Yoda, Luke, The Force, and Willpower

Pretty catchy title for this piece, eh? Sometimes I get a little silly. Luke employing the Force in Starwars, and those of us using willpower here on earth, do not at first glance have much in common. The Force seems magical. It’s science fiction, after all. It affects other things, other people, and it is immensely powerful. It can be used both for good and for the goals of “the Dark Side.” Willpower also, by comparison, can be thought of as a kind of force, an internal strength, but its use is to control ourselves, not others. That's a difference, I suppose, but even the characters in Starwars knew that self-control was the key to eventual mastery of the Force itself.

Neither willpower nor the Force work very well without advanced training, and here is my real point. It wasn’t enough for Obi-wan to tell Luke to “Use the Force, Luke, use the Force”, because even though Obi-wan knew that Luke “possessed “the Force”, Luke really didn’t know how to use it, and Obi-won, although a master in using the Force, didn’t know very much about teaching it. Luke had to travel to another planet to find Yoda, who taught him all the finer points of advanced Forcemanship. Well, what Yoda actually did was to intervene at precisely the right times to help Luke get more and more skilled at directing the “Force” he possessed to achieve his goals and to know himself more fully.

Willpower is very much like the Force in that regard. It really doesn’t cut it to be told to “use willpower” to overcome a negative habit if you haven’t a clue about how to do that. If you are told “use willpower” to end a negative habit or “use willpower” to develop a positive habit, and you haven’t met your Yoda, you aren’t going to get very far. Oh, you’ll do ok for awhile with the amount of willpower that you learned on your own or read about, but unless you are quite exceptional, it’s likely that the strength of the negative habit you are battling will overcome the willpower skills you throw at it. That’s because you haven’t met your Yoda yet.

While willpower is defined as a kind of inner mental strength, it’s really a theoretical construct, a shorthand way of bundling everything you can possible think of related to self-control into that one special word. It’s about awareness that cravings and automatic responses don’t have to be followed reflexly. It’s about knowing how to change the influence triggers are having over you and where those triggers are coming from. It’s about employing techniques to tolerate the feelings the craved object gives you and not to be overwhelmed by them. It’s about awareness of habit circuits and how to wire new neural connections, precisely at the point where the old habit circuit was triggered. It includes what Traci Mann, PhD and colleagues refer to as Smart Regulation Strategies. It’s about believing that you can, in fact, master self-control, no matter how tenaciously the habit torments you, and that your life will be better, not worse, when you end the habit.

Time to make another point, this time about Willpwr, our suite of apps. This blog is like a self-help book in a way. It is information passively delivered to you that you can read, in the same way you can read a book about how to ride a bike or drive a car. But try just reading a book about bike riding and then ride. Try just reading a book about driving, and then venture out onto the freeways of Austin or Chicago and not get smashed. Information about willpower skills is great, but you need coaching in the real world under real conditions to gain a mastery of it. You need a Yoda right next to you to help at precise moments, to show you how to strengthen skills, to transfer your intellectual book learning knowledge to the actions and emotions of being out there and doing it.

That’s our idea, anyway. Willpwr apps jump in Yoda-like to help you at the precise times you need to know more about willpower and all the other aspects of self-control that go into changing yourself. The idea is to get better and better, stronger and more confident in your use of willpower, so that eventually, and paradoxically, you’ll need it less and less because you’ve re-established a healthy balance in your life.

“Do or do not. There is no try.” “The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side”. --Yoda