It’s Not Your Lack of Willpower. It’s Your Misaligned Goals.

Willpower is defined as the ability to control or restrain one's impulses, emotions, and behaviours in order to achieve a longer-term goal.

Based on that definition, you can see how important willpower is when it comes to achieving your health and fitness goals.

Lack of willpower leads to you making decisions that feel good in the short-term, even if they're in conflict with your long-term goals.

That might mean you lie on the couch in the evening when you know you'd be better off getting to the gym.

Or going back for the third handful of biscuits in spite of the fact you're trying to lose weight.

Willpower is important and I will talk about how to improve willpower elsewhere.

But here, I want to talk about something more fundamental: the real reason you're struggling probably isn't your lack of willpower - it's that you haven’t properly thought through your goals.

Take for example a phrase you may have heard yourself or others saying: "I'm going to try to lose a few kg over the next few months".

This goal might sound reasonable on the surface.

But contrast it with someone who says, "I'm going to spend the next three months hitting my calorie target at least 6 days per week, allowing one day per week for the social occasions I have planned, still aiming to keep things sensible on those days, with the aim of losing 5-6kg. I'm expecting it to be difficult at times, but I know it will be worth it and I can then transition to a more flexible approach thereafter when the sporting season ramps up."

I'm sure you'll agree that all else equal, your money would be on the second person making more progress than the first - even if they have the exact same amount of willpower.

But it's worth exploring what about the second statement leads to you thinking they're going to make more progress.

In order to understand this better, you can look at how you might make other important decisions in your life.

Let's take buying a house, for example.

You wouldn't simply set a goal to buy the biggest, fanciest mansion in the most popular location.

You’d more likely pick one you realistically see yourself able to afford, and that suits your lifestyle.

Before committing, you'd weigh up the pros and cons: the price, the commute, the upkeep, the lifestyle changes it would require.

Only after considering all of that would you decide whether this particular house is worth pursuing, or whether you need to adjust your goal to something more aligned with your circumstances and values.

Of course there will still be actions you have to take that you might prefer not to - following up with solicitors, parting with your life savings, packing and moving your stuff.

But because the goal was aligned with your financial reality, your genuine desires, and what you're willing to sacrifice from the start, barring something extreme happening, you're probably going to achieve your goal of getting in the house.

You can take that same thought process into your health and fitness goals.

And if you're raising an eyebrow at the idea of putting as much thought into your health and fitness goals as you would to a big decision like buying a house, I'd encourage you to consider if this misalignment is the reason you haven't been able to do it yet.

To me, your body is your number one asset.

"A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one," said Confucius.

Along with that, if your body is working well, it allows you to do and experience pretty much everything else at a higher level.

So if you're bought into that, creating more aligned goals could look like the following:

1. You take time to assess what you really want to achieve, not based on what you think you should want, but what deeply resonates with you as a goal.

By this I mean avoiding goals that you have to logically justify to yourself as good, and instead focussing on goals that you want to achieve in and of themselves, without any need for rationalisation.

"I'm going to try get lean enough to see my abs" might become, "I want to feel fully energised on the football pitch", or indeed vice versa.

This ensures your goal is aligned with your genuine desires, and is therefore intrinsically motivating, leading to a decreased need for willpower.

2. You assess your current life circumstances and lay out realistic expectations around how much time and commitment you're willing to give to this goal.

This requires not thinking "in an ideal world I'd be able to do this", but rather, "given my current life circumstances, this is what I know for sure, barring something extreme happening, I can 100% commit to".

"I'm going to try get to the gym 6 days per week" might become, "I realistically can commit to getting to the gym 3 mornings per week before work."

This allows you to make a plan that you can actually stick to.

3. You then look at both the pros and cons of pursuing and achieving the goal.

The pros being mostly obvious and based on your goal, but they are very much still worth you highlighting - E.g. Better energy levels, more muscle, looking leaner, better sporting performance, feeling healthier.

The cons might be less obvious - things like having to make time in the week to cook more, or having to have a conversation with your partner about changing the grocery shopping list, or having to get up earlier in the morning and cutting out the late nights watching tv.

This allows you to have an honest conversation with yourself and ask "Is this goal truly aligned with my current life circumstances, my genuine desires, and what I'm willing to give up?"

And if the answer is “No”, I'd recommend you go through the process until you find goals that are better aligned - where your current life circumstances do support them, where they match your genuine desires, and where you're truly willing to accept the trade-offs.

But if the answer is "Yes", then you're in a much better position to go after those goals than if you'd simply chosen to go the route of throwing a vague goal out into the world and hoping willpower was enough to get you there.

So before you tell yourself you need more willpower, first consider whether or not your goals are actually aligned with your reality.

Because willpower alone won't be enough if your goals conflict with your life circumstances, don't match your genuine desires, or require sacrifices you're not truly willing to make.