essay about willpower
Zhen Xu
Miss Ghan
ENG 846
7/14/2014
Self-awareness and Self-control There are many controversies about self-control when we are talking about boosting our willpower. Is it true: the more self-control you have, the stronger willpower I have to achieve my goal? Actually, for me, I did believe that statement before reading the book “The Willpower Instinct”, by Kelly McGonigal. I thought, in order to balance better between my personal lives and learning, I just need to push myself harder and harder to reinforce my self-control. Is that working? Unfortunately, my willpower failed. When I looked up the answer in the book, I found out: “Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t and I want to help you achieve your goal.”(10) and “I will and I won’t power are the two sides of self-control, they alone don’t constitute willpower.” (9) Therefore, we need self-awareness to guarantee our “I want” power can maintain the effectiveness of self-control to boost our willpower. In order to avoid willpower failure, you should take advantage of self-awareness to help self-control improve on the track of your goal achievement. Self-control is easily to be misinterpreted, which is difficult for us to improve without self-awareness. Dr.Kelly Mcgonigal believe that “the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control.”(4) When we seeking the way to improve our self-control, lots of people consider self-control as a product only from psychological self-suggestion or self-hypnosis to manipulate their own behaviors. Because it is easy for them to ascribe why we fail to lose control to that we don’t give ourselves enough intense orders to perform well, and ,once we push ourselves harder, we can easily improve self-control as much as we want. In fact, “Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology.” (Pg.31) When we making any choices leading to lose of self-control, we are not aware of that
Miss Ghan
ENG 846
7/14/2014
Self-awareness and Self-control There are many controversies about self-control when we are talking about boosting our willpower. Is it true: the more self-control you have, the stronger willpower I have to achieve my goal? Actually, for me, I did believe that statement before reading the book “The Willpower Instinct”, by Kelly McGonigal. I thought, in order to balance better between my personal lives and learning, I just need to push myself harder and harder to reinforce my self-control. Is that working? Unfortunately, my willpower failed. When I looked up the answer in the book, I found out: “Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t and I want to help you achieve your goal.”(10) and “I will and I won’t power are the two sides of self-control, they alone don’t constitute willpower.” (9) Therefore, we need self-awareness to guarantee our “I want” power can maintain the effectiveness of self-control to boost our willpower. In order to avoid willpower failure, you should take advantage of self-awareness to help self-control improve on the track of your goal achievement. Self-control is easily to be misinterpreted, which is difficult for us to improve without self-awareness. Dr.Kelly Mcgonigal believe that “the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control.”(4) When we seeking the way to improve our self-control, lots of people consider self-control as a product only from psychological self-suggestion or self-hypnosis to manipulate their own behaviors. Because it is easy for them to ascribe why we fail to lose control to that we don’t give ourselves enough intense orders to perform well, and ,once we push ourselves harder, we can easily improve self-control as much as we want. In fact, “Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology.” (Pg.31) When we making any choices leading to lose of self-control, we are not aware of that