5 Small Suggestions To Create A Solid Foundation Of Discipline In Your Life
1 Make your bed in the morning
Although being a fantastic bi-product, the point of this isn’t to have a clean and tidy room. The point of this is to have just that small amount of consistency in your mornings, potentially a great building block for a powerful morning routine that involves self care. You’ll see the fruits of these small actions when you start pursing your actual ambitions.
2 Alter the phrasing to reflect an absolute position when talking to someone about a change you’ve made in your life.
Example: If you’ve been offered some soft drink but you’re trying to stay away from it, don’t decline and say you’re trying to stay away from it. Instead, say “I don’t drink soft drink”. Not only does this re-engineer the way you think about an action you’ve taken, but it also shows the other person, and yourself that there is no arguing this. This is absolute.
“Want a beer?” — “No thanks, I don’t drink”
“Let’s watch a movie tonight?” — “Sorry, I do strength training on Tuesdays. Wednesday maybe?”
Take a page out of the Sith’s book and deal in absolutes for a while.
3 Create a mastermind group in person, Slack, Discord, Facebook or any other platform.
A mastermind group should consist of 4–5 like minded people looking to improve, they should all be doing something important to them, something ambitious but not necessarily the same. Having a mix of people aspiring to progress in life/business/sport or anything else is actually a positive for a differing perspective.
Meet up weekly with this group, talk about your successes, failures, lessons learned for the week. Bounce ideas and support each other. This will allow you to be kept in check, improve and have a reason to continue progressing to match your peers. Accountability is the key word here. Not only will it speed up the process of improvement, you will be less likely to diverge from the right path.
Announcing your goals to all your friends and family on Facebook doesn’t hold you accountable to them, it makes you think you’re doing work and gives you a false sense of productivity. All the while making you look like a complete idiot when it doesn’t go to plan. Have a mastermind group instead, much more productive, supportive and useful.
4 Proactively modify your physical circumstances to promote discipline.
I’ve written about this extensively before, but look at it this way, the number one reason you do X self destructive behaviour is because you can do it. If you can’t do it, you simply won’t. This works with a great many things. If you have unhealthy snacks at home, you can and therefore will eat them because they’re there and a part of your environment. Remove them and add a healthy option and you’ll eliminate the temptation. Not only this, but after living without the temptation, you’ll realise how much you actually don’t need it. And once that realisation kicks in, you’ll be able to avoid it in circumstances where the environment contains whatever it is that you were avoiding, as you will have developed that extra bit of discipline from your earlier proactive activities.
5 Build up to it, don’t watch a motivational video going all in and burning out in the process.
If you sign up to the gym with the intention of going every day, promise yourself to read a book every week or go cold turkey on x, y or z, you’re going to experience what I like to call The New Years Resolution Effect™. You’ll start strong, crash and burn. Don’t do it, ease into it. Sustainability is key here.
- Start your exercise routine with easier exercises
- If you’re trying to learn something new, be patient and get through all the introductory ‘boring’ stuff first
- Break down large tasks into smaller more manageable chunks
If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, I’d really appreciate that lovely digital clap that seems to be the writers equivalent of crack cocaine on here.
Here’s another article that I think you’d like — It’s 8 Tiny Things You Can Do To Immediately Improve Your Life In Less Than 3 Minutes
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Sah out.
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