Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share M15 Med065: Meditation on the circle of breath
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
M15 Med065: Meditation on the circle of breath
Listen:
Watch:
Read:
It’s the middle of December, time to begin crafting your new year’s resolutions. Or, maybe you don’t ever make them. Today’s episode, however, is not specifically about new year’s resolutions. It’s about reaching your self-improvement goals at any time of the year. Of course, on Mindful15, I make the assumption that your goals involve meditation, but the discussion here can be applied to any kind of goal setting initiative.
Gearing up for positive change can be exciting. Maybe you’ve read a self help book (or 10) full of testimonials showing just how effective the author’s method is and now you’re imagining how wonderful life will be when you reach your goal. In other words, you’re highly motivated and you feel a sense of excitement, maybe even exhilaration. You can’t wait to get started.
But motivation fades quickly, especially when accompanied by a high degree of excitement. You just can’t sustain that level of emotion for very long, so you can’t rely on it to drive your effort. Motivation drops when you come face to face with the fact that the goal you want to achieve requires long, regular, or maybe even difficult work that doesn’t feel particularly exciting or energizing.
Then what do you do? You fall back on willpower, the ability to control your behaviour and delay gratification to achieve long term rewards.
But willpower fluctuates. Sometimes it’s strong. Other times it’s weak. It’s just not a reliable way to foster goal achievement, and that’s why so many of us fail to make our resolutions stick.
How to boost willpower
Willpower involves decision-making. It’s the ability to decide to perform goal-directed activities over other options. If you consistently perform such activities, you’ll eventually reach your goal. If you don’t, you won’t. The problem, of course, is that these activities may not be what you want to do in the moment. Exercising willpower feels a bit like forcing yourself to take the right action instead of the fun/easy action. It can be hard to do.
One of the best ways to boost willpower is to remove choice, or reduce the amount of choice so that it’s easier to choose the goal-directed activity. Here are a couple of strategies that help:
1. Limit the number of options
If, for example, your goal is to exercise first thing every morning for 30 minutes, pick one exercise routine that you will perform every day, pre-select the place where you’ll exercise, and schedule a consistent daily exercise time. You can even select the workout clothes you’ll wear.
Make these decisions up front and stick to them for several weeks. This eliminates the need to make all these little decisions every day. The only decision left is whether to exercise or not. This still requires willpower, but you’ll not have depleted your willpower with the effort of choosing how, where, and when to exercise.
You can use the exact same technique with meditation. Decide what time of day you’ll meditate, choose a specific guided meditation to use every day, which will also constrain you to a specific amount of meditation time every day. Decide up front where you’ll mediate and even what you’ll wear. Stick to this plan for several weeks.
This Week's Peaceful Moment
2. Design your environment to make choices easier
Designing the environment involves optimizing all the conditions required to ensure you perform the goal-directed activity. Make it as easy as possible to do what you need to do...
View all episodes
Listen:
Watch:
Read:
It’s the middle of December, time to begin crafting your new year’s resolutions. Or, maybe you don’t ever make them. Today’s episode, however, is not specifically about new year’s resolutions. It’s about reaching your self-improvement goals at any time of the year. Of course, on Mindful15, I make the assumption that your goals involve meditation, but the discussion here can be applied to any kind of goal setting initiative.
Gearing up for positive change can be exciting. Maybe you’ve read a self help book (or 10) full of testimonials showing just how effective the author’s method is and now you’re imagining how wonderful life will be when you reach your goal. In other words, you’re highly motivated and you feel a sense of excitement, maybe even exhilaration. You can’t wait to get started.
But motivation fades quickly, especially when accompanied by a high degree of excitement. You just can’t sustain that level of emotion for very long, so you can’t rely on it to drive your effort. Motivation drops when you come face to face with the fact that the goal you want to achieve requires long, regular, or maybe even difficult work that doesn’t feel particularly exciting or energizing.
Then what do you do? You fall back on willpower, the ability to control your behaviour and delay gratification to achieve long term rewards.
But willpower fluctuates. Sometimes it’s strong. Other times it’s weak. It’s just not a reliable way to foster goal achievement, and that’s why so many of us fail to make our resolutions stick.
How to boost willpower
Willpower involves decision-making. It’s the ability to decide to perform goal-directed activities over other options. If you consistently perform such activities, you’ll eventually reach your goal. If you don’t, you won’t. The problem, of course, is that these activities may not be what you want to do in the moment. Exercising willpower feels a bit like forcing yourself to take the right action instead of the fun/easy action. It can be hard to do.
One of the best ways to boost willpower is to remove choice, or reduce the amount of choice so that it’s easier to choose the goal-directed activity. Here are a couple of strategies that help:
1. Limit the number of options
If, for example, your goal is to exercise first thing every morning for 30 minutes, pick one exercise routine that you will perform every day, pre-select the place where you’ll exercise, and schedule a consistent daily exercise time. You can even select the workout clothes you’ll wear.
Make these decisions up front and stick to them for several weeks. This eliminates the need to make all these little decisions every day. The only decision left is whether to exercise or not. This still requires willpower, but you’ll not have depleted your willpower with the effort of choosing how, where, and when to exercise.
You can use the exact same technique with meditation. Decide what time of day you’ll meditate, choose a specific guided meditation to use every day, which will also constrain you to a specific amount of meditation time every day. Decide up front where you’ll mediate and even what you’ll wear. Stick to this plan for several weeks.
This Week's Peaceful Moment
2. Design your environment to make choices easier
Designing the environment involves optimizing all the conditions required to ensure you perform the goal-directed activity. Make it as easy as possible to do what you need to do...