“As a GB rowing coach, I have seen countless young rowers use willpower to overcome physical disadvantages and achieve success. This book promotes the benefits of willpower for everyone, while providing the tools you need to acquire it.”
Iain Somerside, GB Rowing Coach
“I used to believe that willpower was in the genes; you either had it or you hadn’t. This book has changed my mind and convinced me that willpower is a learnable skill.”
Gordon Baker, CEO, JMT Consultants
This edition first published 2017
© 2017 Ros Taylor
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Willpower is a series of recipes for willpower success seasoned with some inspirational case studies from adventurers, athletes, Paralympians, CEOs, teenagers and those who have struggled with addiction and adversity. Willpower is dissected and served up in bite-sized pieces so that you can use these tips in your own life for immediate effect.
Willpower is for everyone who wants to be successful in life and work: the unemployed person who wants a job, the graduate setting out on their career, the woman returner, the writer of their first book, the manager desiring to become a leader, the leader wanting to get to the board, the parent wanting to teach willpower to their children, the coach encouraging willpower in their clients
If you think willpower is a Victorian out-of-date concept, think again. Researchers have found that willpower is a better predictor of life and work success than IQ. Children with low willpower are four times more likely to have low-paying jobs, be overweight, have drug and alcohol problems, have short- rather than long-term relationships and have a criminal conviction.
So willpower is the very heartbeat of a successful, engaged and fulfilling life, and is not down to an accident of birth but a series of skills you can put into practice immediately with the help of this practical book.
This book is based on techniques that are known to work, so simply choose which relate to you and put them into practice. There is a three-week rule: try a new skill every day for three weeks and repeat for nine to turn it into a habit.
This book is self-help for self-control.
I have included in each part of the book a number of questionnaires and checklists to gauge how much willpower you have, how you utilise goals, whether you are an optimist or pessimist, or even knowing if you could have the willpower to become an entrepreneur.
Where some established measures have been lengthy, I have shortened them. There is nothing worse than wading through 370 questions when you get the same result with a dozen. Where there is nothing on the market, I have conceived the questionnaires myself and tested them on my clients before you. No person was harmed in this endeavour.
My rationale for these tests is that I want you to become an expert in your own willpower: understanding your strengths and willpower glitches. With that knowledge, you will be that much more successful in negotiating the ups and downs of getting to where you want to be. Knowing when you generally give in to temptation gives you advance warning to initiate your “plan to fail plan”.
A major part of this book is the stories we collected from a diverse group of people selected for their willpower and remarkable achievements.
I would like you to take the opportunity to pursue a Willpower Challenge or indeed Challenges of your own as you read the book. Your Challenge may be:
This title sounds a bit like a scent – but willpower can’t be sprayed on, inhaled or handed to someone else to do it for you. It is you in charge of you.
Part One reviews willpower research and comes to the conclusion that the “muscle” analogy, much utilised by researchers and psychologists in the past, does not fit with recent experiments. So I re-examine the latest thinking to help you achieve willpower.
There are inspirational stories from a young girl who had been confined to her house for four years before emerging using amazing willpower, amputees who are back adventuring, the ill or damaged who have willed themselves back to life. If they can do that, what could you do?
So, the essence of willpower is about how you harness your self-control to get where you want to go, and this part of the book helps you start to understand how to do that.
Goals and Vision will help you address your own Willpower Challenges, working out what is meaningful for you to achieve, turning your dreams into goals. How you do that with goal planning, as well as how you implement these goals, is assessed and discussed.
Working on the steps to your goals and visualising them have been shown to increase positive outcomes, so there are some great stories around the power of visualisation with instructions for you to gain the same outcomes.
How you like to learn should guide you in choosing the “how” of pursuing your goals: should that be in a group with others, by reading and understanding, by practical steps or by experimentation? Understanding your learning preferences increases the likelihood of willpower success.
At least 50% of what we do is down to habit. And our habits are established early on in our lives, copied from our parents or parent substitutes. If that knowledge fills you with dread, as the way your parents behaved is not how you want to be, help is at hand. I outline how habits are established and how bad ones can be changed and replaced with better versions. The purpose of willpower is a drive towards useful habits so that you achieve long-term success with your Willpower Challenge.
If you want to become the best in class for a skill, there is advice on how to achieve that as well as establishing some generic good habits that will prolong your life on earth.
When things go belly up with your own Willpower Challenges, because life is rarely plain sailing, we discuss how you can get over a glitch and move on instead of indulging in self-castigation.
Willpower is a mindset and gaining that mindset is important to get those willpower ducks in a row. If you tell yourself it will never work then … it won’t.
Just knowing about a willpower mindset doesn’t, of course, mean you will have one. It takes a bit of work to achieve, so this part of the book explores how to achieve a relentlessly positive mindset. You can’t leap from negative to positive thinking overnight. That would be the stuff of delusion. There are easy steps presented here that will progress your thinking: understanding your negative thoughts and where they come from, exploring the evidence for their existence, trying out useful thinking before finally achieving a positive willpower mindset.
Learn here about the power of externalisation to remain cool in a crisis, how to have a growth mindset and achieve the same mental strength of winners like Wimbledon tennis players and Olympic rowers. All to help with your Willpower Challenge.
If your Willpower Challenge is about success at work and getting to the top, then focus on Part Five of the book.
Willpower at Work is not just about you but the motivation of others around you, so Part Five presents the three S’s of Willpower at work: Self-Awareness, Skills and Self-Preservation.
You get the chance to complete the Willpower at Work scale to rate your abilities before plugging the gaps with the skills suggested. I interviewed 80 CEOs and asked them to rate what made them successful so others could follow in their footsteps. Six of the skills they suggested are outlined here with tips on how to achieve mastery.
We hear from corporate greats as well as entrepreneurs about their views about willpower and how they came to be top of their game.
Stress at work is prevalent nowadays, with more demands and fewer resources, but a job shouldn’t shorten your existence. Strategies to be fit for the fray are proposed so you will be around for many more Willpower Challenges.
I would love you to share your Willpower Challenges with me, warts and all: what worked for you and what was less successful. Your stories will help others face their dreams, goals, desires – and perhaps demons.
Share your willpower stories on my website (www.rostaylorcompany .com), Twitter (@Ros_Taylor_Co), and Facebook (www.facebook.com/RosTaylorCompany).