Self-discipline is a sign of inner strength and control of yourself, your actions, and your reactions. In short, it’s a way of getting what you want from life and becoming self-reliant.
Habitual self-discipline is one of the things that separate those who are successful from those who aspire to be.
From knowing why you’re building self-discipline to reviewing how you’re achieving your goals, this is how to get into the habit of being in control of your life.
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Know Why You’re Building Self-Discipline
There’s no point in building self-discipline into your life without a clear understanding of the benefits. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an organized or disorganized person, self-discipline is something that adds real benefit to your life. How? By helping you to achieve the things that are important to you.
Let me give you an example. Say you want to eat healthier. The reasons for this are manifold – such as helping the environment, promoting better treatment of animals, and feeling better in yourself. If you simply approach this with a general idea of eating healthier, it’s easy for you to fall back into bad habits. Similarly, if you rely on someone else to discipline you, you can slip as soon as they’re not around to help you.
Adding self-discipline to your life gives you control over the decisions you take to improve your life. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to manage processes when you’re completely responsible for them. Now I’ve outlined the benefits of building habitual self-discipline into your life, I’ll explain how you can do it.
Start With the Things That Will Improve Your Life
You should begin by deciding what self-disciplined habits you are going to build into your life. This will depend on the goals you have for yourself, but a few of the obvious ones are:
- Excercise
- Creativity
- Development
- Socializing
It helps to start by getting the top-level categories right – like the ones above. Once you’ve decided on these, pick one from each category to focus on – it’s always better to start small and make gradual increases, rather than the other way round. This is because it’s easier to stay in control, which means you’re more likely to persist with them.
Make a Routine That You Can Really Follow
Routine is everything in building habitual self-discipline into your life – it’s the glue that holds it all together. The most important part of your routine is that it must, must, must be one that you can keep to – if it’s too ambitious you’ll drop it before you really start to reap the rewards.
Speaking as someone who’s built self-discipline into their life, my personal view is that saying you’ll do something once a week can be counter-productive. Instead, I recommend you get in the habit of doing things every other week. This will make you feel as though there’s still flexibility in your life and won’t leave you feeling over-burdened.
My advice is that you then put your routine into a calendar, one that you tick off as you go along. This will make it real and remind yourself of what you’ve done and what’s to come.
Review What You’ve Done & Celebrate Your Routine
A key part of habitual self-discipline is to review your progress. This is to make sure you’re on track to reach your goals, but it is also to keep you motivated – it’s a chance to celebrate your successes and keep your habit being something positive.
Once a week, you should look back at what you’ve achieved over the previous seven days. Assess how you’ve done – where you’ve done well and not so well. But treat it positively – if things haven’t gone so well then the positive way of assessing this is to establish why and if you need to make tweaks/cuts.
Habitual self-discipline is hugely beneficial. This because it gives you a way of achieving your goals and bringing balance to your life.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your habits are – from as small as reading an online casino blog once a week to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the industry, to as big as running 10K every Saturday to train for a marathon.
What’s important is that you decide what you want to achieve and then build the habits to make it happen.