As promised on the welcome page of this blog, “You don’t even have to rely on willpower at all to accomplish more than you ever imagined.” ~Yeah, right!
(but it can be a lot easier than you think.)

In my experience using the SimpleActions concept, I have noticed one thing. When I make a decision to do something, I have the ability to simply do it. I think it’s because I have learned the ability to take a less emotional approach to every decision. It took a bit of consistent work to get there, go figure!

Now, I make a conscious choice and take action. What’s cool about this is… I also have the ability to choose not to make a choice & not take any action when I want to. But the key is that I am conscious of it and I have the reins. I’m setting the priorities and the old game of running around “putting out fires” is over.

The main thing I have noticed is that willpower is instant and takes virtually zero energy to maintain. So, those of you who feel you might not have the willpower to meet your goals, even half way, you’re in for a treat! And those of you who have willpower out the yin-yang… you’re in luck too because the energy it took to maintain it in the past will be greatly reduced over time.

Here’s a story that will help me explain this willpower thing: I have a friend that was trying to quit smoking. She would go along for a few days doing quite well until things got rough a few days into that first week. Then along came that bad day and out came the cash to buy a new pack of cigarettes!

The problem was that she felt defeated, ashamed, and guilty for backsliding and wasting the money on cigarettes. She not only threw them away when she quit, she turned around and spent more money replacing them a few days later.

So, she did the logical thing… she “re-quit.” But this time the last pack was stashed away just in case. You can see the logic, right? Who would want to throw away a perfectly good pack of cigarettes when you are just going to have to replace them when you fail to quit?

My friend had attached so much emotion to quitting that she forgot to count all the good days that she went without smoking! Out of the first week, had she simply “re-quit” and gone the whole seven days… she could look back and see she went 6 out of 7 days without smoking! Cool right? Even if she successfully quit for 5 of 7 days for 52 weeks that’s 260 of 365 days. Great, right? But logical thinking is tough when something is so habitually, physically and psychologically addicting. So, those emotions came in and she went back to smoking—until the urge to quit comes up again.

The lesson here is more about how we “charge” the events in our life with specific emotions. Her “failure” that we can so easily see as a mathematical success (over many weeks, months, or even years) could have looked like the success it truly was to her had the moment of weakness (or the “event”) been properly assessed and had the “charge” attached to it been reframed.

As an example; I ask you to think of a time when someone around you was over reacting to a situation. I bet you can think of a lot of times this happened. Has there been any times you’ve over reacted? Thought so.

We’ll talk more about properly charging the events in life in a more productive way later. For now, imagine the most “Level Headed” person you know, or a situation when you witnessed someone’s cool-headed or quick reaction to an emergency. Impressive isn’t it!

I hope you can see that my friend, the smoker, would have had a great leverage over the bad habit she wanted to change. If she would have made a simple choice to take a more level-headed view and allowed her disappointment to convert to determination, drive, desire, it would ultimately create pure effortless willpower.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!



Simple Actions
- Where the simple things go a long way

Fill out the form to get updates.

(Required fields are bold)



Preferred format
Preferred format    

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: