• Todd Whiteford, who had testicular cancer but decided to run in the Marathon des Sables between his surgery and chemotherapy, provides us with the story and the outcome.
• Abby, a social phobic who had to be schooled at home, tells us what prised her from the house and how willpower helped her get her life back.
• Grace Boyle, an alcoholic, describes how the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and willpower brought her back from the brink.
• Iain Somerside, GB rowing coach, talks about the willpower mindset which creates Olympian winners.
• Turly Humphrey, founder and CEO of Circle Sports, talks about her organisation which helps unemployed young people achieve jobs.
• Graham Allen, Member of Parliament for Nottingham North, tells us about his work on the “Early Years” project and the difference interventions can make to generations of lives.
YOUR WILLPOWER CHALLENGE
I would like you to take the opportunity to pursue a Willpower Challenge or indeed Challenges of your own as you read the book. Your Challenge may be:
• A dream you might have had for some time but may have lacked confidence or time to pursue. It might be skydiving, parachute jumping, adventuring to unusual places or going to university or college to pursue further education.
• Something meaningful in your life, like raising money for a charitable cause, a test of endurance or “staying alive” – as one of our willpower interviewees admitted as he coped with a terminal disease.
• A habit you want to break – smoking, alcohol, drugs or overeating. You may have tried before to overcome a behaviour and even been partially successful, then returned to your old ways. Make this the time to be successful for all time.
• A habit you want to establish – for example, healthy eating, an exercise regime, a better sleep pattern, a calmer demeanour, an interest in people around you.
• A desire to win in a sport of your choice, perhaps to Olympic standard or for social and personal enjoyment. We certainly meet a plethora of impressive sports personalities and coaches in succeeding pages.
• Promotion at work demands willpower and a variety of skills. Learn the leadership skills suggested by top CEOs and start to become more successful at work.
• Start your own business. Discover if you have the willpower necessary to be an entrepreneur and hear from others who have made that leap and their journey to success.
WHAT’S INSIDE
Part One: The Essence of Willpower
This title sounds a bit like a scent – but willpower can’t be sprayed on, inhaled or handed to someone else to do it for you. It is you in charge of you.
Part One reviews willpower research and comes to the conclusion that the “muscle” analogy, much utilised by researchers and psychologists in the past, does not fit with recent experiments. So I re-examine the latest thinking to help you achieve willpower.
There are inspirational stories from a young girl who had been confined to her house for four years before emerging using amazing willpower, amputees who are back adventuring, the ill or damaged who have willed themselves back to life. If they can do that, what could you do?
So, the essence of willpower is about how you harness your self-control to get where you want to go, and this part of the book helps you start to understand how to do that.
Part Two: Goals and Vision
Goals and Vision will help you address your own Willpower Challenges, working out what is meaningful for you to achieve, turning your dreams into goals. How you do that with goal planning, as well as how you implement these goals, is assessed and discussed.
Working on the steps to your goals and visualising them have been shown to increase positive outcomes, so there are some great stories around the power of visualisation with instructions for you to gain the same outcomes.
How you like to learn should guide you in choosing the “how” of pursuing your goals: should that be in a group with others, by reading and understanding, by practical steps or by experimentation? Understanding your learning preferences increases the likelihood of willpower success.
Part Three: New Habits for Old
At least 50 % of what we do is down to habit. And our habits are established early on in our lives, copied from our parents or parent substitutes. If that knowledge fills you with dread, as the way your parents behaved is not how you want to be, help is at hand. I outline how habits are established and how bad ones can be changed and replaced with better versions. The purpose of willpower is a drive towards useful habits so that you achieve long-term success with your Willpower Challenge.
If you want to become the best in class for a skill, there is advice on how to achieve that as well as establishing some generic good habits that will prolong your life on earth.
When things go belly up with your own Willpower Challenges, because life is rarely plain sailing, we discuss how you can get over a glitch and move on instead of indulging in self-castigation.
Part Four: The Willpower Mindset
Willpower is a mindset and gaining that mindset is important to get those willpower ducks in a row. If you tell yourself it will never work then … it won’t.
Just knowing about a willpower mindset doesn’t, of course, mean you will have one. It takes a bit of work to achieve, so this part of the book explores how to achieve a relentlessly positive mindset. You can’t leap from negative to positive thinking overnight. That would be the stuff of delusion. There are easy steps presented here that will progress your thinking: understanding your negative thoughts and where they come from, exploring the evidence for their existence, trying out useful thinking before finally achieving a positive willpower mindset.
Learn here about the power of externalisation to remain cool in a crisis, how to have a growth mindset and achieve the same mental strength of winners like Wimbledon tennis players and Olympic rowers. All to help with your Willpower Challenge.
Part Five: Willpower and Work
If your Willpower Challenge is about success at work and getting to the top, then focus on Part Five of the book.
Willpower at Work is not just about you but the motivation of others around you, so Part Five presents the three S’s of Willpower at work: Self-Awareness, Skills and Self-Preservation.
You get the chance to complete the Willpower at Work scale to rate your abilities before plugging the gaps with the skills suggested. I interviewed 8 °CEOs and asked them to rate what made them successful so others could follow in their footsteps. Six of the skills they suggested are outlined here with tips on how to achieve mastery.
We hear from corporate greats as well as entrepreneurs about their views about willpower and how they came to be top of their game.
Stress at work is prevalent nowadays, with more demands and fewer resources, but a job shouldn’t shorten your existence. Strategies to be fit for the fray are proposed so you will be around for many more Willpower Challenges.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I would love you to share your Willpower Challenges with me, warts and all: what worked for you and what was less successful. Your stories will help others face their dreams, goals, desires – and perhaps demons.
Share your willpower stories on my website (www.rostaylorcompany .com), Twitter (@Ros_Taylor_Co), and Facebook (www.facebook.com/RosTaylorCompany).
PART ONE
The Essence of