Willpower Exercises – How to increase Willpower

These, among others, are the traditional exercises on willpower that you can find in New Thought books like William Walker Atkinson and Frank Haddock. And if you have tried them, you’ll inevitably realize how BORING they are.

I mean, it’s not a big stretch of the imagination to think that counting a box of matches or looking at a hand of a watch is undoubtedly an incredibly dull activity.

It would be a bit more fun if the box of matches were burning!

Most likely, you said to yourself after doing it: “Well, I can certainly push through it and do it until the end, but it’s so boring; I won’t be repeating it.” Or you may even repeat them a few times, but certainly not consistently to grow your willpower.

Once you convince yourself that you can push through the boredom and complete these exercises, you think your Will power is strong, and the practices are unnecessary.

Yet, these exercises’ actual value and goal are far from completed and understood. Anyone can pull enough willpower to sit through 20 or 30m of boredom. Sure it’s not fun, but anyone can do it and has done it in the past, especially if you have been to school or long business meetings.

You don’t develop the willpower to sit through this, just your ability to be bored during this time. The same thing with the exercises, so you can sustain 20 or 30m of boredom; good for you. You just proved to yourself that you could do what most teenagers do every day at school for several hours.

You don’t gain much by being bored for 30 minutes a day

Once you understand that it’s not the success in this exercise that matters, it’s not being able to do it that matters – since we can all do it – what’s the point? What’s the point of sitting through these boring exercises?

It’s not even about being able to do them every day since, for this reason, you might as well choose a more productive activity to force yourself to do every day, like exercise or running.

The point of this training is to control your state. We can all go through them, but we can’t all go through them consistently with an empowering state, genuinely connected with our Will.

A teenager in school finishes his boring class with a dull mind, a mind that is not active or powerful but just bored and happy the classes are over so he can start doing more fun activities. If you finish these exercises with the same mental state, then as you can imagine, the will exercises didn’t have a good effect on you.

After you finish these Will exercises, you need to feel much more powerful and empowered due to the continued use of the Will and not feel bored out of your mind. If this doesn’t happen, you are not accomplishing the goal of these exercises. It’s pointless to go through it. You must do them empowered and not disempowered and forced. You are not pushing yourself; you are choosing to apply your Will to this. And because of this, your mind rewards you with a very empowered state.

A lot more fun to finish an exercise feeling better than before.

Like most people who read these exercises, I didn’t understand them at first. They were boring, but I kept doing them to prove I could. Still, at some point, you know you can do this for the rest of your life, but what’s the point? Nothing truly changed! So why waste any more time?

After connecting the dots on all kinds of situations and old books, it was only much later that I understood their true meaning and why what I’d done for hundreds of hours was nothing more than a waste of time.

If you are not doing them using your Will, using or developing a powerful state from the beginning to the end of the exercise, and finishing it up feeling more empowered than you were before, then you might as well not do them and do some fun activity instead. You would be wasting your time.

The true goal of these exercises is to control your state. It may be tedious at the surface, but you should be brimming with power. For this to happen, it requires solid inner voice control, a non-leaning approach to the exercise, and a genuine connection to your Will’s source. You’ll need to change your state from a bored out of your mind into a powerful one using all these approaches.

With inner voice control, you reflect away all the negativity and power drainers that are happening inside of you in your mind’s voice.

With a non-leaning approach to the exercise, you develop a present state.

And with the connection with your true Will, you can dissociate from the illusions of the emotions of boredom while connecting with your true power inside.

All these topics are fully covered in the 10 Steps to Inner Power course, particularly Will Mastery, where you can genuinely understand the Will. And you can now apply them and train them with just any simple exercise of willpower, like counting the matches of a matchbox. Something as simple as this can be a powerful way to enter an empowered state when done right.

When done wrong, it’s a terrible waste of time and just a way to be bored, not much different than being in a boring lecture or business meeting. Controlling your internal state is the difference between this being a waste of time or a powerful exercise.

Yes, this can be applied even in a boring business meeting

So it’s a powerful test to know how much inner power you truly have. When you can CONSISTENTLY do these willpower exercises and always end up in an empowered state, much stronger than you were before, you can say that you’ve reached the goal of these exercises.

And by the way, consistently is not just doing it once or twice. It’s a daily practice, finishing the exercises more powerful than you were before and bringing this state to the rest of your day. If this is achieved, you have accomplished a fundamental goal.

When you do this daily, you’ll have to fight off your daily moods of not feeling good or being sad or angry. Hence the consistency of the exercise and not just being it a once or twice activity when you’re feeling full of power anyway. This beats the point of the willpower exercise. If you are already full of power and motivation, then it’s not a big effort, is it? But if you’re moody for some reason, you don’t feel like it… This is where you’ll need your full inner power to control your state.

Continue reading on Part 3: How to use the Will Power Correctly