Trying to kick a bad habit? Eat healthier? Go to the gym every day? It’s important to achieve your goals and become your best self, but no one said it’d be easy. It takes a lot of self-discipline.
It may very well be possible that you may find self-discipline boring, many of us say that routine is not for us and that every day should be challenging and different. But the irony is being inconsistent needs consistency too! In this blog, let us delve into this aspect of self-discipline and understand its importance in everyday life.
What Is Self-discipline?
Self-discipline is the power to harness your thinking, feeling, and actions in a way that is well-suited to your goals. It is the ability to guide you toward the best action, even when there are temptations to move in the other direction. It involves many skills, including decision-making, time management, and behavior management. Many of us may have some negative associations attached to the idea of being self-disciplined; we believe that to become self-disciplined we must be rigid, boring, or even worse, self-punishing.
To think about it self discipline makes us more flexible, not less. Think of it as being like a flashlight—it’s a good tool to have when you need some light to see more clearly, but you don’t need to have it turned on or with you at all times.
Importance Of Self-discipline
Self-discipline is vital to avoiding temptation and reaching success. The benefits of having self-discipline are both varied and unlimited. Once you possess the power of self-discipline, you can turn an unfavorable situation into something that works in your favor. You can stick with things until you are satisfied with the outcome.
One way of looking at the value of self-discipline is to evaluate the costs of not having it. When we procrastinate, we suffer so many negative consequences. We lose self-confidence. We feel we need to avoid enjoying ourselves and our free time to work. We feel like we need to isolate ourselves from others. Procrastination is a huge and unnecessary expenditure of our energy and time, and sometimes our money, too.
One of the core principles of self-discipline is being personally accountable for your actions. When you accept 100 percent responsibility for your actions, you can assume full responsibility for what you do, how you do it, and how those actions and decisions play out. This may sound daunting at first, but when you examine this principle, you will realize it means accepting permission to be in control of your own life. How good is that?
When you start taking responsibility for your actions, you will experience many shifts. You’ll mean what you say, and you’ll do what you say for yourself and others. You’ll end up feeling more trustworthy, significant, and powerful. Accepting responsibility for your actions will help you develop more flexibility to stretch and grow in all areas of your life.
Along your path to self-discipline, you will pick up a variety of different skills, many of which may seem quite small in meaning and impact.
Working through and learning lots of smaller concepts and skills is exactly how you’re going to feel confident when you reach for higher, more meaningful aspirations and goals. Each time you learn something new or get through something you feared might not be doable, you get stronger. You begin to sense you can handle anything that comes your way.
There is a saying that ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. This means that apart from work, you need to get engaged in leisure and relaxation activities as well.
For these activities, you need to ensure, they form their daily schedule and devote time to all tasks and activities. Normally, when morning hours are devoted towards work duties, in the evening, you can take out time for leisure and relaxation activities. Self-discipline helps generate awareness regarding suitable leisure and relaxation activities.
How To Develop Self-discipline?
Form a Daily Routine in Activities
For a particular task instead of devoting a lot of hours one day, and none the other and then a few on another day and so on, allocate a specific time each day of the week for that task. Hold firm. Don’t set a goal other than time allocation, simply set the habit of routine.
Apply this technique to your homework or your projects, you will be on your way to getting things done. By doing this you are working on tasks in small increments, not all at once. You first develop a habit, then the habit does the job for you.
Recognizing Job Duties and Responsibilities
This is regarded as one of the fundamental measures of reinforcing self-discipline. In the majority of cases, we are required to carry out our job duties and responsibilities within as well as outside the homes, particularly when we are engaged in employment. When you are well aware in terms of your job duties and responsibilities and you are putting them into operation methodically and systematically, you will be able to reinforce self-discipline.
Creating a Balance between Personal and Professional Life
Many of us are overwhelmed by the number of job duties, that we have towards our family and home. To reinforce self-discipline, we need to create a balance between personal and professional lives.
For this, you need to ensure, you can take out time for all tasks and activities and put into operation, time management skills. These skills will facilitate making use of time efficiently and productively and assigning priorities to important tasks. These tasks are carried out first, whereas, the less important tasks are procrastinated.
Managing Psychological Problems
In life, we do experience situations that lead to stress, anger, frustration, anxiety, and depression. These problems affect physical as well as psychological health conditions.
Furthermore, they are regarded as major impediments within the course of the attainment of desired goals and objectives. Comprehensively understanding how to manage psychological problems will not only promote good health and well-being but also reinforce self-discipline.
Implementing Ways to Maintain Good Health
Good health will facilitate participation in all tasks and activities. Get yourself engaged in exercise and physical activities, diet and nutrition, positive thinking, obtaining medical check-ups on regular basis, forming amicable terms and relationships with others within as well as outside the home, maintaining cleanliness, and so forth. When you are well aware in terms of ways to maintain good health, self-discipline will be reinforced.
Conclusion
Self-discipline can be taught to a certain extent but putting it into practice is the responsibility of the person itself, also you may not understand its importance till you do not practice it yourself. Self-discipline is like a muscle. The more you exercise it the stronger it gets-Daniel Goldstein.
Keep coming back to this space for more such articles and do let us know your views regarding the same in the comments section below.
Author: Dr Pooja Nilgar (Content writer and editor)
References
Kapur, R., 2021. Enhancing Self-Discipline is the Key to augment Professionalism and Competence. The Journal of Social Sciences Studies and Research, 1(06), pp.5-14.
