Strengthen Your Willpower – An Easy Way

Knowledge is power! All of us must have heard this. But this is only half the truth. The whole truth is ‘knowledge is power if and only if it is acted upon!’ One can experience the true power of knowledge only if one puts that knowledge to use in their life.

We all know that it is not good to suffer from back pain in our thirties or forties. But if it happens, the pain increases if we don’t do anything about it. We all also know that by exercising for 25 to 30 minutes every day, we can reduce the back pain, and eventually, it will go away. We all are knowledgeable about this, but still, we find it difficult to get up early to exercise. By the time we get up, it’s time to get ready for the office, and thus we miss exercise. We all are aware of the benefits of exercising daily, still, we don’t use this knowledge and act accordingly.

The question here is not about wanting or not wanting to exercise. It is about your willpower. 

Willpower……Willpower is your inner strength which helps to train your mind to take action on the knowledge that you know is undoubtedly going to benefit you. It is a muscle that one needs to strengthen first before they start using it. 

You want to do something; say you want to exercise for at least 25 minutes every day. This is your will, but in reality, you are not able to exercise every day as your willpower is low. So, to strengthen your willpower, you need to first give it some exercise, just like a wrestler who exercises first and then enters the ring. They don’t first enter the ring and then start exercising. So how can one strengthen their willpower?

Here is an easy technique for you. Say you are going somewhere on a two-wheeler. Then, decide in advance that you are going to ride it at a maximum speed of 30km/hr. Here, your mind has taken the message that you don’t want to exceed the 30km/hr speed at first. Later, it will try to tell you that the road is empty, why don’t you increase the speed and go faster? This is when you have to remind your mind again that you will ride only at 30km/hr maximum speed. Or say it’s the winter season and the weather is cold, then you can decide to take a bath with cold water at least once a week.

Your mind will try to tell you to take a bath with hot water as that will be more comfortable, but you want to make your willpower strong, so you make sure that you take a bath with cold water at least once. By doing this, your mind will slowly start realizing that until now, you were listening to your mind, but now the mind has to listen to you. You keep telling yourself that you will exercise for 30 mins every day once you have trained your willpower to be stronger. Now your mind will also listen to you. This is because the muscle that needs to be strong to train your mind, the willpower muscle, has already been strengthened by you.

It is ready to be used and will always be supportive in training your mind. We know that by adopting a certain practice, it will give us good results, but we are not doing it regularly just because we are not habitual in doing it regularly. Even though we have the necessary knowledge, we are still not able to do it regularly, then the issue is not about knowledge; it is about action.

And this action directly relates to one’s willpower. Once you have strong willpower, taking action becomes easier. Just like during winter, in spite of the cold, you have decided to act and take a bath with cold water.