Develop your discipline
Tags: Discipline, Habit Building, Training And Development, Lifestyle

Develop your discipline

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So lets start with basics, what is discipline? This should be the first result in google dictionary:

The practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.

Some of you will have this one thought that only other people can build your discipline, which is kinda true but it doesn’t serve well… this mentality is developed in you because you always told to follow the rules in your schools and universities to follow the code of conduct but you never learned to know the answer for “why I should follow this rule X?”. So that brings us to the first step:

1. Learn why its necessary to follow any rule.

Discipline is built with set of rules, know the necessity of the rules.

Knowing why to follow certain rules makes you fight against the thoughts of breaking the rule coz you will feel guilty of breaking a rule that you understand the use of. When you first feel guilty to break a rule that is the time that you are ready to change. You can use this phase to test yourself that you can get disciplined. Once you learned why to follow it you can move on to the next step.

2. Own the rule.

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This step is easy to follow but hard to start this habit. So here we are trying to own the rule when a rule is too hard to follow. By making your own rules you build the willpower to be on track even if its hard. Try to be perfect and remember that you can’t be perfect, I am just telling you to “try to be perfect” not “be perfect”. Having the rules as your own is easy to follow coz you know you are cheating yourself when you break them.

3. Building resistance

Get ready for long paragraphs😅

So you’ve got to know your rule and owned it then what? You’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg the hardest of all habits is “resistance”. This is the second result in google dictionary:

The ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely

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The first result is also correct but I thought this would be easier for this particular topic. Why I portray this as the hardest one is because of its negative feedback… I’ve seen people who wanna change and they are strong enough to do all the necessary steps but they are not able to resist their regret.

This is a problem that is easy to fix at earlier stages and this is very common coz our brain is so powerful and capable but it likes shortcuts. This is the reason that even a good mathematician may answer simple questions incorrectly coz your brain will try to finish the computation fast as possible by comparing the current situation to past situations rather than computing every time.

This method is useful for certain cases but not when you are regretting your choices. Because your brain will reduce doing certain things if that yields a negative reward and this is ok. We need to stop doing things that yield negative reward but that doesn’t mean you are not capable you just need to find the proper way to maximize the reward. So how exactly tackle regret? Well, there are many answers to this question but I am gonna tell you what I did. I just stayed calm when I made mistakes in my schedule and yes I had regret but I tried to use my regret as fuel for my next mistake. So what exactly does this means?

Story time…

So I was trying to eat clean it was easier at first but one day I was craving so much so I ate like two ice creams and so many other junks but I didn’t realize what I was doing until the calorie tracker notified me to log the dinner. It was at this moment that I knew I f’ed up😅.

So all I did is logged my dinner and when I looked at the numbers I realized that I just ate 1.5 times more than what I needed for a whole day in just one sitting. Although I hated myself for that behavior until the next day when I was working out I was able to last long in the gym and that one day made me progress in my workout session and the next week my progression started moving up. But after some days my progression got plateaued and my cravings came back and I did the same mistakes but this time I was conscious of what I was doing. And again I was able to progress in my activity and this time I also noticed that even though I am eating a lot in a single sitting, my overall output from the gym is increased from the previous month when I didn’t make mistakes, coz the more I eat the more energy I get.

So what are your thoughts on my story?… There is nothing wrong with making mistake, they are there to show you what’s wrong with the approach. Just think how much we as a human could have progressed in everything if we never experienced any mistakes, we would’ve not progressed at all.

Real mistakes doesn’t need regrets

Don’t lose hope for your mistake use the regret as the fuel for the development coz your brain tells you that “this is one of your vulnerabilities that stops you from doing this” so your job is to patch that vulnerability not to lose hope in yourself. It’s important to listen to your brain (not always🙁).

4. Know your limits

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Comparing results can give you an estimate of how much you progressed but know your limits. You can’t compare yourself to someone who works differently than you. You might be following a certain procedure and others might follow something else and a different approach will give different outputs. So compare yourself to someone who is like you.

Eg, when you have a workout partner, you can compare yourself to him coz you both follow the same way of workout, and that will help you both to optimize your approach to your goals.

And not all humans are built the same way, we each have some defects. So if you cant cope up with your progress then try a different approach rather than losing your hope. And it’s ok to have a tighter limits that other people you are practicing daily to improve something and as far as you are consistent on your track you will extend your limits.

So now you’ve learned:

Why to follow a rule

Owning the rule

Building resistance

Known your limits

What next? Technically you’ve already in a good start to your goal but I also wanted to show you how much longer can you stay on track before giving up. Ask yourself these questions:

What made you to choose to be discipline?

Will you make time for practicing your discipline?

Do you have reasonable goals?

If your answer to the first question is “New Year resolution” or “Starting from Christmas I won’t do X” then you are not gonna stay on track for more than 2 weeks. And you cannot reach the goal if you are doing it for someone else,

Eg., Stop smoking coz your girlfriend doesn’t like it or stop swearing coz your co-workers don’t like it.

If your answer to the second question “yes”, you are good to go but if not it’s gonna be tougher to stay on track.

If you have reasonable goals then you will see even the small changes in you and hence you get motivated every time you realize the change. And this creates a motivation loop and you will not have problems doing what you are doing.

It’s always a good practice to split your end goal into micro goals and work for those micro-goals which in the end build the goal that you wanted to achieve.

Final thoughts:

I am not here to tell you what to do and what not I am just showing you the way that I was able to learn and keep up my discipline and I hope you will find this helpful too.

My apologies for poor english and poor presentation this is my first writing in history so I will improve in future writings and I will try to update this article when I find mistakes too.

Have a nice day, adios👋.