Willpower: When Motivation Isn’t Enough

📸Karen Thrall, storm in Puerta Vallarta, MX

There are moments in our professional lives when motivation simply isn’t enough.

I’m not referring to Monday mornings when we’re uninspired and struggling to kickstart the week.

I’m talking about the seasons when something has genuinely gone wrong. It’s serious. It’s hard. It weighs heavy on you and can keep you up at night.

Let’s say you worked for years toward a position you were certain was the next step in your career, but you didn’t get it. Not just once, a few times, and that door of opportunity just wasn’t opening. Is motivation really what you need in a moment like that? No.

Let’s say your company restructures, and suddenly the department you’ve spent fifteen years building is going through layoffs, and you’re handed your severance package. At first, you’re optimistic. You update your CV, reach out to your network, and start applying. Then three months pass. Then six. You know you’re more than qualified, but no one is giving you a second interview. The confidence you had at the beginning starts to disappear. Does that mean you lack motivation? Nope!

Or maybe you own your business. Revenue is down. You’ve already cut expenses. You have a small team to begin with, and you’re a close-knit team at that, and you’re faced with the reality that you have to let some of them go. It’s just too unbearable. You know their family members by name, you give them gifts on their birthdays, and they’ve had you in their home. Now you have to take away their livelihood? Trust me, motivation is not what you need in a time like this.

We talk about motivation as though it’s the resource we’re supposed to summon whenever life gets difficult. Stay positive. Keep your eye on the goal. Don’t give up. There are times when those words can be encouraging. And there are times when you want to tell the person to bleep off.

You’re tired.

You’re disappointed.

You’re angry.

You’re scared.

When something has genuinely knocked the wind out of your sail, what happens then? What do you do when you’re not sure you can handle what’s ahead?

That’s where the conversation about willpower begins.

When things get confusing, scary, or simply don’t go as expected, it’s willpower you need. That internal determination that says, This is really hard. I don’t know exactly how this is going to turn out. But I’m going to keep going.

Think of those mom & pop brick & mortar businesses. Serving their local beloved community. Their business takes an unforeseen turn. A two-year construction upgrade blocks the street. Foot traffic goes down. Suddenly, their monthly sales drop to an all time low, and nothing suggests a recovery is coming anytime soon.

What about when it isn’t even work related? Someone we care about becomes ill, a relationship is struggling, or something happening at home follows us into work every morning.

Motivation and willpower aren’t the same. Motivation gets us going. Willpower keeps us going. Motivation can exist without hardship but willpower is necessary in the midst of hardship.

Think about a marathon runner. The runner is motivated to finish the race. But motivation feels very different in the first ten minutes than it does in the final mile when every muscle hurts and the body is begging to stop. At some point, “I want to finish this race” becomes “I’m going to keep going even though this hurts.”

Three Things That Diminish Willpower

1. Dwelling On The Past

The past can be a great teacher. It can give us perspective, a learning that shapes us into becoming a better version of ourselves. But there’s a difference between learning from the past and continuing to live there.

When the present is difficult, it’s easy to start looking backward.

It used to be so much better.

I didn’t sign up for this.

If only I trusted myself more, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.

How did I get here?

And before long, we’re not simply remembering the past, we’re comparing it to everything that’s wrong with the present.

That’s when reflection can turn into rumination. I could write pages on ruminating from personal experience. Let’s just say I own a mug that reads, “Let me overthink about it.”

When we ruminate, we replay what happened. We question our decisions, think about what we should’ve done differently, and imagine where we’d be if things had gone another way.

And the more we brood over it, the harder it can become to do anything at all.

We lose some of the desire to try because we’re so consumed by how far the present feels from what we once had or what we thought our lives would look like by now.

That’s debilitating to willpower because willpower needs somewhere to go. It needs the courage to take the next step, even when that next step is small and the future is uncertain.

Willpower isn’t about recreating who we were or getting back to what was. It’s about acknowledging where we are, even when we don’t like where we are. And deciding what we’re going to do from here.

2. Losing Yourself in the Tough Times

Hardship doesn’t only change our circumstances, sometimes it changes how we show up.

We become more guarded. More cautious. More concerned about how we’re perceived.

You may become so focused on surviving a difficult situation that you slowly change how you relate to the world around you.

It’s like you lose a bit of who you are along the way, bit by bit. It’s subtle.

You know you’re doing the best you can, but you know something feels lost inside you.

I’ve experienced this. Over the years, I placed a lot of value on my professional persona. Be polished. Say the right thing. Look credible. Present yourself well. Blah blah blah.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But somewhere along the way, I became more and more careful about letting people see more of me, of who I am without a job title.

Earlier this year, I wrote down three words. . . don’t lose yourself. They were quite significant for me. Along with them, I also imagined a birdcage with the door wide open. There was nothing keeping the bird inside. The cage was familiar. Comfortable. But at what cost?

That image stayed with me because professionals can become incredibly good at functioning inside cages we’ve built for ourselves.

Yes, hardship may require us to change.

Y

ou know how to ask yourself, “What does this situation require of me?” There’s another equally important question, “Who do I want to be while I’m going through it?” Both are meant to exist at the same time.

Willpower isn’t always about becoming more resilient. Sometimes willpower means refusing to let yourself get smaller. Circumstances can change dramatically without requiring you to lose yourself.

3. Comparing Your Hardship to Someone Else’s Non-Hardship (or the perception of their non-hardship life)

Comparison is another drain on willpower.

Someone else’s business is thriving while yours is bleeding money. Someone finds another job within three weeks while you’ve been searching for six months. Awesome, just what you need. Now you’re not only dealing with something difficult, you’re judging yourself for how you’re dealing with it.

We rarely know the complete story behind another person’s success, confidence, finances, career, or emotional state. Yet we can take a small piece of what we see and use it as evidence that we’re at a deficit.

Comparison redirects energy away from finding your willpower.

Your willpower belongs to you. To your path. To your circumstances. To your next step.

Forget everyone else! It doesn’t matter what they say, what they think, how they live, or what is going on in their lives. What matters most is what you think, what you need, and how you can muster up enough willpower to get past this bad situation. This turmoil. This painful season.

It’s willpower that overcomes the difficulty you’re in, not comparisons.

Over the years, I’ve had plenty of moments when I had to find my willpower. I had to figure out how to keep going, break through what was in front of me, and somehow come out the other side more resilient, wiser, and better.

But when I was in the middle of those hardships, I wasn’t thinking about how great the story might sound years later. All I knew was that, in that moment, it felt unbearable, frustrating, and depleting.

What Keeps Willpower Going

There’s a specific resource that I underestimated. It feels a bit cliche, and I didn’t fully see just how powerful it was until I recently saw it in action.

During a trip to Rishikesh, India, I met a three-month-old monkey named Tulu. She had been abandoned, was extremely frail, and had lost three limbs. She was rescued a month earlier from when I met her.

In that short one-month span, she learned how to move with her limitations. She would no longer jump from tree to tree or swing from a vine, but she still had to figure out how to move with what she had.

It was different now. She had no choice but to adapt.

I saw tremendous willpower in that tiny body. She stole my heart!

But what really got me was watching her climb into the arms of her adopted dad, nestle against his chest, and fall asleep. She did this several times while we visited with her.

Tulu had survived a terrifying and dangerous chapter, one where she had been left to die. She had to learn how to live in a completely different way. And one of the resources she knew she absolutely needed was to be loved.

For emphasis, let me put it this way…

She.

(Her individuality.)

Let herself.

(She knew what she needed in the moment and chose it.)

Be loved.

(A source of support that strengthened her during the hardest time of her life.)

That stayed with me.

Allowing herself to be loved didn’t diminish Tulu’s willpower. It strengthened it.

📸Karen Thrall, Tulu in Rishikesh, India

We’re taught a great deal about how to give support. Be there for people. Encourage them. Listen. Check in. Offer help.

But there’s another side we don’t talk about nearly as much, and that is allowing ourselves to receive it.

Yes, using that kind of language in the workplace would be weird. People would side-eye you if you walked up to their desk and said, “Hey, I just want to be loved, so I’m pulling up a chair because it strengthens me. Hope you don’t mind.” Quickest way to make things uncomfortable at work? Yah, probably.

But being loved does translate to our professional lives.

A mentor doesn’t have to solve your career problem. They can support you with wisdom.

A peer doesn’t have to find you a job. They can help introduce you to a few people.

A peer doesn’t need to know what to say when times are tough. They can take a lunch walk with you and listen.

Sometimes another person’s presence simply reminds us that while the decision may be ours, the weight doesn’t have to be carried entirely alone. The strength of your willpower can be fueled by trusted people around you. Even at work.

Who is that person you can invite into your current hardship? Don’t hesitate, do it.

Final Thought

Willpower is not a test of strength. It’s the resource within you that gives you strength.

Willpower isn’t pretending something isn’t hard.

It isn’t endlessly pushing yourself.

It isn’t cloaking yourself in a facade of positivity.

It isn’t convincing everyone else you’re fine.

Willpower is what you reach for when life unexpectedly asks more of you.

It’s the strong determination to do something difficult.

It’s making the decision you’ve been avoiding.

It’s accepting that the old reality isn’t coming back and asking what you can do with what is.

It’s refusing to disappear inside a version of yourself that hides who you really are.

And it’s having the bold courage to let someone be there with you.

The POWER of your WILL gets you through the hardship.

The WILL to not go through it alone adds to your POWER.

-Karen Thrall