Willpower...

Do You Want More Willpower?

Posted: 16 May 2012 11:56 AM PDT

Probably my all-time favorite book on self development is ‘Your Brain At Work’ by David Rock.

In the book Rock talks about the fact that willpower is a finite resource driven by your energy levels, and as such it usually depletes as the day goes along.
Your brain acquires energy via sleep and oxygen as well as food and drink that it then converts to glucose to keep itself going.
A deficit of one or more of those things means your brain gets very cranky and stops working properly and your decision making abilities decrease rapidly.
You can of course give yourself a boost of willpower by drinking a high energy drink which rapidly converts into glucose, but it’s probably not ideal to jump on that roller coaster too often because when it wears off you will feel even worse.

When Willpower Starts To Wane

Imagine you’ve spent all day mentally saying, “No I won’t eat you” to the piece of your favorite cheesecake your partner selfishly left in the fridge before going off to work.
By the time he gets home (it’s bound to be a him, no woman would do such a cruel thing!) you may well be a quivering, salivating wreck and want to stab him through the heart with a red hot poker or any other available pointy instrument.
And that’s because, every time you’ve said ‘no’ you’ve used up a bit more energy and drained a little bit more of your willpower.
I bet you can think back to a time when your willpower was completely depleted and you crumbled under the pressure of some instant gratification.
Maybe it was that cookie at the end of a hard day when you were on a diet. Or maybe it was that ice cold beer offered to you on a hot day after you’ve sworn to lay off the booze for a month.

But Was Your Willpower Tank Really Running On Empty?

Let’s take the cheesecake scenario as an example.
100 times that day (and trust me that’s not an unreasonable number) your mind had drifted off on its own thinking how great it would be to eat that cake and 100 times the executive part of your brain had responded by saying “No cake, it’s not yours!”
However on the 101st occasion your mind has had enough of just saying no and sets off down a complicated route of self justification why doing the dirty deed was not just ok, but a down right necessity.
Consequently you head off to the kitchen with a big grin on your face and a fork in your hand.
Unfortunately for you I’ve arrogantly taken it upon myself to be your Life Coach, and I’m stood by the fridge brandishing the worlds most powerful handgun, a Smith & Wesson Model 500 as well as my own rather satanic grin.
I invite you to eat the cake, but as I do I pull the worlds cutest baby Koala Bear from my pocket and level the gun at the little fellas head and advise you that if you eat the cake, my eucalyptus eating friend gets it.
For the sake of this quite frankly ridiculous example I’m going to presume you’re a devout animal lover (if you’re not, pretend I have the gun at your own head).
As such you immediately back away from the cheesecake quite rightly appalled at the thought of seeing bits of bloody fur all over your kitchen ceiling.
Where did that new found will power to say no come from?
Did you have some resources all the time that you were unaware of?
Well of course you did, you never really exhausted your will power, you were just very low and needed some extra motivation to tap into it.
My opinion is that we almost never run out of willpower, but we do run out of the ability to recognize it’s there.
I wrote a post on this subject last year in which I explained motivation always trumps willpower, although I’m not sure I went deep enough.

What Drives Motivation?

Let’s take a look at a slightly more sensible example to demonstrate what I mean.
There have been plenty of prisoners the world over interrogated using sleep deprivation until they were so worn down by the process they were willing to confess to crimes they never committed.
I know this is somewhat contrived, but please humor me because it makes an important point.
Imagine as the person was about to sign the confession his entire family were marched into the room by an equally aggressive opposing force.
He was then told if he did make his false confession his family would be executed on the spot.
What do you think he’d do?
My guess is he’d go through whatever torture his original captors threw at him and even accept death rather than be the cause of his own families death.
What both examples have in common is when the people concerned were struggling to resist temptation and thought their the willpower tank was empty they shifted their focus.
And they shifted their focus on to their values, because it’s your values that motivate you.
In the first example cheesecake was good, but not as good as saving the Koala Bear and a number of core values could be making their presence felt:

• Mercy
• Integrity (if the person was genuinely an animal lover)
• Justice
• Kindness
• Compassion

Or the person may be much more motivated by moving away from their anti-values such as:

• Brutality
• Disgust
• Aggression

In the second example core values such as the following could have risen to the surface:

• Family
• Bravery
• Leadership
• Legacy

So if the answer to the question posed in the title is ‘yes’ then spend more time focused on your values because that’s how you do it.
The more I study, work with, get feedback from clients and write about values, the more convinced I am that they are without question the single most important and underrated aspect of successful self development.
A lot of people talk about them, but few understand their true worth in my opinion.
If you want to know more about values check out Aligning With Your Core Values, because I promise you if you do the work and implement the results you can start to change your world for the better.