“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”  C. S. Lewis

“Fear is the mind-killer … I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.”  Bene Gesserit ‘Litany against Fear’ from Dune by Frank Herbert

[Sadly this potential skydiving adventure was cancelled ... for the second time ... because of poor weather conditions.  I'll book again ... hopefully third time lucky.  I'll then aim to complete this blog post!]

“ Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine. ” - Leo Tolstoy

Crucial importance of willpower/self-control/conscientiousness/grit.  Mindset.  Mental contrasting, implementation intentions, wooping.  ‘Driving the bus’.

Note there are already a number of resources available on this website that are relevant for "Willpower & Making It Happen".  Look, for example, in the "Wellbeing, time management, self-control & self-determination" section in this website's "Good knowledge" area. 

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work"   Thomas Edison

In yesterday's post - "Power objects, power postures, power clothes, power prayers: all ways to facilitate change (1st post)" - I introduced recent research highlighting how we can use physical objects and the way we position our bodies to significantly improve our chances of following through on new ways of thinking, feeling & behaving.  In today's post I extend this discussion of ways to help ourselves change to what we wear and what we say to ourselves.

"I will love you like a wind,
like a man stitching a skin
together like a winter coat.

Like a man sitting in meditation
and repairing a cracking spirit.
Like a man in love with a leaf,
a cloud, a flame, a temple.

Like a man on fire
running in the wilderness
shouting for sheer joy."

From the poem "A blessing (the way)" in the book "A shaman's songbook" by Norman Moser 

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).  

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).  

I wrote yesterday about "Commitment contracts: another good way of helping us reach our goals".  In today's post I'd like to look a bit more at the practicalities of setting up and using commitment contracts.  I'll illustrate this by talking about my own personal exploration of this area, but I'd also like to highlight that I think these ideas and the associated web resources are potentially very useful tools for psychotherapists, counsellors, life coaches and their clients.  

(This post is downloadable as a Word doc or a PDF file).

(This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and as a PDF file).