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hey this is leo for actualize.org and in this video i'm going to cover how to build willpower [Music] all right so i'm back we're going to talk about willpower how to build it how to develop it what it really is and why it's important to your life so what is willpower why is it important to your life let's get into this it's a fascinating topic well what willpower is is really your ability to control your own impulses impulse control so how easy is it for you to get yourself out of bed in the morning when you want to stay in all comfy and snuggy how easy is it for you to get your ass off the couch and to the gym when your favorite tv show comes on how easy easy is it for you to say no to that donut or that pizza that shows up at the office how easy easy is it for you to get your ass into gear and start that project that you've been dreaming of starting but you know you should start and you just for some reason have been procrastinating on it like writing that novel or starting that business or composing that song or directing that movie or whatever other activity you want to be doing out there so willpower is necessary to do all of these things willpower really is your prefrontal cortex muscle it's your prefrontal cortex and it's a its ability to exert impulse control on other parts of your brain so this is actually a physical phenomenon and willpower is something that can be developed so if you have will low willpower right now or if you feel like you do then don't get discouraged because actually i'm going to give you some tips right now in this video for how to start building up your willpower and i'm also tell you some stuff that is robbing you of your willpower so that you can eliminate those activities that are really draining and atrophying your willpower muscle so why is willpower important why do we talk about this well willpower is critical to the success that you get in your life and it's especially critical if you're on board with the kind of mission that i have for you and for myself which is to be living an extraordinary kind of life to be challenging ourselves to be living a life of creative contribution when we're out there expressing ourselves when we're creating amazing careers and businesses and we're starting these dream projects and we're fulfilling them and we're you know we're living on our edge to do that takes willpower because that will power helps us overcome the fears that naturally come up when we are out of our comfort zone so willpower is important to advance your career willpower is important to stay on top of your life purpose and to pursue your life purpose in the beginning willpower is important to uh working out problems and relationships and to make sure that you're being conscious and self-aware in a relationship you're not just being triggered and you're not being a stimulus response animal in a relationship and just turning it to basically when you do that willpower is essential really to your happiness because happiness one way to define happiness is to live integrity with your values and to do that means that you need to be disciplined enough to follow through on those activities that you know are good for you but that are oh so easy to fall through on so let's get into some of this stuff well you know willpower is i said it was like a muscle and it literally is to build willpower the process of building willpower is no different than going to the gym and pumping your biceps or pumping your quads or whatever it is a muscle that you're working on on your physical body your physical body actually atrophies from disuse and the same thing happens with your brain is that physically and this has now been proven by neuroscience and some of the cutting edge neuroscience has been done over the last 20 years where they've really done a lot of mri scans fmri scans cat scans and other things where they're really using these technologies and uh electroencephalograms are using these cool new technologies to to to look at what's going on inside your brain they're analyzing and they're doing studies on people who are meditating and they're doing exercise studies on people who are doing exercise and people who are watching television and they're comparing the brain activity of all these people and they're looking at what's going on there and what they're seeing is that the brain and the prefrontal cortex specifically can be built up by using it so every time you actually use your prefrontal cortex by resisting some sort of urge some sort of lower urge then what that's doing is it's building up your discipline and it's building up your willpower reserve so that means that anytime you get some sort of inclination to do something if you can resist then that will build up your willpower just a little bit and then the next time you reach a little bit more that builds up your willpower a little bit more and the more you do that and the more you do that that ratchets up your willpower and it builds it up just like it would a muscle so there's really no way escaping having strong willpower and exercising willpower because the two are the same thing if you're exercising your willpower all the time and you're finding those opportunities throughout the day then you're gonna have strong willpower you know it's gonna take weeks maybe months maybe a year or more to get your to the kind of high level willpower that you want but as long as you're taking those steps just like you would with you know pumping your bicep you're going to get there on the other hand if you're not taking those opportunities and you're falling off and you're you're you're really falling through on that and you're not living up to you know your highest self the highest self that you know you need to be then you're losing willpower with each one of those right so it's kind of a matter of are you building yourself up or are you building yourself down atrophying all right so that's kind of the process let me tell you now some of the ways that you can build willpower these are some of the scientifically proven most effective ways of building willpower number one is meditation meditation is thousands of years old and it's a really popular technique and it's remained popular for so long for millennia because it is so effective at building willpower and then the effect of that spills over into all areas of life that's why meditation is powerful meditation not only feels good in the moment when you're doing it but meditation is good at improving your performance in your career performance and relationships performance at the gym everywhere because it builds up that muscle it really is like the gym for the brain that's basically what i see meditation as being and it's the number one proven way of building up willpower it literally re-sculpts your prefrontal cortex physically when you meditate and that puts you after a while that puts you in a whole another league of impulse control versus normal people so go ahead and start meditating if you're not already start building up a practice of doing that every day for 20 minutes that's what i recommend and i have other videos that tell you exactly how to do meditation so you might want to check those out other things exercise exercise is a really good way to build willpower because well it takes discipline to do that right it takes an exercise of willpower muscle just to get yourself into the gym just to do the workout routine just to lift that extra extra five pounds of weight just to run for an extra 10 minutes on the treadmill that takes discipline to do and exercise has a synergistic effect with the discipline that it takes to go to the gym then you're doing the exercises all that just synergizes and builds up your willpower muscles so that's a great one another one is breathing kind of seems a little bit silly breathing we all breathe but doing deep breathing slow meditative type of breathing is actually a really good way to calm yourself down and to start to actually get in touch with a higher sense of awareness within you because most of the time throughout your day you're running through your day on autopilot and you're not aware of your breathing you're not aware of what your body's doing you're not even aware of what your mind is thinking most of the time and when you start to breathe consciously just like breathe in for four seconds deeply and then hold it and then breathe out for six seconds when you do that i just did it right now and all of a sudden look my my thought patterns have already slowed down my voice is slower i'm talking slower i feel more grounded and when i'm in that kind of state i have more willpower i'm able to resist impulses much more easily so practicing that you can practice that really well with meditation so you can couple breathing in meditation or you can just do uh separate breathing exercises make sure that you're breathing in and then your exhale is longer than your inhale so your inhale maybe four seconds and your exhale six seconds or eight seconds that will calm you down relax you and get you really in touch with your whole body and your thoughts all right the next way to build willpower is just little things i would say taking right action anytime you take right action and this just means doing the things that you know you need to be doing you know are healthy and good for you when you do those things that is building up your willpower so these are just basic disciplines for example maybe waking up on time not hitting that snooze button how about eating right resisting that dessert resisting that junk food that candy bar resisting you know that cheeseburger if it's not on your diet how about working hard going in and putting in a really solid day's worth of work at your job or in your business being on top of that staying on top of that stuff making sure that if you do have a meditation practice that you're staying on top of that meditation practice every day and you're not being waffly about it and you're not skipping one day here and one day there same thing with your with your gym routine making sure you're staying on top of that very consistently when you are doing all those things and you're executing on them just do that for a week take right action for a whole week and just see how you feel compared to when you don't you're going to feel so much more alive you're going to feel so much more powerful and you're going to feel like you have more control over your life and it's going to be a lot easier to start to do the things that are a little bit outside your comfort zone because that's where your willpower is necessary now you've got those reserves you can use them to start that dream project or start that new diet or crank it up even harder at the gym or whatever it is that you really want to put in place into your life so i find that you know that taking right action is the general rule of thumb that is important to building willpower and finally what i'm going to talk about is ways to destroy willpower so i've given you a lot of good ideas for how to build it up now we're going to talk about what is robbing you of it okay this is a pretty obvious list but i'm sure that you're doing some of the stuff on this list i know even i'm doing some of the stuff on this list and so as i'm talking to you about it i'm becoming more aware and i'm making more of a commitment to get this stuff out of my life number one television make sure you're not watching television this is robbing you this is killing you of your willpower it's putting into low consciousness zombie mode turn off the television in fact disconnect it disconnect your cable i don't even own cable i haven't owned cable for years and it's been one of the best changes that i've made in my life such a simple little change but it's amazing it just i have so much more uh energy i'm so much happier so much more fulfilled i'm doing so much more stuff i'm so much more productive because i'm not watching television internet really no different than tv if you're habitual internet browser if you're always watching youtube videos non-stop if you're if you're always checking the news you're checking your email you're chatting with your friends cut that out that's destroying your willpower it's turning you into a low consciousness zombie snacking over eating any kind of ways in which you're using food as a crutch as an emotional crutch as a psychological dependency cut that out that's destroying your willpower it's making you feel guilty you're not taking right action there you know that's not healthy for you sleeping in if you're not waking up on time i know that's actually been a problem lately for me because i have a very odd sleep schedule i live in vegas here so i go to bed very very late and i tend to wake up late as a result and that's a little bit screwing with my work schedule so that's something i got to work on sleeping in less drinking alcohol drugs smoking any kind of chemical substance abuses that you are partaking in cut that out that is destroying your willpower it's also destroying your body uh destroying the performance that you can have in your life it's really a waste of your life it's a shame that you're doing that stuff cut that out video games i used to partake in that a lot i still do a little bit but uh not nearly to the point where i did before cut that stuff out wean yourself off video games huge time sink huge willpower drain get yourself off that stuff porn if you're addicted to porn if you watch a lot of porn unhook yourself from that stuff that stuff is also hurting your willpower and it's destroying your energy destroying your performance so that's basically it those are the ways in which you're destroying your willpower so if you cut some of those out and you put in some of those good methods then you're going to start to see that your willpower builds up and up and up and up the more you keep doing that so for you as a as an action item right now because i don't want you to just watch this video i want you to actually take some action number one question to ask yourself is what can you be doing to build up your willpower what's the one thing for you that you know is going to be right is it meditation is it exercise is it breathing is it waking up on time decide what it is just one thing don't don't try to fix everything at once one thing and then the next thing is what is the one thing right now that you're doing that's destroying your willpower jot that down write that down make it very clear in your mind is it too much tv too much internet too much sleeping in too much drinking too many video games too much porn decide on that one thing and decide you're going to cut it out so you're going to put one thing into place and you're going to take one thing out of place and then you're going to start to watch what happens to your willpower and if you stay consistent on that and you take right action you're going to notice a big shift all right so that's it that's what i want to tell you on willpower i am signing off go ahead post me your comments please like this and share this so this message spreads around if you like it and of course i'm going to send you to actualize.org where i have a free newsletter with exclusive updates exclusive content exclusive 19 part video series a chance to get two hours of free coaching from me which i give away every month and the reason that really you want to sign up and the reason you want to follow me is because the information that i'm sharing you i have distilled down from years worth of research and i continue to do more and more every day and i'm bringing you the best to help you master your psychology because i want you to create an amazing life for yourself i really want you to create a life of purpose something where you're going out there and you're contributing something awesome you're 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