In yesterday’s article (Motivated, Wise, Productive) I mentioned a willpower challenge I’m starting, and it deals with bringing together a lot of skills from this site. If I succeed with this experiment, it should provide some useful findings–and if I fall on my butt, that should at least provide a little amusement.

You’ve probably noticed that this site offers a lot of tools for developing and using willpower, like emotional antidotes, flow, idea repair, feedback loops, and so on. But there are at least two major barriers between being familiar with those tools and using them all the time in everyday life: one is that knowing is not the same thing as doing, and the other is that it’s very problematic to try to pursue more than one goal at a time. Sure, I know a lot of great willpower tricks (like 24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry), but it still takes time, attention, and resignation to use those tricks.

And yet … every time I miss an opportunity to use my self-motivation skills, it’s disappointing. My primary goal right now is using organization and time management to get more writing work done, and that’s been very useful and important to me. But that means my other goals–like having a more orderly home and improving on my fitness–have had to wait on the sidelines for quite a while, and of course I’m impatient. So I theorized that if I could get into a habit of using my immediate willpower skills every time a willpower issue came up, even if it wasn’t in the course of pursuing my main goal, then I might make a lot of progress on those secondary goals and in fact on any goal I had clearly outlined and understood well without having to take on more than one goal at once per se.

The problem, of course, is forming the habit of using all those skills. Forming habits means repeating a behavior on purpose, and it’s necessary to do that daily for months before the habit typically sets in. So my challenge is this: every time a difficult willpower situation comes up, I’ll try using one of the techniques I know to deal with it. If I succeed, great. If I succeed in a surprising, interesting, or unusually powerful way, I’ll make a note about it in a special journal. If I fail, I’ll make a note about it that same journal and figure out what tool I could have used so that I’ll be prepared last time.

There are pitfalls here: this discipline might take too much focus away from my main goal, which wouldn’t be acceptable. Or it might just be that preparation (meditation, planning, etc.) is so important that in-the-moment techniques won’t get me where I need to go. Regardless, I’m planning to find out. Off I go on my adventure: wish me luck!

You might also be interested in reading:

• Knowing Isn’t Enough: The 4 Steps Between Knowledge and Action
• Choosing a Goal That Will Change Your Life
• How to Multitask, and When Not To

Self-motivation and willpower can benefit from learning a lot of different skills: setting goals, tracking progress, repairing broken ideas, organizing priorities; exercising and eating well and trying to get plenty of sleep and meditating to have energy and support a good mood; making rules … and while it’s possible to have willpower without using every one of these tools, the more of them we use effectively, the stronger our willpower is.

One key theme
And yet there’s one simple principle that underlies almost all of these tactics. It’s much easier to state than to follow, but thinking about it helps us keep focused on what willpower means and on what we can do from moment to moment. It goes like this: Think more about the right things and less about the wrong things.

What I mean is that for any goal I might have (for instance, let’s say I was someone who did project proposals as part of my job and wanted to finish three new project proposals by the end of the week), there will be thoughts I could have that will help make that happen (like “there’s a good chance the higher-ups will be pretty impressed if I can pull this off” or “the next step would be doing that competitive analysis”), thoughts that I could have that will get in the way (like “I couldn’t get my proposals done on time the last time, so I’ll probably screw up again this time” or “I hate this work. I just want to go home and eat Twinkies”), and thoughts that won’t have any impact one way or the other as long as they don’t distract me too much (like “These shoes are getting pretty worn out” or “Wow, there’s an albatross outside my window!”). These are right thoughts, wrong thoughts, and neutral thoughts, respectively. The neutral ones we don’t care about, so that’s the last I’ll say of those.

By the way, I want to be clear that I don’t mean that the “right” thoughts are “right” because they are somehow morally better than the “wrong” thoughts. We’re just talking about right or wrong for moving toward a particular goal.

The direct approach
People often seem to talk about thoughts as though we have no control over them, as though they just arise in our heads, stay as long as they want, and then leave without any permission or control on our part. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. We can actively choose to think more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts by reflecting on our own thinking (a process called “metacognition,” which is one facet of mindfulness) and by focusing our attention.

For instance, if I’m trying to play less golf in order to spend more time with my family, and if I then find myself thinking about golf, I can consciously 1) recognize this and 2) select something different to focus my attention on. So when the thought comes into my head “This weather is perfect for golf,” I can then ask myself “Would it be perfect for doing something with my kids, too? What would be fun that we haven’t done in a while?” The more I think about that second, right thought, the less attention I’ll have to spare for that first, wrong thought.

Violence doesn’t solve anything
It’s useful to recognize that “right” thoughts aren’t just negations of “wrong” thoughts. The problem with trying to argue myself out of a “wrong” thought is that the more I mentally struggle with the problem, the more attention I’m giving it, and so the more opportunity the behavior I don’t want has to ensnare me. If I let that thought go and instead focus on letting something else appeal to me, then I can be led away peacefully rather than trying to defeat my own desires in mortal combat.

What tools are good for
With all of that said, thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts isn’t always easy, and it’s not always clear how to do it. Nor is it always easy to focus our attention on our own thinking enough to recognize when we’re getting drawn into non-constructive thinking. To make things easier, we come full circle to the kinds of skills I mentioned at the beginning of this post, skills for making ourselves more resilient, understanding ourselves better, redirecting ourselves more easily, and so on. Feedback loops, rules, tracking, idea repair, and all the other mental tools I talk about on this site help support the process of thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong ones. Regardless of what tools we use, taking charge of our own thoughts leads in the direction of achieving what we want to achieve.

Thinker photo by Rob Inh00d
Albatross photo by MrClean1982