How to Increase Willpower, Become More Self-Disciplined and Be Successful

One of the tenets of personal development is to bring about a behavior change. If you want to develop yourself, you need to change your behavior to some degree.

It is not necessarily overhauling yourself, but it's still a change.

The whole reason of self-improvement is to improve upon what you are. Some of things are not working for you, because the necessary behavior is absent.

Or you just want to improve upon things. And you need new skills to achieve this improvement. Behavior change could also mean learning new skills.

When you learn new skill and actually apply new skills, the behavior change has taken place With this change, you exploit the benefits of the new skills.

So how does one change behavior? At the root of changing behavior is our capacity of self-discipline. This is also called self-control or willpower.

You can have all the knowledge in the world. But if you don't have the self-discipline to incorporate that knowledge in your behavior, the knowledge is of no use.

For example, you know that you are not supposed to do certain things. But if you do those things anyway, what is the point of the knowledge?

Personal development experts will tell you this: you have to set goals, divide tasks into sub tasks, prioritize tasks, write journals and have a positive attitude in spite of setbacks.

But if you don't have self-discipline to put all this advice into action, you won't succeed! And it may lead you to blame that expert advice doesn't work.

What is self-discipline though? It's the eternal conflict between the dual self. We always have a self who is conscious about long-term goals. He gets and remembers what is the right thing to do for us.

Then we have the other self which is impulsive and indulgent. This other self is always getting distracted towards the guilty pleasures that we should not explore. This other self is the one which blocks us from taking the initiative that we really should take.

The impulsive self is wanting a sweet treat, be lazy and just watch TV. While the better self is aware that those are bad things. And one should really be eating healthy in general, exercising and focusing on making that phone call and writing that journal.

At the deepest level, the impulsive self is a primitive self, who is impulsive, craving and desires things. The better self, is our analytical self. This is the neo-cortex in action. This is the recent part of our brain which engages in complex functions. This part of the brain has big picture, it weighs different options and knows what is right versus wrong.

Who doesn't want success, good relationships, health and well-being? Who doesn't want to be happy? And all of these can be achieved through proper self-discipline.

The fundamental reasons, most people don't succeed even after reading books, taking courses and attending seminars, is the failure to exercise self-discipline and giving into the impulsive self.

The root of all personal problems lies the failure of self-discipline. The fundamental reason people are not able to achieve success is because of them not able to keep up self-discipline.

Self-discipline is the biggest human strength.

You may wonder, if it's possible to increase self-discipline.

And the answer is a resounding YES.

One can definitely increase the levels of willpower he or she possesses.

Willpower is a limited resource. In other words self-discipline will deplete. Right after exercising self-discipline, your willpower will deplete and if you later have to exercise your willpower, you don't do that well.

Yet if you practice self-discipline over and over, it improves. This may sound counterintuitive. We just said that using willpower depletes it, but on the other hand we are saying that using it over and over, improves it.

The best analogy to understand this is that of muscle. Right after use, muscle is fatigued and painful. But if you keep exercising repeatedly, your muscle strength and tone improves.

If you intentionally practice self-discipline again and again, you'll build it up You will increase the level of self-discipline.

What are the ways to improve willpower?

Last decade of research in human psychology has revealed many ways in which one can improve the willpower or the self-discipline. A Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, identifies following four methods of improving the willpower.

Get enough sleep.

One of the most common ways to improve willpower is through more sleep.

Lack of sleep actually prevents us from operating at most willpower capacity. If we are sleep deprived, our prefrontal cortex doesn't activate enough, which means our restraining mind is not in action and we easily give in to the impulses.

It is important to get a good night's sleep. For most people 7 hours is what is required. If you haven't slept 7 hours and even if you don't feel sleepy, your cortex is still not working full capacity. Hence its very important to sleep 7 hours.

Meditation is one of the tools that can be effectively used to help with the increasing amount of sleep you can have.

Forgive yourself.

We are usually critical of ourselves. Especially when we have a setback, we tend to criticize us.

Scientists found that for reasons we don't fully understand yet, when we criticize ourselves or when we are harsh on ourselves for setbacks, we tend to repeat such setbacks or the indulgent behavior.

On the other hand when you forgive yourself for the setbacks, it seems to have an effect of preventing future relapses.

So learn to forgive yourself for setbacks along your journey.

Be mindful of distracting urges.

One of the most important tool for boosting self-discipline is the awareness of your urges and impulses.

If you can cultivate the mindful awareness of the distracting impulses, it becomes easier not to succumb.

When you're struck with a distracting impulse or craving that will spoil your goal, you have to become mindful of that impulse.

We feel different types of impulses. You may feel like procrastinating and you won't start reading the book. Or you may feel like delaying that important class registration. If your goal is to lose weight, you may feel the impulse to indulge in high calorie food.

Here is what you do.

Notice the feeling that you're experiencing. Observe the thought that is going through your mind. Notice the impulse. Observe the itch.

Become aware of the impulse. Feel the impulse, what is it? What is the feeling? Where is the feeling? Is it in certain part of the body?

Attend to this inner experience. Acknowledge the experience and then accept it. Don't try to run away from the experience. Face it head on and then accept it.

Once accepted, take a deep breath and pause. Give your body a chance to slow down and plan.

Once you have intimately observed the inner experience, bring your attention to your goal. Think of action that will help you achieve your goal.

This in essence is being mindful of your urge or impulse, then accepting it and moving on to what is the right thing to do.

This may be easier to do for food impulses. It is harder to be aware of your habit to put off things. But you can get better through practice.

Visualize the roadblocks.

Generally people believe that you've to imagine success to become a success. Run of the mill self-help gurus will tell you that you've to imagine success to achieve success and not failure.

But exhaustive research proves that, just imagining the success is not enough. Yes imagining success is a good idea. But a better idea is to regularly imagine failure! You may think that will prime you for failure, but that's what doesn't happen in practice.

One scientific study compared two groups of people. One group just visualized the end goals. They visualized achieving the end goal.

Another group visualized the end goal along with the process of going through the journey to achieve success. The visualized ups and down of the process, they visualized the incremental improvement and progress that they were making along the journey.

The group that visualized the journey as well, was twice more likely to achieve the actual results.

So the journey towards achieving the goal is more important than the goal itself.

What is that you are going to inevitably face along the journey? Lots of setbacks. And for a faint heart the setbacks will demoralize him and make him abandon his goal. There won't be just one setback, there will be plenty of them.

Failure is inevitable. And visualizing the failure prepares you for failure. After having repeatedly visualized failure along with the progress, when you're actually struck by the failure, it's no more a shock. You are already ready for it.

So everyday visualize the journey and visualize a failure.

Make friends with your future self.

We don't normally think a lot about what would happen to us in future. We don't visualize our future self. Apparently our perception of our future self could be very influential when it comes to willpower.

If you think of future self as being totally different from your current self, in other words if you completely dissociate your current self from your future self, the future self becomes like a stranger and you wouldn't care much about future self.

In such cases you don't bother to take care of future self as for all practical purposes future self is a stranger for you.

Different people have different perceptions about their future self. Some think of them more like their present self. Many think of their future self as very different.

The ability to disconnect from the long-term consequences of your choices primes you to be more impulsive. Even in the cases where choices are not relevant to future consequences.

In such cases, you become less attuned to your future concerns and plans. In reality we know that we need to take care of our future self. We need to save for retirement and we should take care of our future by taking care of our future self.

The key is how we can associate more with our future self? One interesting tool, researchers used effectively, is letter writing. Write a letter from your future self to your present self.

Or you can write to your current self, note down about who you are and what is going on in your life. Chronicle your current struggles. Then reply from your future self to current self.

The idea is to connect with your future self through correspondence. It is better to be optimistic in the letter that you write to future self than being completely pessimistic.

The purpose of this exercise is not to view this process as if you are fixing things for your future self. It is more about being able to feel that the future self is real and it is going to be you.

It's not so much that it's going to be same person that you are now.

Even if you start imagining doing mundane stuff in the future. Like driving to work, or going to shop or talking with friends or doing chores in the household. Imagine vividly what it's going to feel like many years down the line.

Here is the Summary.

Self-discipline is the biggest human strength.

One of the biggest reason, people fail is due to lack of self-discipline.

Willpower can be increased.

Sleep well.

Practice forgiving yourself.

Cultivate mindfulness of your impulses and distractions.

Visualize the roadblocks and failures.

Practice connecting with your future self.

Hopefully you will be able to use all these techniques to increase your self-discipline.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7494813

Will Power And Self Discipline In Your Online Business

In your online business, there are quite a number of things that you have to master in order to be successful, but few can compare in importance to will-power and self-discipline. You are going to be tested in so many ways, while building your business that you are going to need these two qualities so important in your life almost every day. It is no good carrying on procrastinating and taking no action about different things that we all know are absolutely necessary in your online business.

So often you may want to do things that you know are beneficial and important for your business online yet, if you do not actually take action to get them done, you see that time carries on regardless and very little is achieved. This sort of thing happens to most of us, especially when we lack will power and have no self-discipline. So keep reading because I will cover a few ways to develop will power and acquire self-discipline.

I don't want you to keep wishing you had will-power and self-discipline. Instead, I am going to show how to get these qualities to make a great difference in your life. When you start eliminating the habits that stop you from going forward, like laziness, excessive eating, smoking and procrastination, you will be on your way to recognize that you are getting more will power and self-discipline. Having more of these qualities is absolutely necessary to do well in your online business.

But how do you get will-power, how do you begin to understand will-power?. Well, if you think, like many people do, that will-power is something very arduous or difficult, or that you have to tense your body and brain to express it, you are mistaken. Don't believe it because I am going to show some strategies that will convince you it is not difficult to develop will-power.

When you don't value insignificant, unnecessary and unhealthy ideas, feelings, actions and reactions that don't empower you, you are showing you posses will-power. This energy is stored inside you and can be available any time you need it to accomplish anything your want.

We will cover later some exercises you can do to gain a lot of will power, but now let us talk about self-discipline and why you need it for your life and your business. You could say that when you make decisions for your business and carry them through to fruition, you have some self-discipline because you have not allowed instant gratification and pleasure take you away from your desired course. Indeed that is a good definition of self-discipline because your actions allowed you to stay with the course that you selected before-hand.

Is this skill useful and required in everyone's life? Absolutely! Without it, as we touched before, you would not stick with your decisions and would have a hard time achieving your goals in business. When you have it, your actions, thoughts and behaviour are in line with a better and more fulfilling life because your inner strength and will power overcome addictions, and other negative traits like procrastination, laziness and lack of focus, to allow you to achieve whatever you want to do in online business.

So why would you not develop self-discipline? You do know how useful and required it is for success in your personal life and of course in your business world too, so fortify it, embrace it and develop it further. Remember that lack of discipline may lead you to failure in reaching your goals. But on the other hand, actions described above that demonstrate you have self-discipline, leads to self-assurance, inner strength and self-regard, as well as to complete satisfaction and happiness.

There are lots of issues and challenges along the path of success, accomplishment and wealth in business and you want to rise above all of them to become successful in whatever you do. You want and need to have perseverance, persistence and sheer will power in order to also overcome other negative traits like smoking, drinking, eating disorders and other damaging habits like drug addition, procrastination and laziness.

Here is what self-discipline can do for you, in addition to those qualities mentioned above:
• It allows you to regulate and control anger, indecision, appetite and various other natural responses.

• You can eliminate many types of temptations which you do not need like gossiping or gambling, overeating or watching too much television.

• It can certainly rescue you from throwing in the towel when things are tough in the business world or in your personal life, by giving you the strength to keep going.

• With it you can get great relationships with others, by not feeling easily hurt or disturbed with what sometimes people do or say to you.

• It gives you better control over the need to accomplish the goals you set for yourself in your online business, as well as having total control over your responses, needs and thoughts.

There are so many more qualities that self-discipline can bring to you...

But how can you develop these inner qualities of will-power and self-discipline? Well, will-power can be obtained gradually and it all depends really on your desire to get it.

And you do not require huge monumental feats of effort to achieve it. Don't believe those who tell you that to get will-power require you to go through great suffering or physical mutilation.

In fact, anyone can become powerful with will-power simply by the challenge of eliminating everything that you know is harmful for you in many areas of your personal and business life. By giving up adverse and useless things that take your time to make you weak, you gain in strength according to how many of these bad habits you can stop. Repeating this process is the challenge you need to make your life more absorbing, gratifying and interesting.

The will-power that you want is not something that can be achieved in one day. You can only developed it bit by bit, over a period of time and it is something that doesn't depend on feelings, emotions, un-focus enthusiasm or even optimism. Instead this gradual ability, developed over a period of time, if it turns into a habit, it is something so special that you can use over and over again whenever and wherever you require it.

This training of the will-power extends or inter-relates with self-discipline since the taking of gradual steps to obtain will-power requires another great quality as we've covered before called self-discipline. So, carry on this way because with self-discipline you also get self-control which is another way of calling self-discipline.

Using self-control wisely is one of the most important tools you can have for self-improvement and for accomplishing success online.

What else does self-control do? It can do a lot of things really, like keeping under control any self-destructive, addictive, compulsive and obsessive action. It can enhance the sense of personal mastery and balance over your life. And it can remove any feelings of weakness and being too dependent on other people. It also enables you to take control over your life. And there are many other qualities that self-control brings to your life.

Self-control also has to act against many obstacles like truly understanding what self-control really is about; or about deficiencies of the desire to alter and improve. And it has to act against solid and uncontrolled emotional responses. Also, do not allow self-control to be considered a restricting and unpleasant activity.

How do you develop self-control? You first find out what areas of your life need more self-control and these could be: Drinking, Betting, Smoking, Obsessive behaviour, Eating and then attempt to identify emotions that lack control, like being angry, dissatisfied, sadness, resentment, delight or fearfulness. See if you can isolate the thoughts and emotions that push you to act in an unrestrained manner.

Here are a few exercises that you can do to gain will-power, self-discipline and self- control: A) Refrain from saying things that are offensive or negative to other groups of people. B) Overlook the gossip useless pages of newspapers. C) When you desire to eat unhealthy meals, discard the thought and prepare yourself an alternative healthy one. D) Try not to drink your tea with sugar for a week if you normally take sugar with your tea. E) Get up straight away at the set time to do it, instead of thinking about it. F) Develop the habit of finishing what you started.

But there are so many more things similar to those above to create an unstoppable muscle to develop your inner strength. The point here is that you do not want to continue making your life hard by doing the things you don't like. Consider instead making your life 'easy' by doing the things that most people think hard to do. These skills are vital for your will-power, self-discipline, your personal life and your online business.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8001352