Goal
This week, I want to discuss willpower and how to respond when your will begins to falter.
What is willpower?
Willpower is your capacity to continue with any task that you are engaging in. We depend on our resolve to help us overcome procrastination and accomplish our goals. With weak willpower, we fail to lose weight, stay healthy, earn money, write that novel, and do a multitude of things we dream of accomplishing.
Willpower encompasses persistence, zeal, fortitude, courage, self-control, self-discipline, and emotional control.
Why is willpower important?
Through self-discipline, we can change our individual lives to improve the world. Having a firm resolve allows us to pursue our goals and control our impulses – two critical aspects of becoming an individual.
How do we develop willpower?
Willpower allows us to accomplish great things
This question requires an entire blog post in itself, but we can cover the basics. Strengthening your resolve involves resisting temptation whenever you can. Some examples include:
- Not eating that second cookie
- Finish your work instead of surfing the web
- Controlling your temper or lust
Willpower is trained by resisting an easier course of action for a more beneficial and difficult path. Practice exercising your impulse control in small ways and soon you’ll be able to build a sizeable grit.
How do we judge a faltering will?
Earlier, I discussed the importance of emotional connectedness. The principles I covered in that blog post apply here. We have to be aware of our feelings and emotions as well as our self-control.
The best way to judge a faltering discipline is to compare and contrast. Remember a time when you felt high and on top of things. Is this situation the same or do you feel less motivated and tired? Through these comparison exercises, we can better understand and identify when our drive may be faltering.
As always, identification exercises require practice to achieve perfection, so start practicing today.
How do we respond to a faltering will?
Walking and movement can help prevent a faltering will
Willpower, like wealth, is not a limited resource. We can train ourselves and increase our resolution, but when we do start to stagger, we need to respond in productive and positive ways.
Personally, the best way I deal with a weakening resolution is to do menial tasks that don’t require much thinking. For example, I’ll wash dishes or do push-ups instead of trying to slog through an assignment. Not only do these activities remove me from places of distraction, such as my phone or my desktop, they also help me engage my body and still feel a sense of accomplishment without too much effort.
Secondly, I refuse to engage in distractions. Distractions are the bane of a weakening resolve, and all distractions do is create a feeling of regret. Additionally, distractions waste time and ensure that you won’t fully recover your self-discipline.
Lastly, I meditate. I’m not an expert at meditation, but I love sitting and silently reflecting on what I’m grateful for. When I’m done, I feel refreshed and ready to tackle whatever I need to do.
These are exercises that help me when I stagger.
Conclusion
Having a strong drive can enable us to make better financial decisions, avoid toxic and abusive people, and help us pursue our individual goals. By having a strong will while acknowledging when your will is fading, you’ll be able to push yourself to greatness.
Actionables
Read the following:
- The Psychology of Willpower: Training the Brain for Better Decisions
- How to Boost Your Willpower
- What You Need to Know about Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-Control
- How do you rank your willpower? Do you have a great ability to pursue your goals? Do you have solid impulse control?
- Have you ever had a moment in your life that threw your willpower for a loop? What was that moment and how did you respond?
- When was a moment where you had a surge of willpower and a passion to accomplish anything?
- What exercises can you think of to regain you will when you feel unable to continue?
Please remember that it’s important to do the actionables. You’re not on this earth to simply read but to do. To become an individual, you must act more than you consume.
*Image credit to Unsplash.
