Willpower to Discipline: Mastering The Art Of Showing Up

Have you ever watched ice melt? If you start with a single ice cube and keep turning up the heat, there comes a point where the ice seems to “suddenly” turn into water. Now think about any successful person you know. Seems like they got success overnight, doesn’t it? But is this really what happens?

Absolutely not. Each 1-degree increase contributed to the temperature reaching 0°C (32°F), causing the ice to melt. Every decision that the successful person made, and every habit they built and performed over a period of time, led to the one day that changed everything. Everything happens slowly, then all at once (The Hemingway Law of Motion). How? Consistency.

Consistency is the key to success. We all know this. But then why does it seem easier for some people than others? Why does it feel like I have to put in more willpower to perform the same habits consistently? Why do I not feel as “motivated” to do what I know is good for me?

It’s because successful people have mastered how to manage their willpower resources. After all, it’s a limited resource! Every time you use willpower, it depletes and needs to be replenished. Every time you see the packet of chips in the pantry and avoid snacking, you’re using willpower. Every time you answer an email, or perform tedious tasks, you’re using willpower. What’s also true about willpower is that it’s like a muscle, and can be trained to get stronger. The more you manage your willpower, the better you get at using it when you need it. People who have stronger willpower tend to do better than their counterparts.

Before we get into how to manage willpower, let’s check our hypothesis and find out if willpower really is a good predictor of success. Lucky for us, "in a 2005 study, researchers from University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164 eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self-discipline" (”The Power Of Habit” by Charles Duhigg). They found out that students with higher willpower and self-discipline outperformed their peers, spent more time studying and showed a higher attendance rate. Self-discipline and willpower have a positive correlation with academic performance, and I would go as far as to say success in other areas of life as well (as corroborated by other similar studies discussed in the book).

As we practice using our willpower, it gradually becomes stronger, shifting from a momentary burst of effort to a steady, sustainable force—what we call discipline. Discipline isn’t just about pushing through tough moments, but about making the right actions feel second nature, so that we don’t constantly deplete our willpower. This shift from willpower to discipline is what allows us to show up day after day. So, how do you turn your willpower into discipline? How do you utilize it in a way that allows for a more efficient allocation of the scarce resource?

That's where the power of environment and mindset come in, helping us turn good intentions into lasting habits without constantly having to rely on sheer willpower.

James Clear in “Atomic Habits” talks about making good habits inevitable and bad ones impossible. The key takeaway from his advice is to prime your environment and context in ways that allow you to use lesser willpower and make the actions more automatic (turn them into habits).

The importance of environment is very clear in one particular experiment discussed in the book where Anne Thorndike and her colleagues attempt to change eating and drinking habits of the hospital staff and visitors without changing their willpower or motivation or even talking to them! They started their six-month study by adding water to all the refrigerators near the cash registers in the cafeteria, and placed water bottles in baskets next to food stations throughout the room. Soda was still available like before. In just three months, the soda sales dropped by 11.4% while the bottled water sales increased by 25.8%. They made similar changes to the food options. These results show just how powerful environment can be in shaping behaviors.

“Every habit is context dependent.” (”Atomic Habits” by James Clear)

So how can we use this to our advantage?

Well, it depends on the habits you are trying to create. Following are some ways you can make changes to your environment that make it easier for you to make the right decision without wasting precious willpower resources:

• Eating Healthier: Don’t buy unhealthy foods like chips or sodas. Speaking from personal experience, it’s a lot easier to eat healthy when you don’t have the option to snack or make the wrong choice. Don’t have sodas? Well, I guess you can drink more water!

• Hitting the gym: Prepare your gym clothes and gym bag earlier. Decide on a time and change into your gym clothes regardless of how motivated you’re feeling. It’s much harder to avoid the gym when you’re already dressed. You think, I'm already dressed, might as well go.

• Sleeping earlier: This one depends on what keeps you from going to bed earlier. Scrolling on your phone past midnight? Well, if you’re like me, the app limits don’t really work. But what if you put your phone on your desk with your alarm and get cozy in your bed? It’s so hard to get out of bed when you’re already comfortable. (It’s all physics, “an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an external force” - use the law of inertia to your advantage!)

• Waking up earlier: I used to turn my alarm off every single time without fail. What helped me get out of that loop was going to the gym right after waking up. This is one form of what James Clear calls “Habit Stacking”. It means doing one habit right after the other so that you’re using the first one as the cue for the second. As soon as I hear the alarm, I stand up without giving my brain a chance to come up with excuses. And then as soon as I am up, I change into my gym clothes. Two birds, one stone!

• Drink more water: Like in the experiment, the more that the water is available, the more likely you are to drink it. Carry a water bottle everywhere if you can. This way you’ll be sipping water more throughout the day, making it easier for you to reach your hydration goals. (I have a glass of water next to me as I write this haha)

• Journaling: I like to journal before bed, but I used to be terrible at being consistent with it. Keep your journal on your bedside table with a pen. As soon as you get into bed, pick it up. You’re more likely to write for a few minutes before putting it back down! The hardest part about any habit is getting started. Once you get started it’s easier to make it to the end.

• Learning: If you want to focus on personal growth, you should ideally be consuming content that enriches your mind. Podcasts, books, articles, and online courses are some great ways of doing this. What you consume shapes your ideas and beliefs. I like to keep my current read on my bedside table to read a few pages before bed. I listen to podcasts on my way to the gym and I have my instagram account (and now this blog) to push me to keep learning and growing so that I can share unique insights. Make it easier for yourself to reach for educational content.

• Bad habits: What if you want to quit a habit? Well, do the reverse. Make it impossible for you to engage in the habit. Biting nails? Paint them. Binge-watching? Use screen limits or accountability buddies. Find ways to eliminate any reason to use your willpower against the habits.

These are just a few examples. But this idea can be applicable to just about anything.

So now that we’ve eliminated the need for using willpower for performing good habits and avoiding bad ones, we want to build this willpower so that we can achieve the most we can.

How to do that? Through consistent efforts toward your goals. Here’s some mindset shifts and tips that helped me go from willpower to discipline:

• Respect promises you make to yourself: Oftentimes we overlook the impact that breaking our own promises has on us. When you tell yourself you are going to do something and then you don’t, you’re telling yourself that your word is not important. That you cannot trust yourself when you say you’re going to do something. Once you start doing what you tell yourself you’re going to do, you build self-trust, and you build a self-perception based on strong pieces of evidence. Nothing can stop you when you start having faith in yourself.

• Allow yourself to be a beginner: We get so caught up in our head about how we might make a fool of ourselves that we never start. And when we do get started, we get disappointed because we aren’t “good enough”. No one is born a master. Even Picasso held the paintbrush for the first time, Michael Jordon started by missing baskets, and Taylor Swift started by singing not-so-well the first time. This mindset shift allowed me to finally realize that it takes time and patience to truly get good at something. You just need to allow yourself to start and not be intimidated by the long road ahead. Keep your eyes on the next step.

• Start small, allow yourself to win: When we set out to do something new, we set really lofty goals for ourselves. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact it pushes us to do better. But these goals need to be broken down into actionable steps that allow you to ease yourself into a routine. For example: if you want to hit the gym, start by going and doing 3-5 exercises with a good form instead of doing 10 incorrectly. Start with the smallest weight and build your way up. There is nothing to be embarrassed about if you can’t immediately lift super heavy weights. Every little action is better than no action. Moreover, consistency doesn’t look the same every day. One day you might be giving 90%, the other just 10%. What matters is that that number is not zero.

• Done is better than perfect: Majority of people don’t finish what they started. If you want to be a writer, you’re probably very motivated to write in the beginning but as the motivation wanes, you slow down and eventually quit. We are our own worst critics. Your piece of work doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be DONE. When I wrote my first blog, I probably read over it a 100 times and I still look back and think I could’ve explained some things differently. But there’s a certain beauty in this process of growth. “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

• Create your identity: Instead of viewing goals as the ultimate destinations, focus on the process. There will always be bigger goals to achieve when you achieve your current goals. If you really want to grow, embrace the journey. I don’t see my goals as something just quantitative, I see them as an identity I want to create for myself and then proving to myself that that is my identity. This idea is also from “Atomic Habits” (can you tell I love this book?). A good example in my case would be the identity of a “gym girl”. To be honest, I never saw myself as a gym girl. In my mind a gym girl was someone who consistently went to the gym and loved the process of working out. But I wanted to challenge my self-perception, so I started going to the gym, trying out different workouts till I found something that I genuinely enjoyed. I’ve been going to the gym consistently 3-5 times a week for months now and it feels second nature. It’s an identity that I wanted to internalize, and the way I did it was by proving to myself through consistent actions that that is who I am.

• Especially do things that scare you the most: Ever saw someone bench press and thought “That could never be me”. Yeah, me too. Well guess what, that fear of doing a bench press was exactly the reason I wanted to prove to myself that I can do it. Because if I can do that which scares me, there’s no limits to what I can achieve. I went to the gym at 7pm, when it was as crowded as it could be, and attempted my first bench press. I asked a fellow gym-goer to help me learn the form and just did it. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. But did it show me that there was nothing to be scared of to begin with? Yes! Since then I’ve tried so many machines that scared me initially. The overthinking really makes most things seem worse than they actually are. So do those things that scare you the most (in a safe way of course) and you’ll see that there’s nothing to be scared of. The happiness you feel after you accomplish one of those tasks is unmatched!

• Show up: I know, it’s hard. But on the days that you don’t feel like showing up is when you make the most progress because that’s when you reinforce your identity. Start seeing it as a form of self-respect. Show yourself what you’re capable of. Challenge the perception you have of yourself, because you are capable of anything if your set your mind to it.

Hopefully, these mindset shifts and tips will help strengthen your mental resilience so that you can become your best self. Because really, it’s all in your mind!

By strengthening your willpower through small, consistent actions, you gradually transform it into the discipline that carries you through even on tough days.

So, what’s one promise you’ve made to yourself that you’re determined to keep?