How to hone Discipline...yep, you actually can
Just Start.
Two pretty mundane words but when put together, they carry oomph and force and maybe even a friendly nudge or an eyebrow-cocked finger wagging.
How many times have you said to yourself things like “I’ll start tomorrow” or “when the First of the month comes along, I’ll begin” or the perennial favorite, “when I’m not as busy”. All those comments have been uttered since the beginning of time-or so it seems-regarding everything from our weight and habits to goals and aspirations for our lives. Yes, you can put me down for a handful of those, too.
Are people born with discipline or is it something honed over a lifetime? What about the young student in class who is super-organized and good about doing their homework without being asked and then the kiddo that sits in the very next seat needs a little extra handholding when they are checking things off their list? How does that happen? Are they just born with some little gene that travels down through their family and lands on them? Consider the flip: the adult who has tried again and again and yet again to latch onto a particular new habit (or break an old one). They’ve read books on the subjects, spoken with friends about their mission, employed apps and trackers, and yet, it still hasn’t been resolved 100%. A true question for the ages. So maybe, there’s a little to the gene theory and maybe a little to the must-be-taught-or-fought-for theory.
Either way, here is a little fact about discipline that can help you: discipline increases the more you do it. Turns out, it’s just like any other any other muscle in your body in that the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. How’s that for a great piece of information that sounds like there’s more in your favor that you realized.
Just like strengthening a physical muscle, you need to take it a few steps at a time. You wouldn’t just get up one day and attempt to run a marathon, would you? Of course not, because your body would completely revolt against you and you’d be left pretty broken after attempting something like that. You’d need to train a little each day, building up your running slowly and training your muscles to perform how you need them to perform.
Discipline is no different. If you give yourself too lofty a goal to achieve, your discipline will give up the ghost before you get there. The key is to strengthening your “discipline muscle” is to give it small goals at first and then build up. Bet you didn’t even know you had this ability, did you? And here you (we) were thinking that we were either a “disciplined person” or “not a disciplined person”.
You see, Dorothy, you’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.
So, a few tips to work on this muscle:
Choose a manageable, achievable goal that you can complete in a certain(shorter) time-frame.
Define why you want to achieve this goal.
Preemptively identify stumbling blocks. Be prepared, just like a scout.
Edge in better choices to edge out the bad.
And finally, keep track of the journey on a daily basis and remember that you’ll have good days and not-so-great days, but those not-so-great days do not mean you’ve blown it. Keep at it, that’s what counts.
You got this, Dorothy.