If you learn self-control, you can master anything.

— Unknown

Do you remember how earlier in this part of the challenge we talked about that sailboat metaphor and how fixing the holes in the boat may be like working on our weaknesses and lifting the sails like using our top strengths? I can imagine that for many the lesson of this chapter may involve paying attention to some of those holes.

Even though it is a top strength for some people, self-control, which is also known as self-regulation, is consistently one of the lowest strengths when you average across all people around the world. What’s more, you can see how it could be quite a gaping hole for some of us – and may cause us to take on too much water and run aground before we can even get started!

But never fear – or at least never let that fear keep you from trying. Just as with self-efficacy, I have some good news. There have been many promising discoveries about self-control and how we can increase it.

What is self-control?

It has recently been compared to “willpower” by the psychologist Roy Baumeister, who has probably done the most to advance its study in the past 20 years. He defined self-control as the conscious and deliberate effort to control:

(1) thoughts – like getting rid of doubts about ourselves or our ability to succeed;

(2) feelings – like not hastily reacting in anger in traffic;

(3) impulses – like not eating the rest of that chocolate cake; and (4) performance – like hitting the right notes on the piano or going for a record on that video game we love.

The classic experiment that demonstrated the importance of self-control is what has been called the “Marshmallow experiment”, of which you will see a delightful example of in the special video for this chapter. This experiment was first conducted at Stanford University in the 1960s when 4-year-old boys and girls were left alone by themselves in a room with one big marshmallow on the table right in front of them. Before they were left alone, the experimenter told them that they could eat the marshmallow now or, if they did not eat it before the experimenter returned, they could have another marshmallow.

After the experimenter leaves the room, a camera films what the kids do. Their facial expressions and what they do to deal with this mild form of torture is priceless for the way it shows us some of what we all do in the face of temptation. The results of the experiment were, first, that a significant portion of the kids quickly ate that first marshmallow, sometimes before the experimenter could even finish the instructions. In addition, there was another significant portion of the kids who waited the 10-15 minutes that must have seemed like an eternity for that second marshmallow.

But the most remarkable thing about the findings is what the experimenters discovered when they followed up with the four-year-olds fourteen years later. They found that those in what the experimenters called the “waiter group” were doing much better than those in what they called the “grabber group.” Specifically, those that waited for that second marshmallow were better copers, more socially competent, self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable, and better able to resist temptation as teenagers.

In addition, the “waiters” were better able to control themselves when things didn’t go their way, more able to focus on their studies, did better in school, and had significantly higher college entrance exam scores. In addition to these initial studies with young children, there have been numerous studies showing how important self-control may be for everything from mental and physical health to success at school, work, and in relationships.

The positive part of the psychology of self-control is that there is so much we can do to strengthen it. The psychologist Roy Baumeister has compared self-control to a muscle that anyone – no matter how big this particular hole is in their sailboat – can exercise and strengthen just as we can our biceps and triceps. As with the ways we can increase self-efficacy that we went over in the last chapter, what we know about how to increase self-control may be some of the most important, powerful, and relevant lessons that modern psychology has discovered for us.

Here are the five ways we know the most about that have been shown to increase our self-control.

1. The first is simply called “self-monitoring.” Most people don’t know that it is responsible for more than half of the success of some of the hardest things we try to do – like losing weight. It is simply noting on paper, a computer, or a smart phone that you did something you wanted to do, or that you didn’t do something that you didn’t want to do. This simple noting how you are doing with your self-control goal can make a big difference in getting us to try to exercise it and how successful we are at it.
2. Second, and I’m sure that this combination of big words probably got someone who studied this tenure, is what is called “implementation intention.” This involves setting a goal for increasing self-control, like not having a chocolate cake at Mugg & Bean on your way home from work. Next, you develop a plan for what to do when faced with potential obstacles, like seeing a new Kentucky on your alternate way home! This may involve practicing what you will do or say to yourself when you hear that little voice saying that one more Kentucky Fried Chicken won’t hurt that much – just this one time.
3. The third way to increase self-control is called “mental contrasting” and this involves three steps. The first is to identify an important change that you want to make. The second is to identify and imagine the most positive and successful outcome that may result from the change. The third is to add the part from the implementation intention about imagining the obstacles that may stand in the way of you reaching your goal. In other words, envision your goal and its benefits and then mentally walk through the obstacles to achieving it.
4. The fourth way to increase self-control is one that I’m sure most of us have done at some point but may have felt like it was cheating. In reality, it may be one of the only things that work at first. It is called “stimulus control,” but could just as easily be called something less technical like “out of sight, out of mind.” It involves keeping yourself physically distant from the liquor store or not keeping alcohol in your house or staying psychologically distant by singing your favourite song to keep you from thinking about that chocolate cake.
5. The final way to increase self-control has by far my favourite name and is called “urge surfing.” It turns out that if we have a strong craving for something, trying to put it out of our mind may not always work. There is a famous experiment where people were asked not to think about a white bear, and the harder they tried not to think about it, the more they thought about it. Anyway, urge surfing is a skill that involves mindfully focusing on rather than fighting a craving and watching it rise and fall like a big wave at the beach. Whereas you may have thought it would never go away, if you hold off long enough from grabbing that marshmallow, you learn that the craving does recede and, in the process, gain more control to resist the temptation to eat before you can get another.

So, there are five things that we can all do to increase self-control – and give us the discipline and willpower we need to reach out goals and avoid some of those temptations that get in the way.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

The tasks focus on understanding the value self-control, savouring and it relationship with self-control, and how to foster them both:

1.There is a special video of the Marshmallow experiment where you are asked to see if you can identify something in what the children do that you have done in trying to exercise self-control. Watching this video can be a way to better understand the many ways that we all try to resist temptation and how imperfect we often are in doing it.

2. You will be asked to identify an area in your life where you would most like to increase self-control and write about how you can use one of the five ways you learned about to do it. The goal is for you to write about something that may be particularly challenging because just writing about it may help you gain the self-efficacy or belief that you can do it.

3. There is an activity that involves savouring, which can reduce our need to exercise self-control by increasing our enjoyment of some of the things we try to control. For example, if we learn to savour the taste of our favourite chocolate for a longer period, we won’t need to eat as much to get the same enjoyment from it.

4. There are reflection questions about the area of your life where exercising more self-control might bring the greatest benefits and what you would most like to savour in the future. Imagining the rewards of exercising self-control and the benefits of savouring will increase your motivation for doing both and make it more likely that you will do them.

Finally, I wanted to congratulate you. You have almost made it to the end of the second part of this challenge. You may have had more self-control than you thought! The goal of this part was for you to better see, appreciate, and use what is best in yourself and begin to experience more of what it might be like for you to lift the sails and feel the wind at your back in using it.

In the next part, we will build on your basic training and what you learned in this part to make it come to life in your relationships with others and the world around you. In the fourth and final part after that, I will try to put it all together in enabling you to develop a plan for continuing to use what you have been learning to create the kind of life you seek and that would make you most happy.