By Manish Sinha
The biggest saboteur in your life is procrastination. You can overcome this procrastination by only and only self-discipline. Self-discipline is an important part of life that allows us to set and achieve goals, stay organized, and avoid procrastination. Another form of self-discipline is self-control.
Self-discipline if practiced can lead to a great life and long-term success in life. It’s required in all walks of life, be it relationships, fitness, work ethics, etc. Knowingly or unknowingly we all follow self-discipline in some cases.
Self-discipline was taught by our parents without mentioning the coined word called Self-discipline, to a larger extent our school and teachers too — especially of not breaking the rules of school required a lot of effort and strength and you all will agree to it. Recall your school days, you had to sit for studies for 2 hours in the evening mandate from parents, time allocation for playing games, school homework and innumerable such examples are there where we followed self-discipline.
A few more to name are: reaching the office on time, reaching a theatre on time for watching a movie and catching a flight or train.
Apart from procrastination, another culprit which does not allow you to practice self-discipline is multitasking. This only leads to distraction and helps in digressing from the core objective of completing a particular task.
We all love to be the way we want to be and do not want to restrict ourselves, but rather commit ourselves. Instead, what we try doing is doing things that matter to us the most and are important to us.
Self-discipline requires practice and nurturing and takes time to develop. With practice, one can find out how one can improve self-discipline. But let’s define self-discipline.
Table of Contents
What is Self-discipline?
In my view, it’s all about how consistently we are able to control our actions, emotion, and feelings.
The greatest example of self-discipline can be understood by people who invest in Life insurance or have taken loans. The installments need to be paid on a particular date without fail i.e sticking to a plan of paying their debts, savings, and investing.
An example of controlling your emotion is you are a nonvegetarian and you order a salad instead of fried chicken. This is a controlled action and is a learned skill.
Benefits of Self Discipline:
By this time you would have understood the benefits of self-discipline. Still, I am listing a few for your understanding:
Lowers Anxiety:
If you have good self-control you will be able to complete your task on time leading to less stress and you are less likely to feel the stress.
Ability to Achieve Long-Term Goals:
Having good self-control, your focus on work will increase as you will be able to avoid distractions and will increase your ability to do a task faster and achieve your goals.
Feel happier:
When you achieve your goals in the time you feel happier as you can see your progress
Become Resilient:
When you build discipline, you are able to avoid temptation. It makes you more resilient and you are able to keep your motivation high.
Now that you have understood discipline and its benefit the question that might be arising in your mind would be, “but how do we bring control over our emotions, feelings, and actions?”
You have seen people going to Gym for fitness and building their muscles. Here we develop our mental muscles. This requires intentional exercise and over a period of time, we will be able to build our self-discipline.
Here are SIX practices that you need to follow for self-control.
Self Control Practices
1. Understand and acknowledge your Weakness:
We all have weaknesses whether this is for food, social media, or video game. These have effects on us. Recognizing your weakness is the first step towards making a positive change. Knowing your weakness is nothing but self-awareness which is a tool to evaluate yourself for expanding your comfort zone and is a continuous evaluation process.
A simple example I think of is customers migrating from key-based handsets to android-based handsets or apple phones. People understood the power and skilled themselves from their comfort zone to adapt to new technology.
Do due daily diligence, evaluate and make changes with the thing you truly want.
2. Setting Clear Goals:
Set goals that can be measured and writing them down makes it more real. At the same time, you need to have a clear vision, of what you want to accomplish.
NOTE: When you set your targets, set them small. It will motivate you to achieve higher targets and have patience with yourself and keep reminding yourself where you started.
Example: If your target is to run 5 kms daily. Start with 1 Km daily and then increase gradually.
3. Remove Temptations:
If things are out of control and out of sight, you are in a better position to have self-control, since temptations and distractions are out of sight.
Example: If you are a social media geek then put your phone away in mute condition while you are concentrating on your work. What you have done here is you have put your distraction away and you can focus on your work.
Initially, you will feel the discomfort, but it’s worth if you want to master self-control.
4. Eat Healthy & Regularly:
Regular eating and healthy eating balance any disbalance in your body. If you skip your food you would have realized that at times you feel tired and lazy to carry out work. Hence it is important to have regular food and Healthy food in place of junk food.
5. Treat yourself with breaks and rewards:
Self-discipline means changing your normal routine, which can be uncomfortable. So while you are practicing self-discipline you need to give yourself a break and also treat on achieving any goals met. This will motivate you to take further action toward your set goal.
6. Forgive yourself and Move ahead with your prioritization:
You will have ups and downs, failure and success. When you meet a setback acknowledge it, understand what caused it, and just move on. Holding it back will only lead to dissatisfaction, irritation, and frustration. But when you move ahead you tend to remain positive and in better control of yourself.
A lot depends on how you act. I have written a guide as to how you can improve yourself through self-discipline and attain success in life.
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