How Can We Have An Iron Willpower?

The ideal would be that we never had to use it and that we could swim through rivers always with the current. It’s generally not a good idea to follow the commitment that some people seem to have: filling their schedules with activities and appointments that put their willpower to the test. Perhaps being able to overcome difficult challenges brings us great satisfaction, but also great wear.

So, perhaps the first way to have an iron will is not to abuse it. Not carrying weight all day, but trying to make most of our activities use gravity to your advantage. This is also intelligence.

will and habit

Willpower becomes less necessary when we create inertia. Inertia is understood in physics as the movement an object has when the total forces on it are zero. Let’s imagine a ball rolling across a frictionless surface: it would never stop or it would be difficult to stop.

Well, this inertia in people has to do with habit. For example, one that we all have is to get up. If we adopt a constant time to leave our haven between the sheets, ultimately the willpower needed to wake up will be less. Somehow it is about taming or adapting our behavior, with discipline, so that the final result depends less and less on will and more on an inertia that perpetuates the movement in our favor.

The motivation, the soul of the will

On the other hand, if there is a help for which the willpower is grateful, it is motivation. This, for example, is something libraries don’t understand. The most common is that if you delay the return of a book you have to wait a few days before you can get another one, as a form of fine. This sanction, once the deadline for the return has expired, acts against the hypothesis that the user goes to the library as soon as possible, since it eliminates his main motivation to visit the place: to pick up new books immediately.

Yes, right away because the cost of not being able to pick them up in two, three or four days is perceived by the user as much less than the cost of going to the library and not being able to pick up other books right away. Thus, there are users who, after the day determined for the return, decide to do it only when the library is on its way to somewhere else, and do not go to it specifically.

The relationship with motivation can also be understood in another sense. For example, when we set ourselves a medium- or long-term goal, meeting the intermediate goals will alleviate the load of willpower required in the tasks we enjoy least. Imagine that you want to lose weight, 10 kilos, and for that you decided to take care of your diet and increase the amount of daily exercise. If you feel that the steps you took to achieve this goal are working, chances are that the effort required to maintain them will be less.

Willpower, self-efficacy and goal setting

The strength we have to exert our will will also depend on how we define our goals. Precise, divisible, measurable, well-defined, stable goals over which we have almost all control will help our willpower. In this sense, uncertainty will be one of the factors that can most harm our will, since it eliminates part of the surface on which it rests.

Will is also sensitive to self-efficacy. Self-efficacy has to do with the feeling or intuition that we are going to be effective in performing a task. For example, I have a friend who is an athlete who said that for some time now he has only had injuries, and that in recent months he had to cancel several training sessions because of these circumstances.

He said that before, doing the hardest training was difficult, but now mentally it’s even more complicated. He thinks he won’t be able to finish, and he’s already canceled some before he even started.

In this case, it’s the perceived lack of effectiveness that has damaged your willpower. The anticipation of having to wake up early, move to the training site, warm up, start, have to suspend training and return home with this feeling was what increased the demand for his will.

will and social support

Finally, it should be noted that the will can also be of very valuable help in social support. For example, sharing with others that we are in the process of quitting smoking can make them help us in times of weakness. Our will, in this case, will have to be added to everyone’s motivation, to maintain consistency between what we say and what we do.

In this sense, social support is a double-edged sword. If you don’t constantly remember our mistakes or bring up anticipations that fill us with anxiety, it can increase our will even more. For this, when we share the goal with others, we can also tell them how we would like them to support us.

As we’ve seen throughout this article, a more or less strong will is important, but often the factors that lighten your work are even more. They are because every exercise of the will involves a great wear and tear, an investment of our inner strength, the use of which we should be intelligent, since it is limited.