4 Ways To Boost Your Willpower

Willpower is essential to the accomplishment of anything worthwhile ~Brian Tracy 

Usually when people hear the word “willpower,” they think about things like losing weight or quitting smoking. 

Willpower is certainly helpful when it comes to trying to break those bad habits, but it can also be very beneficial in other areas of your life as well. Willpower is something we are not born with, but must nurture and build up in ourselves. Once you learn to strengthen your willpower, it will give you a leg-up in achieving your goals. How? Because you will then be able to develop an unshakable focus and intensity in purpose! 

So how do you go about building your willpower? 

1. Commit! 

You must be completely and thoroughly committed to reaching your goals. If you are not absolutely committed to what you want to accomplish, there is no way that you will be able to develop sustaining willpower. It is very difficult to be successful in achieving your goals if you harbor second thoughts, excuses, or doubts. Be absolutely honest with yourself and find that “thing” that you truly want to see through until the end. Also keep in mind that simply having the desire to succeed at something does not guarantee accomplishment or success. It is entirely possible for you to desire many things without making a firm commitment. So, you need to be able to figure out that you really want and then plan to take the appropriate actions. 

2. Call on your inner strength. 

Building your willpower takes perseverance. This is a time for you to call upon your inner strength, you know, that extra push you need to get through the tough times. You have made the commitment to take a journey to strengthen your willpower and accomplish your most challenging goals. Great! The truth is, you will have many days of success, but there will also be those days that don’t feel as triumphant. It is on those not-so-good days that you will need to call upon your inner strength to help you get back on track. Every person has an inner strength and most have used it on more than one occasion. Trust in it, and in yourself, and it will get you through your rough spots. 

3. Get support. 

Building your willpower to achieve a goal is a great undertaking. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming. This is why it is so vitally important that you have good support in place during the journey. Share with a friend, significant other, or parent what you are trying to accomplish. In this way, when you hit a stumbling block, you will have someone who you have entrusted to help get you back on the right track. Your support system will help you through the hard times and will celebrate your successes with you. 

4. Consistency counts. 

If you have the willpower, for instance, to stop smoking for one week, that’s great and should indeed be celebrated. But the only way you are going to build your willpower up is to do whatever it takes to avoid a cigarettes today, again tomorrow, and forever. Then soon enough you will be celebrating two weeks, two months, two years, and then forever! 

This strategy applies to any goal that you are seriously devoted to accomplish. You must be willing to keep up the positive behavior all day, each and every day, no exceptions, and no excuses. 

Willpower can be a tricky thing. Everybody wants to develop it in order to break a bad habit or reach a particular goal. But in order to do so, you must be willing to go that extra mile and fully commit yourself to your success.

If you are committed, you are to be commended! As you achieve your goals, remember to celebrate your successes each and every day. 

What are you working on?

http://www.business2community.com/strategy/4-ways-to-boost-your-willpower-0583915?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=4-ways-to-boost-your-willpower

6 Tips For Happiness

Tip 1: Manage Your Time
“Time,” so they say “is money.” But imagine that as if it was the hours and minutes of your life, managed by a “Universal Bank of Time.” 

Under their strict account usage terms, the UBT would mandate a compulsory daily withdrawal of 24 hours. The hours would be automatically transferred to you at the start of each day. But you could never make a deposit, you could never put back what you didn’t use – unused hours would be taxed at 100%. Worse still, there’d be no online banking with the UBT. No paper statements. You couldn’t even get a balance - you’d never be sure how much time you had left.

If real bank accounts worked this way you’d make sure you spent every penny of your daily withdrawal limit on something worthwhile. Pretty soon you’d probably start to plan your spending – you might even keep a book of items you wanted to spend your money on. So with that in mind…


Tip 2: Make a “Now List” 
Most folks have heard of a Bucket List (taken from the movie of the same name), a list of all the things you’d like to do before you die (“kick the bucket”). It’s a fabulous idea - except for the built-in assumption that we’re going to be doing all these marvelous things at some far flung point in the future, probably when we’ll be far too old and frail to do anything more than regret each and every item on the list as a missed opportunity.

So let’s dispense with the term Bucket List. What we want is to “Live Life Now” list – or a “Now List” for short. Write down everything you’d like to do, then start making it happen.


Tip 3: Collect “Trophies” Andy Warhol, so it’s said, never opened any of his mail. He merely collected it up, put it in a box, and when that box was full, sealed it and wrote the year on the top. 

I’ve never taken the time to find out just how true this story is, but I do know that the first time I heard it, it had a profound effect on me. I wanted to do the same. However, being a somewhat deluded individual, I was fairly certain I could improve on the concept.

And so I started to collect things. Theatre tickets, And so I started to collect things. Theatre tickets, raffle tickets, train tickets, plane tickets, postcards, greeting cards, thank you cards, business cards, labels, badges, anything that was evidence of somewhere I’d been, something I’d done, or someone I’d met. And something I could pin to a board.


Tip 4: Decide What’s Important
Most people I encounter haven’t actually got a clue what they really want. They might wake up in the morning and want to go back to bed. They might flick through a magazine and want those shoes. They might even want the person in the magazine wearing those shoes. But these desires come and go. Few of them seem to stick around and become important - and that’s a mistake.

Knowing exactly what you want is hugely important. Merely knowing has the power to change everything. Not convinced? Then allow me to introduce you to the incredible, completely automated wish-fulfilment machine you have inside your head…


Tip 5: Use The Power of Focus
Brains are amazing. Especially yours. Even mine has its moments. And one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human brain is how it deals with focus. Have you ever noticed how when you buy a new car, or even when you’ve merely decided what type of car it is you want to buy, you start seeing that same car everywhere?! That’s the power of focus. It happens because in order for our brains to cope with the extraordinary amount of information coming in through our five senses from the world around us, we’re programmed to concentrate on what’s “important,” and more or less ignore the rest.

Unconvinced? Excellent!

You might be asking yourself how does the brain determine what’s important? And the answer is: you tell it! And this mechanism isn’t just taking place during card tricks; this happens all day, every day. Your brain is continually filtering the information coming in based on what you’ve decided is important. Strange then that we quite often focus on entirely the wrong things, or nothing at all. 


Tip 6: Remind Yourself Of The Important Things Most people own a wallet, a purse, or some other item to carry around their credit cards, dog-eared receipts or (if you’re really retro) cash.

If your wallet is like mine then it might have a small see-through pocket where you’re supposed to put a photo of a loved one. Ditch it. Not the loved one, just the photo.

On a small piece of card, just big enough to fit that space, write down what you really want in life – your “life vision” if you like – and place it in your wallet. What we’re doing here is utilizing that Power Of Focus on a daily basis by creating something that will remind you of those important things, each and every time you look in your wallet.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-jones/6-tips-for happiness_b_3436324.html#slide=2567639

Focus More On Your Brain And Less On Your Diet To Lose Weight

Weight loss is tricky business. Obviously what you eat has a huge impact on your health and body weight. But anyone who has ever tried to modify their diet for the sake of losing weight knows it isn't so simple.

Most of us understand intuitively that broccoli is healthier than cookies. We can talk about sugar, fat, gluten, and antioxidants all day, but that doesn't change the fact that cookies taste good and you still want to eat them. Any weight loss plan that simply tells you what to eat and neglects why you make the choices you make is unlikely to help you in the long run.

Nutrition knowledge is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. The real secret is understanding your behaviors and motivations at their roots, and using this information to have a meaningful impact on your health. In this sense, good health starts in your brain, not on your plate. 

Willpower is a Limited Resource

The first thing you need to understand is that we don’t have as much control over our food decisions as most of us assume. We tend to believe that we can call on willpower anytime we wish and use it to order a salad instead of a burger, and if we fail to do so it is our own fault. However, self-control is not something we can simply turn on or off, and as a result the process of decision making––particularly when it comes to food––is much more complex.

Approximately 20 percent of the calories we expend daily are used by our brains. Because brain activity is so costly, things like self-control and decision making cannot be relied on indefinitely. As a result, willpower is a limited resource. Like a muscle, willpower becomes fatigued when exercised too frequently. All the decisions you make throughout the day deplete your willpower, and when you start running out of steam your ability to choose healthy food over more convenient food rapidly diminishes. Ironically, increasing your blood sugar can help restore willpower to some extent. But finding a healthy way to raise blood sugar in a state of depleted willpower can pose quite the dilemma. Tired brains find it much easier to just grab a cookie.

The way our brains cope with the willpower conundrum is to automate as much of our decision making as possible. It does this by creating habits. Habits are specific behaviors that occur in response to a trigger or cue. They are also always associated with some kind of reward, which in turn reinforces and strengthens the trigger. For example, a buzz in your pocket is a cue to reach down, grab your phone, pull it out, and glance at the screen. The information you see causes a bit of dopamine to be released in the reward center of your brain. We humans love novelty, which is why most of us have a reflexive response to checking our mobile devices when we receive a notification. This is how habits are born.

Once established, habits occur automatically without expending any willpower or mental effort. Scientists have estimated that up to 90 percent of our daily food decisions occur as a result of habits. This saves our brain energy for more difficult decisions where habits cannot be used. 

How Can this Knowledge Help Us Lose Weight?

For one thing, it shows that willpower is not particularly reliable as a means to achieve lasting weight loss, and we’re better off spending our efforts creating healthy habits.

It also teaches us that any habit we wish to develop needs to impart a meaningful reward in order for it to stick. You can probably guess that some vague promise of future thinness is not sufficient––the reward for any habit needs to be immediate and tangible. This means that in order to achieve long-term weight control you need to find healthy foods you actually enjoy eating, physical activities you like doing, and spend your time making these as convenient and accessible as possible.

Fabulous news, right? Using willpower for restrictive dieting is difficult and incredibly unpleasant. We can all let out a collective sigh of relief that it doesn't actually work. To achieve true success in health and weight loss, we’re better off quitting diets altogether and focusing on building healthy habits we enjoy. Try starting with something as simple as breakfast. Warm muesli with a splash of almond milk and cinnamon only takes two minutes to prepare and is absolutely delicious. Invest in a pedometer and challenge yourself to reach 10,000 steps a day. Setting and achieving an attainable goal is a very powerful reward, and is one of the reasons so many people love video games.

Since our brains are easily overwhelmed, don’t try to develop too many habits at once. Work on just two or three habits at a time, and build from there. Habits take anywhere from two weeks to six months to take root, but on average about two months. Start with the easiest ones and work your way up. Once you've built enough good habits, your health will take care of itself.

http://lifehacker.com/focus-more-on-your-brain-and-less-on-your-diet-to-lose-507545694