Ever wish you had more willpower?  Is it possible to develop willpower, or are we all born with a certain amount of willpower?

First of all, what exactly is willpower?

Willpower is a person’s capacity to exert the power of their will to perform a desired activity despite any obstacles that get in the way.

A common example of exerting one’s willpower would be if someone wanted to implement a new exercise program into their lives, such as for example running for 30 minutes on a treadmill every day.

Often times, when we look around and see people who are exercising, meditating, reading or eating a healthy diet on a regular basis we think that those people have strong willpower to do such things on a consistent basis.  If we try to implement an activity such as these into our lives and we can’t stick with it for any period of time we usually label ourselves as having a lack of willpower to get the job done.

Do others really have stronger willpower?

I believe that willpower is a force that every one of us can learn to tap in to with more or less the same capacity.  Meaning, if you properly learn to active the force of your will, you can have the same amount of willpower as anyone else.

Willpower is not something that you are born with having less or more than anyone else.  Our capacity to engage and activate our willpower, or as I like to call it the force of our will, does vary from person to person.  Some people, whether naturally gifted or raised in a certain way, have the ability to more easily engage and activate their willpower and so it seems like they have more willpower than others.

How do we activate willpower?

There are a number of factors involved in activating the power of your will (your willpower).

(1) Clarity

Having an unclear goal makes it difficult to activate the power of our will.  For example, if a person sets a goal such as “to lose weight”, they might find it difficult to use their willpower to get themselves to exercise regularly.  The reason for this is that a goal such as “to lose weight” is ambiguous and therefore difficult for our minds to visualize.

Getting more clear on the goal, such as for example quantifying the amount of weight a person wants to lose and the type of weight they want to lose helps to activate willpower.  A goal like “to lose 15lbs of fat” will much more easily activate the power of your will than a goal like “to lose weight” because it is more clear and more specific.

(2) Purpose

Getting clear on the purpose behind a goal is also very important.  If you get clear on the reasons why you want to achieve a certain goal, it will be much easier to active the power of your will.  For example, “to lose 15lbs of fat so that I can fit into my wedding dress” is much more powerful than “to lose 15lbs of fat”.

The more clarity you can get in terms of having a strong and clear purpose behind your goal, the more easily you’ll be able to activate willpower.

(3) Leverage

Another way to greatly strengthen your willpower is to apply leverage to a goal.  For example, someone who makes themselves accountable to someone else such as a coach or partner applies leverage to their goal.  Knowing that there is someone else out there who is going to check up on your progress, activates your willpower further.

Other forms of leverage could be to pay a friend to hold you accountable to performing the daily activity you wish to perform, such as for example paying your friend $250 which he may keep and spend as he wishes if you don’t run on the treadmill for 30 minutes each day for 30 days.

There are many other forms of leverage as well.  Visualizing yourself in the future based on what will happen if you don’t follow through versus if you do follow through is another powerful form of leverage.  Agreeing to give yourself a “prize” of some sort for achieving your goal or a “penalty” of some sort for not achieving your goal can also be a form of leverage.

Can willpower be used long term?

The power of the will, if properly activated, can be a very strong force in our lives and we can use it to accomplish many different things.  However, willpower is not a force that is long term.  For most people, even properly activated willpower will only last for 30-60 days.

This is where most people misunderstand the power of the will.  They try to use willpower to perform activities that last for much longer than 30-60 days and when that willpower runs out they feel like their willpower was defeated.

Willpower was never intended to be used for long periods of time.  There is another force that we have within us that is used for that purpose and that force is called habit.  Many people who can’t seem to stick to performing an activity long term don’t suffer from a lack of willpower, but rather from a lack of understanding of how habits are built.

This diagram shows the typical amount of willpower that is required to perform an activity long term.

As you can see, the amount of willpower required to perform an activity grows with each day and usually peaks around day 28, then slowly dropping over time.  What this means is that usually for the first 28 days of performing an activity, the amount of willpower needed continues to increase, but usually between day 21-28 the force of habit takes over and the amount of willpower required decreases significantly.

The reason that it usually takes more willpower to do something from days 14 to 28 than it did from day 1 to 14 is that usually our initial excitement to achieve a goal runs out after the first few weeks.  Some people who don’t properly activate the power of their will are only running on that excitement energy and when it diminishes in the first week or two they abandon their goals.

If you can get your force of will – your willpower – properly activated it can easily push you to do what you want to do for that 30-60 day period of time it may take you to form a habit.  Usually by day 28, the force of habit will start to kick in and it will become increasingly easier and easier to keep performing the desired activity than to not do it.

How do we activate the force of habit?

One challenge that many people have is that they are good at activating their willpower for that first 30-60 days, but they lack the understanding of habit forming to activate the force of habit.  Because of this, their willpower starts to run out after the first 30-60 days but the force of habit that should have taken over by then hasn’t been activated yet.

In most cases the reason for this is because people don’t understand how habits are formed.  For example, lets say that the desired activity is running on a treadmill for 30 minutes each day.  It is much easier to form a habit if the desired activity is performed at a regular point in time every day, than if it is performed irregularly.

For example, performing the activity every day from 7:00am to 7:30am or from 11:00pm – 11:30pm as an example is better than performing the activity at 10am one day, then 4pm the next day, then 7pm the next day etc.  Also, performing the activity consecutively every day is more habit forming than skipping days.  Think of habits such as smoking or drinking coffee etc.  People who smoke, smoke every day.  They tend to also have regular patterns of when they smoke, such as before or after a meal, before getting into a car etc.

To make it easier for your mind to form a habit out of an activity, try to give it as regular of a pattern as you can.  Breaking that pattern makes it harder for the mind to establish a habit, and if you break the pattern too many times the habit may not form before your willpower runs out, which is typically what happens to people.

In many cases where I wasn’t able to install a new activity into my life and to keep going with it past the 30-60 day mark, it was due to the fact that I failed to establish a regular pattern that would build a habit in my mind.  I would perform the activity at a different time each day, and sometimes I would skip days or take days “off” and then “double up” on other days to make up the missed activity.  I didn’t realize that while this kind of irregularity may be fine for my willpower to handle, it made it very difficult for me to build a regular habit out of the activity and so when the willpower ran out, the activity stopped.

What else can we do to improve our willpower?

The other thing that I have found to be very useful in increasing my willpower and my ability to form habits is to track my progress meticulously.  For example, when I started my new diet last week on April 15th, I began to meticulously track my weight, weighing myself every morning and tracking it in a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet I created for myself to track my progress tracks my daily weight, my seven day average weight, the average pace at which I’m losing weight etc.  The spreadsheet also graphs my results on a graph and it uses my seven day average pace to “predict” my weight on May 21st when I hit my deadline for the Blogger Weight Loss Challenge I’m doing with Tyler Cruz.

I have always found that this kind of tracking helps me to stay on track each day and makes it easier to stick with the desired activity during that 30-60 day period of time that willpower lasts, before habit force takes over.

When Willpower Fails

What do you do when you try using some of the tools I described above and you just can’t get yourself to have the willpower to do something even for just a few days?

Whenever there is a scenario where you can’t even do something for a few days, it is usually not willpower that’s the culprit.  If willpower fails on you, it’s usually after the first week or two, not in the first few days.

If you can’t get yourself to perform a desired activity for even a few days there are a variety of reasons for that.

One of those reasons could simply be that you don’t really desire to perform that activity.  Such as for example when someone around you tried to influence you or inject their beliefs or values into your life, or to make you feel guilty for not performing an activity so you caved in and tried to do it just to please them.  Unless your desire to please others is very strong, you will not usually be able to activate your willpower to help you. As long as that persons energy is around you, you may try to perform the desired activity but the minute they leave, you’ll stop doing it.

This is a good thing.  You don’t want to be wasting your willpower trying to live the life someone else wants for you.  Your willpower is reserved for the things that you want to do in your life for your own reasons.

Another example where willpower may not activate for you is if the timing for such an activity is just not right for you, but you try to force yourself to do it anyways.  Such as for example if you aren’t ready yet to lose weight, but January 1st rolls around and so you try to set a New Years resolution to exercise just because it’s January 1st, not because you’re actually ready to do it.

However, the biggest reason for willpower not to activate at all for people is when they haven’t decided to do something.  Meaning, you have to first decide to do something before you can use willpower to do it.  This may seem simplistic, but most people don’t actually decide to do something and then they wonder why they can’t do it.  They will use vocabulary like “I tried to lose weight” or “I tried to exercise every day but I couldn’t even do it for two days”.

“Trying” something is not the same as deciding to do it.  Don’t try to use your willpower to “try” something for 30-60 days.  You’re just wasting your time.  You can try something once, for a day or two but that’s it.  If you want to engage your willpower to help you do something, first actually decide to do the thing.  Commit to it.  Cut yourself off from any other possibilities.  Declare to yourself (and possibly others) that you will do something.

That kind of conviction is what fuels willpower.  Trying is a weak energy.  It’s reserved for unimportant things in life that you don’t really care about.  It has no place in working with forces such as willpower and the force of habit.

For example, if you want to set a goal to write a blog post every day then decide to do it.  Commit to it.  Don’t “try” to do it.  The same goes for exercise, eating healthy, or any other activity you may want to start doing in your life.

What about you?

How long have you found your willpower to last?  Does it fall within the 30-60 day period of time I described?

What about forming habits?  How long have you found it takes you to build a habit of doing something?