Exercise Your Willpower To Make It Stronger

“Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.”

 

– William B. Yeats

 

When I was stationed in Korea in the 1980s, I had a jacket made after I graduated sniper school. I called it my sniper jacket. On the front, I had a scroll with the saying, “It’s not the skill to win, it’s the will to win.”

 

Willpower is a key to success. You must be able to resist temptation and do those things that are right and that will take you closer to your goals.

 

We all know that muscles need to be worked to get stronger, and if you don’t use your muscles they will atrophy and become weaker and smaller. We can look at willpower the same as muscles. This idea of willpower being a muscle is an idea you can find in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Baumister and Teirney. The authors list a number of reasons why willpower behaves like the other muscles in your body.

 

• Willpower gets weak when you don’t use it, just like your muscles get weak when you don’t use them.

• To increase your overall strength, you must engage in regular exercise, the same can be said about willpower.

• Your willpower has a limit before it will completely fail, just like your muscles.

• When you tire your muscles on an exercise and then proceed to another exercise, you will have less reserves to draw on before your muscles fatigue. The same can be said about willpower.

• Your muscles need time between workouts to recover and gain the benefits of your previous workout (i. e. become stronger) – the same can be said about willpower.

 

You can train your willpower to become stronger, just like you can train your body to become stronger. But also realize, that like your body, when you draw from your willpower resources, your willpower gets “tired” and you are less capable of exerting mental strength on the next task or temptation. (This is why often after a hard day utilizing your willpower for a number of things, you break down and eat that bowl of ice cream or bag of chips. Your willpower is weaker at the end of a day when you’ve already taxed it all day.)
 

You can exercise your willpower, by starting with smaller things, and then building up to bigger things that take your willpower. If you always give in to the little things, the bigger things may seem impossible. Exercise your willpower by resisting smaller temptations and become stronger.

 

You can also cheat a little by strengthening your willpower by using it to create habits. When you follow a new habit each day, it takes less willpower to overcome temptation, and once the behavior becomes automatic it doesn’t take willpower any more. A couple keys to this are to start with smaller habits, they are easier to keep going; do one habit at a time for best results; and stick to it for at least 30 days. The reason this helps your willpower is that when something becomes a habit, it doesn’t match your identity to cave into the temptation, so it is not a matter of willpower to resist any more.

 

Willpower is important to resist the temptations that get in the way of achieving our goals. Exercise it and achieve smaller goals and it will get stronger and enable you to achieve your big goals. You can do it, it’s just a matter of will. And willpower is a key to living with the warrior’s edge. It is one of the traits of warriors that give us the edge over others, and allows us to accomplish more with less. So discover your warrior’s edge and exercise your willpower. You’ll be mentally stronger, disciplined, and better for doing it.