Micro Class - Top 10 Ways to Build Your Willpower (and Why You Should Care!)

This morning we're going to talk about how to build your willpower and why you should care. How to build your willpower and why you should care. This is a really big idea here. Willpower. It's known by research scientists as the queen of all virtues. It's the greatest predictor of health, happiness, love, wealth and all this other stuff. We're going to talk about why I think you should care and then how I think you can rock it. Going to give you 10 tips, meditation, breathing, exercise, and then a bunch of other things that are going to help you develop your willpower. This is grounded in deep science. We're going to draw on the wisdom from Roy Baumeister and John Tierney from their great book, Willpower. Baumeister is one of the most quoted social psychologists in the world. In fact, he might be the most quoted psychologist, period. Extraordinary guy and great book. And we're also going to look at Kelly McGonigal's the Willpower Instinct. She's out of Stanford. Amazing, fun, playful, great book. And then a bunch of other notes that we'll draw on. I mean, the reality is that willpower is at the heart of everything we talk about. It's arete, it's living with virtue. It's what all the great teachers have talked about forever. And it's what Baumeister says, that improving willpower is the surest way to a better life. That's a strong statement. Improving willpower is the surest way to a better life. Why is that? Well, it's because we know that willpower is a better predictor of academic success than iq. It's a better predictor of leadership than charisma, and it's a better predictor of marital bliss than empathy. Willpower. It's amazing. Queen of all virtues. We know you live with more willpower. We can predict that you are living with more health, happiness, love, wealth, all the other stuff that we want that gives us that famed happy face. So willpower is a good thing to pay attention to. That's your why in less than two minutes. Here's the how. So, first thing we got to know with the how is you can train your brain to get better at self control. You got to know that wherever you're starting from, if you think you're kind of a willpower idiot and you're just not flourishing in this aspect of your life. Hello, Shadow. Don't worry about it. You can train your brain to get better at self control. Well, do worry about it, but know that you can control yourself better. Than you are right now. So here are 10 ways we can go about doing it. The first tip, perhaps surprisingly, is meditation. If you want to build your willpower, start meditating. Why is that? Neuroscientists tell us. And again, this isn't woo woo stuff. This is out of peer reviewed research methodology that tells us that meditation builds neurons that help us stay focused, that help us control our impulses. And they like to say that. And they know that meditation actually increases blood flow to our prefrontal cortex. So it's kind of like weightlifting. Weightlifting increases blood flow to our muscles. Well, meditation increases blood flow to our prefrontal cortex. Really, really cool stuff. That is number one. And we can talk about meditation for hours. And in fact, we will. I'm going to do a whole video on why I think you should meditate and how to meditate. But for now, just know that it's an important thing. You can sit down and just watch your breath, do a mantra, whatever. But literally, you do all this stuff and more just in minutes of meditation. I'm going to go off. I'll save that for another time because we got a lot to talk about here. But meditation is big. The number one tool, as we say in this note, the number one way to boost your willpower is meditation. Number two is breathing. Breathing builds my willpower. Yes, it does. So here's the deal. When we're stressed, we're feeling a little bit of the exhaust. Our willpower goes down. Very surprising. You diminish your power when you're stressed and you're not feeling good. So what we want to do is we want to build that power back. You want to get out of fight or flight that you're experiencing when you're stressed. And you want to get into what researchers call pause and plan. And you do that by breathing and stepping in between stimulus and response. If you're knee jerky, going from thing to thing to thing to thing, guess what? You're going to be pretty out of control with your impulses and your willpower is going to be shot. What you want to do is take a deep breath, pause and plan and choose your most empowered response. Now, breathing is your easiest ticket. Taking a deep breath is how to give yourself an immediate boost. That and something else. We'll talk about glucose making sure you aren't starving. Two immediate ways to boost your willpower. Well, what should your breath look like? Super simple. You want to slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. It is what's called magic sauce. Four to Six breaths per minute. Try it out. Time yourself when this is over and see how many breaths you take per minute. It actually takes some work to slow down, to get to four to six breaths per minute. And you do that for a minute or two and you tell me how you feel, I will guarantee you that you will feel less stressed and this little sad face will go to a happy face more. And from that place you can pause and plan, get out of the fight or flight and make a better decision. Your willpower muscle will be enhanced by greatly. That's your number two. Big tip. Number three is exercise. Kelly McGonigal tells us that exercise is the closest thing to a wonder drug. Closest thing to a wonder drug. And again, this is a scientist telling.

Us this.

Amazing exercise reduces cravings, it reduces depression. It's as powerful as Prozac. We're going to go off on exercise in a video, but it's huge. So these are your fundamentals. Meditation, breathing and exercise. Alright, now let's look at some other fun stuff. So we've got a few more tips to round out our 10. Well, another big one, I've got it in the eight slot here, but Willpower by Baumeister, they actually put it in the number one slot. Eat your way to willpower and that if your glucose is shot, your willpower is shot. So pay attention to your glucose. Make sure you're eating and I'm sure you've experienced this like I have. You're just a different person when you're hungry and your glucose is all low and whacked out. So here's some other fun tips. So know that you can build your willpower muscle with small exercises. So in one of the videos we did a couple days ago, we talked about how you want to one touch things that take less than two minutes. If you actually practice that, if you do a willpower experiment and you exercise your willpower muscle with that, you will build your willpower in every aspect of your life. It won't just help your inbox management, it will help your relationships. It will help you going to the gym or you eating more healthfully or you being a better parent. It's amazing. When you build your willpower muscle in one aspect of your life, you build it in all aspects of your life. Unbelievably profound. And again, this is scientifically proven. Now another tip. You want to reduce the variability of your behavior. What does that mean? It means you want to get more consistent. You want to wake up at a certain time, you want to floss when you go, before you go to bed, you want to. For me anyway, I wake up, I meditate and I record these videos. I don't go to email, I don't let my mornings kind of get it get out of control. And by reducing my variability of my behavior, I enhance the likelihood that I'm going to demonstrate willpower. Pretty straightforward, pretty powerful. Reduce variability of your behavior again, we can talk about that for an hour, but we've got less than a couple minutes left here. Number six, be nice to yourself. You want to destroy your willpower, criticize yourself, feel shame. Great way to decrease your willpower. We need to be honest about what we're doing. That's working, that's not working, but we don't need to beat ourselves up. Be nice to yourself. Don't overly criticize yourself. Don't get to work, just do what needs to get done next. Next one is pre commitment. Again, this could be a whole video and it probably will be actually. You want to pre commit. You want to make a decision in advance as to what you're going to do and then you need to make it non negotiable. It's kind of the 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze thing that I talk about quite a bit. If you say you're going to meditate tomorrow morning, you meditate tomorrow morning, you've pre committed, you're done. It's not going to be a negotiable thing. When you wake up and you're feeling a little bit tired, etc. You just do it. Pre commitment is huge and it also reduces your variability, etc. Etc. We already talked about glucose. It's big. Here's another one to boost your willpower. Tidy up. A messy desk equals less willpower. If your house is a mess, your desk is a mess, your office is a mess, your car is a mess, your willpower will go down. This isn't woo woo, this is science. So tidy up. Another one is bright lines. You, you need to be really clear on who you are, what you stand for and what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. And lawyers call those bright lines. You have a bright line and it's obvious what's going on, right? So if you have a bright line that you're for me right now, I have a bright line that I'm going to record a video before I check email. I said this is important to me. I'm going to do one every day, right? That's a really bright line for me. Bright lines, bright. This is where I want to be, right? There's no ambiguity. And I know if I check my email I just violated this bright line principle. And of course I can do that, but I'm less likely to when I have such bright lines. So what in your life can you create bright lines around? You know, it might be no longer eating certain things as you manage your glucose. It might be exercising every day. I haven't missed a day of movement since February 17th and today's November 4th, 14th or something. That's a fun bright line. What's your hundred percent commitment to your meditation practice and to implementing all the other things we've talked about and that you know are important for you? So there you go. We're over the 10 minute mark so I'm going to wrap this up. Obviously we can talk more about it, but I hope you got something helpful out of this. And again, willpower is so big. It's the key to happiness, to health, to increase relationships and increased bliss in relationships, to making more money. You want to make more money. Increase your willpower power. It's all straightforward. Huge predictor of all these things. The surest way to a better life and you just got 10 tips on how to rock it. Meditation, breathing, exercise, building muscle by practicing different willpower things which translates into all aspects of your life. Reducing the variability of your behavior, being nice to yourself, pre committing 100% commitments, glucose management, tidying up your life and creating bright lines. Hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you think and let me know if you have any other ideas you want me to cover. And have another awesome day. Can't wait to share more with you soon. See ya.

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