“There are 3 types of strength” I tell my kids. “Physical strength, intellectual strength, and the strength of your willpower.” I tell them this because I see them stuck in a lot of the frustrating patterns of behavior that I also see in myself… and that I’ve been working on for years. So much of our performance in our jobs and in our roles in life will ultimately be tied to our strength of will. For a lot of my customers and coaching clients, their will is tested most when they move from an operations or technical role (engineering, consulting, etc.) into a role with more leadership or sales responsibilities. It is very often willpower, not knowledge, that limits our performance.
I teach a workshop in our Sales Mastery program focused on building willpower and habits – it’s coming up on the calendar in December. Purely by luck a good friend recommended a book to me called “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength” by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. The book provides lab tested scientific support for the ideas we’re teaching and great insights into the science behind willpower. I want to share a few takeaways from the book – mixed together with some ideas from our workshop, that I have found to be universally valuable.
First key idea: Willpower is best viewed as a muscle… it can get stronger over time, and it can become depleted. Use of willpower, regardless of the context (work related, family related, etc.) will deplete it. Another key idea is that willpower does not increase or decrease relative to the task at hand – it is more accurately viewed as a reservoir that is drained by ALL tasks a person engages in. The idea that a person has strong willpower with respect to one area of their life, and weak in other areas is scientifically unfounded. A strong will impacts all areas of our life, and a depleted will also shows up everywhere – and regardless of how strong your will is, it can always become depleted! I use an example of painting the ceiling when making this point in our workshop – it may seem easy when you start, but that paintbrush grows heavier and heavier as time wears on. I first heard this idea in a talk I heard by Jim Rohn, and Baumeister/Tierney’s work provides great scientific basis for it.
The activities that deplete our willpower occur constantly in the course of our daily lives. Things like making decisions, resisting temptations, doing things we don’t particularly want to do, focusing intently, controlling our emotions, shutting out distractions, and having lists of goals and tasks that have not been done all deplete our will to some degree. So what refills our reservoir of willpower? I like to view it as “energy” – and the things that give us energy also would seem to be sources of willpower. In the book Baumeister/Tierney focus on things such as sleep and blood glucose levels. Our will is scientifically shown to rise after a good night’s sleep and after meals. This brings to mind an adage that a mentor shared with me… if you have a frog to eat, eat it first thing in the morning. If you have 2 frogs to eat, eat the bigger one first!
The book concludes with a number of proactive strategies driven from what they learned in their experiments. On the simple end of the spectrum are ideas such as avoiding temptation and not taking on too many willpower draining tasks at once. Other strategies include setting up If-Then rules for yourself in how you will deal with situations that come up and which may test your will. An example… when cold calling, agree with yourself: If the person I call says “I’m not interested”, then I will always ask “who would you suggest I call that might be interested?”. Don’t trust yourself to do simple obvious tasks if they require any amount of willpower! The book also goes into psychological strategies related to pre-commitment (locking yourself into a course of action in an irreversible way), habits, and delay of gratification balanced against rewards (postponing doing something tempting and counterbalancing that with an agreement to complete something difficult first).
One topic that the book does not cover is the psychological concept of “Flow” and how it impacts our willpower. It is a concept we use in our workshops and I felt it was conspicuously absent. The essence of this idea is that we can get ourselves into a highly productive “zone” (athletically or at work) and achieve at much higher levels of performance for periods of time. When we’re in such a state, it would seem our willpower is increased – things that may have had us procrastinating seem easy, and our productivity skyrockets. But we’ll save that discussion for another post.
The book was a worthwhile read – I do recommend it. If you do read it (or have read it) please leave your thoughts below. I’m also interested in hearing how you maintain your willpower at a high level? What impact does it have on your life and your productivity? Leave me a comment!
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