Willpower: Can You Manufacture It?

In studying the whole idea of the ability to create action, my previous article alluded to a concept known as personal power. However, just defining personal power as the ability to take action is insufficient. I can take action, but why should I if I know that it will end up in failure? The most common theme in success training is simply that “you can”. It’s great and inspirational, but fairly limiting if you don’t have accompanying skills.

Actually, the problem with such an approach is that you might end up with greater anxiety. By getting oneself hyped up alone without sufficient building of skills often causes more problems in the long term than you think. It becomes a vicious cycle because it will influence future decisions. For instance, you may attend a retreat that is a “team building” session that gives you a high after, but the fact is you start picking on challenges where you really have no skills to handle.

In many cases, then, to build willpower is to build not just the drive and determination to move forward, but also to be able to create the “pathways” or the possibilities. In many cases, therefore, those who are good with contingency planning will often find the different ways to achieve their goal, giving them a higher likelihood that they will achieve their outcome, rather than sit there and do nothing. In a sense, the level of creativity and willingness to tolerate ambiguity comes into the picture.

My worry in most cases is that motivational talks give a spur of the moment experience, but do not help with the development of confidence overall. It is therefore necessary for one to be put into a “possibility” mode, and given tools to carry out these possibilities.

There was a participant  I had once who was really good at coming out with ideas, but because of limited self-efficacy, was not able to push his ideas forward. Once his self-efficacy was better developed, and when he had a higher level of confidence in pushing his ideas forward, he was able to convince himself to embark on new jobs and projects. Still, his ability to push on with his idea was limited as he didn’t put in 100% of what he could have, largely because the options that he had were finite. When he realized, through coaching, that there were many other possibilities he could pursue to enhance his possibilities of success, he felt that he had better control over his choices and direction, raising his willpower to pursue this goal.

As you may realize, goal-setting is an extremely important tool that this person had to learn to build the capacity of willpower. According to the concept of “hope”, it refers not just to the average person’s understanding of “pray and hope”, but rather a sense of drive in action as well as choice of strategy.

Another thing that is necessary to build willpower is emotional resourcefulness. One simple way I often teach my participants to do is to begin revisiting positive emotional states. Most people tend to visit negative emotional states. I know many people tend to feel bad because their thoughts are on auto-pilot. They don’t know how to manage thinking. It’s not about just positive thinking – it’s about knowing how to interrupt negative thoughts, and also replacing those thoughts with more productive and directive thoughts. To learn how this is done, one should be certified in NLP with a qualified and experienced NLP Trainer. Without effective emotional resource-building skills, one’s ability to develop PsyCap will be limited.

To expand your emotional resource-building capabilities, write me at Facebook and stay notified about my next NLP Certification training workshop.