What We Practice Shapes Who We Become

What can prayer teach us about leadership? Explore the connection between repeated practice, neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, and how we show up under pressure.

I didn’t start praying because I was looking for God.

I started praying because it was a required class.

I remember seeing the prayer and meditation course on my curriculum and thinking, I don’t know one prayer. NOT ONE.

When I did attend church, which was pretty much never, I had developed a strategy. I would mouth the words, pretending I knew what everyone else seemed to know, and then deliver an emphatic AMEN, hoping no one noticed. I felt embarrassed and out of place, like everyone else knew the words to the latest pop song except me. Instead of creating connection, those experiences reinforced the separation I already felt and my sense that I didn’t belong.

So when prayer and meditation became part of my required curriculum, I was less than excited.

Then I was paired with another student who would become my prayer partner for the entire first year. We were required to sign a contract agreeing to pray together every day, seven days a week. At the time, I knew very little about this woman, except that she had an extensive spiritual practice, which I found intimidating. If I’m being completely honest, I also thought she was a weirdo. (That was my 12-year-old self passing judgment on someone I didn’t know.)

It was a rocky start. I was out of the country for the in-person weekend when prayer partners were announced, and she never contacted me to let me know we had been paired. I was furious. We were supposed to have been praying together for an entire month, and I didn’t even know I had a prayer partner, much less who my partner was, until the next in-person weekend.

What I couldn’t possibly know then was that this awkward, mandatory assignment would introduce me to something I would eventually come to understand very differently. And the woman I initially thought was a weirdo would become my prayer partner, my closest friend, and an important part of my life until the day she died.

I Had to Learn How to Pray

As part of the class, I learned to write different kinds of prayers: affirmative prayers, prayers of adoration, petition, supplication, and thanksgiving. I learned that prayer didn’t have to be complicated or eloquent. Sometimes it could be as simple as:

Thank you.

Or:

Help.

At the time, I was learning a spiritual practice. Today, I can see that I was also learning something about attention, intention, emotional regulation, hope, and connection.

Leaders are constantly deciding where to place their attention, how to respond under pressure, what to focus on when circumstances are uncertain, and how to stay connected to what matters when everything around them feels urgent.

Science now gives us another lens through which to understand why practices like prayer may matter.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to experience, learning, and repeated behavior. Research involving meditation, compassion practices, and other contemplative practices suggests that repeatedly engaging certain mental and emotional states can influence the brain’s structure and function, including networks involved in attention, self-awareness, emotional processing, and social connection.

Research specifically examining prayer is still an emerging field, so we should be careful not to claim that neuroscience has proven every benefit attributed to prayer. But researchers have found measurable changes in brain activity during prayer, including activation of areas associated with reward and changes in the processing of emotionally threatening information.

In other words, the practice may matter even before we attempt to explain the mystery behind it.

What Happens When We Practice?

Think about what happens when we repeatedly do anything.

We become more familiar with it. We get better at it. Eventually, it can become automatic.

If we repeatedly practice worry, our minds become very good at finding what could go wrong. If we repeatedly practice criticism, we become quicker to notice what’s wrong with ourselves, other people, or our circumstances. If we repeatedly practice reacting from fear, that response can become our familiar path.

The same principle applies to leadership.

If a leader repeatedly responds to uncertainty with control, people may learn to wait for direction rather than think for themselves. If a leader repeatedly responds to mistakes with criticism, people may learn to hide problems instead of raising them. If a leader practices curiosity, accountability, and calm under pressure, those behaviors become part of the experience others have of being led by them.

So what happens when we repeatedly practice gratitude, hope, reflection, compassion, or prayer?

That is where the science of neuroplasticity becomes particularly interesting.

Research on loving-kindness and compassion meditation has found structural and functional differences in brain regions involved in social and emotional processing, and empathy and compassion among people who engage in these practices over time. This does not prove that prayer itself increases gray matter in these specific regions. But it does provide evidence for a broader principle:

The brain can be shaped by what we repeatedly practice.

And that makes me wonder what happens when prayer becomes more than something we do when life falls apart.

What happens when it becomes part of how we lead ourselves and support others?

Prayer and the Fear Response

Our brains are wired to detect threats. That is not a flaw. It is one of the reasons we survive.

But there is a difference between having a healthy response to danger and living in a constant state of threat.

Fear asks us to scan the environment for what could go wrong. It can narrow our attention, increase reactivity, and make uncertainty feel like something we must immediately control.

Prayer can create a pause in that cycle.

Research involving repetitive religious chanting has found changes in neural processing associated with fear and negative emotional stimuli. Other prayer research has found activity in brain regions involved in reward and motivation.

Again, this doesn’t mean prayer simply turns off fear or eliminates stress. It means that intentionally engaging in a spiritual practice may give us another way to relate to what we are experiencing.

And that distinction matters.

That matters in leadership, too.

When we’re operating from fear, we can become reactive, controlling, defensive, or overly focused on what might go wrong. When we can create enough space to pause, we have a better opportunity to choose our response.

Prayer can create that space.

• What matters?
• What can I control?
• What do I need to release?
• How do I want to respond?
• What do I still have hope for?

Those questions can influence much more than how we feel in the moment. The way we respond to stress affects our decisions. Our decisions affect our relationships. Our relationships shape the culture and experience of the people around us.

A small practice can have a very large ripple effect.

Maybe Prayer Doesn’t Change the Situation

This is one of the things I find most meaningful about prayer.

Sometimes we pray for the circumstances to change, and they don’t.

The person is still sick. The relationship is still difficult. The loss still hurts. The answer doesn’t come when we want it. The uncertainty remains.

So does that mean the prayer didn’t work?

I think there is another question worth asking:

What if prayer doesn’t always change the situation? What if it changes the person experiencing the situation?

Prayer can create space to acknowledge what we cannot control while reconnecting us with what we can choose. It can help us practice gratitude in the middle of uncertainty, compassion in the middle of conflict, hope when the outcome isn’t clear, and surrender when we have reached the limits of our own control.

That doesn’t mean denying reality or pretending everything is going to be okay.

It means choosing how we meet reality.

And isn’t that part of leadership?

We don’t always get to choose the circumstances we are leading through. We do have influence over how we show up in them. Our presence, our reactions, our words, and our choices send signals to the people around us about what is possible, what matters and how we will move forward.

From Fear to Faith, From Reaction to Response

I think back to that young girl who felt embarrassed because she didn’t know the words.

She thought prayer was something other people knew how to do.

She didn’t understand that prayer didn’t require the perfect words. It didn’t require knowing the latest verse or saying the right thing at the right time.

Sometimes it was simply Thank you.

Sometimes it was Help.

Sometimes it was sitting quietly long enough to hear my own thoughts.

And sometimes it was learning to trust something beyond myself.

That required practice.

Years later, I understand that this is also what I try to bring into my work as a spiritual coach and wellness strategist. I don’t believe spiritual practices need to be complicated to be meaningful. I believe they need to be intentional, practical and supportive of the life you are actually living.

Because leadership development isn’t only about acquiring more skills.

It is also about becoming more aware of what we practice when no one is watching, especially when we’re under pressure.

Prayer is one spiritual practice. It may not be yours.

Maybe yours is meditation. Maybe it’s gratitude, journaling, time in nature, breathwork, silence, worship, service or simply creating a few minutes each day to reconnect with yourself and what matters most.

The practice may look different.

The principle is the same.

What Are You Practicing?

Every day, we are practicing something.

We practice worry. We practice rushing. We practice reacting. We practice judgment.

But we can also practice gratitude. We can practice compassion. We can practice hope. We can practice listening. We can practice pausing before responding.

The question isn’t whether you are practicing.

The question is: What are you practicing?

And perhaps the more important question is:

Is the practice you’re repeating helping you become the person and the leader you want to be?

What started as a required class became a practice that eventually became part of how I support myself through life.

I couldn’t have understood the science then. I couldn’t have articulated neuroplasticity, emotional regulation or the role of attention and repetition. I simply knew I was learning to pause, to listen, to express gratitude, to ask for help and to connect with something greater than myself.

Today, I see those practices differently.