Developing Willpower

Developing Willpower If you recognize the importance of willpower, want it for yourself, and decide to develop it, what can you do to be successful? Practice exerting willpower. Research shows that by controlling small patterns of behavior you are exercising your control and your overall willpower will improve. If you decide, for example, to drink a glass of water every morning (great for the brain and the body), or to exercise for ten minutes every morning when you get up, and do so, you will find that your willpower is stronger when you apply it to other tasks. So choose a small new activity that will improve your life and get started right now. And you will have begun your story as a self-directed person. You can build on that story right away by finding a touchstone in your past, an experience in which you exerted self-control to achieve a result that was important to you or to others? I remember working in a logging camp when I was a young man to earn the money to go to university. Both the camp and the university were hard work for a distant goal, but I completed both. What is your touchstone? Go over it in your mind and remember the effort and the feelings involved, especially the pleasure of achieving the vision you had. You can take this further by remembering a number of incidents and stringing them together as your story of self-control, yourself as a person with willpower. Apparently will power is a limited resource. We start the morning with a full tank, but use it up with every application of it we make, so choose carefully what you decide to spend your powers on. Be sure also that you maintain a full tank by eating well, getting a good night’s sleep, and staying healthy.