6 Key Examples Of Self-Discipline In Your Personal Life
Self-discipline is a character trait that most people admire. As a personality feature, it isn’t something you are simply born with. Self-discipline is trained over time. One of the easiest ways to train yourself to have greater discipline is to mirror the examples of self-discipline in other people.
If you’re not sure what self-discipline traits that other people have, it’s ok. Many people have a hard time identifying what elements make up self-discipline. Here are six examples of self-discipline that people have in their personal lives and that you can mirror to develop your own disciplined life.
Create Realistic and Adjustable Goals
For some reason when people set goals, they think that they need to be set in stone. The problem is that we rarely know how much effort it is going to take to meet the goal, until we are already in the middle of our progress.
An example given on a personal success blog: if you want to write a book, and you set yourself up to write 5000 words a day, you’re likely to burn out. Setting small goals that can change as you progress will help you achieve the bigger goal.
Instead of forcing themselves to write 5000 words a day, a person with good self-discipline would start small, like 240 words, and then when it is too easy they add more to the daily target. Self-discipline involves constant evaluation.
Stabilize Your Energy
People with high levels of self-discipline like to have consistent energy levels. If you have steady energy, you can better budget your time and energy. Most people can achieve this clean energy state by avoiding insulin spikes and watching their caffeine intake. A popular self-development blog points out that this may be a bit of a catch-22 as it already takes self-discipline to watch what you eat and drink in the first place.
Sleep
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking less sleep will make you more productive. Sleep connects directly to our impulse control. Our hormones and cognitive functions are all connected to proper sleep. Self-disciplined people make sure they get enough sleep daily.
Remove Temptation
Most self-disciplined people remove the temptations for their lives. Whether you are trying to avoid social media to get more work done, create a budget, or stop smoking. Removing temptation will be the quickest way to help develop the discipline needed to avoid the objects that are keeping you from your goal.
Long Term Thinking
One thing that highly disciplined people have is an ability to think in terms of the end game. Long-term thinking allows you to achieve your goals. Gratification delay is a key factor in success.
A personal development blog, Dumb Little Man, highlights this with the example of going to the gym. While the daily task may not appeal to the undisciplined, those who are successful don’t look at the daily task. They look at the end result.
Honesty
The final and hardest factor in developing self-discipline is honesty. Being brutally honest about your successes and failures is the only way that you can improve on the next project or attempt. It is easy to gloss over your failures. This common tendency to ignore our faults is not the best. Self-discipline is the ability to be honest about your actions or behavior even when that honesty may hurt you.
If you have any of these traits, chances are you have some level of self-discipline already. If you have all of these traits, you are probably a very disciplined person. Don’t worry if these habits seem foreign to you. Self-discipline is difficult. If it was, everyone would do it.
Practice incorporating these things into your daily life. Get more sleep, eat healthier, become honest and realistic about yourself. If you can do these things, the rest is easy as pie.