A nudge on my shoulder. Sleep’s warm hand instantly drags me back under. Another, much stronger bump on my shoulder.
I stir from the only 90 minutes or so of fitful sleep I’ve had in the past 48 hours.
“Foxley, you’re up,” whispers another Commando in training. Rain drumming the tarp above me, wind buffeting the goretex bag I’m laying in. I slowly accept what I have to do from the warmth and comfort of my sleeping bag.
My body is in pieces. The heat is on as we prepare ourselves for the final exercise before our Commando tests.
Anyone who has served in the military knows the horror of wet and dry routine, and it was that dread that I felt in the pit of my stomach. Wet and dry routine is where you exchange your soaking wet and filthy clothes for a dry set to sleep in. Dry clothes mean your sleeping bag works well and stays clean. As a bonus, it’s a nice feeling to get into clean clothes after a day of Commando training in a sodden training area. The horror comes around when it’s half past two, it’s pissing down with rain, and you need to put your wet, cold pile of clothes back onto your body and lie in the mud and rain for your stint on sentry.
The battle between your sleep deprived comfort seeking mind, and your rational goal seeking mind is intense. It requires willpower to get your uniform back on. What I chose to do back then was grit my teeth, clench my fists and force myself to do what I needed to do. This is the image of willpower I held in my mind for years and it’s the image of willpower that pervades our culture of entrepreneurship too.
Here’s the problem: this is the image of willpower that is used to build soldiers whose job is to carry a rifle to the enemy and then squeeze the trigger, not to build a Personal Training service, travel agency, or supplement manufacturer. These two faces of willpower are where the confusion lies. Willpower is more nuanced than meets the eye.
Through my military training, in moments like the above and many more, I trained my willpower to a degree most never do. That didn’t give me an endless pool of it, but rather a nuanced understanding of it. Willpower really is a limited resource. Willpower is not always aggressive. That forceful approach didn’t work when I was turning my attention to business. Maybe because the fear of reprimand or failure isn’t as intense in civvy street, but more likely because it involves a more evolved, mature type of willpower.
That’s part of what I teach my clients - how to build a constant supply of willpower, and it’s what I’ll teach you in this article.
How Business Owners Can Generate More Willpower & Discipline
If you’re anything like most people looking to level up, “I need to be more disciplined” and “I need more willpower” are sentences that saturate your mind.
When there’s a significant gap between the type of person who would have made the day count, and the person you were for the past 24 hours, willpower and discipline are the natural answers. Maybe you long for those days where you woke up with a rocket up your arse and ticked everything off your to-do list in a blur of efficiency. And maybe those you look up to, or at least voyeuristically stalk on Instagram, always seem to be a cavalry charge of alpha execution.
You know what willpower is, you know what it looks and feels like, but you can’t have it sustainably. Why is that?
I think it’s because most of us have learned an inaccurate description of willpower. The willpower that counts in becoming who you’re meant to be, isn’t the one where you muster all your aggression, tenacity, and force into one last rep at the gym. The willpower that counts is the one where you take a breath, still your mind and body, then regain composure to put your phone in another room and get down to honing your craft. Your pursuit of freedom and growth isn’t a Rocky montage of pain, it’s a quiet, but firm step back onto the path you’re meant to be on.
When your job is to pull the trigger after a 30 mile march and no sleep, force is a fine version of willpower to use. When your job is to be creative and cerebral over a long time horizon, the flavour of willpower you need is one of spaciousness and openness.
The 2 Methods to Train Willpower
Here are two essential truths you need to know about willpower:
1 - You can train it. It’s a component of mental fitness that responds to the sets and reps you perform
2 - There are 2 ways to develop more willpower, and if you only do the first, you’re doomed to fail.
Method 1: Sets & reps
Every time you put your phone down, turn back to work, or sit to meditate, when you don’t want to, you engage a cluster of neurons called the basal ganglia. These are the parts of your brain that are responsible for willpower development. Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist, talks about this as strengthening your ‘go’ and ‘no-go’ muscles.
This technique involves finding things that require willpower to execute, and then doing them. You choose how many reps per day you wish to put in, I recommend 25 reps. From here, each time you make yourself do something you don’t want to do, or stop yourself from doing something that your weaker part of you does want to do, that counts as a rep.
Taking your supplements is a rep. Doing that last rep at the gym is another rep. Taking a breath before you respond to that shitty email is another rep. There are 3 reps out of 25 done for that day. Find another 23 opportunities.
Doing this stresses and engages this part of your brain, and it grows in size then becomes more likely to be recruited in the future. Therefore, if you start small, and put in the reps, you will be training your willpower.
Method 2: Emotional Intelligence
The sets and reps method resonates with most people intuitively. But it’s not the main limiting factor, and it’s not the methodology that really makes the difference for most people looking to become who they’re meant to be.
I’m working with a guy called Mike right now who used to go through these boom and bust cycles of doing what he should then not doing it. He would work hard for a short time (when he had to), and then when things got more chill, he would ease the pressure off and let his standards slide. He had tried forcing himself to be more disciplined, but now, he’s trained in a different approach.
We figured out the reason he was procrastinating was due to an emotional state that disrupted him. In this case, it was fear of how putting that hard work in would actually feel. The sets and reps we mentioned above worked when he had enough fear/pain/urgency to outweigh the pain of doing the work. But, they wouldn’t when life was easier.
So he needed to train the emotional intelligence to:
Become aware of the emotion before it generated too much momentum to stop
Learn to tolerate its discomfort by developing his presence and awareness
Learn to gently guide himself back to work through a more emotionally intelligent process.
What we’re doing in this second approach is removing the stories and emotional states that blockade your willpower. You do this in 3 steps:
Developing a mindfulness practice that trains you to be more present and aware
Figuring out the stories and beliefs you’ve picked up and learning to recognise them in the moment
Learning to turn these stories into your ultimate advantage
Now, Mike is developing a quiet, but stable consistency in his efforts that doesn’t feel manic or stressed, but composed and deliberate. That’s what true mastery of the self feels like.
I teach you how to do this and much more in one of the brand new courses I’ll be releasing soon. Keep an eye out.
The Single Most Important Thing To Know About Willpower
Most of us have the idea that we need to generate willpower and it comes from a place of force; that The Will generates energy. In truth, the energy is already there within you. If left at peace, The Will wants to create.
Willpower isn’t the engine that drives a boat. Willpower is the sail that captures that wind. This is the view of Psychosynthesis founder, Robert Assagioli. What this means is that you already have the drive and the energy to complete your tasks, it’s about directing that energy where you want to go. If you still yourself, stop distracting yourself, you will find the energy arises within. All you need to do is control the sail.
To double down on that analogy, wind fills the sail. That wind blows from the direction of authenticity. If you’re constantly tacking and jibing against a headwind, progress will be slow going. If you line the sail up to capture your individuality, quirks, and genuine intellectual curiosity, you will make much greater progress.
We struggle most with willpower when we’re misaligned with our authentic direction. Maybe the truth isn’t that you’re lacking discipline, maybe it's that you’re living someone else’s life.
You don't need to create discipline, you need to channel it.
Willpower In A Nutshell
There are 2 types of willpower: forceful and gentle
Willpower is a trainable component of mental fitness
Performing 25 reps per day of willpower training will help you build your willpower
The most important part of willpower training is presence
The will is not the engine, but the sail
If you want to learn how to train your character comprehensively (including training willpower intentionally), you’ll want to find out about my Character course I’ll be releasing this week. Shoot me a DM on Instagram (@tomfoxley) if you want the full info.
Outstanding. “Not an engine, but a sail” ⛵️