Willing the Will
How You Can Cultivate a Strong Will, No Matter Where You’re At
This article is not intended as a scientific manual on how to generate willpower. Rather, it is based on my own experience in making the shift from aimless hedonist to someone with a tangible sense of agency in my life. Although therefore I cannot make claims to the generality of such an approach, I can unequivocally say that it has worked.
The Buddha said that happiness is A Disciplined Mind.
What he meant was that happiness is a life that can be lived in accordance with one’s will. Happiness is the life where we can do what we have decided, in full consciousness and sovereignty, to do.
So, pretty important then, the will.
It’s a funny and quite astonishing fact that the majority of human beings alive, the majority of human beings who have ever lived, have failed to shape their lives in the way they wanted to.
It is likely that you, as a member of the human race, are one of these people. Sorry. (Don’t worry though. There’s a solution!)
For proof, think of all the unrealised dreams that drift like tattered plastic through your mind, haunting your waking moments, whispering to you in the pauses of your day: Why did you forsake me?
Think of all of the New Year’s commitments dropped by mid-January, if they even made it that far. The failed diets. The unused gym subscriptions. The unlearnt languages and unfinished novels.
Our lives are littered with these unborn ghosts, and we are pregnant with them, carrying the weight of unrealised potential, of life which wished to express itself through us and instead became stuck in our system, unresolved, unlived.
Why is that? Why do we fail to do the things we want to do?
Willpower.
Most of us lack the strength and consistency of will to bring about the things we dream of.
Is it possible to become strong-willed?
Some people just seem to be born with iron wills. If you have seen the recent Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary, there is no obvious reason why the conditions of his youth resulted in him becoming an unstoppable force of ego and resolve, while his older brother, growing up in the same environment, was weak and demure.
But for those born without this gift, can we cultivate a stronger will?
Any characteristic that we can name: courage, love, kindness, strength, fear, hate etc can be cultivated, can be practised into being. But the will is a little different.
Because what lies behind the cultivation of these qualities is will. We have to have the will to practice. The will to improve. The will to ignore our doubts.
That is, I have to have the will to will myself! (Reading that sentence back, I’m amazed it even means anything).
The question then is: Can I will this will? Can I will myself to be the kind of person who cultivates a strong will, even if I currently seem to lack one?
The answer, happily, is ‘yes’.
What has held you back from exercising your will upon the world up until now is not in fact your own weakness or deficiency. It is simply a matter of approach.
No matter who you are or how many times you’ve failed, you will always have the opportunity to increase the strength of your will. Here’s how.
How to Cultivate a Stronger Will
The beautiful thing about cultivating a strong will (and indeed a stronger anything) is that all we need to do is make it one degree stronger than it was the day before. No matter how weak you are, your starting point is always exactly where you are.
So that’s what you do. You start here.
And you simply ask yourself: What is the next step that I take to become a little stronger than I was before?
When Socrates was asked how he would reach the top of Mount Olympus, he replied that he would simply make sure every step he took was in the direction of its summit.
In order to achieve something great in your life, you must simply start moving in that direction. Indeed, what makes the achievement great is precisely the fact that it is beyond your current capacities. Yet you move towards it anyway. You grow by striving towards that which is beyond you.
That is, greatness is always something reached at some future point. Not something you already, by definition, had before you started. In order to become greater than you are, you must simply start from where you are. No one has ever reached their goal from anywhere else.
“But!” You complain. “I’ve tried this. I’ve started so many times from the ground up. And I always fail. I just don’t have the will to will myself”.
Now, at this point, I could lace in a lot of things about habit formation and all of that.
But you will never stick to any habit until your motivation becomes solid enough to do so. And, in my experience, motivation waivers for one reason and one reason only: your current mode of being has not yet become intolerable to you.
In order to finally wrest control of your will, you must descend deeply into the suffering that is the unwilled life.
As human beings, we are wired to avoid pain and move towards pleasure. But the great irony is that the greatest pain lies in living a life that is at odds with who we know we are supposed to be.
In my own life, there simply came a point where I could no longer stand the harm that I was causing myself by giving into life’s countless addictions: booze, drugs, social media, porn, whatever.
There came a point where I was no longer prepared to swap short-term pleasure for long-term happiness. And there was no way of coming to this conclusion without fully confronting the true toll that these little peccadillos were taking on me. (Not to say I now invariably follow the dictates of my will. But feeling into this pain has given me immeasurably more agency in life).
Descend into this pain, so that you know its true depth.
Count the cost of the missed opportunities. The wasted years.
Recognise the indignity of being dictated by moods that are as capricious as the outside forces which cause them.
Feel the weight of being out of integrity with your own self. Of the daily betrayals of yourself and others because you don’t have the strength to do what you know you should.
This may sound masochistic. But the real masochism is in pretending to yourself that you are not in pain, all the while subjecting yourself to it. The real masochism is continuing in this state of being when something so much better is available to you!
That is, when the pain of your current mode of being has sunk in, feel into what could be!
Life, experienced directly in all of its infinitesimal majesty, unfiltered through the refractive lens of craving for something else.
The actualisation of the person you know in your heart you can become if you just stopp acting against your own best interests.
Freedom! To truly choose how you spend your time, how you respond, how you show up.
Acknowledge and feel into the gap between this potentiality and where you are now. Because your pain in life is precisely the gap between where you are now and where you perceive that you should be! It is the abyss between the yearnings of your soul and the inertia of your conditioning. It is the consciousness of your own unrealised potential.
Listen to the unrealised dreams inside of you. What are they for? Are you a writer, a traveller, a dancer, a singer, a filmmaker, a lover, a leader, a teacher, an orator, a nature guide? Or something as yet undefined by human categories, some new thing which only you hold within yourself and can bring into being?
Perhaps you regard these as mere daytime fantasies, as distractions from the daily demands of life. But that is only so in a culture that has taught us to disregard our dreams. Where we are told our dreams are unrealistic only because they are unrealised.
The great poet Rabindrath Tagore said it best:
“The thing about imagination is, the more you use it, the more real it becomes.”
Your dreams are not illusions. They are conjurings from the depths of your mind of what could be.
Do you understand that as a human, as something capable of willing, this means that you can bring your vision of the world to bear in it? That you can make thought reality? That every single human-made thing around you is the result of someone doing just that?
Listen to your dreams, let them marinate in your consciousness. And allow them to become the secret fuel of your will. Your dreams are nothing but your subconscious yearning to express itself, and thus they are the unexpressed parts of you which beg for realisation.
Through the will, we manifest not only our desires, but the fullness of ourselves into the world. Learning to will the will within ourselves then is not simply a desire to exert power or influence. It is a matter of becoming who you are. This is your sacred purpose on this planet. And no one else can do it for you.
So come, take the next step, propelled beyond what you now think is possible by the magnetism of what only you can be.
My Coaching Offer
What I have attempted to outline here is a rough sketch of how you can begin to move from a life unlived to one of agency and choice.
If you, like most of us, are someone who has become disillusioned about your own capacity to change, I hope that this piece has at least sparked some ember within you which is ready to question that belief.
And if you have felt that spark glowing, however dimly, I would like you to consider reaching out to work with me.
We all have the will within us to become what we know we can be. As a coach, I work by relentlessly helping you return to that inexhaustible wellspring within you.
If you would like to explore what that looks like, you can go here to read a little bit more about my work, or set up a call — https://calendly.com/ronanloughney
