WILLPOWER – A USELESS WORD
WILLPOWER – A USELESS WORD
As a personal trainer, the number one reason why people contact me isbecause they can’t achieve their fitness goals alone, they come to me forguidance and support, which is a courageous first step. I have seen somany people ‘try’ to lose weight purely on willpower.
They think it’s allabout how much weight they can lose and how quickly. They’re usually hooked on some promise of a magic pill or a late nightinfomercial selling a product that manipulates them with unrealisticimages about getting your body back. Even if they manage to lose someweight, they will typically gain it all back, often more than before. I tellthem using willpoweris as bad as doing nothing. Let me explain.
The first problem here is that willpower is only a conscious undertaking;it is superficial and easily loses any ground it might make.
Your minute-to-minute and day-to-day choices are usually guided by yoursubconscious mind, not the conscious mind, so you will always default backto your subconscious motivations. If I have lost you here stay with me. The subconscious mindfunctions below the surface of our awareness and activates whenever asequence of thoughts, words or events take place.
The subconsciousmind controls our beliefs, behaviours, habits and even the words wesay. It also contains the foundation of how these thoughts and actionsstarted, possibly back when we were children. It operates on reallyold programming and can undermine all our efforts.If we do not try to unravel the reasons why we sabotage ourselves,we continue this pattern of not fulfilling the promises we make toourselves, we give up early and we end up doing what we swore toourselves we wouldn’t do. This could be choosing to have ice-creaminstead of doing those sit-ups we had planned. Sound familiar? Oursubconscious minds want to satisfy our immediate desire which sabotages
Mindset is everything our long-term desire. Imagine the power if you change your thoughts, you can change your life!There is a bigger reason why willpower is useless – our subconsciousmotivations are more powerful than our consciousness; they learn, holdand efficiently recall frequently used behaviour patterns. So our healthy,conscious desires are not only outnumbered, they’re outmanoeuvred. Willpower is useless as a weight loss tool, because it puts you at war withyourself and unfortunately, it’s a war you can’t win as long as your self-sabotaging motivations remain unchanged.Awareness of these motivations is the first step to changing them. I’llstart easy on you, be honest with your answers without criticisingyourself. It is brave to acknowledge your very human imperfectionsand even braver to try to better yourself.
Now is the time to face unhelpfulthoughts and habits and move forward.
