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“Willpower and desire when properly combined make an irresistible pair”
~ Napoleon Hill
Willpower is one of the key elements that ensure that you achieve the state of high performance. We learnt in the previous sections that it is only the deliberate practice that leads to mastery, and also one needs to put massive action into the pursuit regardless of what one feels about it. You would agree that deliberate practice towards learning and putting consistent and massive actions requires you to control your urges to check your next social media notification, not getting swayed away easily by some outside distraction or other people around you. In short, the deliberate practice and consistent and massive actions that lead you to perform at your best – which requires willpower.
Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, describes[8] three necessary components for achieving your goals. First, you need to establish the motivation for change and set a clear goal. Second, you need to monitor your behavior toward that goal. The third component is willpower. Whether your goal is to lose weight, kick a smoking habit, study more, or spend less time on Facebook, willpower is a critical step to achieving that outcome.
Let’s start with a simple definition of what is willpower.
Willpower is our ability to control and resist our short-term temptations to enable us to achieve our longer-term goals. It is also known as determination, self-control, drive or self-discipline. In terms of psychology, as many researchers in the field have defined it, willpower can be stated as:
With above definition, it is now evident that willpower is the force that can keep us glued to the actions that are important to achieve our long-term goals. As goals take a long time, our internal desires to enjoy instant gratification, often drift us from our path, and that’s where willpower help us keep doing and delivering the highest level of performance.
In this section, we will talk about how one can develop willpower that enables one to take massive actions towards the goals. Let’s look at some the best ways to improve your willpower:
1. Meditation significantly improves willpower
Whether it is East or West, you would agree that nowadays meditation is not something that one considers only as a religious or spiritual activity, rather it is benefits for the general well-being and improved functionality are well recognized by neuroscience already. It is not any mystical ritual – rather it has become a part of daily routine of many high-achievers, who start their day with some kind of mindfulness practice. Tim Ferriss, a best-selling author, who has also interviewed more than two hundred high achievers in the field of sports, business, entertainment confirms that more than ninety percent of these high-achiever interviewees have instilled the daily habit of some kind of meditation even if it is for few minutes a day
If you are new to this seemingly mystical word, meditation, let’s briefly understand about meditation.
Meditation is nothing but a process of traveling inside your body and mind and enhancing your awareness about the ongoing thoughts, and emotions. One of the most common techniques to do meditation is to sit silently with your spine erect and focus on your breath only as anchor to observe regularly. This practice slowly enhances your consciousness and calms your mind, even if you do it daily for say ten minutes only. For beginning, you can do it with some guided meditation available through many free smartphone apps like Headspace, Calm, Welzen etc. In my book The Mindful Mind, I have captured various aspects of mindfulness, including the benefits as confirmed by neuroscience and the best ways to get started immediately.
I’d agree that for sitting in meditation on its own requires willpower, but it has immense benefits to develop your willpower.
In her book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It, the author Kelly Mcgonigal, psychologist and researcher describes the benefits of meditation on the willpower.
Neuroscientists have now found that when we make ourselves sit and instruct our brain to meditate, not only it gets better at meditating, but it develops a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. Science tells that people who meditate regularly for longer periods, have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as other regions of the brain that support self-awareness.
She further explains that you don’t need a lifetime of meditation to see the results and explains intense meditation for few hours shows great results. She states:
Some researchers have started to look for the smallest dose of meditation needed to see benefits.... One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control. After eleven hours, researchers could see those changes in the brain. The new meditators had increased neural connections between regions of the brain important for staying focused, ignoring distractions, and controlling impulses. Another study found that eight weeks of daily meditation practice led to increased self-awareness in everyday life, as well as increased gray matter in corresponding areas of the brain. It may seem incredible that our brains can reshape themselves so quickly, but meditation increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles. The brain appears to adapt to exercise in the same way that muscles do, getting both bigger and faster in order to get better at what you ask of it.
I’ve been meditating for quite few years now, but not very regularly. But over the last few months, I am doing it every morning and in the evening before going to bed. My personal experience is that I am starting to sense thoughts, emotions, and even tiny vibrations in my body. I am starting to make a fine distinction between different thoughts and emotions in my mind and body. The most important benefit is that I often find myself literally able to tell my negative emotions or the desires for instant gratification to get away from my mind—and simultaneously I can ask my mind to focus on resourceful thoughts that will lead me towards my goals. I can honestly tell you that it is an amazing feeling, when you can control yourself about what you should do next. I know it is a long journey, but if you keep moving, you will become closer day by day. One last thing, once you start meditating and start enjoying the benefits of it, then you won’t feel like skipping it even for a single day.
Slow down your breath to beat stress:
As you just noted above that focusing on breathing is one of the common technique for meditation. But you would be surprised to know how one simple technique of slowing down your breathing pace helps to improve your willpower. This is what you need to do. Breathe slowly– so slow that it is just four to six breaths per minute only. Each breath in and out will take ten to fifteen second. It will be initially little difficult, but you can master it with some practice and it is not that hard.
Explaining the benefit of this technique of slow breathing, Kelly McGonigal states that the slowdown of breathing activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges
Therefore, breathe in for a count of four, and then breathe out for a count of six. Do it few times, and you will start getting the benefits of relieved from any anxiety but geared up for taking the next action.
Remember, you don’t need to hold the breath. It will rather increase the stress. One another important thing that I have learnt in my meditation practices is that you should focus more on exhaling, rather than inhaling of your breathing. Once you pay attention more on emptying your body and leave no particle of any air in your body, it automatically takes care of breathing in.
Okay coming to next technique for developing willpower. Here it is:
2. Exercise is the wonder drug for willpower
We all know the famous quote from Albert Einstein:
“Nothing happens until something moves”
That applies to our bodies too. We have to move our bodies to bring our internal organs in good health by increasing blood circulation that gives us energy for performing at our best levels. Again, Psychologist Kelly McGonigal describes benefits of exercise as a wonder drug to develop your willpower. Here is what she states:
Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that help them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect.
You would have already realized that with specific tools and techniques like meditation, and exercise, it is not that hard to strengthen your willpower muscles. This enhanced willpower will help you to stay longer and perform better in your pursuits.
3. Use Self Control Exercises to Build Your willpower
Willpower is also like a muscle and if you get yourself committed to small self-control exercises on a regular basis, it will help you to build your willpower muscles. Seemingly insignificant activities like making your bed in the morning after you wake up; improving your sitting posture continuously, cutting back on sweets etc., play a role in improving your overall willpower.
Martha Beck, a sociologist life coach and author once said, "The way we do anything is the way we do everything." If you practice exercising self-control on small and inconsequential things, you will tend to improve your willpower in important areas of your life i.e. focusing at your work, taking care of your health and tame your emotions better.
How small self-control exercises help us to develop our willpower is explained by Heidi Grant Halvorson in her book Succeed. She states:
If you want more self-control, you can get more. And you get more self-control the same way you get bigger muscles—you’ve got to give it regular workouts. Recent research has shown that engaging in daily activities such as exercising, keeping track of your finances or what you are eating—or even just remembering to sit up straight every time you think of it—can help you develop your overall self-control capacity. For example, in one study, students who were assigned to (and stuck to) a daily exercise program not only got physically healthier, but they also became more likely to wash dishes instead of leaving them in the sink, and less likely to impulsively spend money.
Developing willpower is one of the most important requirements if you want to bring significant changes in your life and perform at your best levels. One annual survey conducted by the American Psychological Association[9] about level of stress in America asks, among other things, about participants’ abilities to make healthy lifestyle changes. Survey participants regularly cite lack of willpower as the #1 reason for not following through with such changes.
Fortunately, you don’t need to spend hefty amount, take any medication, or visit any medical specialists to address your lack of willpower. The solutions are easily available to anyone at home. It is only a matter of putting in a very little sum of willpower to start with the techniques stated above, and anyone can start seeing the results in terms of enhanced willpower. Of course, this will get you focused on your work longer and improve your performance.
4. Be Precise and Specific- Supports and Strengthens Willpower
Willpower depletes by vague directions. The more specific you are about the timing, and action to be taken, the more you will be able to use willpower to your advantage.
A few studies already confirm that specificity of timing and precision of behavior significantly increases the likelihood of success. This is because we have a limited amount of willpower during the day and every small decision depletes the willpower. Knowing this principle, many successful people pre-decide their routine things, so it doesn’t take their willpower and time to decide. For example, they decide what clothes they will wear on each day of the week, is a decision they take every Sunday evening – for the entire next week. What food they are going to eat during the day – is already pre-decided.
Developing these routines is the key. You also need to remove the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. Former United States President Barack Obama once said, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” If we spend energy making too many little decisions, we'll have less to make the more important decisions.
Our pre-frontal cortex is responsible for executive decision making and other important functions that require conscious thinking efforts. By determining when, where and how any behavior will occur, we no longer have to think much about getting it done.
In one of the interesting experiments, a group of drug addicts were studied during withdrawal—a period of abrupt discontinuation or decrease in the intake of medications or recreational drugs. During this period, the energy required to control the urge to consume drug severely affects their ability to carry out any other task.
In this withdrawal period, one group of addicts was asked to commit to writing a short resume before a particular time on a particular day. This was to help them find post-rehabilitation employment. Not even one succeeded. A second group was asked to complete the same task, but the group was additionally told exactly when and where they would write the resume. The result was eighty percent of people in the second group succeed.
Therefore, specificity of time and precision of action to be taken safeguards the use of willpower. Next time, don’t give yourself any vague instructions, rather you should tell yourself the precise time and precise action to avoid unnecessary wastage of your willpower, which is a precious resource.
Let’s move to the next technique to enhance your willpower.
5. Rituals safeguard willpower:
All highly effective people use well-crafted rituals to perform their task. Rituals can be defined as carefully defined and well-structured behavior that are purposefully induced to our days.
As opposed to use of willpower and self-discipline, which requires pushing yourself to do a particular action, the rituals rather pull you towards them. Taking a shower in the morning, brushing your teeth are the daily rituals. You don’t need to use any willpower or discipline yourself to undertake these morning routines –you never feel a need to push yourself to do these activities. You would have noticed in the previous point about how successful people safeguard their willpower by organizing their routine. Rituals ensure that we use as little conscious energy as possible where it is not absolutely necessary, leaving us free to strategically focus the energy available to us in more creative and productive ways.
All high performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their behavior. It is also said that more exciting the challenge and the greater the pressure, the more rigorous our rituals need to be. Robin Sharma, in his study of the world’s high performers discovered one key thing – Consistency on the fundamentals. High performers don’t need to think about fundamentals, as they have become their rituals.
Similarly, Jack Canfield, in his great book The Success Principles says that “99% is a bitch and 100% is a breeze.”
If you have to use willpower or have to think about going to the gym every morning, that’s not going to work, if you want to perform at your best levels. But once you commit and make going to gym as a ritual, then it happens almost on autopilot basis. You have to become non-negotiable in planning and adhering to your rituals. Only then it works.
With rituals formed for most of their daily activities, high performers benefitted in multiple ways:
Don’t take your precious resource of willpower for granted. Safeguard this priceless gem for your high value activities with the support of well-crafted rituals- and very soon, you will find yourself in the category of ultra-performers.
