So yesterday I heard a really motivational speech where the speaker talked about developing the skill of choice. This was extremely fascinating to me and I thought his main point was very motivating- that willpower alone will do nothing, however, skill power is a different story. When you spend time developing skills to help you avoid bad habits, you will succeed. Merely making the choice to not PMO will only get you so far. Spending the time to develop skills and good habits to avoid PMO will actually help you overcome it. In his talk he talked about how we as humans are extremely naive about the things that influence our choices. I have come to realize this through my struggle with PMO addiction, and I thought that his insights were very enlightening. So if anyone has any ideas for skills that are worth my time developing, I appreciate any and all insights on how to stay clean by developing skillpower vs. willpower. I can only control my behavior by taking control of the things that control me.
How about improving a aspect of your personality? For example i am trying to be less judgmental of others. That means not judging their actions or words or appearance , looking them on a positive light. Seeing them as persons and not labeling them ( he is this kind of person or that ) . This helps me olso to keep my mind of negative thoughts of me. Double win. How to achive that. Maybe read a self help book or a sociology book or a spiritual one. Have a clear plan of action and set " scores " to se your progress. Maybe it doesn't fall in the same category of a skill but its 100% guaranteed to help you against PMO.
An example could be almost anything related to the bad habit you are trying to overcome. For example, if I'm trying to avoid looking at P, I could look at what influences me to want to watch P, like being on the computer late at night, taking long hot showers, staying awake in bed, or indulging in fantasies. Then I look at what causes those triggers, so maybe procrastinating schoolwork keeps me on the computer late at night so I can then set a goal to prioritize my time better. In this way you can find a lot of "hidden" triggers I guess you could say, and eliminate them. But the examples I gave are just some, there are so many different examples, and not all of them related to PMO. One example given in the presentation was of a woman trying to quit smoking. She realized that she smoked when she was stressed, and that she was stressed when she had fights with her husband, and she fought with her husband because of her lack of communication skills, so she invested a lot of time in improving her communication and stress-management skills, and she strengthened her skillpower instead of just trying to rely on willpower. Hope that explanation helped.
