How to Re-Educate the Will, Make Decisions, and Practice Virtue
By Edward Simmerer
The ability to re-educate the will, make decisions, and practice virtue can be summed up in one word: Determination.
The meaning of determination can be broken down into three parts or steps:
- Determination: The weighing of options
- Determination: The choosing of one of the various options
- Determination: Carrying through without second guessing or changing your mind
These three steps of determination correspond to our three main human faculties for action: the intellect, the will, and the affections. The intellect’s job is to know the right thing to do. The job of the will is to choose the good – and to choose strongly. And the task left to the affections is to feel good about doing the good.
This sounds easy in theory, but it can be difficult in practice. Here are some practical steps to follow:
- Concentration
- Willpower
- The training of the feelings
Let’s look at each of these in depth:
- In order to perform human actions, we have to be able to concentrate. Concentration should not cause us any pain or tension. On the contrary, distraction and indecisiveness cause stress on the mind and body. Do what you are doing. Stop multi-tasking and start mono-tasking. Put away all distractions and do one thing at a time with undivided attention. The key word here is attention, not tension! This means you should not have your phone with you all the time. Your phone is a highly addictive, behavior changing, attention dividing device. Simply having your electronic device close to you distracts your mind from what you are doing. “Joy follows every perfect act.” Says Aristotle. What does this mean for us? It means if we could focus on doing one thing at a time without distraction, we would find the performance of tasks to be quite pleasant instead of draining. What we need is perfect human action without distraction.
- There is nothing wrong with your willpower or your ability to make decisions. However, your will may be weak from lack of use. Think of your will as a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. No one is born with a so-called “strong will.” Stubbornness is not the same thing as having a strong will. Stubborn people actually have weak wills because they are unable to choose contrary to what their passions desire. Strong-willed people have developed their willpower because they worked hard to establish the habit of choosing strongly. If you feel that you have absolutely no willpower whatsoever, start small with some thing you know you can do. In the morning, before you put on your socks, lay out two pairs on the bed to choose from. Tell yourself, “I am going to count down from five, and when I get to zero, I will choose which socks I am going to put on, and then I will not second-guess my choice.” Then do it, and don’t change your mind! Build up your willpower over time by running similar will-drills. Eventually, with a bit of concentration and practice, you should be able to set a “mental reminder” for a future task simply by choosing strongly: “Tonight, before I go to bed, I will remember to say my night prayers.” If you do this, you will probably remember.
- The training of the feelings. Feelings are not bad. God did not create our beautiful human nature by mistake. However, if your feelings do not make sense to you, it could be because you are using them the wrong way. Our emotions are like nuclear energy. They can be very powerful, but they have to be directed. If we can direct our feelings towards the good we have chosen with the will, then the feelings will make sense, and we will live an emotionally fulfilling life. But if we selfishly turn our feelings upon our own emotions, they will become confused, and we will devolve into an emotional black hole of self-introspection and feelings that do not make any sense, and we will be prevented from performing any good actions. The way to train the feelings is to start with ideas. Change the way you think, and you will change the way you feel. If you find that you are in a bad mood because you “woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” ask yourself, “do I have a good reason to be in a bad mood today?” When you realize the answer is no, decide to drop the bad mood and assume a cheerful disposition. Make an act of the will. Force yourself to smile. And what do you know? You will start to feel happy.
The three steps of determination are like driving a sports car. The intellect is like the driver of the car who knows the destination. The will is like the steering wheel which points the vehicle in the right direction. And finally, the feelings are like the gas pedal which give the car the necessary giddy-up. We should not be slaves to our passions. If we have the bad habit of always following our emotional impulses, we must re-educate ourselves to act in accordance with the way God made us to act. Think about what to do. Make a decision and choose strongly. And the feelings will follow.