If you want to achieve your goals, you must discipline yourself. Lack of discipline is the biggest obstacle to achieving success.
Try to find some time to develop discipline. This will help you do what you should, even when you don't want to, and ultimately achieve success in achieving your various goals.
The discipline to consistently get the job done is the hardest thing to achieve and is therefore valued by employers more than any other skill.
Stay focused
Set goals every morning before your day begins, and plan them the evening before you go to bed the next day.
Choose a quiet place and time to focus and visualize what you want to achieve in the short and long term. This will help you create a list of your most important goals for the next day.
Along with what you are thinking about, imagine the feeling of success that will come with achieving your goal. Start your day with a productive and positive mindset.
Planning
How to become a disciplined person? At the initial stage of working on this issue, it is necessary to allocate some time. And this will already be the first step towards self-organization. You need to sit down and calmly think about a plan that will allow you to achieve your goal. It should include the actions that will need to be taken to implement the plan. Psychologists recommend calling this plan. For example, “Discipline yourself.” Such a headline will become a person’s main goal. In addition, the plan must contain columns with specific names. These include: Actions and Getting Started, Possible Difficulties and Coping Strategies, and Report. Let's consider what the content of these columns should be.
Learn to relax
An important key to success is getting your mind and body ready for the day. Establish a certain sleep routine that will help you draw a line and end the day.
Whatever bothers you before bed, be able to negotiate with yourself to let it go. The thing that bothers you can be your number one goal the next day.
A great practice is to keep a journal and write about your day before going to bed, this will help you end the day emotionally. Putting your thoughts in writing will help you find a solution and reduce the impact of stress before bed. This is a great way to get rid of negative energy accumulated throughout the day.
Don't strive for perfection
It often happens that a perfect result is not required. It is enough just to perform your tasks well. But people who strive for perfectionism focus on details and small nuances. In the end, this only leads to wasted time and sometimes bad results. The secret of organization: complete your tasks well and know how not to waste your energy on trifles that are not worth it.
Good and successful businessmen say that many novice entrepreneurs cannot start their own business for a long time because they are afraid of making mistakes on some small detail, so even before launching they polish their product to a shine. However, this does not bear any fruit and only delays the launch and real problems and tasks for improving the product as a whole. Do it to the “3rd level”, and then, if necessary, bring the business/task/product to “4th level” - maximum! There is no limit to perfection.
Eat well
Good nutrition helps the brain work better and provides the body with energy. Start your day with a high protein, low carb breakfast.
To avoid a food coma during lunch, avoid starchy carbohydrates and alcohol. Eat natural foods. Eat greens for carbohydrates and lean meats for protein, and drink enough water.
Stay away from sugar, excessive caffeine and nicotine. This will help you maintain energy throughout the day. You can use protein bars or almonds as a snack and to help maintain optimal blood sugar levels.
Strategy for overcoming difficulties
How to improve your own organization? To do this, a person sometimes needs to turn to someone for advice or use the brainstorming method. Such ideas will be the most remarkable options reflected in this column. The ways in which a problem was previously solved unsuccessfully can become patterns of action. They should be applied in the future in certain situations.
When a person knows that his previous experience is unlikely to be successfully used as a strategy for overcoming difficulties, he should come up with new, more effective techniques. For example, when an alarm clock is unable to get a person out of bed with its ringing, it should be placed further away. In this case, to turn off the signal you will have to get up, which will force you to finally wake up.
Get things done
Make decisions early. If you decide to train every morning before work, then don’t allow yourself to put off training, no matter how much you want to. If you decide to take on a major project in the morning, don’t change your mind. The decision was made - we need to follow it.
Without the habit of getting things done, there will be no discipline. Your mind most often becomes your worst enemy, and when push comes to shove, it tries to tempt you into laziness and procrastination. You must win this battle and do everything planned.
Why do some managers try not to notice violations of labor discipline?
I know that many new managers deliberately allow looseness in the team. What pushes them to such “ostrich” behavior?
A banal lack of management skills and fear. It is very difficult psychologically to oppose yourself to an entire team. Therefore, when employees begin to test the boss’s strength, he most often gets lost.
In order to be seen as modern and democratic, the young leader takes as a basis (sometimes unconsciously) the tactic of “ingratiation.” He indulges most of the whims of his employees, does not notice their antics in the hope that over time his approach will be highly appreciated by employees who will be imbued with respect for such a humane leader.
Unfortunately, this never happens. I myself stepped on the same rake when I took over the management of three cafes for the first time. The chefs of these establishments constantly gave me mini-strikes before important banquets.
I had to give them some concessions so as not to stop the work of the cafe. As a result, the work process turned into a real farce. I decided to fire the troublemakers and built relationships with new employees in a completely different way.
Encourage yourself
When you do something that requires you to be disciplined, successful completion rewards your efforts. When success looms before your eyes, reward yourself upon completion of the work.
Feel happy and proud of yourself. Share your achievements with your loved ones and invite them to dinner. Offer to celebrate the completion of hard work and future achievements.
Every time you witness your own success, you see that your habit of discipline is paying off. It motivates you.
To stay disciplined, you must adopt the mindset of “Just do it.” Don't let your mind tell you what you need to do to achieve certain things.
Every day, commit to being disciplined, healthy, with good energy, and a motivated, positive mindset.
The first thing in the morning is to reduce the influence of stress factors. This is the only way you can focus on your long-term goals for the rest of the day. When you discipline yourself, you will be less stressed and this will make you more successful.
How a habit is formed
Agree, how great it is to have healthy habits, such as reading every day before bed or eating vegetables for dinner, and do them without thinking. How do you form a habit of doing something?
Let's start with the most common myth about 21 days: supposedly you only need to “endure” for 3 weeks, after which you will automatically live the life you want. This statement was made by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who noticed that it took his patients about 21 days to get used to their new appearance. In reality, this does not always work out.
Man is a rational being, so he tries to act and live in a way that will be the least resource-intensive and most enjoyable. Fear, inherent in us by nature, protects us from dangers and, in relation to modern life, from discomfort. That's why people quickly get used to junk food, lying on the couch, and so on - because this is the fastest and easiest way to get pleasure.
The more complex a habit you want to get into, the more time you will need. You need to develop something like a reflex in yourself.
Here's an example: you need to get used to jogging. Promise yourself to watch an episode of your favorite TV series after your run - this will give you more motivation, and you will be eager to start running as quickly as possible to get the reward. You should also create an atmosphere for yourself that will encourage you to go for a run: you can hang photos of athletes on the walls, join runner communities on social networks. Your environment should constantly remind you of your new habit, and then the process will go much faster and easier.
But remember that you should not force yourself to do anything through force. If you just can’t bring yourself to go for a run and turn it into your daily routine, maybe you should think about another sport?
Let's continue to learn how to form habits. If your self-discipline has not yet been pumped up to a level where you can easily control yourself, involve your friends in this matter. Share with someone in your circle that you now run every morning, and ask a friend to ask you for encouragement every day. A sense of responsibility and a reluctance to fall in the eyes of those around you will help with motivation for the habit. Ideally, of course, you would be such a friend to yourself, but everything has its time - we have just begun. There are also many apps that track your habit formation: Daily Habits, Habitica, iDoneThis, Productive, Coach.me.
We also recommend: How to defeat procrastination: step-by-step instructions for young scientists
A common mistake that many people make is the desire to get “everything at once.” Let's continue to look at the example of jogging. For example, you decided to start tomorrow and immediately ran 10 kilometers. You have never run before. Of course, your body is in shock, all your muscles hurt, and thoughts about the next workout fill you with dread. Always start small, then a new business will be easier and without disappointment, and nothing motivates like your own successes, even small ones. The same principle applies to scientific papers. Do you agree that the phrase “write a dissertation” is a little scary and prevents you from getting started? And if you promise to write just a page a day, then things will go easier and, surprisingly, faster. But don’t forget that you need to write every day.
The main factor when forming a new habit is regularity. Skipping one day will set you back to the beginning of the journey, especially if you started the task relatively recently. What to do when days come when you don’t want anything at all? Give yourself some slack, but don't give up the habit entirely for that day. Can't bring yourself to go running? At least go for a walk. Do you want to watch TV instead of a book? Promise yourself that after reading 10 pages, turn on your favorite program.
Self-discipline
The internal logic behind discipline is to establish a more constructive relationship and improve the balance of power between your higher executive functions: your rational adult mind and your inner three-year-old who makes an overwhelming number of decisions.
Don't console yourself, that little asshole is still out there. The human personality is like a tree: it grows outward, adding layers, but the insides never go away (well, technically, old trees are often hollow inside, and old people often shed the outer layer and turn back into children, but generally speaking, all metaphors have boundaries).
The baby is still there, with his impulsiveness and distracted attention, with his myopic desire for immediate gratification. Overall, you want to be in control of your higher functions. This is more difficult to do if you are tired or stressed, hence the importance of concentration and meditation, as well as managing your external environment.
