No Willpower? No Problem. Use This Psychologist’s Tricks to Skyrocket Your Results
“Change yourself. You can do anything that you want to do if you try hard enough!”
How many times have we heard this from well-meaning people around us?
How many times have you “wanted” to do something but couldn’t “get yourself to do it”?
Who did you blame? Yourself, of course. For what? For lacking the personal willpower to do it.
However, Dr. Benjamin Hardy says our environment and other external factors can dictate our goal success much more than individual willpower.
And that’s actually good news!
Why? Because changing your environment is much easier than developing superhuman willpower.
In this guide, you’ll learn tactics to craft your environment so that generating motivation, staying on course, and achieving goals becomes natural.
(If you prefer to have a formatted workbook, get the free PDF version of this article here.)
In this article, you will learn how to apply the core concepts from the book
First, we’re going to learn how to make willpower unnecessary by avoiding temptations and distractions, and we’ll apply that to our goal.
Next we’ll find out how to stay on course with your goal by planning for obstacles, and we’ll apply that to our goal. Then we’ll discover amazing tactics for willpower-free motivation using something called “Forcing Functions.”
After an exercise to apply Forcing Functions to your goal, we’ll review the importance of who influences you on your goal, and go through an exercise to apply that.
Knowledge is not power — until it’s applied.
Think of a personal goal to apply the book’s tactics on
To understand the book’s tactics, it’s important to apply them to something concrete. For now, just think of possible goals to work on. To get you thinking, here are some examples:
- Starting a habit (meditation, exercise, better sleep) or eliminating a bad habit (smoking, drinking, junk food, too much screen time)
- Completing a personal project (scrapbook, create an app by date, write the next great American novel)
- A learning goal (read # books this month, complete an online course)
In a little bit, I’ll ask you to select one of your goals to use with the guide’s exercises.
Tactic #1: Make willpower unnecessary by avoiding temptations and distractions
The problem with willpower is that it’s very difficult to summon when we are stressed, tired, hungry, bored, or feeling other negative emotions. Unfortunately, those are the times when we need it most!
In the fight against willpower, the first solution is deceptively simple but powerful. You can beat willpower by avoiding having to use it in the first place.
Have you ever walked into a bakery with the aroma of fresh-baked treats and suddenly had irresistible cravings? Of course you have.
Our environment triggers us in ways we don’t even realize. It’s one reason advertisers spend so much money to market in as many places as possible such as TV, billboards, websites, pens, magazines, buses, movies, and so on.
Once we are triggered and in the throes of a temptation, it’s nearly impossible to pull ourselves out of its gravitational force.
That’s why the first tactic is so powerful: deliberately avoid facing temptations. When you face fewer temptations and distractions, you rely on willpower much less.
Avoiding Temptations Examples
Consider the following scenarios and decide which would make succeeding easier.
Which way would make it easier to stick with your goal — the first column or second column?
Let’s look at another scenario.
As you can see, the second column makes success much easier.
It’s important to note that we looked at an isolated event in each goal scenario. On any goal, you will encounter events like these 20, 50, or hundreds of times. Having a higher success rate every time you face the scenario will translate to big wins in aggregate.
Note: You might think that you don’t get triggered by your things in your environment. “Other people may be triggered by things in their environment, but I don’t get triggered by the negative influences in mine,” you say.
That may be true — except when you’re tired, stressed, hungry, bored, or feeling any other negative emotions. Once those negative states kick in, your ability to fend off temptations and distractions plummets. So, let’s set you up to win!
How To Strategically Avoid Temptations and Distractions
You will create a list of things that tempt or distract you from your goal. Then you will list some very simple actions to avoid encountering those things unnecessarily.
Step 1: Identify what tempts/distracts you on your goal
For the goal you selected, think of what tempts and distracts you from your goal. This should be relatively easy. Ask yourself what temptations and distractions you have given in to before. The more honest and direct you are with yourself now, the much better your chances of success.
Example temptations:
- (Goal to eat fewer sugary sweets) Sugary drinks in your house, the ice cream shop on Main street, the candy bowl on your desk
- (Goal to exercise more) Couch, TV, alcohol, unhealthy food that makes you less motivated to work out
- (Goal to invest time on a personal project) Television, video games, alcohol, mindless internet surfing
Step 2: Brainstorm how will you avoid encountering each temptation
For each temptation/distraction on your list, write down how you can reduce or avoid encountering it.
Example strategies:
- Remove junk food from your line of sight when you open the refrigerator or pantry and from your countertop
- Take the candy jar off your desk
- Avoid walking down the street with the irresistible ice cream shop
- Tell the waiter not to bring bread to the table
- Delete unnecessary phone apps
- Put your phone in another room or on airplane mode
- Remove shortcuts for distracting apps from your phone’s home screen
- Unplug your TV during the week
- Put liquor or wine bottles out of sight
- Take down posters, magnets, or other visuals that have unhelpful messages or tempt you (for instance, alcohol paraphernalia, “humorous” items that joke about laziness or other flaws)
Action Steps (5 minutes)
- Brainstorm 5–10 temptations and distractions that are most likely to derail your goal
- Identify an action to make it harder to see or encounter the temptation or distraction
Tactic #2: Stay on course by planning for obstacles
It’s not always possible to avoid temptations. We will encounter obstacles — it’s inevitable.
The problem is that when we encounter obstacles, we tend to be in a negative state. Stressed. Overwhelmed. Hungry. Angry. Tired. Rushed. Bored.
When in a negative state, your willpower is diminished. Your brain will seek quick fixes to feel better. Typical quick fixes include checking email, eating junk food, drinking alcohol, watching TV, mindlessly surfing the web, playing video games, and so on.
Once you’re in a negative state with diminished willpower and a brain seeking quick fixes, you have little time for careful decision making. Unless…
You do the thinking and decision-making ahead of time.
Obstacle Planning
Obstacle planning involves deciding how to respond before you’re in an obstacle-induced negative state. If you already know how to respond, you can navigate obstacles without succumbing to quick fixes.
Obstacle planning is one of the most effective and evidence-based tactics. Study after study has found that planning a response in advance produces up to a 200% increase in goal success. For instance, one study showed that students who proactively created responses for obstacles improved their grades, attendance, and classroom conduct. The list of studies is extensive.
Obstacle Planning Example
A few months back, I set the goal to only drink adult beverages on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Since this would be a behavior change, I brainstormed potential obstacles.
One obstacle was work happy hour events on several upcoming Wednesdays. While I could have used Tactic #1 to avoid the events, I wanted to attend for the camaraderie with colleagues. So I needed a response plan.
My response plan was, “If I’m at happy hour, I’ll order club soda with lime.”
And I planned responses to other expected obstacles.
“If they tease me for not drinking, I’ll share authentically about my goal and/or tease them about being boring without alcohol.”
And finally, “If I am really tempted to order alcohol, I’ll order a sugary treat (Sprite) rather than break my goal.”
How To Do Obstacle Planning
This tactic puts you in the driver seat rather than at the whims of your brain’s automatic responses. It empowers you to act in line with your best self.
Step 1: Write down obstacles you might face in accomplishing your goal. These are in addition to the obstacles of temptations and distractions you identified in Exercise #1.
For example:
- Healthy eating goal potential obstacles: When you are out to dinner with friends; when you drive past that fast food restaurant; when you are hungry at work and don’t have healthy food to eat; after you’ve been drinking; when someone at home orders pizza
Step 2: Write down your response plan.
When you encounter that obstacle, how will you respond? Make your plans very specific (e.g., not “When I’m hungry,” but “When I open the pantry to look for candy”).
For example:
- “When I open the pantry to look for candy, I will eat a protein bar.”
- “When I want a beer, I’ll order club soda with lime.”
Note: Response plans don’t work if you aren’t committed to your goal. If you want to get more committed, then the next section on Forcing Functions is for you.
Action Steps (10 minutes)
- For the goal you are working on, write down the other potential obstacles you’ll face (besides the temptation/distraction obstacles you identified earlier)
- Write down the response you will use if you encounter that obstacle
Tactic #3: Create willpower-free motivation using “Forcing Functions”
What are Forcing Functions?
An amazing tactic to increase goal success.
Amount of willpower required: ZERO.
A Forcing Function is an upfront commitment you deliberately make that “forces” you to follow through. When you use Forcing Functions on your goal, you create instant motivation and accountability.
You aren’t relying on personal willpower to keep yourself motivated and accountable. Instead, you have deliberately outsourced those things to your environment.
Forcing Functions Example
For instance, Dr. Hardy wanted to write a proposal to get a book deal. He knew he would write the proposal someday. But then, he decided to hire a publishing coach and paid $3,000 upfront.
Suddenly, his procrastination vanished. Motivation was no problem. Once he had a serious financial investment, he couldn’t do his proposal “someday” — he had to do it now!
If you have ever signed up for a race, you have experienced multiple Forcing Functions in action. It doesn’t matter if it was a 10K, triathlon, or another sport:
- You pay the fee when you register (pay up front)
- You ask a friend or a coach to train with you (commitment to someone else)
- You post on social media to ask others to join you or to donate (commitment to many people)
- You compete for the best race time against a friend, training group, or your own personal best (enter a competition)
How To Use Forcing Functions
The following Forcing Functions will create motivation to execute your goal, without relying on a single shred of willpower. Review the list of Forcing Functions and think about which ones to use.
Action Step (5 minutes)
- Pick one or more Forcing Functions and write your actions to implement them.
Tactic #4: Intentionally decide who influences you
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
- Jim Rohn
Who you spend time with is who you become. We are a social species and are heavily influenced by who we spend time around.
With kids, we know this. Parents never want their kids to hang out with bad influences. They want to know who their kid’s friends are, what activities they’re into, and so on.
We seem to forget this as adults. We think we are immune to the influence of our peers. But nothing could be further from the truth.
In an analysis of three decades of health data, medical researchers Christakis and Fowler found that your likelihood of gaining weight or smoking cigarettes is statistically higher if your friend does.
Basically, if your friend gets fat, your chances of putting on weight go up statistically. And the effect holds for friends of friends, even those you don’t know. So, if your friend’s friend gets fat, your likelihood of gaining weight still increases statistically, even if you don’t know the other person!
Just as people can be negative influences, they can also be positive ones. For instance, Christakis and Fowler found that you are more likely to be happy if your friends are happy, too.
So the tactic here is to spend more time around positive influences on your goal. To do this, we are going to do two exercises.
First, we’ll look at an easy way to add positive influences on your goal. Second, we’ll review who we interact with regularly, assess whether they are a positive or negative influence on our goal, and make a plan.
Deliberately Add Positive Influences on Your Goal (Part A)
To surround yourself with positive influences on your goal, there are two easy ways that Dr. Hardy suggests: 1) Get a mentor or coach on your goal, or 2) Spend more time around individuals who are aligned with your goal.
Example
Not long ago, I wanted to increase the amount of time I spent around goal-driven individuals. I found a leadership mastermind group, which I joined. I also decided to join a CrossFit gym. The gym gave me an instant community of goal-driven (and health-conscious) friends, as most CrossFit gyms do.
Decide Who Influences Your Goal (Part B)
Your parents were right. Your friends do influence you. So, if you really want to achieve your goal, you must take an honest look at who you interact with regularly.
Step 1: List the names of the 10–15 people you interact with most regularly
- Friends you interact with regularly (IRL or virtually)
- Work friends you interact with regularly
- Home or family members you interact with regularly
Step 2: Categorize your people based on their influence on your goal.
Step 3: Brainstorm actions to adjust where you spend your time. For example:
Green: spend more time around these positive influences
- Your action might be to set up a regular coffee or phone call with them
Yellow: either “nothing” or see if you can turn them into a Green
- Your action to turn them into a Green might be sharing your goal with them. You might directly ask them to provide problem solving, accountability, or coaching — the active support of Greens
Red: spend less time with them or take other steps to reduce their influence
- Your action might be to reduce the frequency you interact with them, to not tell them about your goal, or to have a boundary-setting conversation
Action Steps (10–15 minutes)
- Determine at least one way from Part A that you will deliberately add a new positive influence on your goal
- List the names of the 10–15 people you interact with most regularly for Part B
- Categorize each person as a Red, Yellow, or Green influence on this goal
- Brainstorm actions to increase the influence of Greens, convert Yellows to Greens, and reduce the influence of Reds
Conclusion
Willpower-free change is easy if you use the right tactics. Now you need to get into action. So, if you completed the Action Steps, write down the top 3 actions you will do next. If you didn’t complete the action steps, you can download my free PDF workbook below.
Call To Action
If you want to craft your environment so that generating motivation, staying on course, and achieving goals becomes natural then download the free workbook version of this article. It has clear formatting and space to do each exercise above.
