How building self discipline can help you live a better life.

      Hey practitioners, today's topic is going to be on how to build Self-Discipline.

Have you ever procrastinated on work so long that you didn't get proper sleep, where have you ever binge on food even though you're on a diet.

Both of these actions show that you're not self disciplined and need to improve it in order to lead to a more happy and healthy life.

Today we'll be going over five steps to become more disciplined in your day-to-day life.

Change Your Environment

When you first begin to change, it will be hard to get away from the habits that are unconsciously ingrained in your mind.

Most of our actions in our lives are instinctive. So, if you have the same environment it will be much more difficult to better yourself, well change yourself.

If a bad habit of yours is procrastinating by binge watching TV, playing video games for too long or compulsively watching youtube videos.

Then rather than locking yourself in your room, you can work in a public library in more public area like a living room or with around other people or you could go outside to the park depending on the weather.

Getting away from the usual environment by going to Starbucks does not make your mind trigger the habit loop that it developed in your basement for instance.

Check out the book  Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg for more information on this step. You will learn many good lessons from from that book.

 Remove Bad Habits First Then Replace With Good Habits

Based on personal experience that is almost impossible to add in good habits on top of bad habits. You have to remove bad habits first and then replace them with better habits.

Back to our example of watching too many youtube videos or watching TV, when you know you have work to do. Instead of either trying to add meditation to the mix on top of that which you will definitely procrastinate on or going the opposite direction and removing YouTube for having nothing else to do, leading back to that bad habit you have to find and replace.

If you spend two hours a day on social media limit your time on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to one hour a day using a Chrome extension on it stay focused and then replace the other hour with working hour.

This will provide a great return with a better body, better looks and at the same time with the same reward of watching entertaining videos online.

Scheduled Breaks

 

To stay productive on your new mission on being more disciplined you cannot expect to work for hours on end without work quality suffering were you just giving up out of exhaustion.

Over time you will become better at this but you should schedule breaks no matter what.

For example, when finishing homework at the library and let's say you have five assignments for math, science, history, literature and foreign language.

Each time you finish an assignment it may take you 30 minutes. So take a five-minute break. This way you get to enjoy your breaks without the feeling of knowing that you haven't done anything in two hours.

You also get your work done faster than just trying to plot through it all in one shot

Journal and Schedule Your Day

Scheduling and setting goals for yourself is a very important aspect of achieving anything there's a very solid analogy where if you want to go to Goa from Bangalore, either you can use the GPS, enter the location, find the most efficient plan and head there in a few hours.

Or you can be the person who drives around randomly hoping to make it to your destination.

This would take much much longer. That's what clarity is. It's being able to know where your goals are also known as your purpose and to be able to map it out in short term goals for each day of the week.

If you don't have an attack plan for each day you'll most likely have random bursts of motivation, do a little bit of work and then get bored.

With a plan there is no excuse, no need for willpower. You just have to do what you plan for yourself.

Enjoy the process

This is the last step to growing self discipline. Most people go through their day-to-day life doing something that they do not really enjoy. They do it for the sole purpose of maintaining their standard of living through a paycheck.

It may even be a large paycheck. However, if you do not enjoy what you were doing while you were doing it then you will never achieve mastery and you will never be truly discipline.

I'm not saying that if you go into a field you find fulfilling every single moment will bring you ecstasy. But if you stick with something that you find a definite interest in you enjoy the challenges that come along with it.

The learning curve, the slow progression as well as the victories. Don't just look at the end goal because that's essentially saying that you wish time would pass by a two-year goal, which is also basically saying that you want to end your life sooner. 

Thanks for reading..