What Is Inner Strength and How to Develop and Improve It

What is inner strength?

• Inner strength means the possession of willpower, self-discipline, and staying power.
• Resilience, perseverance, and tenacity.
• It means inner fortitude.
• It expresses itself as assertiveness, courage, and the ability to withstand difficulties and obstacles.
• Inner strength is like a powerful engine that drives you forward towards accomplishment and achievement.
• It is like a powerful battery that gives you the power, endurance, and discipline to carry on in situations where others fail or break down emotionally and physically.

Inner strength is essential for carrying out tasks, chores, and decisions and achieving goals. Without it, it’s difficult to start anything, and it’s difficult to get to the finish line.

1. We need inner strength in our lives. We need it to deal with stressful people, our boss, and our employees.
2. Teachers need it when teaching and dealing with difficult children.
3. Business people need it for dealing with customers and when plans do not proceed in the way they want.
4. It is an essential skill for athletes to help them persevere with their training and to keep going in contests.
5. We need it to keep our patience and deal with impatient people.

This list can go on and on.

This skill is erroneously considered as belonging only to highly successful people.

The truth is that everyone can develop inner strength. Everyone can improve this power with some training.

What Are the Benefits of Inner Strength?

Sometimes, in certain circumstances, people display a great degree of inner strength they did not know they possessed.

Many break down in difficult or dangerous situations, but some display some unexplainable power and help themselves and others.

To make this power available to you at any time, you need to cultivate it. This requires training.

• Inner strength enables you to control unnecessary and harmful impulses and habits
• If you tend to be lazy, developing this skill will help you overcome laziness.
• If you procrastinate, it will help you stop procrastinating.
• Inner strength can enhance your self-esteem and self-control.
• Cultivating and gaining inner strength will give you more control over your life.
• It makes it easier to make decisions and follow them through.
• It gives you the courage and strength to endure difficulties and hardships.

You need this ability to do a good job, to succeed in business, to study, lose weight, exercise, maintain good relationships, change habits, self-improvement, meditation, spiritual growth, keep promises, and for almost everything else.

Do You Lack Inner strength?

How many times have you wished you had more inner strength, willpower, or self-discipline?

How many times have you lacked the persistence and inner stamina to follow your decisions and plans?

Do you admire and respect strong individuals who have overcome obstacles and difficulties and reached far because of their inner strength?

Most people are not born with inner strength, but it can be developed like any other skill.

• A great number of people lack the inner strength to say “no”.
• Many find it difficult to display assertiveness.
• Many people lack the inner strength to follow their dreams.
• Some, are afraid to take action and make changes, preferring to leave things as they are.
• Some people lack the resolution and the persistence to go on with their plans to the end.

How to Cultivate Inner Strength

You can cultivate your inner strength, even if you lack it now. How far you go and how strong you become depends on your earnestness, ambition, and the time devoted to this pursuit.

Developing this ability requires training your willpower and self-discipline. It is a gradual process that is highly beneficial.

I have emphasized the importance of developing willpower and self-discipline in my article on this topic and in my book Strengthen Your Willpower and Self Discipline.

Contrary to erroneous beliefs:

1. You do not require super ordinary powers to gain inner willpower, self-discipline, and inner strength.
2. You do not need to sleep on a bed of nails, fast, or stand on one foot for days, as fakirs supposedly do.
3. The concept that the development of inner strength requires you to undergo suffering and physical hardships is not true.

You get stronger through constant practice, just like exercising your muscles at a gym makes your muscles stronger. In both cases, when you need inner power or physical strength, they are available to you and are at your immediate disposal.

Steps and Exercises for Gaining Inner Strength

Here are a few steps and exercises to increase your inner strength:

1. Refuse to satisfy unimportant or unhealthy desires of yours. Stop and think how unimportant and meaningless they are.
2. Strive to carry out important tasks, even if you feel inner resistance to make the effort. Refusing to satisfy useless, harmful, or unnecessary desires and abstaining from negative reactions adds to your inner strength.
3. Don’t read the newspaper for a few days.
4. Now and then, drink your coffee or tea without sugar.
5. Climb up the stairs instead of taking the lift.
6. Park your car a little farther away from your destination so that you have to walk.
7. Now and then, choose not to watch one of your favorite TV programs.
8. Read a book that is useful and informative but which you find boring.
9. Curb your desire to criticize people.
10. Delay your desire to retort angrily.
11. Strive to get out of bed quickly on a cold day.
12. Be more mindful of your actions.
13. Learn to respond calmly, while using your common sense, instead of reacting instinctively and with anger or impatience. Showing more compassion and forgiveness are an act of inner strength, especially when people display resentment and anger and are unable to forgive.

Though the exercises seem simple, their practice adds you inner strength.

These exercises are only a few examples to show you how you can develop your inner strength. By practicing these or similar exercises, you gain inner power, which you can use when you are in need of it.

Practicing these simple exercises, will develop your inner muscles, just like lifting barbells develops your physical muscles.

After practicing the above mentioned exercises, I strongly advise you to read and practice the exercises in the book about willpower and self-discipline. You will find in this book a simple but powerful and systematic method of training.

In time, you would gain control over yourself, your habits, your reactions and your life. This will take you closer to achieving you dreams and your goals.

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