Our willpower is limited, and we need to rely on it less. The best way to do so is by forming healthy habits and practicing them with discipline. Productive, meaningful routines are the foundation of acting like, and ultimately becoming, the person you want to be.
A habit is any behavior that you perform over and over to the point that it becomes automatic and no longer requires much willpower to get it done. Once a habit is formed, giving it up is harder to do than continuing it. This can utilized both to your own benefit and impediment.
Use Your Values as a Platform for Your Habits
In the same way that your actions rest upon your habits, your habits rest upon your values. With this being the case, it is critical to ground yourself in deeply held values that complement your habits. They are will keep you rooted in continuing to build your habits when you hit plateaus and lose focus.
Choose Your Values With Intention
A dangerous characteristic of our values is that they tend to be cultivated subconsciously. As kids, our values and beliefs were based on what those we trusted told us to value. If we aren't intentional about vetting our values, we may be acting based on outdated beliefs.
To escape this trap of misinformation, we must mindfully seek out the truth, regardless of whether or not it matches our current values and beliefs. We must carefully evaluate the sources of our information and learn to account for ulterior motives the source may have in trying to mislead us.
Take the news, for example. As a kids, I was taught to value the news as being important, reliable, and unbiased. The general consensus on that has changed, but news is still more biased that most people think. All news is biased, to some degree. Some sources are intentionally misleading, some not.
Regardless, throughout your lifetime, you have adsorbed information from untrustworthy sources like the news with the belief that they were, in fact, trustworthy. This is why it's so important to be relentless with your beliefs. Even if you no longer trust a source, information it provided to you previously may still be in your mind as valid.
Challenge What You Believe
You cannot take your beliefs for granted, because to do so is to put the foundation of all your habits, actions, and even your perspective to chance. To do so is to unconditionally trust that the beliefs you were imparted when you were young were all absolutely true--and that is a needlessly risky decision.
Continuing to believe something only because it feels safe, because your parents believe it, or because you feel that you could not go on without it is a bad way to go about understanding the rules behind how this ride works, and it's a great way to be confused, disappointed, and hurt.
Always be in the process of reevaluating the beliefs you already have and the ways in which you prioritize them. Learn to be okay with feeling uncertain.
We all fear that which we are uncertain about. We crave certainty. This is where the difficulty in challenging your beliefs lies. To do so, you have to face your fear head on instead of running from it. Any growth generally requires us to take this leap of faith: that going outside our comfort zone won't hurt us. Instead, it almost always improves us.
The Bottom Line
Live your life based on what you love, not what you fear. Your values and beliefs determine your habits. Your habits determine your actions. Your actions determine what you achieve in life. If your values are not reflective of who you want to become, then your actions will never be reflective of that person either.
