improvement pill here welcome to lesson 10 of the tamed course in our previous
lessons we learned about how habits and willpower works so if you have not
watched any of those videos yet pause this video right now and click on the
link in the description box below it will bring you to a playlist with all of
the lessons of the team course in chronological order we now know that we
have a lot more willpower than we think we do but when our levels of willpower
drop below a certain threshold we entered a state of ego depletion where
it becomes much harder to stick to our habits so how can we increase the amount
of willpower we can use before we entered a state how can we increase our
self-discipline well numerous studies were conducted
between 1999 and 2006 by professor Roy Baumeister who's one of the pioneers of
willpower research he took large groups of people and tested how much willpower
they had initially by forcing them to do certain willpower exercises such as
seeing how long they could work on an unsolvable puzzle before giving up he
then split these groups into two the first group was the control group and
they were simply told to go home and come back in two weeks the second group
was told to participate in a variety of different tasks some were told to try to
fix their posture some we're told to try to use their non-dominant hand for tasks
like brushing your teeth and opening doors and others were even told to
actively change the words they used in their sentences like removing the use of
filler words like um and like these groups were told to actively try and
stick to these changes for the next two weeks and then come back so Baumeister's
surprised all of the groups that elicited some sort of control over their
lives had a significant increase in their levels of willpower after a
two-week period as compared to the control group who saw no change so what
does this mean well this means that willpower is just like a muscle when you
workout constantly for long periods of time your muscles get stronger they get
bigger and you're able to lift more weight willpower is the exact same if
you actively try to change something in your life you're using willpower to make
these changes then over time you'll be able to use more willpower without
entering a state of ego depletion your willpower muscle will get stronger and
this explains why Keystone habits are so powerful if you recall in a
previous video which I will link to in the description below we spoke about how
some people change one habit in their life and all of a sudden they change
their entire life they change a bunch of different habits the Keystone habit is
so effective because by sticking to a single habit you're training your
willpower it's getting stronger and as your willpower gets stronger you have
more strength to change the other habits in your life so what can we do with this
knowledge well for one it shows us just how important it is to stick to our keys
don't have it if we can successfully stick to this habit and get it to that
line of automaticity it will mean that the amount of self-discipline we have
will also increase dramatically and this is the reason I structured the course
this way we put the focus on building a keystone habit instead of focusing on
getting rid of our bad habit and that's because by building the keystone habit
you will eventually become strong enough to get rid of the bad one and that's why
you'll notice that the large majority of people who are extremely successful have
an obsession with self-improvement they're always looking for ways to use
their willpower to improve their lives and they may not know it but this
obsession with improvement makes them strong enough to accomplish the tasks
that make them so successful so drill this into your mind by actively trying
to change your life by being interested in self-improvement by sticking to that
keystone habit you will become stronger so keep strong and carry on because
you're getting stronger every single day as long as you stick to this and that
sums up everything we need to know about willpower at this point in the course
you should already be building up your keystone habit if you find yourself
slacking remember all you need to do is stand back up and stick to this habit if
you follow this one simple task you will get much stronger in our next lesson
we're gonna speak about the effects of our social environment on our habits how
you socialize actually has a huge effect on how likely you are to overcome your
bad habits the team course was brought to you with the help of the patrons of
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besides that guys stay tuned