“ Any unexplained phenomenon passes through three stages before the reality of it is accepted. During the first stage it is considered laughable. During the second stage, it is adamantly opposed. Finally, during the third stage, it is accepted as self-evident. ” - Arthur Schopenhauer

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. 

I recently wrote the blog post "New research describes effective ways of changing long-term personality traits & other persistent behaviour patterns (1st post)" where I introduced two new research articles - Hudson and Fraley's "Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change personality traits?" and Elliott et al's "Psychometrics of the Personal Questionnaire: A client-generated outcome measure".  The Hudson & Fraley paper describes an intriguing way of deliberately changing long-term personality patterns.

Hudson and Fraley's great new article "Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change their personality traits?" still just has "online first" status at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology so it hasn't even got to "hot off the press" yet.  It describes such interesting findings.  The abstract reads "Previous research has found that most people want to change their personality traits. But can people actually change their personalities just because they want to? To answer this question, we conducted 2, 16-week intensive longitudinal randomized experiments.

(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 post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.)  

(this post is downloadable as both a Word doc & as a PDF file.) 

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you ..."   "If" by Rudyard Kipling