Why willpower never works for long…
If you want to make any permanent change in your life, willpower won't get you there.
Really, willpower is for people who are still uncertain about what they want to do.
If you're required to exert willpower to do something, there is an obvious internal conflict💥. You want to eat the cookies, but you also want to be healthy. Environment versus goal.
✨What are you going to do?
✨Are you going to be strong this time and resist?
✨Or are you going to crumble? (No pun intended)
✨Are you serious about this?
✨Or are you just talking?
✨Are you still on the fence about wanting to improve your health, or have you ACTUALLY decided you want this?⭐️ Until you decide, you'll be required to use willpower, and will continue making minimal progress.
Let me ask you this - What is commitment?
How do you know if you're truly committed to something?
When it comes to achieving goals, commitment involves:
Investing upfront (yep, that's spending money)
Making it public
Setting a reasonable timeline
Installing several forms of feedback & accountability
Altering things in your environment that opposes your commitment
If you're committed to running a marathon (which I would never in my life do, lol), you're going to put everything in place to make sure it happens.
You're not going to leave it up to chance and wing it!
You're going to start by signing up for a race (investment). You're going to make it public (phase one of accountability). You're going to get a running partner who holds you accountable. You're going to track your progress (feedback) and recount your progress to your accountability partner. Lastly, you're going to remove things in your life that keep you from running.
Because it's a priority, right? And you've committed.
➡️ If you're requiring yourself to use willpower:
You haven't made up your mind.
Your desire (your "why") for your goals isn't strong enough.
You haven't fully committed to what you're going to do.
You haven't declared your intentions to someone else asking for ultimate accountability.
Your environment opposes your goals. Thus, you haven't created an environment that makes your goals achievable.
Willpower sucks. Forget about it. Stop torturing yourself.
🧑🏫 In my opinion, personal progress and achieving success are best approached like you're overcoming addiction. Because, quite literally, that's what you're doing.
Relating to food and exercise it could be combating emotional eating, binge eating, restricted eating, overexercising, or being in the same yo-yo diet cycle for YEARS...the list goes on...
