The alarm rings.

You open your eyes. It’s 6AM – meaning it’s time to drag yourself out of bed, change into your workout clothes, pack your shoes and head to the gym.

You turn to your nightstand, grab your alarm, and promptly tap on snooze. You close your eyes and tell yourself – just five more minutes, and then this happens….

Sound familiar? It does to me.

Truth is, it’s happened more often than I care to admit.

There are two parts to this quandary –

1. First, your sleep hygiene. 
2. Second, being over dependent on Willpower, when there is an Easier Way.

Sleep Hygiene is another topic altogether, so we’ll cover that in another article.

Lets talk about Willpower

Or rather, lets talk about the over-dependence people have on willpower when trying to make a change in their life. 

First I want to be clear that using willpower is not a bad idea at all. In fact, I would say its necessary to kick start any endeavor. The problem arises when we don’t move on once we’ve started the change process. 

Understand that no matter how much mental fortitude you exercise, willpower remains a limited resource and with time and exertion – it will deplete. When this happens, you will find yourself suddenly unable to stick to your guns and you slide back into your old behavioral patterns. 

We are Lazy (but we’re intelligent about it)

Remember, that our minds are built to make decisions that leads to the least amount of energy expenditure. We are evolutionarily lazy. 

And change is hard work.

What’s more, being logical creatures we justify our energy conservation *coughlazycough* decisions behind intellectualisations, using self talk like “I’m too sore to train today anyway”, “I’ll make up for it tomorrow”, etc.

If you’ve ever trained in a dedicated manner for a while, only to find yourself going OFF EXERCISE AND DIETING for 1 – 2 months after, and having all your progress reversed – You’ve had this happen to you!

In fact, this extends far beyond the realm of exercise and diet. People give up on “difficult” things all the time. Mostly because willpower runs dry and now they have nothing to fuel themselves. 

So then, Willpower doesn’t work!

You may be feeling lost right about now.

If willpower doesn’t work, then is it even worth the effort to try and change?

Absolutely! In fact there’s an easier, more systematic and scientific way!

It isn’t overly elaborate or fancy, but it works!

4 Step Strategic Approach to Change:-

STEP 1: Ration your willpower, wisely.

When you start off, you’re going to need a kick start with willpower. While this is true, its best to ration your reserves.

• Think about your end goal and figure which aspects of your life will be either (A) easiest to change OR (B) may not be easy, but once changed will have the biggest impact on your life.
• Out of these, pick only one or two aspects of your life to change. it isn’t a good idea to try to do everything at once ie. quit smoking, clean up your diet, go to sleep early and start working out all at the same time. Pick one or two at most, at a time.
• Break these down further to behaviors that you can change. Be specific! A bad example is ‘I will exercise more’. A good example is ’45 minutes of resistance training, 3 times a week’.
• Pick only one (max two) behaviors that you can begin exercising your willpower on to kick start the change process. 

STEP 2: Be conscious of the excuses your mind makes for you.

After a few days, your willpower is going  to start running low and motivation is going to plummet. You will not feel like sticking to the routine you have planned for yourself!

This is when negative self talk will take over. Be conscious of the excuses your mind makes for you, and expect them. When you recognize a faulty thought process, you become aware of it and can choose to reject it.

It also may be that the behavior you’ve chosen to indicate might be too large a step to take at this point. Try to break the behavior down further, to make it easier to implement without completely exhausting your willpower reserves. 

STEP 3: Form Habits to free up conscious willpower.

With habits, willpower becomes redundant.

Have you noticed that when you get out of bed in the morning, no matter how tired you are, you’re going to brush your teeth? We do this, without even thinking about it!  

It isn’t because brushing your teeth is an instinctual activity intrinsic to us, like walking or running. Instead you’ve formed a habit through continuous repetition and conditioning since a very young age. The result is engaging in this activity requires little to no effort or willpower!

Through consistency and keeping with your schedule, your chosen behavior (in this case working out 3 times a week) will also become a habit and will require lesser and lesser willpower to execute. It’ll just become one of those things that you do everyday, like brushing your teeth. 

STEP 4: Assess and redeploy your newly freed willpower where its most needed!

Periodically, I’d say every one to two weekends, its a good idea to spend some time thinking about and assessing how you’re doing with respect to your short term and long term goals.  

Eventually you will realise that this behavior (in our example – working out 3 times a week) that was at one point difficult for you has become much easier to execute. You’ve probably developed a schedule that works for you, and you can now make it to the gym 3 times a week, with no problem – A more easier to sustain ‘habit’ has developed.

‘Habit formation’ has the very fortunate side effect of freeing up willpower. 

You can now choose to redeploy this willpower to:-

• changing another behavior in the same aspect of your life (following a more structured workout program).
• Zero in on another behavior in another aspect of your life (eating more protein to support your nutrition, for example)
• use it to address some urgent life matters that need attending to (AKA go into maintenance mode when tackling stressful situations!)

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Lastly,

If you’re serious about making a change, then I’d implore you to invest 5 minutes to check out the Coaching Program I run for my Clients.

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