Neuroscience of Coaching – Episode 15
Is Willpower Like a Muscle? (Dov Gordon)
Dov Gordon: What are the small number of things that I am going to do, whether I feel like it or not? Because that’s the critical 10% that will give me 90% of what I want. If I show up every day and do these small number of things, and I do it really, really well, that will, over time, enable me to do less and less of the things that I don’t want to do at all.
Dr. Irena O’Brien: Hi, I’m Dr. Irena O’Brien, and you’re listening to Neuroscience of Coaching. I’m a cognitive neuroscientist with almost 30 years of study and practice in psychology and neuroscience. And as the founder of the Neuroscience School, I teach coaches and other wellness professionals practical, evidence-based strategies to use in their own practices. In each episode, I invite a seasoned coach to discuss a topic that clients struggle with. And together, we provide you with science-based tools to help your clients reach their goals by working with their brains to create results that last.
So most of us have heard the phrase, where there’s a will, there’s a way. It reminds us that tenacity is key in accomplishing what we want in the face of difficulty. So today, we’re going to dive into the topic of willpower and where it originates in the brain. Determination, persistence, grit. These are all characteristics that we hear about in the stories of accomplished people from all walks of life, and they all speak to the phenomenon of willpower. It’s no exaggeration to say that success in any endeavor is strongly correlated to the will required to achieve it. By the way, it’s interesting and useful to know that the strength of our willpower applies both to the will to do something and the will to not do something. Both come from the same part of the brain.
So your level of willpower to get on the treadmill also helps you to not eat that chocolate doughnut you want. So how do we harness willpower? Are we given a certain amount of it that we’re stuck with, for better or worse, or can we actually increase our willpower? We’ll explore these questions today, but the short answer, for now, is good news. The part of the brain that governs and generates willpower is a lot like a muscle. You can build it. In fact, this part of the brain, the anterior mid cingulate cortex, which we’ll call the AMCC for short, is one of only two parts of the brain that we can actually build.
So it really is a lot like a muscle in that more mass equals more power. We have willpower very simply, because the brain, specifically the AMCC, assesses predicted output against predicted benefit. We’re constantly asking ourselves either consciously or unconsciously, is this worth the effort? The AMCC is governing efficiency to accomplish the many things, big and small that we need to accomplish every day. It has the ability to do this because it’s situated in a unique area of the brain at the intersection of multiple intrinsic brain networks. The AMCC is a major hub that is able to combine information about our internal and external senses, decision making abilities and physical movements.
And what’s especially amazing is that this goes beyond theory, we can actually see in imaging how the AMCC functions with regard to willpower. As a result, we’ve learned so much about how we can use this incredible tool for our benefit. And you can strengthen your AMCC and build your willpower by pushing yourself a bit further than you think you can do. It doesn’t have to be all the time, just several times a week. So today we’ll dig into why people naturally have more or less willpower, how coaches can help clients in building the so-called brain muscle, and of course the neuroscience behind it all. And I’m so grateful to be able to talk about all of this with Dov Gordon.
Dov is the founder and CEO of Profitable Relationships. Starting out in his twenties, he began coaching small business leaders. After nearly a decade of arduous ups and downs mixed with enough wins to keep him going, Dov knew he wanted to go bigger, so he started a peer group for CEOs of companies doing $150 million or more in annual sales, pushing his work to a new level. Since then, Dov has created even more success through his current business, Profitable Relationships, uniquely helping consultants find and retain a steady stream of ideal clients. So thank you very much do for joining me today. I’m honored to have you here.
Dov: Thanks for inviting me, Irena.
Dr. Irena: So we’re going to get into willpower, but first please tell us a bit more about your work and how you grew to be where you are today.
Dov: I’ve been focusing on helping consultants and coaches to get clients consistently for probably the last 15 plus years and that flowed from my own frustration with getting clients. I started my business in year 2002, 2003 and I started with the knowledge that I had something to offer, but I was not a natural salesperson, still not a natural salesperson. And it was a struggle to get clients because I’ve come to understand that we are the majority, we’re good at what we do, we genuinely care about our clients, but we’re not that natural marketer salesperson. We’re not that charismatic guru type and we look around and think, this is so frustrating.
I mean, that person on the stage, really, I could do a lot better. Why am I in the audience and they’re on the stage? This person who just landed this big client who talked to me two weeks ago and said they didn’t have money, and now I hear that they’re working with this other person and they’re paying three times what I wanted to charge. Right? What am I doing wrong? Or can I even change anything to start to think to ourselves? Right? So that was where I was.
And I spent many years studying marketing and sales, studying to try to understand how do I connect to somebody in a way that works for me. Because one thing I did understand pretty well was that trying to be, you know, that charismatic guru type, which I’m not, was going to be a recipe for disaster. And even if it would work, so to speak, people say, well, this is what works. I wasn’t interested in doing it. I’m not interested in doing what works if it’s against what I believe is honest and straight and true.
So over the years, I came to develop a framework and understanding of what I realized was that there are really two ways to thrive and succeed as an independent coach, consultant, agency owner, entrepreneur, small business owner, professional service firm, and so on, speaker, expert. And one is the path of the charismatic guru, and the other one is the path of mastery. And I realized that maybe only 10, 15% of people belong on the path of the charismatic guru, and the rest of us belong on the path of mastery.
The problem is, it’s the charismatic gurus that we all see. They’re the most visible. They’re the ones who are out there making the big splashes, and everybody talks about them and everybody wants to be like them. And I realize that I don’t want to be like them. I just want to be like me and do my best. And I realized that there are a lot of people like me. And I realized that what I need to do is take those years of hard-earned lessons and skills. And often I did feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again and push it up again.
But what happened was I also came to realize that by kind of pushing through the difficulty, I was learning skills and I was learning deep insight, and I was developing the ability to articulate what I was noticing and to not just use it for myself, but to share it with others. And that’s what I started to do. So eventually, I shifted from focusing on company with between 10 and $150 million in sales. And I realized that I can help people who are similar to me but a few years behind me. And that’s where I shifted the focus on helping other coaches and consultants and so on, who are good at what they do. They know they’re good at what they do, but they’re struggling to create that consistent flow of ideal clients.
Dr. Irena: I’m like you Dov, right? I’m not this charismatic guru. I’m understated. I love what I do. And those are the kind of people I also attract are people who are not enthralled by the gurus. So what are the first things that came to mind, Dov, as you listened to what I said in the opening about willpower?
Dov: So, first of all, I don’t profess to be an expert on the topic, so I’ve read a little bit about it over the years. But in my own observation and experience is that when we have to really force ourselves to do something, we’re already focused on the wrong thing. We’re already starting at a disadvantage because if I have to muster up the willpower or whatever that means to different people to get myself to do something, then probably I’m focused on the drudgery of what I don’t want rather than the outcome that I do want.
You know, if somebody wants to be strong physically and energetic and very well fit, and therefore they decide they’re going to start exercising, start going to the gym, but in their mind, they’re constantly thinking about, hey, getting all sweaty, and then I have to get all washed up or just, oh, I don’t know. Who has time for this? I don’t. You know, I don’t have time for this. I got to get up earlier, stay up later, or whatever we tell ourselves. We’re focusing on the drudgery of the process as opposed to keeping our minds focused on the desired outcome that we really want, that’s one thing.
And if we can shift our focus to think about what we really want, and we just know that this part is necessary, that I think to some degree helps us. I think that we also have to learn to enjoy the process and to get to where we want to be. There will always be tasks that we do not enjoy. And if we could learn to enjoy them, and how we learn to enjoy them is by looking at them more closely and focusing on the process of mastery or creativity or making a game out of it for ourselves, then also I think that we can end up doing much better than if we have to force ourselves with willpower. So that’s what came to mind. What about for you?
Dr. Irena: In an ideal world, yes. Right? In an ideal world, you want to enjoy everything that you do, but there are things that we need to do that are not so enjoyable. Right? And they might become enjoyable, but at the beginning, you have to push through them, and that’s where you would need willpower, for example. Or there are just some tasks that you just don’t like doing at all. Like, a lot of people don’t like doing bookkeeping and accounting type work at all. I used to be an accountant, so I love it. Right? Whenever I’m tired or bored, I’ll just do some accounting because it keeps me moving forward in my business. So that’s not hard for me to do. But a lot of people find exercise really hard to do. And so, yeah, it does take willpower to start an exercise program.
Dov: So you’re saying its willpower is often what’s needed to kick ourselves off, like, to get started on the process or with some things that we don’t enjoy. I hear you.
Dr. Irena: Yeah, exactly. I’m not saying that you have to push through because, I mean, that’s a terrible life right, where you have to keep forcing yourself to do things that you don’t really want to do, right?
Dov: Right.
Dr. Irena: And exercise is a good one, though, because sometimes we just would rather just not do exercise at all. Right. We just rather just sit around. But it’s not good for your health. It’s not good for aging. As you get older, you’re really hurting yourself if you’re not getting into an exercise program. So, yeah, that requires willpower. And there are other things. Right. Like making those sales calls, like starting to do those. Those are tough to do.
Dov: Yeah. And on that point, also, I think that often, there are certain things that we may not enjoy because we don’t really have a process for it or we don’t have the skills. So with making sales calls, a lot of reason why I think people have a hard time with it, and speaking from my own experience, is because, you know, okay, I’m sitting down to make a sales call, but I don’t know what to do first. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know who to call. Maybe I only have three people on my list, and I’m afraid of losing them, because if I call them, then they’ll tell me no. Then I’ll have no one on my list.
Right. As crazy as that sounds, I was guilty of that. Okay. And if you’re there and you’re laughing because I just called you out, well, okay, laugh and then realize there’s a better way. So we have to understand what we’re actually missing. A lot of times it’s not that you don’t like doing sales calls, is that you don’t have a system for it. Or maybe you have a system, but in order to operate a system, you need skills. And maybe you’re lacking certain skills, maybe you’re lacking several skills, maybe you’re lacking one skill amongst several.
And that is enough to make you think about the idea of making sales calls or whatever it is that you need to do and cringe and recoil from it and procrastinate and instead read the news or whatever. And so if you’re working with a coach, which is always a good idea, then your coach is going to take you through certain stages, and each stage you’re going to have some milestones that you need to reach in certain areas. For business owners, it’s hard because it’s not as easy in many cases to determine what your performance metrics should be.
And one of the things that makes things a lot easier for you is when you just make a decision about, okay, I am going to call, let’s just say three prospects every single day. I am going to follow up with three to five prospects every single day. And just make yourself a checkbox or however you want to do it. Keep it as simple as possible. Don’t try to track everything. I used to fall into that mistake as well. I try to track everything because I want to be super organized. And the result of that is you never get anywhere. You never get anything done because you’re trying to keep everything organized except doing the work.
Dr. Irena: And I would add, you have to avoid making those goals too big. Right. You don’t want to set a goal if you’re just starting them to make sales calls. You don’t want a set of goal; I’m going to do 20 calls a day.
Dov: Exactly. Something else that I was guilty of for sure for a long time.
Dr. Irena: Yeah.
Dov: I still fall into that.
Dr. Irena: Yeah, three calls are doable.
Dov: Right? And it will take longer than you think. I’m still annoyed with how long these things take. I get annoyed, I mean, which doesn’t help me because that’s the reality. I’m just sharing that because if someone else is listening and they get annoyed with how long it takes, just know it takes time. The time it takes is the time it takes. And give yourself that permission to spend an hour a day, 90 minutes a day, whatever it is on this process, whatever the process is, something that you know is going to move you forward. Like the athlete knows. Push ups are boring.
Dr. Irena: Yes, they are boring. But you really develop some good muscles if you do them.
Dov: Absolutely.
Dr. Irena: So as I mentioned in my introduction, we know that willpower is like a brain muscle. So what experience or knowledge do you have in guiding clients in building that muscle?
Dov: The reason why people are not doing the simple things, such as making three outgoing sales calls a day, or whatever it might be, is because they never make a decision about what they’re actually going to do. I don’t know if it should be three or five or six, or I don’t know how many days a week, or I don’t know who I should call or I don’t know what I should say or all these different things, or maybe I should email. Maybe I should do that. We have all these inner conflicts because we haven’t made a decision.
And I think you said something before about it’s not about perfection, it’s not about getting it right. It’s about just doing it. It’s about every day you block off a simple process for yourself. It could be, I’m going to do as many calls or as much outreach as I can within 30 minutes, following very simple checklist. Keep it simple, and I’m going to focus on getting through as many such people as I can at a high-quality level within 30 minutes. And then maybe when that’s going well and you’ve improved your process. Okay, I’m going to push it to 40 minutes, right. And that could be weeks or months to build a simple process that you get good at and that you build a routine.
And if you expect yourself to get it right from day one, you’re going to be very frustrated and you’re not going to get anywhere. Everything I’m sharing I had to learn from experience. And some of this I still work on because I far from perfect at any of this. So the point is that you want to get yourself to a place where you have a simple process and you have to allow yourself to start imperfectly and step by step, build up and develop and improve it over time. All of our work I think of as process and project. If I want to go from A to B, there’s a process.
Now that process may have five steps. Those steps, I might need different tools to go from a to b to work those processes. I might need different skills to work those processes. So if I’m going to have a system for reaching out to potential clients, potential referral sources or whatever it might be, potential joint venture partners, I need to just write down the steps as simple and clear as possible and then get started. And then I need to keep a window open in the background where I make a note of, oh, improve the process or just a notepad on your desk, whatever works best for you, and just allow yourself to improve it.
Allow yourself to spend some time reflecting on what worked and what didn’t. Allow yourself to review your process, just like an athlete is going to review the tape of what they did and watch how they, you know, shot the basketball or whatever it is they’re doing. And this brings in another important point, which is that a lot of times we get stuck because we are impatient. We want to arrive already. We want to be there already. We want to have that success that we’re looking for, but we can’t.
It’s not just the way the world works, right? You can want big muscles all you want, but if you’re not there every day working out, you’re not going to get them. And it takes time. It will take you the weeks, the months, the years. So that desire to arrive already frustrates us. It has us focused not on improving the process, but on being frustrated that I’m not there already. And then we don’t do a good job of the process. We’re not focused on enjoying the process. And people can go sideways for years or even decades. And that’s our biggest tragedy.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly what I teach my students, is to keep it simple and take small steps, and that always works. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to take you longer to get to your goal. And in fact, you could be getting to your goal even faster if you do that. And some parts of that do require willpower. Right. Doing this step by step and building and learning, and it takes some effort to be able to push yourself to do it. So you might have to push yourself for a bit of time, but in the end, you want to arrive at this place where you’re not pushing yourself.
Dov: Yeah. You build muscle a lot faster by working out every day than if you are inconsistent.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. And so that brings me to how you can build willpower. So I’m going to tell you a way that you can build willpower. And so I’ll use exercise as an example. So I’m a power walker and I use a treadmill that tells me which zone my heart rate is in. And I can consistently get into and stay in zone four. And zone five is difficult to get into and stay in. But I try to get into zone five even for 30 seconds during most workouts. And I do that by increasing the incline to 12% or higher.
And so after I move back down from zone five, I get the reliefs that I did it right. It feels great. Just 30 seconds makes all the difference. And I’ll occasionally give myself an additional reward, but only on occasion, since we need to train ourselves to be motivated by the challenge, not just the reward. And this is the important thing to remember, right? Building willpower, it’s like in the previous episode of the show, we talked about being motivated by the process to achieve a goal, not just the goal itself. And you can build willpower by pushing yourself further than you think you can do in any domain, right. I use exercise. I’m getting stronger and more agile and building my willpower generally. So how do you build your willpower, Dov?
Dov: Similarly, especially if it’s something that perhaps in the past we’ve pushed off or procrastinated because it wasn’t pleasant or we didn’t feel like it. And then we get up and do it, we feel good about ourselves. And I think that too much of modern life, we’re talking about being happy or feeling good. But I think there’s a big distinction between happiness and joy. Let’s say fun and happiness. Fun is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily give you anything. But if you really want to be joyful, like to genuinely, to feel that deep joy or that deep happiness, it has to be based on pushing yourself beyond your limits. It has to be based on growth.
It can’t be based on just having what you want as easily as you want it. That’s just not the human condition. And I remember Tony Robbins, I hear him years ago, he says, you know what your biggest problem is? Your biggest problem is that you think you shouldn’t have problems. And I thought, well, he just nailed me. And that’s really what we’re talking about, is that we’re going to have problems and we have to accept them as a challenge. Whatever games you need to play with in your own head to get you to that point where doing the thing that needs to be done, but then you feel good about it, you feel proud of yourself, you feel like I accomplished something today.
Dr. Irena: We’re almost talking about flow here, about how to get into flow, right? And so you get into flow when you’re working on something that is a bit beyond your, that’s a bit challenging, right?
Dov: It requires you to give yourself permission to do one thing now and not start one thing and think, oh, I should really be doing this other thing, and then jumping to the other thing and then jumping, oh, I really should be doing this third thing and then, oh, I never finished the first thing. And productivity is just making a decision about what one thing I’m going to do at what time on the calendar and then just doing it. Doesn’t have to be perfect, doesn’t have to be every minute utilized to the max, but it’s a process. And I get better a little better every time. Slip back, sometimes get back up and try again and do it again.
Dr. Irena: Yeah, we’ve all been there. I’d been there where I jump around from thing to thing. But you don’t accomplish very much that way.
Dov: Absolutely not.
Dr. Irena: So since you’ve worked with so many high achievers in business, what do you see as being different about how they approach willpower? So are they more naturally gifted with it or do they just put more attention toward building and using it?
Dov: I think people are naturally gifted at certain things, but most of us fall within a range where it doesn’t really matter if someone else is maybe more naturally gifted at x or y, because really, we’re just competing against ourselves. And the real question is, could I have done better today than I did? Could I have done better yesterday? Could I do better tomorrow? Okay, what is the small thing that if I do it better tomorrow, I will accomplish more than I did today?
If we’re talking about specifically willpower and personal peak performance, I think that some people recognize that I just have to get stuff done, whether I feel like it or nothing and other people don’t. I remember reading, so James Clear years ago, had a blog post. He called, something about, like, the gym rat telling a story about how he was at a gym somewhere and there was an Olympic coach at the gym. And he asked this question, or a version of it, what’s the difference between those who really succeed and those who don’t?
And he said, well, those who succeed, they show up at the gym and they put in the repetitions every day, whether they feel like it or not. And those who don’t do well, they’re going to wait until they feel like it, and that’s what they’re going to do. And I think at the end of the day, we need to make a decision about what are the small number of things, because we can’t do that for 100 things. What are the small number of things that I am going to do, whether I feel like it or not, because that’s the critical 10% that will give me 90% of what I want. If I show up every day and do these small number of things and I do really, really well, that will, over time, enable me to do less and less of the things that I don’t want to do at all.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. But there are a lot of coaches who say that mindset is everything and that you need to get into the right mindset before you can start working on it. You don’t have to start. You don’t have to want to do it. You just have to do it. You have to do what you have to do to get ahead. And I like what you said about how every day you want to do a little bit better than you did yesterday, a little bit more than you did yesterday, so that you can just feel yourself progressing. And that is motivation in itself when you can see that, right. In small steps. Yeah. So, Dov, it’s been such a pleasure. I mean, you have such wisdom.
Dov: Thank you.
Dr. Irena: And I can see that it’s all from personal learning, right? You lived it all.
Dov: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Irena: It’s not book learning.
Dov: Well, and that’s another point. I have read many books over the years, that’s for sure. But I was always concerned about sharing an idea that was already said before. I didn’t want to just repeat someone else’s thing. And then over time, I came to understand that when you learn an idea from somebody and then you act on it to the point where it becomes a part of you, when you share that with someone else, it’s now you’ve earned the right to talk about it, and you’re able to talk about it in your own way with your own voice.
And that’s what really enables you to connect with people and to actually serve them and to influence for positive and to help people, because they could tell that, okay, you’re not just repeating something. You’re actually talking from having done it, and it lands differently. It feels different to the listener. So I appreciate you saying that. And for anyone who’s, like, also struggling to find your voice, just keep moving. Just do it your way. Learn from others and apply it the best you can today. Compare yourself only to who you were yesterday and to how you did yesterday, and just commit to do a little bit more tomorrow.
Dr. Irena: I really appreciate that great insight, Dov. So what’s the best way for listeners to learn more about you and what you do?
Dov: You can go to profitablerelationships.com/themanual. That’s T-H-E-M-A-N-U-A-L. And you can get a free copy of my manual called How to Systematically and Consistently Attract First Rate Clients. And for five years I sold that for $97. But we give it away free now. So the manual How to Systematically and Consistently Attract First Rate Clients at profitablerelationships.com/themanual.
Dr. Irena: Thank you very much for your time today, Dov, and this has been like a really great conversation.
Dov: Thank you.
Dr. Irena: Thank you all for listening. Keep in mind that willpower is like a muscle that needs to be challenged and exercised. Let the challenge itself be the motivation, but enjoy the reward of having done it afterward. And occasionally, but only occasionally, add an external reward for reinforcement because you want the effort itself to be motivating, not just a reward. So the next time you work on your willpower or help your clients with theirs, try some of what Dov and I explored today. And remember, our ability to push through challenges builds the muscle to take on even bigger challenges.
I’m Dr. Irena O’Brien, and you’ve been listening to Neuroscience of Coaching. You can find out more about me neuroscienceschool.com. Neuroscience of Coaching is a part of the Mirrasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and To Lead is Human. This episode was produced by Andrew Chapman. Danny Iny is our executive producer, and Marvin Del Rosario is our audio editor.
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