Your list of qualities becomes your recipe for how you will act. Throughout each day, face every situation as if you are playing the part of the person you have written down.
Some would contend that this approach sounds an awful lot like the adage “fake it till you make it.” Character is built through decisions over time. Here’s a more accurate but less fun phrase: “Make it till you make it.”
Who you are is what you do and why you do it. There is no magic switch that happens after you’ve lived according to some quality for an arbitrary amount of time. If you act in the moment as one with the quality would, you have that quality—at least for that moment. It is easy to have a certain quality in just one moment, and realizing this is the key to making sweeping improvement in your life. The hard part is keeping it. Any attribute you can practice for a moment is thereafter yours to lose.
The necessity of continuing to live true to the qualities you have temporarily demonstrated might seem stressful, but it is yet another one of those things that seem hard only because we don’t realize that everyone—including you—is already doing it. You are already who you are, and you are only that way because you consistently live true to your present qualities. What is discussed here isn’t the suggestion to adopt the consistent practice of certain qualities, but rather to choose better qualities to practice.
An important point missed by those who say “fake it till you make it” is that. It’s a false and you are never finished making it detrimental belief to assume that any quality will ever be automatic and enduring. Just one lapse in many qualities, such as honesty or trustworthiness, instantly robs you of those qualities for a long time, no matter how long they were true before. You are never done making it.