Self-Discipline

You might want to ask yourself: Am I well-disciplined?  Do I find it easy to do all the small steps that are needed to reach my goals?  Am I able to find the patience?  Do I find myself willing to do the hard things right now so that I'm able to reap the rewards later?  Am I able to activate myself at will to get something done or build momentum?  Or is "later" a word I tell myself too often?

     Discipline can have multiple definitions.  One definition might be the willingness to do whatever action or task, despite if it is hard or something you don’t particularly enjoy, in order to make progress towards what you want to accomplish.  To take it further, it might be an action or task that you have to do over and over again for some extended period of time.  For certain really important behaviors you may be trying to achieve, you may need to repeat that action or task until it becomes a habit for you.  At that point, it can be a habit that lasts for a long/designated period of time or even indefinitely.

     For some, discipline can come very easily or naturally.  For most, discipline may be one of the more difficult proficiencies to develop.  Give yourself some grace and know that each of the skills & habits you are building can be worked on, reinforced, and strengthened over the course of years or decades.  One can get better and better over time, and you don’t have to have complete mastery of any skill. Getting better and making progress is success.  As long as you have some discipline, it is enough to push you through to advance in various areas.  Of course, if this ability for you is very advanced, it would likely accelerate the growth and development of many facets of your life.

     Going through some examples, we can see how discipline is very important and how far reaching this ability is.  If you wanted to work on your health & fitness and asked yourself to do 2 pushups every day for 1 week, it might be a pretty simple task if a person has some level of discipline.  For someone that lacks discipline, this task may only see through one or two days before the person either quits or conveniently forgets about their own goal to accomplish it for a whole week.  The same might be the case when it comes to someone’s diet.  A person may be instructed by their doctor to eat healthier due to a health concern.  If the person lacks discipline, he/she may not be able to comply with the doctor’s orders no matter how severe the health concern might be.  A person with great discipline might be able to adopt a health-conscious diet immediately and never look back.  It can literally be a life-or-death situation and a person’s discipline may be able to help the situation greatly or not if discipline hasn’t been developed well enough.

     Discipline can play a role in something as simple as learning.  A person may know that they should study because he/she has signed up for a course and a test is coming up.  Or it could apply to someone that is developing their career and knows they should be learning some skills that are used "on-the-job".  If a person has high enough proficiency with discipline, he/she will be able to study for the upcoming test or learn the skill(s) needed for their job.  A person who lacks discipline might end up playing video games instead of studying for the test or spend too much time at the bar rather than spending that time learning the skills needed for his/her career.

     Learning personal stress management techniques is something that requires some level of discipline too. Pretty much learning anything will require some discipline so that is one reason why it is so important.  Without it, a person would likely learn/do much less than they would otherwise be capable of.  Discipline touches, at least on some level, most other abilities a person may have.  It probably has the most obvious and visible impacts on fitness/health and how the two can have a symbiotic relationship with one another.

What can help you increase your abilities to keep good discipline?

Self-Discipline