Willpower: What is it and how do you get more of it? 8 tips

Willpower is the energy and perseverance you need to achieve your goals. Many people think that willpower is incredibly important, and that's true. It's also commonly linked to self-control, but it's not quite the same thing. Self-control, in fact, is when you don't do something you actually want to do, whereas with willpower, you need the energy and control to actually do something

What is willpower?

Willpower is defined as the ability to want something and to carry it out[1]. With willpower, you have a specific goal in mind and the energy to take the steps necessary to achieve that goal.

This requires perseverance, and it’s important to be resilient if taking these steps doesn’t initially lead to the desired results.

The power of willpower

Willpower is really about holding your own identity. You think certain things are important and therefore impose personal rules on yourself. This could be about the time you get up or how many times a week you can be found in the gym.

Willpower often strengthens when you experience a moment in your life that isn’t so pleasant. This can range from small things—like the shock of stepping on the scale for the first time in years only to discover you’re severely overweight, which motivates you to exercise more—to traumas caused by drug use or other issues you want to prevent in the future through positive behavior.

When you then find that you can change your own behavior you gain more confidence in this which makes your willpower even stronger.

The downside of having an enormous amount of willpower is that you can go too far and end up developing compulsive behavior, a work addiction, or anorexia. Another downside might be that you want to be too frugal with money because you’re happy when you can save, which means you’re not really living your life[2].

Broken Willpower

Your willpower, unfortunately, can also diminish. For example, if you have a setback to achieving your goal, it can cause you to lose the will. You may then abandon the goal and start with something else.

If this becomes a pattern in your life that makes you never achieve anything, you can say that the resilience in your willpower is not great and your willpower is easy to break. (Unless of course you really always have total drama).

Increase Willpower

To have enough resilience to go after important goals, it is helpful to increase your willpower. This can be done in several ways.

Tip 1: Keep a journal

By keeping a journal, you can figure out what causes your willpower to diminish or break down. Is it certain people who tell you your goals are unrealistic? Is it when you lack certain knowledge? By figuring out when your willpower wanes, you’ll know what you need to address to build more willpower.

Thereby, through the journal, you can also find out exactly why you get more willpower. Do you have better willpower when you've exercised? To certain music? When you are in a certain mood?

Tip 2: Find out why you're doing it

Understanding why you want to achieve a particular goal is very important for developing your willpower. Finding intrinsic motivation, in particular, is very beneficial for improving your willpower.

In the process, you can tell yourself at difficult times why it is so important to keep going.

Tip 3: Create positive emotions

Willpower requires energy, and nothing is more exhausting than negative emotions. Having a positive mindset and seeking cheerfulness will ensure that you have more energy to do what is needed.

Music and movement often create positive emotions. In the process, hypnosis can also help you look at certain things more positively. After all, whether you have a negative or positive view of things depends on your beliefs. Hypnosis can be used in several ways to shift your focus so that your beliefs become more positive for you.

Tip 4: Start small

You can say you want to become a millionaire, but if you don't get to celebrate success until you reach that goal, you can wait a long time. In addition, not being a millionaire can cause your willpower to diminish, whereas you need positive things to develop self-confidence so that you can achieve your goals.

So start to break down a big goal into small sub-goals. This is because each time you achieve a sub-goal, it reinforces your feeling that you can achieve your big goal, thereby increasing your willpower.

Tip 5: Reward yourself

Do you know the slogan: "Work hard, play hard"? This refers to allowing yourself to be rewarded when you have done something. By attaching a positive consequence to well-executed willpower, you ensure that your subconscious willpower starts to be seen as something good from which only good things come.

So when you achieve one of these sub-goals, celebrate it. Have a nice dance in the living room. Have a nice lunch with friends. Treat yourself to a haircut appointment or something similar.

Tip 6: Develop yourself

Keeping your knowledge and skills up to date often makes it easier to achieve goals than finding out you can't do something and need to develop it first. Therefore, keep your knowledge and skills up to date so there are no surprises when you find yourself with business goals due to developments in your field.

For example, you can read 30 minutes every day from an informative book. Or enroll in a course.

If you find it difficult to develop yourself, a hypnosis expert can help you with this. For example, they can identify and remove mental blocks for you. If, for instance, you’ve come to believe that you aren’t smart enough in certain areas, regression therapy can help you overcome that belief.

Through regression, you go back to the moment when your subconscious decided, for example, that you aren’t smart enough to develop a certain skill. Many beliefs originate in childhood. As a result, you may have drawn conclusions that no longer make any sense as an adult. Consequently, your belief about your ability to develop changes almost immediately through a regression exercise.

Tip 7: Keep your standards high

As mentioned, personal rules are part of your willpower. Therefore, try to keep your standards high. That way, you will almost automatically ensure the healthy behavior of being strong-willed and, for example, perform behaviors that can help achieve your goal immediately rather than procrastinating.

One way to keep your standards high is to repeat hypnotic suggestions, possibly during self-hypnosis. These cause your beliefs about a particular standard you want to achieve to improve. Because you are under hypnosis while repeating these suggestions, you also absorb them better and they become part of you faster.

These may include suggestions such as:

"I find time to develop myself."

"I keep my back straight."

"I eat with a knife and fork."

"I take good care of myself."

"I eat fruits and vegetables daily."

"I move 30 minutes a day."

"I hang out with people who support me," he said.

"I always look at the positives."

These are just examples of hypnotic suggestions. Depending on what you care about, a hypnosis expert can help you with other suggestions.

Tip 8: Hang out with people who inspire you

External factors can demolish your willpower, such as people who do not support your goals. By associating with people who also want to achieve goals themselves and whom you find inspiring, you kindle yourself with their willpower, so to speak.

You can motivate each other and learn from each other, growing your willpower.

If you find it exciting to find people with whom you can achieve goals together and who inspire you, a hypnosis expert can help you deal with this tension. For example, you can get a guided visualization on how to have such a meeting, or how to approach such a person. In the visualization, you then feel how everything can go perfectly, and you immediately learn how to deal with tension that can thwart this.

As a result, you learn to remain calm, allowing you to face with focus any situation necessary to achieve your goals. So you can use this visualization to meet inspiring people or for other goals you want to achieve.

With these tips, you can do a lot to strengthen your willpower, and as you can see, hypnosis can also play a major role in this. Would you like to know exactly how hypnosis works and how you can use it to help yourself and/or others? Then come to the hypnosis workshop or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands. Ask about the online options if that suits you.

[1] https://www.encyclo.nl/begrip/wilskracht

[2] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/421167