Everyone suffers from a lack of discipline. Whether it is a student who keeps putting off his homework, a woman who is looking for motivation to diet and lose weight or a man who tries to maintain his fitness but prefers to sleep in. Many self-improvement books advocate a disciplined approach to life to achieve success and happiness. However, it is almost never told how, let alone that clear exercises are given. Here I will give a practice session that teaches people to work in a disciplined manner. You can practically train discipline just like you train a sport. By repeatedly focusing on a particular technique or movement, it is trained and you improve in such an activity. The problem is that such training already requires discipline. However, the motivation to read this article is enough to succeed in this exercise and, after a few weeks, to be disciplined in the activity you need it for. This exercise only takes 5 to 20 minutes a day and will in many cases increase your motivation, concentration, willpower and, above all, your discipline.
Own results thanks to this discipline exercise
Thanks to these exercises and discipline in general:
- I write a daily report, a review or an article every day.
- I train at least two muscle groups intensively every day.
- I have learned to plan and organize my life
- I ensure that I work from home at least 6 hours a week and thus earn additional income
- I start learning to play the guitar on my own initiative
- My studies (both lectures and self-study) come with ease
- I am more energetic, vital and cheerful than normal
The idea behind the exercise:
With the above results I hope to have proven enough that this method actually works. There are also many people who have achieved similar results using variations on this technique.
Disciplinary action is actually the same trick over and over again. Once you can maintain it well in one area, you can continue this with other activities or training. However, this first plane should not be pleasant and completely useless. It is much easier to maintain fun or interesting activities than activities that normally cause pain first and then results, such as losing weight and following a diet.
So we start with the basics of the concept of ‘discipline’. Rehearsing an activity on a continuous basis. Because we have to start with the most boring and difficult activity, after which you can apply the discipline to everything, the emphasis is on useless activities that do not lead to a goal. When you perform these useless exercises every day, you train the ‘discipline’ in itself, which you can then apply to your own activities.
Exercises:
- Step 1: Choose one of the exercises from the schedule below. Try to keep your thoughts clear of impatience or irritation, concentrate entirely on the task at hand and know that it will only take 5 to 10 minutes. If you complete this, write down to yourself that you have achieved it or check it off a list. It also helps to write down how it felt: before, while you were doing the activity and after.
- Step 2: If you don’t succeed, try again the next day. If you succeed, choose another exercise the next day and now do two in one day. Document it as with the previous exercise. You do this step for two days.
- Step 3: If you succeed, add a third task and complete this 2 days in a row.
- Step 4: Stop one exercise and choose a new one. Do this also for two days.
- Step 5: Transfer an exercise with a light form of your own discipline. For example: eat a piece of fruit a day, do 20 push-ups, look critically at a piece of music, do 5 math problems. Keep it as basic as possible and make sure there is little effort involved. The previous exercises should make it a lot easier.
- Step 6: Drop more and more useless tasks and gradually increase the severity of your own discipline in small steps. Try not to think about the goal or any form of reward but concentrate on completing a given rehearsal.
- Step 7: After a week of repetition you will get used to the discipline and it will become part of your daily routine, eventually it will become as normal as brushing your teeth and you will no longer think about it. Ultimately, you can also drop the last pointless exercise and concentrate fully on your own disciplinary activities.
- Stand on a chair for 5 – 10 minutes every day. Don’t listen to music or read anything.
- Move 50 paper clips or drawing pins one by one from one container to another, calmly and with attention.
- Stand and sit back down on a chair thirty times
- Write on a sheet 100 times: I will do a useless exercise.
- Memorize an entire song lyric or poem.
- Shuffle a deck and order it again
- Roll 5 dice until you have rolled a yahtzee (5 of the same).
- Repeatedly whisper to yourself that you will complete this exercise while killing five minutes in this way.
- Go to bed fifteen minutes earlier or get up fifteen minutes earlier than normal.
- Pace around your room or yard for five minutes
You can also add exercises here yourself, but remember that the exercises may not have a goal or yield, the requirement is uselessness!
Final tip: Objective
It has been proven that people achieve more when they set goals. Once you’ve mastered the discipline, it helps to set monthly or even weekly goals and write them down or discuss them with someone (otherwise the goals won’t be concrete and you’ll be more likely to forget them). Always make sure you can check a box and reward yourself when you achieve a goal. Examples are: losing 2 kilos in a month, being able to bench press 50 kilos in 2 weeks, talking to 4 unknown people a day, not eating cookies or chips for 5 days in a week.
Always persevere in disciplinary activities, especially at the beginning! Continuity is initially much more important than the rigor with which you practice this activity. Later you will automatically spend more time and effort on it, but you first have to learn to keep it up. You can exercise for 3 hours one day and then not at all or for fifteen minutes every day. The latter will always be more effective in the long term and require less effort.
read more
- 13 tips for more self-confidence and less insecurity