The Willpower Equation: Navigating Identity and Growth
In my teen years, I struggled with self-worth. I had lots of bouts of unrequited love, and I always put myself into a subservient position with serious girlfriends. As I entered college, I had a chip on my shoulder, and I wanted to prove that I was desirable and lovable.
My unconscious strategy to deal with my insecurity (that I also wasn’t even really aware of at the time) was to try to “hook up” with lots of girls. But as I succeeded off and on, predictably, I didn’t feel any better. Instead, I started waking up with a lot of shame, and I decided I had to stop.
However, about a month later, I found myself—and I mean literally found myself as if I wasn’t the person in control—hitting on a girl at a party and trying to go home with her, even though I had decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. This monthly cycle of back and forth continued in some way for months, and more mildly for years.
There are two important principles of the “human condition” that this story illustrates. The first is that we don’t have complete control over our choices all the time. The more emotionally charged a dynamic is, and the more it is tethered to our identity, the more we go on autopilot. The second is that we are not one uniform thing, but have “parts” that often don't align, like for example one part of me wanted to stop trying to hook up with girls and the other part of me needed the validation. And because of how each of these principles played out in me, you could say I lacked the willpower to change.
Willpower is tricky. Some people think they have a lot of it, but I’ve seen that in most cases it’s actually that their identity is already aligned with the things we consider desirable pursuits in our culture (hard work, emotional evenness, individualism, and physical fitness). The truth is that each of us has weak points that can use growth – for example, conversely, a common ability that many people lack is straightforward vulnerability. Mostly willpower is something that we need to cultivate to balance where we lack skill and capacity.
Doing this cultivation is a pretty simple process. We’ll start with understanding how it works and as I describe it I suggest you relate the principles and my story to your own life. The understanding will be your foundation from which to practice. Even though it’s somewhat simple, it can be hard to execute, so it may take some time to iterate.
When you make a commitment, what turns you away from executing it as designed is going to be this other “part” of you that is uncomfortable with changing things up. When I was hooking up with girls, the part of me that had a chip on my shoulder and needed validation was uncomfortable with no longer having the external data points that I was desirable and only having my own internal barometer for my self-worth. I didn’t know this consciously at the time, but most of our motivations are a little hidden from us and we don’t need to know them consciously for them to operate in the background.
The first step to gaining willpower is being aware of and admitting what is dragging you away from the change. For me, it was through working on myself with this issue that I realized my lack of self-worth and was able to admit to myself without defensiveness or self-depreciation that “Man, I am very insecure and want attention from girls to make me feel good.”
The second step to increasing willpower and changing your behavior is to increase your capacity to “sit with” the discomfort. This literally means being able to feel the discomfort without turning away from what you want or acting on it. Meaning, in college, I would have had to be able to acknowledge the sadness of not feeling good about myself without acting on it.
I’ve found three general ways to make these changes that have worked historically for myself and clients.
The first is admitting your discomfort without self-deprecation or qualification to a trusted person that I call an advocate. Someone who can hear your feelings without inserting their own agenda or giving advice. The idea is simply to bring them outside your head and into connection with another person to make your brain understand that it’s not so scary. It’s like they say in AA, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”
The second is to acknowledge it consciously just to yourself but try to stay in it, like doing another few reps at the gym when you’re tired. You literally say to yourself, “I’m feeling like I’m not good enough right now,” and try to just be with it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. You’ll want to do something else with every fiber of your being.
The third is to do some therapy, self-guided or with a practitioner, to increase your sense or internal freedom or to give you more ability to do options one and two. If you do it in a self-guided way, you can bring to mind the theme of the discomfort (for example, not being cared for, chosen, mattering, funny enough, perfect, strong, high-achieving, etc.) and think about times in your earlier life that you’ve experienced those themes. Having that greater awareness of its origin will give you more emotional distance from it and lessen the grip, allowing you to go back to one and two, and/or also be freer to make different choices.
As I said, cultivating willpower and changing habits is often challenging, and can require lots of iterations of practice and reminding yourself of what’s happening beneath the surface. So you shouldn’t beat yourself up if progress is more like a wave than a line straight up. But the best thing you can do is continue to engage with the process and not turn away from it in “fuck it” mode. As you do this over time, you’ll certainly become and feel like more of who you want to be.
