Summary
A saying about how people change: “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.” Change what people do, it claims, and belief tends to follow.
Nobody knows who coined it. Quote Investigator traces the earliest form to a 1930 Sunday School convention in Nebraska. The missionary E. Stanley Jones popularised it in the 1930s, and the psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer quoted this wording in 1959. A 1979 book of maxims labelled a ‘behave’ version ‘Kegley’s Principle of Change’. It’s now an adage of the positive deviance approach, which starts by changing practice.
Rationale
A proverb for a question Part 2 puts to practice: can it “embody experience or reshape relationships rather than simply communicating an idea or belief?” We’d add that stories shape practice in return.