This post is all about how to be disciplined.
What is the secret agent that helps us achieve our goals and objectives? What is the ingredient that makes people achieve their goals and build their dream life?
Most people believe it is motivation, but the truth is that motivation is a very sneaky friend and will most of the time leave you halfway through.
Motivation is a great feeling that pushes us to get up from the sofa and start a new project, but motivation is short-lived. It is a burning flame that extinguishes as fast as it lights up. And although it might help you start it will most definitely not help you achieve your goals.
So then what is it?
The answer is self-discipline.
And if right now you are thinking about how difficult you find it to be disciplined, don’t give up just yet, because today I am sharing with you the 4 ultimate tips on how to be disciplined and build the life of your dreams!
Building the life of your dreams and reaching your life goals is not easy, or a piece of cake, because if it were everyone would be doing it.
But why?
Because to have the life you have always wanted, you´ll have to do the things you have never done.
To achieve success and the life of your dreams, you have to change the things you are currently doing and how you are living your life, meaning your mindset, beliefs, habits, your attitude…
And sometimes new and change and the unknown are not words that precisely motivate us to chase our dreams because our comfort zone is safe and known.
But that is where self-discipline comes in. Because when we constantly do the things we do not want to do, that is when we achieve our goals.
When wanting to reach a goal, in your path you´ll face difficulties, setbacks, insecurities, failures, and a million more reasons that are going to push you to quit. But that is why self-discipline is so important.
But what does being disciplined exactly mean?
Having self-discipline means choosing between what you want now and what you want most, it means ignoring current pleasure for future rewards.
But only that is because self-discipline is also the biggest form of self-love you can master because when you have self-discipline you are loving yourself enough to give yourself everything you have always wanted.
And the way I see it every day you have two options: either to choose the pain of the regret or the pain of discipline.
So tell me which one are you choosing today?
Benefits of developing your self-discipline
“Okey so developing my self-discipline is key to achieving my goals, but what other benefits does it have?”
Well, did you know that disciplined people are actually happier and that they live guilt-free lives? Because they are not constantly living with this regret and guilt towards themselves for not being able to achieve their goals.
But only that, because self-discipline will make you feel better about yourself and many studies have found that people with self-discipline are less likely to:
-Be depressed
-Feel anxious or stressed out
-Develop eating disorders
-Suffer obsessive-compulsive disorders
-Consume drugs and alcohol.
In conclusion, being disciplined has many benefits and it is an essential skill that you must master if you want to be successful, but how can we actually develop self-discipline?
How to be disciplined
Humans love to feel good and avoid as much as they can feeling bad, that is why we stay in our comfort zone and why we don´t have self-discipline, because we have the habit of following our natural instinct that has an aversion to bad feelings.
So if it is in our nature to procrastinate and listen to our current desires: how can we develop self-discipline?
Here are the top 4 tips on how to be disciplined that help you achieve just that!
Focus on showing up
As the famous quote goes: “don’t focus on the whole staircase, just on the step ahead of you”.
And the truth is that you don´t need huge amounts of self-discipline to do something you don´t want to do, you just enough to make you show up.
Especially when you are starting out focus only on showing up, rather than perfection or performance.
Because when you show up you realize that working out is not as bad once you start. Or that reading a book doesn´t seem as difficult once you open it and start reading the first lines. Or that eating healthy isn´t as boring as you thought.
This brings me to a little tip that I want to share with you and that has enormously helped me develop my self-discipline.
And that is to start small.
In the beginning, you don´t need to work out for an hour, moving your body and doing light exercise is perfect enough. You don´t need to read half the book in one sitting, reading 3 or 4 pages is just fine. You don´t have to completely change your diet in one day.
And what are we achieving by starting small?
We are getting the “ball rolling”, and we are starting to move towards our objectives no matter how small our progress is because beginning and showing up is better than not starting at all.
Focus on the step ahead of you, the first step, showing up, and remember to prioritize progress over perfection.
Wait for the good feeling
We previously talked about how we are constantly chasing the good feeling and how that is the main reason why we procrastinate and quit.
So what if we actually eliminated the bad feeling?
And you might be wondering how can you do that? How can you turn something you hate into something you love?
Well, let me tell you 2 things I realized while working on my self-discipline:
The first is that making the effort to turn a process you don´t like into something you enjoy makes a huge difference.
And the second is that the bad feeling will eventually be replaced by the good.
And it is the combination of these two factors which will help you master self-discipline.
Now I won´t lie to you, because the truth is that this won´t happen with everything, and there will always be things that you don´t enjoy doing and that you will have to “force” yourself to do.
But to this I have another secret: It WILL get better and easier to do the things you don´t like doing.
When you make something enjoyable and pass the stage of incorporating it into your daily routine, it becomes something that makes you feel happy and accomplished to the point where it naturally starts to motivate you to be disciplined.
Although it´s not self-discipline anymore, it´s just you chasing your dreams and taking action because it makes you feel good.
Never quit
The third tip on how to be disciplined is to never quit and to keep getting back on track. Self-discipline, like any skill you want to develop, needs to be practiced.
You will fall back or fail to be disciplined in a situation in which you should have, but that is okay. You might even have the motivation to do something, but most of the time our old habits and inner dialogue, the ones convincing us to not do the thing we should do, are so engraved in us that they are difficult to break.
The important thing to remember in these situations is to always get up and start again. Whenever this happens, reflect on how you are feeling and review how you could make the process more enjoyable and easy.
Determine your why
And last, but not least, determine your why.
Sometimes making the process easier and fun will not be enough, sometimes you´ll need a little push to get you started and a little reminder of why you are doing it.
And this is where this tip comes in.
Identify the areas you can improve regarding your self-discipline, think about all those goals and dreams you want to accomplish but never have, and write your why:
- Why do you want to accomplish this goal/objective?
- How does this dream make you feel?
- What has stopped you from achieving it before? Fears, insecurities…?
- How do you think your life will change once you accomplish it?
Another thing that I found really helped me aside from reminding myself why I started, was quotes on discipline which gave me enough motivation to get started and show up.
Conclusion
Self-discipline is a must skill to develop and although it may seem difficult in the beginning to resist the urge to listen to your current desires, you are incredibly capable of doing it and of achieving even your biggest dreams.
Remember to start by focusing on showing up and making the process easy, to remind yourself why you started and that the bad feelings don´t last forever.
And lastly, no matter how many times you fail to be disciplined, NEVER give up, ever.
Thank you so much for investing your time in this article. I hope the tips and exercises in this article will help you develop your self-discipline.
Always remember that you are worthy of even your deepest and wildest desires!
And whenever you feel like giving up, whenever you feel like quitting, remember this: “The pain of self-discipline will never be as great as the pain of regret”.
Related posts:
0 Comments