Ways to Develop Self-Discipline and Willpower
If you think you have no willpower, you are sabotaging your own success. Everyone has willpower. You must have willpower to even be reading this sentence. The prerequisite for developing your own will power is to acknowledge its existence. It is as certain a fact that you have willpower, as well as your soul.
If someone puts a big barbell in front of you and wants you to lift it, but you know you can’t lift it, you probably wouldn’t say, “I don’t have the strength.” If you’re drawing, you can only say, “I don’t have the strength to handle this.” This is a more accurate way of expression; because, on the one hand, it implies that you can reach the power to lift that barbell when you work hard enough in that area, on the other hand, it makes you feel that you have a certain power.
This also applies to your willpower. When you take a piece of the chocolate cake served to you, it is not understood that you lack willpower at all. Just as you have an arm, you also have willpower. Maybe your arm is not very strong; but you still have one arm.
The second step in this area is knowing that you can develop your willpower, as well as your arm. It is up to you to strengthen it or weaken it. It is never fortuitous external circumstances that best develop man’s will power. Willpower is the inner matter of man…
Make a commitment to yourself and be open and realistic about your own willpower. That power is always there. To make it stronger and more useful to you, you must be willing to play the game inside you. Some call this game self-creation.
Developing and using willpower is the most direct and quickest way to get us to self-motivation… Many people think that self-discipline is closely related to self-punishment. Even when they attribute this negative meaning to it, they never have the desire to develop it… “Self-respect is the fruit of discipline,” says psychologist Abraham Heschel. “The sense of dignity develops with the ability to say no to oneself.”
The American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of the warriors of Sandwich Island believing that when they killed an enemy tribesman, his courage passed into their own bodies. Emerson tells us it’s the same thing when we say no to something seductive. The power of that seductive thing passes into our willpower. And when we resist a little temptation, we become a little stronger. When we resist great temptation, we gain great strength.
To keep this power alive, William James advises us to do at least two things every day that we don’t want to do – just because we don’t want to do them. Only in this way can we continue to be aware of our own will…
Zen thinker and teacher Alan Watts hated the word “discipline”; because he thought the word had a lot of negative connotations. Yet he knew that the secret to savoring any action lay in discipline. Therefore, he replaced the word “discipline” with “skill”; it was only then that he succeeded in developing his own self-discipline.
Steve Chandler – “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever”
60 Effective Self-Motivation Techniques to Boost Your Motivational Power
