You Don’t Always Need More Willpower

The Manhattan Beach Sand Dune

Willpower is great and as athletes we have it in abundance. But in the workplace, if we’re not careful, we start relying on it too much.

One of Pat Summitt’s Definite Dozen principles is “Don’t Just Work Hard, Work Smart,” reminding us that success isn’t about effort alone. It’s about setting yourself up in the right place, at the right time, with the right tools and awareness of your strengths and weaknesses.

And that’s something as athletes we often forget once we leave sport.

Actually, I don’t know that we truly forget it. We just push it to the back because now we are the ones responsible for structuring our own environment for success.

James Clear argues in Atomic Habits that our environment is one of the biggest drivers of our behavior.

Think about that for a second: how has your environment changed since you left your sport?

In sport, you were surrounded by people and systems designed to help you succeed. You weren’t just blindly grinding or muscling your way through everything, you had structure. You had scaffolding.

• Coaches designed practice and long‑term development plans.

• Your athletic trainer designed your rehab.

• The locker room was intentionally designed to transition you into performance mode.

• Even your academic schedule was shaped around helping you graduate and compete.

Your entire world was intentionally engineered to support your goals.

But once we enter the workplace? That scaffolding disappears.

And when it does, many former athletes default to the only tool they completely trust: willpower.

And without realizing it, we try to recreate the athlete version of ourselves without the systems that made that version possible. This is something I see constantly in conversations with former athletes.

Here’s something that can be hard for us to hear and truly embrace: sometimes success isn’t about getting stronger internally. It’s about putting yourself in an environment that makes the right choice the easier choice.

It’s not always about how much you can overcome. Sometimes, it’s about how you set yourself up to avoid having so much to overcome in the first place.

Look at your current environment:

What does your desk look like?

Is it set up for high focus the way your weight room was set up for high performance?

When you really need to lock in, is your phone out of sight, the way it stayed in your locker during practice?

Here’s the irony: for athletes, making things easier often feels wrong. Because sports taught us that everything meaningful is supposed to be hard. If we weren’t suffering up the Manhattan Beach sand dune (if you know, you know), then we weren’t doing it right.

We were conditioned to connect struggle with progress. Hard meant worthy. We had to earn victories, earn playing time, earn good grades. So when something feels too easy, we don’t trust it.

That mindset worked in sport because we had the structure around it. However, only relying on willpower in the working world can do us a disservice.

It drains us. It burns us out.

And it blinds us to just how much our surroundings influence our outcomes.

So take a look around. Has your environment been set up to support you, or are you unintentionally making things harder? And what is within your control to change? When I walk through this exercise with athletes, we’re often surprised by how much friction we’ve normalized.

Sometimes we can’t make huge changes because of circumstances. You can’t redesign your office building. You can’t magically move your gym closer to your house.

However, sometimes the smallest tweaks have the biggest impact:

Lay out your workout clothes the night before.

Prep the space you work in.

Put friction between you and the habits you don’t want and remove friction from the ones you do.

Make the choice you want to make the easier choice.

You don’t always need more willpower.

Sometimes you just need a better setup.

The good news is that now you get to build your systems. You can tailor them specifically to you and build them with a huge amount of intention. Not just inherit systems from the teams that came before you.

You get to create a performance environment that is specifically designed for you and that is kind of cool.

See you next week. - Jill

I work 1:1 with a small number of former athletes at a time to build sustainable, high-performance systems after sport.

If you’re interested in exploring that, email me at jill@jillmuhe.com with the subject line “Performance” and tell me a little about where you are right now. We’ll start the conversation from there.