I think that is because it is a terrible message. It isnt an either/or situation, and successful breaking habits does rely on willpower, just not willpower alone.
Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.
To break a habit, you have to replace it with a different habit. Willpower is one of the ways to do that, but others are more successful on more people.
The reason why so many people hire a coach for physical activities, diet or even life decisions isn't so much that these are extremely specialized domains that need high expertise; it's that having someone make the decision, i.e. not relying on willpower, is often more effective and easier. It also leads to accountability: you have to show results to someone else, not just to your brain. And for most people, that's also more effective and easier than willpower.
Telling people to get over themselves and take charge is generally a well-meaning, but often misleading call to action. And after a couple of failures, the lesson they'll learn is that they're weak and ineffective and there's nothing that can be done about it, which compounds the problem instead of solving it.
I think there is a fundamental misalignment here about what constitutes willpower.
The coach isn't a contradiction to willpower. You still make the choice to get up and go when you are lazy, you have just changed the incentives and accountability.
It also takes willpower and initiative to hire a coach.
If you avoid anything difficult and quit the second things get hard, no a mount of support will help.
By all means, use every trick in the book to make it easier. However, you are setting yourself up for failure in life if you avoid everything that requires effort, or think everything can be made easy with enough tricks
For some reason you and others seem to think every action or decision takes the same amount of effort and willpower. That's the only contradiction I see in these comments which is causing all these conflicting opinions.
I beg to differ, and we know this. Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
It's a terrible, terrible idea to just "stop taking heroin". Pray tell, if you see someone who is an heroin addict and they say they are going to stop it and make no changes to their life, do you believe for a single second they are going to succeed? Hell no.
>Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
You then say:
>Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
Those things are all a complex sequence of tasks that requires a huge amount of planning, logistics, task initiation, etc etc. Not to mention money, uncertainty, fear etc. They are literally orders of magnitude more difficult for a person to do than continuing to take heroin.
It'd be like if I told you, "want to stop being hungry for breakfast in the morning? Just go change your whole life instead of eating a bagel."
I think this is good advice (don't just try to exercise your willpower, change your surroundings), and it holds for making good habits as well. If I want to start doing daily exercise, it's not likely to work if I just wake up at six and try to will myself to do it. Make an appointment to play tennis with somebody the day before--then you're socially obligated to show up. Do it frequently enough, and pretty soon you'll know a bunch of people who also play tennis; they'll start making appointments with you to play. Is this a "habit"? Or is it just a natural outcome of the environment you've surrounded yourself with?
Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.