To develop your full potential, you must unleash your hidden powers, the power of the mind, body, and spirit. With the right attitude and a few simple strategies, you can build the mental muscles you need to overcome challenges. We’ll teach you how to harness your power, the source of your strength and willpower.
Unleash Your Hidden Powers
Some people are born achievers. The Enneagram of Personality shows us how the Enneagram personality type three has a natural drive to get things done. However, all nine personality types can still meet goals and achieve the same performance levels. We must learn to tap into this energy to increase our mental currency. Here’s how to do it.
Inner strength is the term psychologists use to describe mental and emotional thinking and behaviors. These tools help solve problems and maintain our emotional equilibrium. At the same time, willpower is the degree of control that enables us to resist and restrain unhealthy impulses. It also helps us persist and push through mental or physical obstacles.
These two forces are the power that helps us overcome barriers and achieve objectives. Motivation sustains us in physical and mental trials and tests. We can recognize people who push through adversity. You know who they are. We call them survivors and thrivers. At the same time, those who succumb to life’s pressures fall into the role of victims.
The best part is that it is not rocket science. Anyone can do this. Six practical steps and strategies exist to unleash your hidden powers and strengths.
How to Harness Your Power
Many people are unaware of the potential of their inner resources. Worse still, mainstream society and religion discourage their development. They don’t want people to unleash their personal power, autonomy, and creativity.
Why is that so? The answer lies in the fear of change, the love of control, and the dependence on external authority. In other words, those who benefit from the status quo don’t want you to realize that you have the power to change it.
Moreover, some religious doctrines teach that humans are weak, sinful, and dependent on God’s grace for salvation. While this perspective may inspire humility, it also disempowers people. It undermines their dignity and responsibility and makes them vulnerable to manipulation. If you believe you are worthless and divine intervention is the only solution, you become a victim. You may never try to improve your life or contribute to society.
If you want to learn how to harness your power and inner strength, you’ll need to break free from these limiting beliefs. You need to recognize that willpower and inner strength are muscles that you can exercise and strengthen. Just as you don’t expect to run a marathon without training your body, you shouldn’t expect to overcome your fears or achieve your goals without training your mind and spirit.
Unleashing the Source of your Strength and Willpower
If you want to unleash your hidden powers, we recommend the following steps and strategies. Follow the steps in the process, and you’ll be successful in creating a plan to transform your life. It’s the kind of exercise that can be life-changing.
Step 1: Identify the Gifts Locked in Your Mind
The best tool for this is the Enneagram. This tool is based on a questionnaire that identifies your personality and instincts. The questionnaire results will show you your strengths and how to unleash your hidden powers. Take some time to reflect on the results of your Enneagram profile. (1)
Ask yourself, What makes you stand out from the crowd? Are you a great communicator, a creative problem-solver, or a natural leader? Whatever it is, identifying your strengths will help you understand where your power lies.
Step 2: Understand Your Strengths
Everyone has unique strengths and talents that make them special. The source of your strength and willpower is a tangible resource of your body, mind, and spirit. Think of them like money—they are valuable resources that can be used to achieve your goals and dreams. The good news is that willpower and inner strength are muscles that can be developed and strengthened with practice. (2)
“Baumeister says that people who succeed don’t have more willpower than you: they just develop better daily routines and habits, which after a while become automatic and require less thought — less conscious energy.” ― Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You’ll Ever Need
Willpower is like money in a bank account. It has a limited supply. On any day, you have only so much to spend. If you are like most people, you have things to do. Most people have goals and dreams to accomplish. You need to know how to harness your power and strength to reach them. It’s our valuable mental currency. It provides the focus to help us achieve goals. Most people want to increase it. You’ll need to amplify your willpower to help keep you on track.
For example, the goal is to live a healthy lifestyle, and it involves eating the proper diet and exercising daily. To accomplish this, you need willpower. It also requires eating healthy foods. Sometimes, the foods that taste the best aren’t healthy. You must either pack a healthy lunch or go to a restaurant that serves the type of food supporting your diet. You also plan to go to the gym after work to exercise.
These are excellent plans. You know from experience you need to plan lunch. Otherwise, you may eat things you shouldn’t, like pizza. When you fail to eat the correct type of lunch, you are less likely to go to the gym. It will deplete the source of your strength and willpower.
Staying with your plan and resisting temptation is a deposit into the willpower bank. It gives you the motivation to go to the gym. Making a deposit increases the likelihood of making better choices. So you make more deposits, reinforcing a healthy lifestyle. The greater your bank account, the stronger you are in resisting temptations.
Step 3: Connect with Your Inner Self
To unleash your hidden powers, you must first connect with your inner self through meditation, journaling, or simply spending some quiet time alone. By listening to your inner voice, you’ll better understand your values, goals, and desires.
It also puts you in touch with your intuitive mind and your willpower. Your willpower is like a muscle. Muscles will grow more vital if you subject them to the right resistance. Willpower is like a muscle. You will encounter resistance to whatever goal you have set. However, you grow stronger by pushing back, enabling you to take on more significant challenges. The source of your strength and willpower is the resisting force. Adversity and difficulties can motivate us to achieve if we build our willpower reserve.
“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.” ― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business
The above example of resisting the temptation to eat pizza for lunch applies here. Planning and eating a healthy lunch builds your willpower. The resistance is the temptation to eat pizza for lunch.
The resistance may show up after work. After a long day, you are tired. It’s hard to go to the gym when you are tired. It may require you to withdraw from your willpower reserve. It’s a challenge that will come up again each day.
You’ll have opportunities to make deposits and withdrawals throughout the day to build or deplete your willpower. Above all, project positive thoughts. You can meet these challenges if you know how to harness your power and strength when needed.
It’s important to set realistic short-term or incremental goals. It’s like lifting weights. You won’t meet the challenge of lifting a heavy weight if you set the goal too high. The goal or challenge can be a demotivator if it is too large.
Instead of building muscle and getting stronger, lofty goals can become a source of discouragement. Instead of a source of inspiration, they become failures, thus degrading your willpower. That doesn’t mean you should not have big dreams; it just means you must break them down into small goals. Now, onto the following observation.
Step 4: Visualize Your Goals
Visualization is a powerful tool that can help you manifest your dreams into reality. Take some time to envision yourself achieving your goals. How does it feel? What does it look like? By visualizing your success, you’ll begin to believe in your power to achieve it. (3)
The power to achieve things comes from our intention, which drives willpower. Visualizing will unleash your hidden powers. We must learn to set our intent to grow our willpower bank account. You can do this by using SMART goals and monitoring your self-talk.
Harness the Power of Your Mind with SMART Goals!
Setting the right goals will form the structure for building positive behaviors. Writing your goals increases the likelihood of reaching them 3X more than if you don’t. Smart is an acronym for an effective goal.
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- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-oriented or time-sensitive
Step 5: Take Action
Harnessing your power requires action. It’s not enough to identify your strengths and visualize your goals. You must also take tangible steps towards achieving them. You’ve created your goals. Now, set a plan of action in motion. Make a schedule, and hold yourself accountable. The key is to take small, achievable steps toward your daily goal.
Build daily habits. Set small goals and try to stick to them every day. You know how to set SMART goals. For example, you may commit to meditating for 10 minutes, reading a book for 15 minutes, or doing push-ups for 5 minutes. Over time, these habits will become easier and more automatic.
Step 6: Create a Positive Attitude
There is an essential connection between attitude, emotions, and willpower. The ability to turn down pizza for lunch is one example. Sometimes, the relationship is not apparent, but there is a significant link here. The simple act of boosting your attitude will immediately unleash your hidden powers, the gifts of your spirit.
A stressful day at work can affect attitude and emotions. It weakens your willpower and inner strength, and you give in to the temptation to have pizza for lunch, making it harder to go to the gym.
Step 7: Embrace Failure
Failure is a natural part of the journey toward success. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks or obstacles. Instead, embrace them as opportunities to learn and grow. Your ability to bounce back from failure is a testament to your inner power and resilience.
If or when you fail, don’t worry. Stay on track—start again. You have willpower reserves to keep you from being over-critical. Because when you beat yourself up for failing, chances are you’ll continue to fail. That’s why you need to harness your inner strength and willpower.
Learn from failure. If you plan the proper lunch, co-workers ask you to join them at the local pizza joint. You don’t want to say no because you want to build good working relationships. Plan and see if the pizza place has other things on the menu that fit your calorie budget, like salads.
The first and most important thing to remember is that we all fail. We all get off track. So, put things in perspective. Start again. Start over again. Acknowledging our failures has a positive effect, and it is one way to unleash your hidden powers of self-compassion. Now, you can address the issue and change the trajectory of your thinking and attitude.
Using affirmations helps keep your attitude from becoming a pessimistic downward spiral. However, be sure you plant them into good ground. Practice self-care and exercises to increase your willpower.
The key is being “present” enough to realize what’s going on with your attitude and emotions and making the course correction necessary. If you give in and have pizza for lunch, which will happen because we are all human and are apt to fail, you can still recover. Accept your failure and then get back on track. Make it a win by finding the strength to go to the gym. Or, if you have a bad day, eat pizza, and fail to go to the gym, don’t beat yourself up. Start over again the next day.
A pattern of unmet goals likely results from unhealthy patterns of behavior. Short-term stretch goals are an excellent strategy to help get back on track. If you can’t make it all week without pizza, try making it for at least three days.
When you make it three days next week, set a four-day goal. Then, stretch the objective from a week to ten days, and so on. This strategy works for any goal. It reinforces the ability to reach stretch goals. It becomes a pattern for building willpower and inner strength.
If you want to boost your willpower quickly, take a deep breath and change your attitude about the situation. It starts with a beginner’s mindset, always ready to learn and grow. That will help you see the best solution.
“Those who understand others are intelligent
Those who understand themselves are enlightenedThose who overcome others have strength
Those who overcome themselves are powerfulThose who know contentment are wealthy
Those who proceed vigorously have willpowerThose who do not lose their base endure
Those who die but do not perish have longevity” ― Lao Tzu
In Conclusion
By following these practices, unleash your hidden powers. You can tap into the source of your strength and live a more empowered, fulfilling life. Remember, your attitude affects your ability to access your inner powers. You can achieve amazing things if you believe in yourself and your potential. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you from unlocking your true power and shining your light in the world.
Your willpower is money in a bank account. You use this asset to accomplish your goals and dreams. So, you’ll need as much of this mental currency as possible. Start with the proper beginner’s mindset and be adaptable. Set SMART goals and learn from your failures. Do what you need to do to increase your internal strength and resolve.
“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.” — James Gordon
We’ll say it again. Your strength and willpower are like money — they are valuable resources that can be used to achieve your goals and dreams. The good news is that willpower and inner strength are muscles that can be developed and strengthened with practice. But, just like any muscle, they must also be nurtured and protected to thrive.
You now have the knowledge needed to realize your full potential and unleash your hidden powers of success.
References
(1) Discover Your Inner Strength: A Positive Psychological Approach to Bolster Resilience and Address Radicalization: Frontiers in Psychology
(2) Character Strengths, Strengths Use, Future Self-Continuity, and Subjective Well-Being: National Library of Medicine
(3) The Effect of Goal Visualization on Goal Pursuit: Implications for Consumers and Managers: Sage Journals