Each task or exercise has to be carried out for several days, usually a week, and then replaced by another in order to avoid monotony and the formation of a habit leading to automatic performance.
Resolution—Each day, for the next seven days, I will stand on a chair, here in my room, for ten consecutive minutes, and I will try to do so contentedly.
At the end of this ten minutes’ task write down the sensations and the mental states you have experienced during that time. Do the same on each of the seven days.
Several other exercises of the same kind:
- Repeat quietly and aloud: ‘I will do this’, keeping time with rhythmic movements of a stick or ruler for five minutes.
- Walk to and fro in a room, touching in turn, say, a clock on the mantelpiece and a particular pane of glass for five minutes.
- Listen to the ticking of a clock or watch, making some definite movements at every fifth tick.
- Get up and down from a chair thirty times.
- Replace in a box, very slowly and deliberately, one hundred matches or bits of paper. (An exercise particularly adapted to combat impulsiveness.)
Similar exercises can be invented ad libitum. The important thing is not the doing of this or that exercise, but the manner in which it is performed. It should be done willingly, with interest, with precision, with style. Try always to improve the quality of the work, the dearness of introspection, the fidelity of the written account, and above all to develop the awareness and the energy of the will.
It is good to compete with oneself; in other words, to assume a “sporting attitude” in the best sense of the word.
Sources:
Strength of Will and How to Develop It (New York, Harper, 1931)
Training & Developing The Will by Roberto Assagioli
The Act of Will by Roberto Assagioli
Online References:
http://www.synthesiscenter.org/articles/0117.pdf
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