patterns. By the end of the book, our habits of self-reflection have been tied in with several active disciplines, including meditation, reciting personal declarations, prayer, and praise. In this way, the book keeps its focus on self-reflection from merely becoming a process of passive navel-gazing.