The Power of Willpower

Dear loving people,

The possession of willpower or its lack plays an important role in everyone's life. For example, you wish to be the best football player, knowing how good it is for your fame and how great you feel afterwards to be named best player, but you feel too lazy, and prefer to watch movies instead. You might be aware of the fact that you need to change your sporting habits or stop drinking too much alcohol, but you don't have the inner power and persistence to change these habits.

I can bet this sound familiar? How many times have you said, "I wish I had will power "? How many times have you started to do something, only to quit after a short while? We all have had experiences like these. Everyone has a few habits they wish they could get rid of, such as smoking, excessive drinking, laziness, procrastination or lack of assertiveness. To overcome these habits or addictions, one needs a certain degree of willpower. Their possession makes a great difference in everyone's life, bringing to the fore inner strength, self-mastery and decisiveness.

Will power is the ability to overcome laziness and procrastination. It is the ability to control or reject unnecessary or harmful impulses. It is the ability to arrive at a decision and follow it with perseverance until its successful accomplishment. It is the inner power that overcomes the desire to indulge in unnecessary and useless habits, and the inner strength that overcomes inner emotional and mental resistance for taking action. It is one of the corner stones of success, both spiritual and material.

Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s celebrated Presidents said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

I find everything I know about willpower in this Presidential quote. It displays what we as people are capable of when we are pushed to extremes. Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a nice invitation to party with a date tempting us from our days plan or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep in when it’s time to work, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.

The ability to resist our impulses is frequently described as willpower. The forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol and others don’t. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.

During my secondary school days, I decided I will never fall prey to the beauty of young women but will go for a woman only when I have CONCIOUSLY taken an informed decision to do so. Over seventeen years later, sticking to that principle has paid off. I must tell you that it has never been that easy but I have succeeded in resisting what some people will commonly call ‘temptation’ from some of the most charming women you can ever imagine. Not only do I not have that word ‘temptation’ in my dictionary but I have resisted pressures from numerous women that some men will plunge into head-long. I have extended this quality to many other areas in my life. I can stand up tall today and anywhere to tell whoever that will power is sheer magic.

You cannot take a conscious decision about something and later blame it on the simplistic ‘temptation’. If Jesus Christ defeated the devil after some tiresome forty days and nights in the wilderness, it was because he hadn’t that word ‘temptation’ in his vocabulary. If you are Christ-like and made in God’s image, you shouldn’t either.

Friedrich Nietzsche reordered the appellation calling it the will to power and saying that it is a prominent philosophical concept. He believed that the will to power is the main driving force in humans: achievement, ambition and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life.

If you are just starting and plan to “willpower” your way through success in life, chances are you are setting yourself up for failure because if you had enough willpower to do this before you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place, right?

It is your quest to succeed that is pushing you into learning the magic that is willpower and how to use it to your ought most advantage. Living Lectures can be part of the solution. Stick with us.

Be The Winning Speaker Part4: Ice the cake

Dear loving people,

 

Let us get back to our strategies of becoming a winning speaker and ice the cake with two more strategies:

 

Always interact with your audience: An easy technique to calm your nerves during a presentation is to engage the audience. Encourage them to participate. A simple way to do this is to ask your audience an interesting and topical question. You will be amazed at the responses you will receive.

If your audience has been sitting for a long time, you can interact with them by asking them to stand up, give their neighbor a friendly hand gesture, or by patting themselves on the back. This unexpected physical movement helps your audience stay more engaged with you for the rest of your presentation.

Should your nerves begin to raise, this gives you a quick break to compose yourself again before you continue on with your presentation. The key is to keep breathing…you will overcome your fears.

Always remember to breathe and enjoy: It’s common for anxiety to set in as you approach the platform to give your speech or even during your presentation. If this happens, then remember to take a deep breath and relax. You will get through it.

You can also relax yourself by simply focusing on a friendly face in the audience. For example, make eye contact with a listener who is smiling or nodding his head with what you are saying or has just laughed at one of your opening sentences or jokes. Once you find that friendly face in the audience immediately focus on that person and speak to him as if that person is your friend. This will calm you.

Public speaking can definitely be challenging at times but in the business world, it is really an inescapable part of the every day. As a business owner, you are by default the spokesperson for your company. So, embrace it and put your fears aside. Enjoy the experience!

 

Recapitulating and as a friendly reminder, when it comes to public speaking, remember to do the following:

1. Throw perfection out the door…don’t beat yourself up if you make a mistake or two during your presentation.
2. Be prepared and use an outline to present your ideas.
3. Add humor and humility to your presentation to connect with your audience.
4. Interact with your audience by asking questions.
5. Breathe and enjoy the experience.

The Wind and The Sun

Dear Loving People,

I know I have too often talked about the importance to stay FOCUSED on your goals and to create meaning in your life by aiming at one goal at a time and making sure you get it. Part of the downside of this doctrine has been that many people get to misrepresent it and some of the times become fanatical.

Now, part of staying focused on your dream is finding the right fit. We must strike the right balance within us on our path to success by accepting that some of the roads we take lead us to nowhere and so we need to correct course by at time taking a completely new road that will lead us to destination.

What I mean is that we must have a burning desire to have what we want and thus, take action in the physical world in order to get it. At the same time, we cannot stick to such desires or that particular thing we want as though our entire existence depended uniquely on getting it. Don’t get me wrong here, in the same way as you wouldn't stick to one specific option throughout life, you cannot permit yourself to stick unto what you want only. Unquestionably, you want it so bad, and that's perfectly alright, but you must be willing to let go of what you want so bad and especially the way you want to get it and be very ready to move on to something else as easily as a monkey moving from branch to branch in the same forest looking for fruits to eat.

Let me use this beautiful childhood story to elucidate this model. One morning in a hilly tropical African country, the Sun and the Wind were having a friendly chat. They started by listing their accomplishments on earth and got into a disagreement about who was the most powerful between them. The Wind pointed to a man walking down a hillside on his way home.

“Whoever can get that man to remove his coat faster will be proclaimed the most powerful and the other should respect him,” said the excited Wind. Sun thoughtfully agreed, nodding his head. Wind in his eagerness to prove himself right started first. Wind mobilized a stormy blast of dust. He pumped it at the man’s face. The man leaned into the oncoming blast, and wrapped his coat around himself even tighter. The harder that Wind tried to get the man to remove his coat, the tighter he held onto his coat. Eventually and after what seemed eternity, the wind puffed a breath of total exhaustion and said, “I blackout! I don’t know what you plan on doing, but good luck with it! Goodness! That man really adores his coat and nothing can take it from him.”

“Don’t conclude just yet” said the smiling sun. As he smiled, his rays flashed over the beautiful hills giving them a golden color and cleansing them with a roasting glow. Sun kept on shining while the man kept walking down the slope. In a few minutes, he felt the heat of Sun reaching through the coat, all the way down enveloping his body. Without thinking, he removed his coat, and draped it over his shoulder, as he walked home, whistling a chirpy African tune and wiping the sweat that was damping his face from time to time. Wind gave Sun a contemptuous look and departed without a word while Sun smiled to himself.

The moral to this story is straightforward; force makes only an effort where gentleness achieves results. More to it, the more we become attached to a specific outcome, the harder we try to make that outcome work. This blinds our critical minds from realizing that we are using the same inconsequential tactics that weren't working before. The wind worked and worked and worked and still got the same result, nothing. In physics, we would describe that as energy wasted, no work done (W = F x D). The sun, with a little bit of effort in the right way, and with no attachment to things being a certain way was able to get the results necessary.

We need to remember that we have to stay focused on our goals and what we want to achieve, but we equally have to be very careful not to create a barrier inside our minds and hearts that has to have things a specific way. Put the desire and passion into what you want, and open yourself up to possibilities and opportunities. It will be a much more rewarding experience emotionally and physically.

Self-Image Part3

People with negative self-image some of the times unfairly personalize the actions around them. They may think that everything someone says or does in some way is a reflection of them. For example: If during a group conversation one individual walks away to go to the bathroom, the person with a negative self-image may think "they left because I was acting stupid again." There is also the feeling that "everyone hates me," or only hangs around because they feel sorry for them, or are just being polite. Compliments are seen as polite gestures, but not truly compliments, and are often met with an invalidating remark about themselves. For example: someone compliments on a negative person’s achievement and they reply, "no really, I'm so stupid. You should have seen how badly I messed up during my last activity..."

Self-blame can be another aspect, a people with a negative self-image may blame themself for everything bad that has ever happened to them, believing that in some way they deserved it; for example, "my parents hated me because I was such an irresponsible child." On the contrary, they may also blame others for everything and take no responsibility for their own lives. For example: "if you'd been there for me, I wouldn't have been this bad."

Negativity prevents you from being optimistic about any aspect of a situation or your life. Everything seems negative in one way or another, or you only pick the negative to focus on. In comparison to others, someone else who achieves something is considered great, but the same achievement for yourself would be met with negativity and how it could have been done better. Though the world is not seen as perfect and others are not expected to act as such, the person with a negative self-image may have high expectations of perfection for themselves.

Ultimately, one of the biggest perception distortions of the negative person is that "life will be better and I will be happy when I lose the weight, decolorize my body or buy the new car." There is a false sense of control that is achieved during self-starvation, a feeling of comfort when overdoing, or a temporary release of emotions and guilt during exclusion... In reality none of the above has been achieved except within the victim's perception. There is no light at the end of the tunnel of a person with a negative self-image, even though those who suffer may think there is. In reality, the only true light comes from recovery, from adopting a POSITIVE SELF-IMAGE.

It stands out clearly that with a negative self-image, underperformance characterizes your whole being. The only remedy is to realign your processes, and develop a POSITIVE SELF-IMAGE.

For the HOW? That is why Living Lectures is at your service.

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