Sometimes it’s just plain hard to do the thing you want to do. Your internal muscle simply isn’t strong enough. How do you strengthen that willpower muscle?
In last week’s blog post, I focused on the necessity of creating structures that decrease the need for willpower when willpower is low. Now I focus on how to increase willpower.
I love making goals. In my early years of idealism, I would make numerous goals and set out to reach them, but like always, my energy for them faltered after about a week. Yet my mentor would remind me that I accomplished more than if I would have set no goals at all.
While that’s true, at least in the short term, what my mentor missed was the fact that consistently not reaching my goals was eroding my trust in myself, and a loss of trust in myself set me on a course of perpetual feelings of inadequacy and therefore lower long-term productivity.
Stephen M. R. Covey, author of The Speed of Trust, emphasizes the importance of first trusting yourself before you can become trustworthy to others. And trust in yourself starts with the small things. 1
In other words, if you cannot make and keep commitments to yourself, your confidence erodes, making you untrustworthy even to others. Growing that confidence happens when you lower your commitments to levels you can keep.
For example, one man who wanted to lose weight started by spending one minute standing on the treadmill each morning. Another man stood in front of the TV for one minute each hour without turning it on. These tiny actions were small deposits into their self-confidence bank account. Kelly goes on to say “Change, in its smallest, least threatening form is usually the most successful.” 2 Focusing on levels of commitment they could keep gave these men the self-confidence that eventually helped them reach their long-term goals.
How do you lift a bull? You lift a calf every day until it becomes a bull.
How do you increase your willpower? You start with small, attainable commitments that you will keep; then you slowly increase those commitments, all the while keeping them attainable.
What commitments or goals do you struggle to keep consistently? How can you break them into smaller commitments that you know you will keep?