A client recently shared that while he made a commitment to get into a cold plunge three times weekly, he never actually felt motivated to do it. Yet he realized that anything worth having typically has a level of resistance and requires a certain level of work—a price.
No matter what it is that is generating resistance (working out, eating healthy, a relationship, etc.), when you do the hard thing, whatever it is, ask yourself how many times you’ve regretted it. I assure you that answer will be close to zero.
Hard things always bring a level of resistance. Is the stuff you do really that hard? Again, the answer probably approaches zero. Always do the right thing, hard as it may seem. Keep your commitments. When you do, you strengthen the muscle called your “will.” You teach your mind that your will is not something to mess with. That’s the whole reason to do hard things: it strengthens will.
Who is captaining the ship at any given moment? If you say, “I am,” and you truly are, that’s a matter of will. However, there are times other things take control to captain the ship, like fear, panic, or fatigue. Each time we consciously strengthen the will, it becomes stronger. Like anything, it’s a practice. And through this practice, we begin to exercise more and more will and inevitably become willful.
Then a weird thing happens. We begin to envision certain things and point that strengthened will in a specific direction. The result is that positive things begin to happen without us taking action. The force becomes stronger within us. That result is that we then create the reality we experience. What we give will and attention to increasingly becomes our reality—good or bad.
Back to the initial comment about the cold plunge. It serves as a great metaphor because you have to get beyond the surface level thinking and fear (“I don’t want to do this”) to strengthen your will and get beyond the fight-or-flight reaction. Consider this: It’s not about being focused to be successful. Success comes from eliminating distraction. In the cold plunge, the distraction comes from the noise inside your brain (“Oh my gosh, I’m going to die”). Eliminate the noise and distraction. Once you commit to doing what is hard, everything else is noise.
As another analogy, if you set the bar at million-dollar accounts, you’ll find that when you turn away those that don’t meet the threshold—a hard thing to do, you’ll end up with more million-dollar accounts. If you do the easy thing and take the $500,000 account, the bigger accounts take longer to materialize. It’s a matter of exercising your will.
All value is earned. Earn it through being willful.
