The Easiest, Fool-proof Way To Become Self-disciplined

Have you ever set up a personal goal, only to give up a few attempts later?

Have you ever promised something to yourself that you’ll make serious changes, only to lose the battle as soon as the first few discomforts set in?

I certainly have – for far too many times. It’s an awful feeling isn’t it – when you know you have let yourself down yet again. I used to beat myself up, berate myself and call myself names in an effort to motivate myself to keep my own promise. It never worked. What I ended up with was a low self-esteem, low self-respect, and worst of all, zero self-trust.

Losing self-trust is the worst thing you could ever do. When you have no self-trust, you don’t believe in yourself. Your word means nothing to you, so you regard your own promises as worthless. This causes you to second-guess yourself, to doubt yourself. You doubt your own abilities to accomplish anything, because you have come to regard yourself as unreliable. This in turn creates a very negative self-image, which guarantees your failure even before you start.

It’s a vicious cycle, and if you are in it now you have come to the right place.

So how do you break this cycle? How do you ensure you follow through? How do you get yourself to stay focused and stick to that exercise regime, or that new diet, or that new way of thinking and behaving?

The first step is to understand that becoming the person you really want to be will not just happen overnight. It is a process that requires commitment, continuous self-improvement, and self-evaluation.

If you really want to make real, long-term changes in your life, there are two primary things you must do: 1) You must continually think the right thoughts and 2) You must continually do the right things. By ‘right’, I mean those thoughts and actions that will get you where you want to be.

Your success will depend on how well and how consistently you “stay on the right track”.

You need tools that will keep you on the right mindset. You need tools to help you consistently do the right things.

There are several ways to stay on track effectively, but the most powerful tool I have come across is having your own life practice, something which I call your ‘Power Ritual’.

What is a Power Ritual?

A Power Ritual is a specific activity (or set of activities) that:

* Affirms your core being or your highest Self

* Gets you closer to your goals

* Enriches you, nurtures you, energizes you, fulfils you

* frees you from your fears or limiting beliefs

* stimulates you to grow and boosts your confidence to live your best life

* make you feel truly alive and one with life

The ‘what’ is not really important, as long as it serves your purpose. Some people feel most focused when they are active, like when they are dancing or playing their favourite sport; Other people feel they are at their best when they are creating something like painting, baking, cooking, knitting, photographing. How about you? What makes you feel truly powerful, what makes you feel you’re in “your element”?

The 3 Characteristics of an Effective Power Ritual

Personal Development is a process of unfolding, of blossoming into the fullness of who you choose to be right now. It’s a process of realizing your loftiest dreams, your highest hopes, of fully becoming the person you truly want to be.

This unfolding however, can only be brought about through your actions, for it is through your actions that you redefine and recreate who you are.

But you cannot recreate or redefine who you are just by any action. It takes a specific type and quality of action to shape your life’s destiny.

In order to recreate who you are, in order to design your life, you must execute focused, consistent, conscious actions.

Focused – your attention and energy are directed toward a clear purpose, a well-defined target

Consistent – you must perform them often enough to create the desired change in you

Conscious - you must execute them with absolute awareness; You must be 100% Present.

How to Craft Your Very Own Power Ritual

Step 1. Identify your Top Priorities

It’s possible that you may want to change a lot of things and achieve a lot of goals. In fact, one of the most common reasons why people fail to stay on track is because they overwhelm themselves with far too many targets. We’ll discuss more about this in later articles, but for now, I want you to focus on the top one or two things that will make the greatest impact in your life.

For example, you may say this is your health because you’re thinking that if you lose weight, then you will look better. If you look better, then you’ll feel a lot more confident. If you feel more confident, then you’ll perform better at your job, which will cause you to earn more money and enable you to go out more and meet more people, therefore increasing your chances of meeting your dream man/woman, which in turn will make you so much happier.

You get the idea.

Once you have identified your top priority, just focus on this for now. The key is to take it slow, and to avoid overwhelming yourself. What you want is an easy but steady progress.

Step 2.  Take up a Specific Activity

The second step is to list possible enjoyable activities that will help you achieve your priority goal.

Examples are:

Physical goal – yoga, dancing classes, swimming, running, becoming Vegetarian, cycling, playing Tennis, learning Martial Arts, etc.

Personal development goal – Learn how to play a musical instrument, learn to speak a new language, attend a Writing class, learn how to speed-read, learn to drive, adopt that hobby you’ve always said you wanted to do, attend an event and meet new people, etc.

Financial goal – take an Investing course, start your own business part-time, learn how to make money online, bargain hunt, research how to save money, etc.

Narrow down your list until you decide on one activity that you know you will enjoy.

The key is to choose an activity that directly contributes to the fulfillment of your goal, and something that you will also enjoy. For example, if your goal is to be an Olympic Champion swimmer, having a power ritual of baking cakes is not going to cut it, is it? But if you adopt yoga or meditation as your power ritual, then it directly contributes to your goal because yoga keeps you supple, while meditation harnesses your mental and emotional resilience.

For my recommneded Top 12 Daily Power Rituals click here

For my recommended Top 10 Weekly Power Rituals click here

For my recommended Top 5 Monthly Power Rituals click here

Step 3.  Set your Incremental Targets

Next, you have to set a target about how much time you can allocate for your power ritual, and how often you will do it.

If you have difficulty being self-disciplined, the best way to do it is to start easy and gradually increase the difficulty level. This is crucial.

For example, say your goal is to lose weight. Starting easy may mean walking for 5 minutes every day for 7 days. From day 8 to 14, walk for 10 minutes, then raise it to 15 minutes from day 15 to 21. After another week, walk for 15 minutes then jog for 5 minutes. You get the idea. Keep raising the bar by a few inches at a time  until you reach your highest target which could be say, running for 20 minutes every day.

The reason for this technique can best be explained by the “frog in the boiling water” syndrome. If you place a frog in boling water, it will leap out immediately because of the pain. However if you place a frog in a pan of cold water over a low heat, it will stay there until the water boils.

The reason why most people don’t follow through or fail to stay on track is because of pain or discomfort.  Let’s admit it: we love being in our comfort zone. So the solution is to start easy so you hardly experience any discomfort. This makes accomplishing your  target  like a walk in the park. Increasing the difficulty level slightly and slowly means you will keep progressing but because you hardly feel like you’re outside of your comfort zone, you stay on track. There’s no pain, no perceived discomfort, only proud moments and a sense of consistent accomplishment!

Step 4.  Ensure your Success

Lastly, you must create an environment that will ensure you stay committed. You may do this by:

> Get an “accountability partner”.  Give him/her a list containing 3 things:

1. Your challenge for the next 7 days
2. The reward you are entitled to if you accomplish the challenge
3. The punishment you must endure if you fail to stay on track

It is your accountability partner’s job to carry out the reward and the punishment, whichever is applicable. Make sure they are not going to let you off the hook whatever happens. They must not take any excuses from you, nor tolerate your weaknesses.  They must know how to give some tough love. Equally, they must also know how to celebrate and congratulate you in style when you followed through!

Top tip: make sure you set a reward that really motivates you. Equally, set a punishment that you associate so much pain with. For example, a friend of mine who couldn’t stand the smell and taste of milk set drinking a pint of milk as her punishment if she didn’t exercise for 20 minutes every day. It worked like a charm, because she knew there was no way she could convince me and the rest of our  equally sadistic circle of friends to not drink it if she failed to follow through!

> Create a conducive environment.

You could put up a picture of your reward and punishment on a place where you could see them every day, to remind you of what could be awaiting you. Look at them every time you need some motivation boost, or call your accountability partner for some pep talk.

You could also create a ‘Vision Board’. It’s a visual illustration of everything you ever want to be, do and have in the short, medium and long term. Look at it every day to inspire you to keep doing whatever you need to do for as long as it takes to make all those things come true.

Creating the right environment for you could mean adding or subtracting a few things. For example, if you are on a diet, having access tothe foods you ought to avoid is not going to help, will it? Throw them away, NOW. No excuses.

Likewise, if you just promised to say, do Yoga at home every evening, make sure you have your stretching area prepped up. Get your yoga mat, buy some yoga clothes, borrow some yoga DVDs. Make sure everybody else in the house understands that when it’s your time to do yoga, it’s utterly important that they give you the space you need. Encourage them to support you. Getting support is very crucial to your success.

Related posts:

1. 3 Reasons Why You Fail to Achieve Your Goals