For those who watched the video or are familiar with her work, did it strike you as strange that both of these things are correlated with increased willpower in the future: (1) forgiving yourself and not being critical of failures of willpower and (2) being pessimistic and envisioning failures for the future? Just trying to work out in my mind why they would both be effective.

Let

Defensive pessimism. Imagine how/why you will fail at your goal. Imagine concrete steps. Write it all down, revise when something different happens.

Gads, no. I've got a brain that sees things potential problems. I've concluded that spending your time picturing failure is a great way to invoke akrasia - by focusing on failure scenarios, you develop an availability bias for failure scenarios. I call that the "futility bias".

I need to spend more time imagining how things will succeed.