How self-discipline can make you a better person?
One of the traits that I noticed from successful people, whether millionaires or celebrities, that they are all able to have a good self-control and stay incredibly disciplined in whatever they do.
Therefore, over the years, I learnt that self-discipline is one of the key steps to success. Self-discipline is a habit that requires continuous effort and a trait that most successful people had adapted into their lives, hence; they could improve and sustain their progression.
From my experience, I had devised three steps that I follow to stay disciplined in my life. Nowadays many people seek this sort of advice, but this is coming from personal experience; earlier in my life, I had a violent life style and I was far away from a disciplined manner. I used to be a messed up person with a lot of aggregation, and especially after my military service, I had an extremely violent attitude with people especially towards the ones that were much better in their careers out of jealousy. For someone from a background like me and the mistakes I did; I knew what it was like to procrastinate, I knew what it does like to feel depressed, not wanting to do anything and was much tending to giving up on life. Somehow, I managed to get out of that state, and it was through applying these three steps, which I did not figure out at that time, over 8 years ago. Thus, if you would take an action based on my experience, I can assure that you are going to get some results, as I totally believe that we learn through incidents rather than books, and through going into the trouble itself rather than hearing about who came out of it. You will always come to the point when you have a disciplined life; your life would become more a content one. Having a self-discipline actually gives you freedom to live your life under your own control.
From my point of view, a self-discipline actually is the ability to self-control your primitive basic desires. If you look into our daily negative habits, like leaving the alarm snoozing, like no venturing out, not doing new things, like not becoming an entrepreneur. If you look at it from a primitive view, where we survive and reproduce, so guess what, who wouldn’t want to lay in bed, who wouldn’t want to play it safe, who wouldn’t want to know what to do every day and not feel confused, we all basically do by nature desire forces. We are designed to survive, so people who give in to that are often giving into it because they don’t know otherwise, most people are living in accordance to what they know and feel secure about, however; I know if you are reading this, then you aren’t one of them. Then you are not average, because this is the behavior of average people, average people don’t know how to control their minds, they don’t have that knowledge, and that’s why they hit the snooze bottom, procrastinate and not doing something big simply because it feels nature to be lazy.
Every person at any point know that it is all about mind and body connection, the mind pushes the body to rest and the mind drives your finger to press the snooze button, but when you learn how to control your mind then you are one of those who have really made it big and now you own your self-discipline.
The first thing I did eight years ago, was to change my identity, and the biggest reason for that was because our behavior won’t ever change from our internal mapping, in other words by “The most powerful force in the human psyche is people’s need for their words and actions to stay consistent with their IDENTITY — how we define ourselves.” By Tony Robbins, so how you view yourself right now tells you who you are, so if you reveal yourself as a lazy person you will be a lazy person; however if you view yourself as a productive person with vision, you will be that person even if it might not be vividly true at the moment. Sometimes it takes time to realize that your goals are not meant to be achieved but its true purpose is to understand who you need to become for your goals to be attained. In order to view who you need to be to make your dreams come true, you need just to think about it; every goal will shape you into the person you are going to be, every goal is going to change you positively. Now think about your old goals and how they changed you, the question will always be, who are you now without your name? What labels have you enforced on yourself? am I fearless who eats uncertainties at breakfast? If I keep saying that to myself, I will be a fearless person and that exactly what I did eight years ago. I changed how I view myself, back then I viewed myself as a violent broke loser with a messed up career path and life ,and all it took was to know that I won’t ever deviate from my internal mapping and deep inside. I felt that I can make a difference and that is when I started to believe in myself and change my future identity.
Become that person you want to be in advance to achieve your goals, you have to start now to be able to be that person. To be a millionaire, you have to act like it today and start your journey to your life dream.
The second point that I learnt was to always always set a big forfeit. We as human beings are normally motivated through avoiding pain and seeking pleasure; therefore, the way you can actually influence yourself to be more disciplined is to actually penalize yourself for not achieving a goal. In my opinion it should be extremely painful and uncomfortable for anyone who doesn’t fulfil his true self; hence, I always teach people how to self-forfeit for not achieving their own dreams as the more pain you attach to any failure, the more likely you are going to achieve those dreams. When I failed to keep my marriage going, I decided to give away all my money to my family and friends and rather support them as a lesson for me to not accept failure again without punishing myself. I felt pain about my divorce but I had the pleasure of supporting my family and the same goes when you achieve your goals, you need to reward yourself, rub your back and say well done, we made it.
The last step that I learnt was that the more you put into believing in your dreams and who you wish to become, the more you make it more accountable to happen. Finding and believing in your goals can help generate the needed mindset that imped your new identity and internal mapping in order to visualize your goal achieved. Just like what most motivational speakers tell us “show me yourself and your friends and I will show you your future”, so always believe in your dreams and find people who believe in the same thing to hold you accountable.
It is very important to take it seriously and set yourself in the progress to win. Now how you can set yourself to win when you know that there will be times when you are down and defocused. I always have a strategy that keeps me improving my goals every day, which is that I set my goals higher almost every other day and when the bad days come ahead, I look back and see what I have been through and what I have learnt through my journey to keep moving forward.
The key to success and becoming a better version of yourself is self-discipline along with will and power then you will start to see more results. You would only get the life you always wanted to have once you start believing in yourself.
