Breaking Down Barriers To WILLPOWER

Let’s face it: motivation is the biggest, and often the only, barrier to a whole, new world. Being more fit, eating healthier, pursuing deep, meaningful relationships. The failure in all of these usually can be chalked up to improper motivation. Either being motivated toward the WRONG thing (such as junk food) or lacking the motivation to the RIGHT things (like exercise).

There is nothing physically holding us back from getting up and working towards these goals. In other words, there is nothing EXTERNAL, there is nothing OBJECTIVELY stopping us.

It is all in your head.

Keywords: Motivation | Behavior | Diet | Exercise

The difficulty lies in the fact that most people have never developed the skills needed to control what goes on inside that head. And, what is often ignored by many motivational gooroos is that, just because the barrier is inside your own head, that makes it no less difficult to overcome any more than a physical barrier outside of your head.

Which is more difficult to conquer: scaling a mountain, or your own mind?

Slogans like “Just do it” or “Just put in the work”, while they may be TRUE, ultimately aren't much help.

These platitudes are the same as walking up to a four year old and saying, “Daddy’s car won’t start. I need it fixed now. JUST DO IT!” Daddy is not “wrong”. That four year old, if properly motivated, could develop a spark of fascination with cars, start learning everything they can about cars, and in 10 or 12 years, master enough of that knowledge to finally be able to fix Daddy’s car. So Daddy’s telling the four year old to, “Just do it!” was true, but not helpful in actually solving Daddy’s problem—getting to work that morning.

The problem with the slogans is that they are too abstract.

For a command to be useful, it has to be concrete. Specific. Objective. It has to be a call to action that is not open to interpretation or subjective manipulation. It must be objective to the subject.

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