What's your toughest management challenge?

It's not your time, your direct reports, your elders, your deacons, your denominational superiors, your budget realities, or the expectations of your toughest critics who attended Catalyst, the Leadership Summit and dislike both John Piper and Rob Bell.

It's willpower.

There is a man named Roy Baumeister who is cranking out remarkable work these days. He's likely the world's top experimental social psychologist, and he is almost single-handedly bringing the concept of "will" back to psychology. (He's got a book out now called Willpower that is well worth reading.)

Ever wonder why it's hard to keep New Years' resolutions? One of Baumeister's early experiments was to investigate the nature of willpower. In this experiment, one group of people had to resist the temptation to eat delicious fresh chocolate chip cookies, while another group had to resist eating radishes. Then both groups were given (secretly) insoluble math problems to solve. It turns out ...