How to create a memo to yourself - “What is needed to become a strong personality and maintain your individuality?”: tips

On websites dedicated to psychology you can find many recommendations on our topic. Here are some of them.

1. Keep your word, always fulfill your promise. There is nothing more unpleasant than empty talk. So weigh your options carefully before you promise anything. If you understand that you are unable to fulfill your promise, warn the person about this and minimize the damage caused to him.

2. Learn to say no. Don't be afraid to offend the person you said no to. Understand that you cannot be good to everyone at the expense of yourself. And don’t hesitate to think about your own good first. There's no shame in this.

3. Don't complain. If something doesn’t go the way you planned, don’t feel sorry for yourself and don’t cry, but think about how to get out of the current situation, how to help yourself.

4. Develop a positive mindset. This means not dwelling on failures, but perceiving them as useful lessons life teaches you, thanks to which you become stronger.

What is will

Will is one of the most important components of personality, which determines a person’s effectiveness in all areas of life. This is the ability to mobilize your internal resources to achieve your goals and move towards them, maintaining a consistently high level of motivation throughout the entire journey.

No matter how outstanding talents and abilities an individual possesses by nature, without strong will and self-discipline he risks spending his entire life “hammering nails with a microscope.”

Take a look around. The world as we know it is the result of an act of will and the daring of strong-willed people. Without will there would be no great works of art, scientific discoveries, or space flights. Everything we admire is created by this power within us.

History knows many examples of people with phenomenal willpower. The most striking of them, perhaps, is Alexander the Great. Born into a royal family, he had everything one could dream of. He could have rolled around like cheese all his life, without knowing worries and troubles, but he chose a different path. His indomitable will and ambition made him the greatest commander in human history who never lost a single battle.

Why is it important to develop willpower?

Those who consider willpower to be an innate characteristic like temperament or mentality are wrong. Will is the muscular frame of our personality; it becomes stronger from constant training and weakens from idleness. It can be developed and strengthened at any age.

Why is this necessary? To answer this question, look back at your life and imagine that you had the will and perseverance to achieve all your goals. Who would you be now? Do you like this person? Does he look like the real you?

Now think about your current goals. They have a chance to become reality. And after a while, looking back again, you will be able to proudly state that you have become the person you wanted to be today. Or they will remain pipe dreams, buried under a thick layer of laziness and lack of will. The choice is yours. As they say, the strong look for a way, and the weak look for a reason.

I suggest you honestly answer the following questions to determine how developed your will muscle is.

1. Do you have bad habits?
2. Do you often put off important tasks until the last minute?
3. Do you spend a lot of time hanging out on social networks and watching TV series?
4. Do you find it difficult to concentrate on a specific task and work without distractions?
5. Do you tend to give up on things you start without finishing them?
6. Have you ever tried unsuccessfully to go on a diet to lose weight?

If you answered “yes” to most of the questions, I have two news for you: good and bad. The bad thing is that you clearly lack willpower. The good thing is that by reading this article to the end, you will take the first step in the right direction. I have prepared for you 9 effective psychological techniques and ways to develop willpower.

Why is all this needed?

The development of a person’s will necessarily forces him to pay attention to certain energy-consuming conditions. Having discovered the emergence of self-pity due to deprivation or fatigue, it is easy to notice how much time and effort is spent on this feeling

By replacing it with satisfaction from fulfilling a decision, a person increases self-esteem.

Trying to avoid unpleasant actions, it is impossible to solve the problem. In some cases, it can get worse (for example, a bad tooth). But cultivating the will, as a victory over one’s own fears, allows one to carry out these actions without much strain, solve the existing problem and enjoy the result.

Often a feeling of pride and personal exclusivity interferes with open communication. Developed fortitude, which makes it possible to adequately evaluate others, allows you to adequately relate to both their strength and their weaknesses. As a result, a strong personality gains the ability to constantly remain in a calm and confident state, without blaming others for their own failures and miscalculations. But these are precisely the traits that are characteristic of a successful individual who knows how to achieve success.

How to develop willpower: 9 practical tips

Create new mindsets

Before you start working on willpower, you need to tune your consciousness. Read and remember the following rules, they will help significantly increase your productivity.

• Do not perceive the manifestation of willpower as a refusal of pleasure in favor of duty.

Behind the concept of “debt” there is most often another pleasure, delayed in time, but more valuable and emotionally rich, associated with the satisfaction of a higher need.

Look at the famous pyramid of A. Maslow. The needs for it are distributed across levels, ranging from the lowest (physiological) to the highest (spiritual). They may come into conflict with each other. The lower ones are designed to provide comfort and security, while the higher ones are associated with personal development and leaving the comfort zone. Willpower helps you not to get stuck at the bottom of the pyramid, but to move up.

• The result will appear much sooner than you notice it.

In any business, the most difficult thing is the beginning. Our brain is inert and treats everything new with caution. The first steps will be difficult for you and seem insignificant. At this moment, remember that at the psychophysiological level changes have already begun to occur, although they are not yet noticeable to you. We'll look at them in more detail when we talk about healthy habits.

• Every volitional act of yours needs positive reinforcement, especially at the initial stage.

Do not skimp on praise and encouragement for your loved one. If today you are a little better than yesterday, then this is already a reason for pride.

Start planning

Proper planning is the foundation on the path to a strong will. While chaos reigns in your head and affairs, it is useless to try to achieve any serious goals. You will stall, distracted by all sorts of little things.

Before you start planning, you need to decide on your priorities. Use the method of Stephen Covey, author of the bestseller “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” He advises dividing all your affairs into 4 groups according to the criteria of importance and urgency.

1. Important and urgent. These are matters that require attention first: critical situations, force majeure, projects with an approaching deadline.
2. Important and non-urgent. These include preventive measures, searching for opportunities and connections, and planning.
3. Unimportant and urgent matters. This may include personal calls, correspondence, and meetings.
4. Unimportant and not urgent. This is everything related to idle pastime: watching TV series, surfing the Internet, empty conversations.

Once you have made your to-do list, you need to allocate specific time to complete them. Stephen Covey recommends planning a week in advance. Start a weekly journal and distribute your tasks by day of the week: first, write down important and urgent tasks, then important and non-urgent ones, and then down the list.

At first, it will be unusual for you to stick to the plan; you may forget about things, get distracted, confused, feel stiff and uncomfortable. Give yourself two weeks. You need to endure this time and under no circumstances leave the distance. Within half a month, you will fully experience the benefits of planning and you will no longer want to return to the chaos of a disorderly life.

Keep a daily routine

This point is closely related to the previous one. It happens that you seem to have planned everything out, allocated a specific hour to complete an important task, but, as luck would have it, at this time you have no strength at all - your eyes close, your hands don’t obey, and your body is trying to take a horizontal position.

Our body has its own biorhythms that need to be taken into account. Before you create a daily routine, observe yourself. Notice and write down when you are most productive and when you feel tired and tired.

For some people, peak activity occurs in the morning, others are especially productive in the afternoon, and pronounced night owls feel a surge of energy in the evening.

Based on your observations, create a schedule and follow it for several days in a row. Adjust and refine it until it becomes as comfortable as possible for you. Once you get used to living according to a schedule, your body will help you. For example, if you have lunch every day at the same time, your stomach will begin to produce gastric juice by this hour, and food will be better absorbed.

When creating your daily routine, take into account the general recommendations of doctors and scientists:

• sleep 7–9 hours a day;
• Avoid heavy physical activity and large meals before bedtime;
• take breaks from work every 1.5 hours;
• alternate mental activity with motor activity;
• spend more time outdoors.

Form healthy habits

The best way to train willpower is to consciously form new healthy habits. Habit is a tendency to act in a certain way in the same situations. An action repeated many times becomes fixed in the brain, and each time it becomes easier to reproduce it. To understand how this happens, let's look at the structure of the brain.

This organ consists of billions of special cells - neurons. These cells constantly exchange electrical impulses with each other, forming neural circuits. The more often we repeat an action, the stronger the neural circuit becomes. The impulse passes through it easily and quickly, like along a high-speed highway.

Usually such chains form spontaneously. But this does not mean that a person cannot consciously lay such a highway in his brain - form a new useful habit or consolidate an effective algorithm of actions.

Imagine that you need to drive a car off-road. For the first time, you may wander, skid, or get stuck on bumps. The road will take a lot of time and take a lot of energy. But you will have some guidelines and experience that will be useful in the future. Each new trip along this path will become easier and more pleasant, and a comfortable track will appear on the ground overgrown with weeds.

Gradually, this track will turn into a dirt road, and after some time it will become so smooth and wide that you can quickly rush along it with your eyes closed. Similar processes occur in our brain.

The brain's ability to build new neural circuits and destroy old ones is called neuroplasticity. This phenomenon is clearly shown in the video.

Now, armed with knowledge of psychophysiology, start forming new habits. I have prepared a few ideas for you, feel free to use them.

Master Meditation

A laconic and at the same time very capacious definition of will was formulated by the Soviet psychologist Alexey Nikolaevich Leontyev: “Will is the ability to control attention.” It is with mastery of attention and power over your thoughts that any conscious proactive activity begins.

If your mind is in chaos, you are driven by spontaneous impulses, and anxiety is your constant companion, meditation will be the best medicine for you. By meditating, you learn to control your thought flow, direct it in the right direction and establish a mind-body connection. We suggest you start with a simple technique proposed by Katsuzo Nishi, author of the book “Cleansing the Soul: Lessons in Meditation.”

Find a comfortable position, preferably sitting. Relax. Focus your gaze on one point in front of you at eye level. Stare at it without blinking until your eyelids become heavy and droop.

Now imagine an object that is familiar to you, such as your favorite vase or a beautiful flower. The image should be lively and bright. Look at it from all sides, study it to the smallest detail.

If extraneous thoughts enter your head, drive them away and return to contemplation.

Start practicing 15 minutes a day. Each time it will become easier for you to maintain your attention, there will be fewer obsessive thoughts, and your mind will gain clarity and sharpness.

Spend 10 minutes a day on self-hypnosis

Self-hypnosis or auto-training is a simple but surprisingly effective thing, the main goal of which is to reach our subconscious and make it work for us. This is what happens when we repeat the same thought hundreds and thousands of times.

You can do autogenic training anywhere: on the way to work, in line at the store, in the dentist’s office, etc. You can combine autogenic training with meditation.

Using the tips and examples below, create a few sentences that are emotionally charged to achieve your desired goals, and repeat them for 10 to 15 minutes a day.

• Phrases must be affirmative; our subconscious mind ignores the “not” particle.