9. The truth about willpower!
Who hasn't experienced their own weak willpower forcing them to take actions that they don't want to? Many books have been written about this; people have philosophized about how human it is to follow “inappropriate impulses”. I've noticed that even people who know about the law of attraction talk about this as if it were an inherent part of our lives. To do something that shows our weak willpower makes us likeable and human. A human weakness makes us seem congenial to others because then we can show our own weaknesses as normal and lovable. Sometimes it's really strange what people come up with just so as not have to think about that which not many others realize either. My definition of weak willpower is as follows:
Our weak willpower is the part of our subconscious which doesn't correspond to our actual wishes.
Let's say that an overweight woman would like to eat a salad for dinner. Her brain tells her that it's the right thing to do. But suddenly she has an enormous craving for pizza or a burger. She then fights with herself and decides on the fast food! She thinks up good reasons for this and promises herself that tomorrow she'll only eat salad the whole day. As she orders her unhealthy food she is sure that she will succeed in carrying out her resolution the next day. She believes it! Her subconscious makes her feel certain for a short while! When she finishes her meal she suddenly knows that her plan for tomorrow will fail. She then feels guilty and tells herself, if only I had eaten the salad instead!
What happened? Her subconscious was stronger than her rational mind. The imprint is always stronger! The subconscious simply supports our brain and sabotages our decisions as a result! First her inner self supplied the appetite and the good arguments for a believable change in plans (a salad day tomorrow). When the unhealthy food was consumed, the subconscious had carried out its plan and took everything back again (changes of plan, beliefs)! If the subconscious was a person, you could accuse it of swindling her, lying convincingly in order to get its own way.
This is commonly chalked up to a weak will. In this way a “someone” is created who can be blamed for unwanted changes to any plans. Giving up your responsibility for occurrences in this way will of course not lead you to your goal! That's why you don't have to change your thoughts, but your conditioning, that way destructive patterns will simply dissolve.
I think that this is a good example of how people are not able to change their thoughts. First of all the content of your subconscious must be changed. I think that you can identify situations in your life in which your brain fought against your subconscious and lost. Maybe you also let your weak willpower get the upper hand.
Could you have acted differently? No, otherwise you would have done so!
Weak willpower means doing something that your mind didn't want you to do, but the inner impulse was stronger than you. It is the discrepancy between your will and your impulses. These impulses are your imprints! People are not particularly strong or weak-willed. They are simply either a person who thinks about where they want to go or who thinks about what's going on now or, in the worst case, where they don't want to go.
The word strong-willed is nonsensical, no one is ever strong-willed or weak-willed!
If 51% of the content of your subconscious focuses on desirable things, you will win, but it will be a struggle. If it is only 49%, it will be a struggle, but you will lose. So, the more you feed your subconscious with desirable content, the less you'll have to struggle. The inner voice is the opposite of weak willpower. This highly-praised inner voice, which you are always supposed to listen to, is the desirable content of your inner self that guides you.
So, if you are overweight and the inner impulse leads you to a bakery, that is your weak willpower, but if it leads you to a vegetable stand, that is the highly-praised inner voice which you are supposed to listen to.
Many claim that the inner voice is your most important guide! Despite being such a widely-held belief, I don't agree with this notion!
If you think about this intensely and observe other people, you will realize that the inner voice or the call of your heart are just impulses that arise from your subconscious. So, one person who is negative about money and has a scarcity mindset will be led by their inner voice in such a way that they will remain poor. When Steve Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, he also listened to his heart and didn't allow himself to be treated by the world's best doctors. Instead for 9 months he tried alternative methods of healing, acupuncture, fruit juices, and nutritional supplements from the internet. The founder of Apple took on this fight against the illness the way he had done for decades as a very successful businessman and inventor: he swam against the tide. Why did he do that? Because his inner voice told him to! He had been very successful being different, and thankfully we have his great innovations as a result of this mindset! It affected his subconscious and he believed that it was definitely better not to follow old traditions.
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford
In this case pure intellectual thinking or listening to his doctors and his wife would have been more appropriate.
What is intuition? Intuition is your own inner voice and this is based on the content of your subconscious! If these are unconditionally aligned with health, happiness and wealth, then follow your inner voice. But if they are not, then this voice can lead you to poverty, unhappiness, even to your death!
The quality of your inner voice always corresponds with the quality of your subconscious!
Conclusion: If Steve Jobs had not listened to his inner voice, but his doctors instead, he would likely still be alive today.
“He probably felt that he should have had an operation much sooner” and “He definitely wanted to speak about how much he regretted his decision” his biographer, Walter Isaacson, later said.
But this terrific inventor, businessman, visionary and millionaire, Steve Jobs, could not act differently because his subconscious was formed this way. In this way I want to show you that your inner voice is not necessarily valuable even if the whole world claims it is. Your inner voice is simply an echo of the imprints of your subconscious. If you improve yourself internally, then your internal voice will be ever more valuable and it will truly make sense to listen to it.
It is often said that you should always do what feels right.
Rhonda Byrne and Esther Hicks also wrote in their world bestsellers that if you listen to your feelings, then you will always be right. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to contradict these two greats of the self-help world, but I will simply do so.
The reason is that it's not always true that whatever feels good is also truly good for me. Let's now try to completely omit opinion, religion or ideology when distinguishing between “good” and “not good”. In “The Secret” Jack Canfield said that feelings are merely a feedback mechanism of whether my thoughts are helpful or not helpful. This is indeed true, but now you have to decide: a feedback mechanism based on what? On my heartfelt wishes or on the wishes created by my upbringing, my culture and religion?
Whatever I feed my subconscious with, will basically influence what feels good or bad to me!
The best way to recognize the validity of this statement is through an example.
Person A and person B, both young men, have heartfelt wishes to become rich. They have both seen examples of it on television: big villas, several sports cars, beautiful women, parties, a distinctive circle of friends and everything of the finest quality.
Only one of the two was raised in a middle-class family, not really rich, but materially quite well off who saw wealth as something worthy of pursuit. The other young man grew up in a poor communist family.
The young A was told that if he worked hard he could have anything he wanted in life. For him it will feel good when he dreams of wealth.
Young B was told from the cradle onwards that rich people are bad, that they take others money, that they'll walk over dead bodies and won't stop at anything to get what they want and should be stopped at all cost and that money is evil and corrupts character. If B now notices a heartfelt wish to become rich, this will not feel good to him at all. On the contrary, he will feel bad and guilty! But that doesn't at all mean that it would be better for him and that he would lead a happier life if he remained poor for the rest of his life
The same could be true, for example, of a healthy red-blooded young man who has “enjoyed” a highly religious upbringing. He feels strongly attracted to the opposite sex and wishes he could have many different sexual partners with whom he could live out his fantasies, but his upbringing and imprint are diametrically opposed to this. On the other hand a drug addict feels good when he shoots up and an obese person looks forward to the feasting he can do at Christmas. They all have one thing in common: that the content of their subconscious influences them to feel bad when they think of their deepest wishes or feel good when they think of something that deep down they would like to give up.
You don't feel good or bad when you have certain thoughts or take certain actions because they are good or bad or because they are good or bad for you; it's only because your inner self is imprinted in this way and you have these beliefs.
If you think or act in accordance with the content of your inner self, then you feel good, if you think or act in opposition to the content of your subconscious, then you feel bad. A fat person has “being fat” anchored in their subconscious, so they feel good when they think and act (eating a lot) out “being fat”. If they were to think about fasting next week, they would feel bad (that's why they don't do it), and all this even though they would like to be slim. If you continuously change the content of your subconscious, your life can – in every way – only become better. That is the law!