Winning Your Willpower

When you look at the top performers in the world, the CEOs, the professional athletes, the ultra-marathon runners, or even that super fit person you see at the gym and you ask yourself, how do they do it?! How do they find the time and the Willpower to be that successful while making time for a balanced life? And how can I be more like that?! The truth is, the top performers aren’t where they are because of some alignment of the stars that blessed them with exceptional talents, it’s because they have learned, practiced, and mastered optimizing their Willpower to create world-class habits.

Your Willpower is strongest in the morning and dwindles throughout the day through what is known as decision fatigue. Therefore, you will see your best results by utilizing the first hour of your day. One of the best self-control practices is getting up every day at 5 AM. It sounds crazy, I know, but trust me. Personal discipline is a muscle, and the more you stretch it, the stronger it grows.

Before we can create habits, we must first learn to exercise our Willpower. I mean think about it, if you are struggling to get up in time for work, what makes you think you will get up even earlier to do even more work? Start building your habit by getting up early first and taking your time in the morning. You can read, take your dog for a walk, do slow stretches, complete a chore, anything except staying in bed. Then once that becomes your new norm, begin adding in a workout. The single best way to build your Willpower is to voluntarily put yourself into conditions of discomfort. Great practices for this include:

- Waking up at 5 AM each morning. Practice self-control by quitting your snooze alarm!

- Taking cold showers. Start with a cold blast at the end of your shower and slowly build up tolerance. Practice deliberate cold exposure for 11 minutes per week TOTAL. Practice 2-4 sessions lasting 1-5 minutes each.

- Fast for 1 day per week. This is not a clinical practice of intermittent fasting, but more so an experiment of self-discipline. Alternatively, you can eat only fruits/vegetables for a day, detox from caffeine, or solely drink fresh celery juice. Hydration is key here!

- The time you least feel like doing something is the best time to do it!

You can also strengthen Willpower by cutting out a bad habit. Try capitalizing on impulse control for 30 days before you install your routine. Then you can redirect your Willpower to a habit that will initiate goal completion. By making 1% course corrections and improving small moments of your day, these days will stack and turn into weeks, which slip into months, and soon become years. If you concentrate on creating great days, they will stack into a gorgeous life.