Willpower

This is part of a series of posts inspired by the ideas in Seth Godin’s free ebook entitled What Matters Now.

Willpower:

“The strength of will to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans.”
(American Heritage Dictionary)

This topic is near and dear to my heart, and it seems particularly appropriate this time of year. When I first started coaching, I focused on productivity. I helped people identify goals, articulate steps to achieve these goals, and then create systems to achieve them. We worked on organizational systems, how to create and work through a task list, and methods for reducing procrastination. Sounds good. Except that people wouldn’t do it. Even though they had defined their goals and created systems to get there, they still didn’t make progress.

Apparently, Ramit Sethi saw the same thing. Ramit is the author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and here is what he has to say about willpower:

We love to believe that willpower determines our actions. “If I just try harder,” we tell ourselves, “I can lose that last 10 pounds.” Or save $200/month. Or improve our time management. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Willpower is important, of course, but there’s more to behavioral change than just trying harder.

You may be trying to improve your life and career by focusing on things that matter, things that you love. But this requires changing your habits. And changing habits is not about willpower alone. It is about changing the way you think. And that can often mean working with a part of your brain that you aren’t consciously aware of and which doesn’t respond to logic.

In a fascinating U.S. News & World Report article, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak explores how your unconscious is making your everyday decisions:

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

Szegedy-Maszak goes on to tell us about Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor of marketing from the Harvard Business School. Zaltman was interested in determining “what made people buy one thing and not the other. In the world of neuroscience, this goes to the heart of the profound questions of motivation.” Zaltman ended up creating tools that allow companies to figure out how to access the 95 percent of the brain that motivates choices. He did this by “accessing the deep [unconscious] metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.”

Another example provided by Szegedy-Maszak comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s awesome book Blink:

In Blink, Gladwell describes how the Coca-Cola Co. made a costly mistake in using data from blind taste tests between Coke and Pepsi–in which Pepsi was emphatically preferred by most cola drinkers–to change the recipe and create the marketing debacle that was New Coke. Still, even with a less preferred taste, Coke remains No. 1 in the soft-drink world. More recent research that was published after Gladwell’s book was finished may explain why.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine offered 67 committed Coke and Pepsi drinkers a choice, and in blind testing, they preferred Pepsi. When they were shown the company logos before they drank, however, 3 out of 4 preferred Coke. The researchers scanned the brains of the participants during the test and discovered that the Coke label created wild activity in the part of the brain associated with memories and self-image, while Pepsi, though tasting better to most, did little to these feel-good centers in the brain. P. Reed Montague, director of the Brown Foundation Human Neuroimaging laboratory at Baylor, explained…: “There’s a huge effect of the Coke label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up of memories and self-image.” The point, says Montague, is that “there is a response in the brain which leads to a behavioral effect.” And curiously, it has nothing to do with conscious preference.

So, the bottom line is that we often do things (or don’t do things) because of hidden stuff that is stuck in our brain. Nice.

The good news is that there are things you can do about it, and it doesn’t necessarily require that you go through the time consuming process of figuring out why the hidden stuff is there, or even that you know exactly what the hidden stuff is.

There are many tools you can use to access your subconscious mind, including meditation, hypnosis, dream analysis, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), directed visualization, and stream of consciousness writing. Personally, I experienced amazing results using hypnosis to get past some of my hidden blocks. During hypnosis, you are able to access your subconscious mind and “install” new scripts or metaphors to replace those that are blocking your progress or making it harder to break bad habits. This still means that you have to do the hard work of making changes, but at least you aren’t working against hidden ick buried in your brain. I was so happy with my results that I decided to become a certified hypnotist myself.

If you find that you are not doing things you really want to do, or you do things you really don’t want to do, the path to changing your behavior is to change your subconscious scripts. Regardless of how you choose to do it, the goal is to get the conscious (read: logical) part of your mind out of the way so you can access the scripts that are sabotaging your good intentions. This is the key to making willpower work.

Do you have other ideas about how we can access our subconscious mind? I’d love to hear about them, and I’m sure others would too. Please leave us a comment…