Almost every one I have ever met has said they have no willpower and if they did have some then it would solve all of there health and fitness woes. My belief is that this is not the case, everyone has enough willpower already but they have beliefs and neural connections that keep them from getting to their goals.
The whole concept of will power is based on conscious thinking. The idea is you tell yourself you are going to stop doing something e.g. eating late at night, or alternatively you tell yourself to start doing something e.g. go to the gym before work. However, your subconscious programmes have not changed since you made this new decision and thus you must battle against your ‘natural’ thinking patterns. The problem with this strategy is you are in a battle that will almost always be lost because your underlying programmes produce your emotions and this determines the majority of your behaviours.
That is not to say you cannot get results using the traditional willpower method, because you can. However, the success rate is very low because it is not targeting the powerhouse of your actions – The subconscious. People who do succeed using pure willpower usually induce a change in their thinking along the way and hence are able to sustain results. The problem with any conscious thought is that it is only active as long as you are aware of it. Often your goal is forgotten as you go about daily activity or when life gets busy or stressful.
A second problem is that the subconscious is still producing its emotional output in response to what you encounter in life. For most people their conscious thoughts produce a conflict in the mind. Put another way, if your conscious thoughts did not produce a conflict you would already being doing that task without a problem. If you said you were going to give up smoking and no conflict occurred then you would just stop easily and effortlessly. As you are aware, this does not happen for most people.
Willpower is like a muscle and has a limited capacity. You only have so much willpower to use per day (just like you can only exercise so much per day) and after it is depleted you will not be able to use it until you have recharge that night. Like exercise your willpower can be developed and strengthened over time, in the same way you can get fitter or stronger. Though personally I believe much of this strengthening is more to do with breaking of neural connections to do bad behaviours over direct strengthening of the willpower muscle itself.
A typical example of the Willpower Method comes each New Year. An enthusiastic resoluter consciously decides this will be the year to lose the weight and decides to cut out all junk food. During a miserable couple of weeks they battle hunger and temptation before caving in and eating their body weight in junk food. The person then feels guilty and berates themselves for their lack of self discipline. As they also have a subconscious behaviour pattern that says they eat junk food when they feel bad the person then goes on to eat even more junk food as a result. This negative spiral is a common result of the will power method.
The will power method is based on the premise of giving something up. I am going to give up eating rubbish food. If you are giving something up it suggests that this is a sacrifice and what you are giving up is something you want to have. The mere action of taking something away from you makes you want it more regardless of how you felt about it before. You see this with children. Have you noticed how one child will always want the other child’s toy even if they are not interested in it themselves? We may be a bit bigger but do not think that we are that much different in our behaviour. The will power method accidently creates an increased desire for the very thing you are trying to give up.
When you are deciding to do an action using the will power method the behaviour will only occur as long as it is under your attention. The moment you go into automatic you forget the task. Conscious behaviour patterns can very easily be knocked off track. For example, if your water bottle is empty then that may stop you drinking for the rest of the day, If your train is late you may bypass your planned gym session, if you do not bring in your pre prepared lunch you end up eating rubbish.
From my experience the will power method does have a place in regards to getting into amazing shape. This is because it takes a degree of will power (not much but a little) to get you going . It also takes willpower to do specific tasks that can change your mind set forever
You can enhance your will power using various strategies. These include visualisations, having goals such as holidays, weddings etc, competing with someone else, making a pact with a friend, joining a weight loss group, using a personal trainer etc. These all greatly enhance will power but they are still limited for long term success unless you also change your subconscious programming along the way. This is how I work with clients, how do I change the underlying thoughts so the person produces results naturally.
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