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Central to success is the ability to be self-disciplined. Irrespective of the domain in which you intend to be successful, be it in your financial, professional or personal life, it is impossible to make headway without self-discipline.
Self-discipline demands that you are in control of your excesses, base desires, emotions, and habits. Self-control is a germane part of self-discipline. This control is not just for the sake of it. We all have goals, things we aspire to. Achieving these things are dependent on keeping a lot of things in check so you can focus all your energy on the actualisation of your goals.
A talk with, read up on, and study of the world’s successful men and women is incomplete without a reference to the centrality of self-discipline to their success. They, without any exception, extol the virtues of working hard, working smart and remaining self-disciplined.
It does not come in easy, however. It is not going to happen overnight. You would start and fail a few times as old habits are very difficult to do away with. It is hard to subsume your desires as you go to make the best of your time and resources.
It is important at this junction to disabuse you of the myth that self-discipline can be equated to denying yourself a chance to live good, or fine. No. It is a decision to do all things in moderacy, to do things at the right time, to prioritise what is and what is not important. With such an attitude, you are better able to reach your goals, keep your word, be time-conscious, be more productive and also work on your strengths.
Like Theodore Roosevelt once said, “with self-discipline most anything is possible.”
The question now is, how. How do you go about working on being self-disciplined? How do you keep to it when your old but bad habits try to rear their head? Herein are a few tips on how to go about it. Before going into that, know that it is all on you. You can have help but the decision is all yours.
First off you need to recognise you need to work on your self-discipline. If you do not think it is an issue, if you do not acknowledge it, you cannot fix it.
With that done, you have to control your habits. Those things that you do regularly, without thought because it is something you usually do. This is because over 40 percent of what we do is rooted in our habits. Being in control of your habits means being more in control of your actions and decisions.
We tend to have more bad habits that are detrimental to our lives than good habits that help to move us forward. Of course, bad habits usually are more fun but they are not really, in the long run, beneficial.
When you get the hang of controlling your habits, create new ones. Create new habits, good ones, that you know would take you closer to your goal of being self-disciplined. Over time, these new habits would replace the old ones and become the things you do automatically.
Another surefire way of developing self-discipline is imbibing a culture of contentment. Contentment does not preclude the drive to be successful. It is an appreciation for that which you already have achieved. Goals should be chased but not with a do or die attitude. Apart from taking too much out of you, it denies you a chance to be as objective as you can be.
Furthermore, make a conscious effort to stick to your decisions no matter what. Fight the desire to procrastinate or to give up. When you fail, get back on, you will not get it on the first try.
The last tip I would share here is that you surround yourself with people who would hold you accountable. Friends or peers who would drive you to be the best you can be.
