How To Be More Disciplined In Life: [New In-Depth Guide]
This is an article that contains the best ideas and techniques on how to be more disciplined in life to attain your goals.
I want to begin by acknowledging that the contents here are straightforward and to the point, yet there’s also more detailed material explored that is important for you to understand what is required to build a habit of being disciplined in your life.
If you have been researching on how to build self discipline, I’m sure you are sick of the cluster of information that bombards us in the digital age leaving us with short bouts of feelings of motivation yet fail to provide us with an action plan to produce lasting results.
That is why I have gathered the very best ideas on what you need to do to enhance your self-discipline in a step-by-step guide that you can look back on if you do find yourself steering off track in achieving your goals.
How To Be More Disciplined In Life
Building self-discipline is a process that requires you to venture into the realm of the unknown. In order for you to attain what you have never achieved before you must do what you have never done before.
Therefore being disciplined requires you to push yourself to the very limits in order to tap into your extraordinary hidden capabilities.
Self-discipline is the ability to do what you need to do regardless if you feel like it or not. It is in my opinion, the most precious skill that you need to amass in order to succeed in any given field.
You could learn every single success principle in the entire world yet it succumbs to uselessness if you don’t have the ability to put what you have learnt into consistent action.
As you begin to learn more and more about the to keys to success, you realize that attaining your goals is much less about your IQ and genetics but rather your ability to stay self disciplined and keep moving forward in the face of adversity.
We eventually want to be disciplined to attain our goals. The surest way to make sure that becomes a possibility is to be consistent with our actions and mindset.
That is why you need to need to learn the ideas that I will be sharing with you and manipulate them to reap the successful results of action.
Building self-discipline is analogous with progressive weight training. Just like a weight lifter does repetitions of heavy weight to grow muscle, it is important for you to push yourself out of your comfort zone to become more disciplined over a gradual course of time.
I need to bring attention to the indisputable fact that building self-discipline, like with any other task in personal transformation, is difficult. A key factor that will distinguish those of you who commit to these ideas and those who don’t is your ability to embrace the pain of failure and discomfort.
As I have stated above, building self-discipline is an idea that will lead you to fail, as you’ll push yourself to the very limit.
Just like a weight lifter does that last repetition and fails halfway because they cant take any more, you’ll fail because you’ll push yourself to a level that you have never experienced before and wont have the ability to handle it for too long before taking a break.
What I mean by saying this is that it is important for you to embrace what you fear and seek to do this what is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. If you aren’t feeling discomfort everyday then you aren’t doing a lot to change your ways.
This is not a fast fix method and in order to provide results that last, it is important that you do the work and when you fail, which you’ll, you get back up and keep going rather than beating yourself up.
The power of clear thinking
Pursuing a high level of self-discipline in your field of practice requires you to master the art of clear thinking. Thinking is what determines the decisions we make on an everyday basis, which influences our actions and thus goes on to influencing our results.
It is important to think clearly so you are conscious of spending your time in the most useful way. To put this into practice it’s my highest recommendation for you to incorporate daily mediation and solitude into your life.
I say this because these two practices enable you to calm your mind and detach from the complexities of our lives in the digital age. If you’re a beginner to these practices it is suggested that you build a habit of performing these rituals for small durations of time to begin with.
Start with mediating with an easy 4-second count of inhalation and exhalation for a period of 3 minutes and then increase this duration to 5 – 10 minutes over 2 – 3 weeks.
This advice might be perceived as unimportant to you but you must understand that the approach to acquiring high levels of self-discipline is holistic in the sense that it requires you to exert and train numerous components of your mental capability.
Goal Setting
The key to successfully visualize and bring clarity to your hearts desires is to learn the art of daily goal setting.
At the end of this section I want you to take out a pen and paper and write down what it
is you want to do, who you want to become and what you have wanted to achieved by the end of this year for it be successful.
Follow the S.M.A.R.T acronym and make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed. You want to ensure your goals are as specific as possible and you also don’t want to get overwhelmed by the amount of things you need to do, so pick a maximum of 5 key areas that need to be worked on.
Examples of good goals are:
- Lose 10kg by the 31st of December by doing high intensity workouts 3 times a week in addition to dieting 6 out of the 7 days of the week.
- Get at least 80’s in all my assessment works for this semester by planning my study time in advance, hiring a tutor and attending all supplementary help lessons while measuring my progress with a study log.
Read your goals out loud every morning and just before you go to bed at night and that I can guarantee you it will do astonishing things for your productivity and talent to become more disciplined.
This tactic will provide you with a foundation to fall back on when times are tough and you feel like doing something easier rather than what is actually important. It will also program your unconscious mind to get to work, as you’ll shine a spotlight on the trouble areas in your life that need to be addressed.
Where are you right now?
In order for you to know what you want to attain in relation with your self discipline it is important to be conscious of where you stand in relation to your work practices at the present moment.
Many people, when trying to take on a new routine such as following a new diet give up only after a few short days.
This is explained through the easy reason that people don’t understand how much they can take on before starting something new and thus get overwhelmed from their drastic changes, for example, trying to eat healthy for each meal of the day for weeks on end.
As a result of this, we beat ourselves up for not maintaining our progress yet in reality all we need is a different perspective on how we should start and see our failures. To put this into practice, imagine a person going to the gym for the very first time and trying to lift an especially heavy weight.
The person inevitably fails and beats him or herself up for not having the ability to successfully lift the weight. This is precisely what we do when we try to take on a new routine that’s way more advanced for our current level of physical or mental ability.
The fundamental principle that you need to understand when addressing this idea is to find out where you are in relation with what you want to attain at the present moment and how can you work towards achieving that goal.
To find your starting point, observe and analyze your daily practices and situation in relation to what you want to attain. If it’s weight that you wish to lose, weigh yourself and calculate your body fat percentage and log what you eat throughout your day.
If you wish to improve your grades for school or university, analyze the different components that make up your grade and work towards developing a plan that will see realistic improvements in your overall score.
Big steps in small periods of time normally lead failure so it is vital to divide your steps towards achieving your goal in as many little increments as possible.
Find the motivation and begin to execute
This section is all about providing you with insight on the powerful tool of willpower. Willpower is essentially that surge of motivation and energy that lets you get up and execute your goals.
It is the crossing point between inaction and action and if you used correctly, will enable you to attain phenomenal results. Most people depend on this motivation to begin to incorporate a new idea into their lives.
What is important to know is that willpower is an unsustainable resource that will ultimately be depleted over a few day’s or even hours. With willpower depleted, we wonder why we cant follow through with our task that leads us on an endless cycle of frustration and failure.
The major flaw here is that people don’t know what to do with their willpower. Uninformed people have a skewed perception that willpower can be reused on an everyday basis and that the positive rush of energy you get when you start a task should last endlessly.
This is solely not the case and it’s critical that you use your limited reserves of willpower wisely so you can carry on with your pursuing your goals even in the face of adversity.
To use willpower correctly, don’t think about actively pursuing your goal but rather focus your attention on planning and changing the environment around you so that when you do pursue your goal, it’s as easy for you as possible.
To clarify this in an example, say your goal is to lose 10 kg by the 31st December. You look at the videos and images of previous people who have lost significant weight and at last harness the drive and willpower to make this change for yourself in life.
Instead of concentrating on following a diet the next day spend your time in doing all that you can to eliminate any temptations around you to make your environment as easy as possible for you to diet in.
Clear out any junk food that you have in your kitchen, go buy a weeks worth of food that’s approved on your diet and prepare your food in containers for the week so you don’t have an excuse to resort to fast food.
The idea is to act quickly while your willpower lasts so when it runs out and you don’t feel like dieting any more, you have a system around you that will make breaking your diet harder.
Whether your aspiration lies in career progression, better marks at school, gaining muscle or anything, this process can be replicated by simply following the principle of using your willpower to construct a system so that when times get tough all you must do is just follow what you have already planned.
Different areas that contribute to self-discipline
Self-discipline is multifaceted in the sense that exerting yourself in one area will help you gain discipline in another area.
Just like exercising one part of your body will make it easier for you to perform other exercises, exerting yourself in dieting will provide you with discipline that can be carried on to help you become more productive in your work.
The basic premise is that it’s not precisely what you do this helps you build self-discipline but rather going against what is snug that will help you expand your perception of what’s attainable for you.
Key areas such as:
- Exercising
- Meditating
- Dieting
- Professional work
- Study for school/University
All compliment each other when you push yourself in one specific area. On the contrary, a weakness in one discipline of your areas of focus will result in weaknesses in all of your other areas.
Think back to the times where you had a very bad day at work and wasted lots of time and you found yourself indulging in junk food when you got back home.
This means that your self-discipline in dieting was weakened as you previously weakened your discipline with your work.
Persisting
Now that we know what to do with our willpower, how do we persist when times get tough?
It’s all well and good for me to tell you that when times get tough you can simply follow your plan but in reality our motivation fluctuates and most of the time we feel like engaging our time with what is fun and straightforward rather than what is difficult and necessary.
As I have stated before, this isn’t a fast fix method and if you wish to be disciplined in your field then that equates to you spending many hours of focused work on developing your skills.
The logical perspective is to however not consider the task ahead as a long grind but rather as process that can be digested over a series of steps overtime.
The key is to look at your goal and ask yourself what’s the one greatest thing that you can do to attain that goal and from there ask yourself what’s the one greatest thing that you can do to attain that step.
Conventional goal setting asks you to plan our your steps in a chronological order that goes forward, this process, in my opinion, is more beneficial in achieving your goals as you bring light to the tasks which we regularly negate in importance.
Keeping with the theme of diet, if you were to ask yourself what’s the one greatest thing that you can do to attain weight loss, you might answer by following a diet for a certain number of days per week.
You would then ask yourself what’s the single greatest thing you can do to make sure that you diet repeatedly; your response might be to prepare your meals so you don’t get suckered into eating junk food.
You would then ask yourself what’s the one greatest thing you can do to make that step a reality and that might be to allocate a time where you go shopping for your weekly groceries. You can break this process up with as many steps as possible, the key is to ensure that you have a snug starting point so you can know what you must do.
As I have discussed above, most people get so overwhelmed from the amount of work that’s required when taking on a routine that they ultimately give up on the plan utterly.
The key is to make sure that you have regular intervals of intense work and also frequent breaks where you can recharge. Start this process by concentrating on the here and now and do disciplined, focused work in intervals of 30 minutes with a 5 minute break.
This initially might look like a brief working period but it’s the time that almost all people find that their concentration wanders elsewhere. Conventional thought might persuade you to grind out your work in lengthy periods of time such as 5 hours.
In reality, our average attention wanders after roughly 30 minutes of work and we end up spending 30 minutes in focused work but spend the rest of our time in stalled progress.
An incredible way to make sure that you don’t get burnt out over long periods of work is to take a day off once a week where you spend the day the in relaxation (1).
Don’t stimulate yourself by going on the computer and your phone but rather spend time with family or friends or take part in recreation outdoor activities. This is neglected in importance but it is important for you to have the energy to persist when you need to work.
Just like you regularly need to refuel a car to make sure it runs properly you need to make sure you take time off so you can maintain progress towards your goals.
It is significant to continuously remember that self discipline cannot only be learnt but also ingrained in your character through the power of human habits. What is initially daunting and may seem virtually impossible to do now will become easier to perform over time through consistent practice.
Studies show that it takes 66 days to build a habit. That is why you need to persist through the initial phase of developing a successful habit of self-discipline and trust that over time, the hard work will be perceived to be easier than it’s now.
The key is to be conscious of your actions and regularly ask yourself what’s the greatest use of your time in the current moment. To be repeatedly conscious of our decisions we need to make sure that we follow a system that will up rewire our thoughts to what is most significant.
We do this by setting up two periods of the day, the early morning when you wake up and just the evening before you go to bed, as times when you can focus your attention back to your goals. My recommendation for you is to spend 20 minutes in your morning to look over your tasks for the day and read and visualize your goals.
In your evenings you should also spend 20 minutes in measuring your progress in relation with your goals so you are conscious of any improvements that you have made or need to make in achieving your goals.
Journaling is probably the most powerful tools that will enable you to bring clarity to any fuzzy thinking and that will let you make better decisions throughout your days when you need to be productive and disciplined.
The Payoff and the implications
An incredible method to persist with following through with your actions is to consider the rewards of your hard work. This is usually neglected, as we tend to focus on our immediate state of mind and emotions.
What is important to understand is that the rewards for disciplining yourself to do hard work are immediate. When you pursue to attain your goals and step into an unchartered level of your ability your brain releases the neurotransmitters that are responsible for making you happy.
As you persist, changes in the way you perceive yourself will dramatically alter. If you are tired of seeing yourself as a person with low self-esteem (2) and value then this is a must-do to lift your spirits to be more congruent with that of a winner.
Fundamentally it’s not the motivation that thinking about our future vision that will reap our rewards but how we feel and act in the present moment so we have the drive to keep on carrying through with our actions that will achieve results. That is why hard work is such a robust motivator.
The more and more you incorporate discipline in your life, the more likely you are to continue with that momentum and achieve further results.
On the contrary it is vital to understand the results of inaction to what it’s that you want to attain. If you are hesitant about doing various things and being a different person then you need to associate feelings of pain with the inaction of your positive intentions.
We all want to avoid negative emotional feelings and that’s why when we fail to act towards achieving our goals, we mask the negativity in indulging in what gives us a fast spike of joy such as watching television for hours on end.
You need to associate achieving your goals with a high level of importance in your life and that’s why you continually remind yourself on an everyday basis of the benefits of attaining your goals and the implications of inaction.
Instead of focusing on the actual punishment for inaction, focus your attention onto preventing your inability to act in the first place.
Therefore, you need to remind yourself every morning when you wake up and at night just before you go to sleep on why you have set out to attain what it’s that you want and what will occur if you achieve the goal and if you don’t achieve the goal.
Conclusion
We have now come to the end of this article about how to be more disciplined in life.
I hope that these ideas have been of great service to you and that you go on to attain phenomenal results in your work, school or anything!
