How To Develop Self-Discipline

Self-discipline is terrible for most businesses and, therefore, never gets advertised. Imagine if you start cooking your food every day, working out on your own, avoiding junk food altogether, waking up early and sleeping on time. It will shut down more than half of the entertainment and restaurant businesses. You wouldn’t ever need a doctor – unless there is another pandemic.

Businesses give you tools to make it look easy and convenient. Well, Arnold didn’t need Apple watch to get him fit and neither did Warren Buffet use Finance management apps to be a billionaire. They were all self-disciplined. And as much as the term sounds strict, it is not.

What is Self-discipline?

In simple words, self-discipline is staying consistent and motivated, the ability to take action and keep performing one or several positive activities consistently, irrespective of your feelings. The most crucial and challenging thing about self-discipline is the ability to perform a task and keep doing it daily. Tremendous willpower is necessary so that you keep up the performance.

Another thing about self-discipline is to keep aside all your feelings and keep doing the right thing. Following through to ensure thorough completion of the job daily is the key to successful self-discipline. Self-discipline is also when you work without someone telling you to do it. It’s that mental rein which guides and checks and directs our actions – and it’s a rein which you control yourself.Self-discipline is also known as determination, self-control and self-motivation

Steps to develop self-discipline

Self-discipline can be compared to a muscle – the more you work on it, the stronger it becomes. Think about working out in a gym, and on your first day, you pick a dumbbell of 80kgs to work out. What do you think would happen? Either you’ll end up damaging the floor or yourself.

Yes, having a goal of building chiselled biceps is good, but that’s not going to happen in a day or a week. It would take months before you pick that 80kg dumbbell. What do you do meanwhile? Pick the 10kgs first and start there.

1. Decide a goal

Carrying forward the example we saw above, finalizing a goal is the first step in instilling self-discipline. It can be anything like having chiselled biceps, losing 30% fat, writing a story, saving money, cooking every day, etc. It is essential to decide on a goal before going ahead with disciplining yourself.

Some can be short-term, and others can be long-term goals. If you are starting, it’s highly recommended to start slow and short. For example, your long-term plan can be to learn Yoga. The more concise version of that goal would be to pick one pose and practice it for a week. Then selecting another pose and practising both – because by the end of one week, pose number 1 of last week would be relatively easy.

Goal setting should be SMART: the goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. So the goal of “learn yoga” would change to “learn ten distinct poses of yoga in 3 months”. Now you divide this goal into smaller and more attainable steps.

2. Motivation

What is the reason you have chosen this goal? What is the objective of your achievement? Do you do it to feel good? Or look good? Or impress someone? Jealousy? Anger? Any of those reasons are fine as long as you can remain motivated. One of the most challenging steps in self-discipline is staying motivated consistently. A simple way to do it would be to remind yourself of the objective. What made you decide on that goal? Relive the idea over and over again to keep you motivated.

People feel gloomy every once in a while and tend to give up. Bad weather, bad day, fight with someone or just a low feeling. In all those incidences, remind yourself of the reason and objective of your goal. Remind yourself why you started all of this. This process of reminding yourself is internal motivation.

There are also external forms of motivation like watching an inspiring video, reading an exciting book, vision board or talking to an idol of yours who has achieved the goal you are working towards. While external motivation works for some, it is short-lived and shallow for others. Everyone is unique; ergo, no two people’s difficulties, hardships and efforts will be identical. Internal motivation gives you that burning desire to get up and start working towards your goal and, therefore, is considered adequate at times.

3. Recognize those pesky hurdles

You have a goal, but what is stopping you from getting it? What comes in the way of your reading goal? What stops you from going to the gym or practicing that skill you want so bad? What is stopping you from eating healthy? Can you point it out?

Identifying hurdles is critical to the success of having a habit of self-discipline. If most of your answers to the above questions are “Nothing. It’s me. I don’t feel like it”, then the problem is self-motivation. If it’s something else, identify it and list it out. Hurdles are easy to cross if you know them.

Identify those challenges that prohibit or slow you down and start taking action on them one by one. Keep the fridge full of healthy snacks so that you don’t have to think when you are hungry, watch a video of Arnold on body building or talk to your gym buddy to help you get moving.

Using incentives to motivate is one of the worst things you could do. For example, we all have this idea that if you get that fitness watch or band, you’ll be motivated to work out and get in shape faster or buying expensive shoes will inspire you to go to the gym. That is ridiculous. The watch will not help you lose weight; it will simply measure it, or buying that air fryer doesn’t mean you are now eating healthy. Having an incentive before your goal will destroy all the motivation you could ever muster, and that incentive will become a hurdle.

4. Break bad habits

Imagine the pain in tooth extraction and multiply it a hundred times. That’s the mental pain we feel when trying to break a bad habit. The pain you feel when you are trying to wake up early is an example of that. Before you start working on the good ones, it is critical to weed out the bad habits. Stop drinking that can of pop, forget the burger and get a salad, don’t put down that dumbbell. Our bodies and mind try to be as comfortable as they can. The cozy bed with a phone in hand and music playing in the background would seem like a perfect evening over getting to bed at 10 pm, but it’s not.

Bad habits creep slowly into our lives – sometimes knowingly and unknowingly. If you look at the process of bad habits, it starts like “just one chip won’t harm”, “a cheat day today is fine”, “10 more minutes of sleep”, and the most common one “, I’m tired today”. These habits start slowly, and before you know it, those 10 minutes of sleep have now become three more hours of sleep, or that one cheat day is gradually leading to diabetes.

Funny enough, good habits ALSO start the same way. Just that they are challenging; they require you to come out of your comfort zone and make an effort to keep up with them.

5. Negative Motivation

If you are the sort of person, who won’t get motivated by positive motivation, then it’s time to take negative motivation. Negative motivation is any attribute or idea that infuriates and inspires you to fulfil your goal.

For example, a positive motivation would be working out to get fit, look and be healthy. But the negative version of that would be, working out because an ex rejected you for your looks or because everyone laughs at you.

Negative motivation works perfectly fine to reach the goal; however, the only hurdle would be what next? We should never forget that we are doing all of this not to achieve one purpose but to build self-discipline.

The idea isn’t to simply read one book but read every day, and with negative motivation, there is a high chance you’d lose the ‘juice’ to stay disciplined.

6. Measure but don’t compare your progress

As you start pumping in your efforts, you will see the results – very slowly. To know that you are on the right track, measure your performance or progress over time. Instant gratification is a concept far away from self-discipline. So if you are looking for instant results, self-discipline is not for you.

Measuring your progress will let you know if your efforts are in the right direction and if you need to change or speed up something. As you measure over time, the progress starts adding up little by little and eventually, you will get a good chunk of success. 

Tracking your success is okay, but comparing will severely demotivate you. Imagine you start working out, and after six months, you compare yourself with Brad Pitt from Fight Club. That would be disappointing. On the other hand, if you compare it with your version of self six months before starting the workouts, you would be relieved. Self-comparison to measure your efforts is the best thing you can do to keep you motivated.

Conclusion: Self-discipline requires self-motivation to replace bad habits with good ones. The practice of self-discipline is the only thing common in all high achievers. Avoiding distractions, focusing on your goal and getting self-motivated are vital steps to lifelong self-discipline.