How to Develop Self-Discipline to Improve Your Life

This is a collaborative post.

Do you ever wish that you were more disciplined and that you were able to accomplish more each day? If you constantly feel like a failure and lack willpower, then you might be missing a key element that successful people tend to have a lot of- self-discipline.

I want to share with you how this can change your life for the better and how you can develop greater self-discipline.

Change Your Habits

This one is big, but it will be the foundation of strong self-discipline. A new perspective and greater willpower start with changes in your habits. These can be very small habits or large ones but changing the bad ones for good ones is vital to growing your self-discipline.

Let’s say you have a bad habit of biting your fingernails. You will want to eliminate this habit and focus on replacing it with a good habit. Always replace habits you want to stop with new, good habits. This will make it easier to say no to the pull of bad habits. This replacement process takes something you are used to doing and puts a new thing in its place that you then become used to doing.

Identify the habits in your life you would like to change and then make a list of new habits you would like to develop. For ideas, you may want to create new habits of getting up at a certain time, studying a language each day, reading books regularly, or calling your parents once a week. For bad habits to eliminate, you may want to focus on overeating, tardiness, sleeping in late, and excess screen time.

The Benefit- Eliminating unwanted habits and replacing them with new habits will transform your life for the better.

Be Accountable

Learning self-discipline and sticking with your new goals may be tough for very long. The first few days may be easy, but as you attempt to change who you are and how you behave, you may start to struggle after a short period of time. What will probably help you is to find an accountability partner.

This is someone you trust who you can tell about your decision to work on some areas of your life, and they will in turn let you know if you are sticking to your plan or not.

You are supposed to give them regular updates, and they are supposed to check in with you, asking you probing questions to help you stay on track, and discover if you might need to make adjustments. Think of the accountability partner as your best friend because that is who will call you out if you deviate from what you are determined to do.

The Benefit- Having an accountability partner will keep you honest, and that will ensure that honesty pervades all of your life. They will also help you reach your goals faster.  

Kill Temptations

What things in your life entice you to do what you don’t want to do? Maybe they are not wrong, but they are temptations that you want to avoid. Maybe you feel you play video games too much and want to stop.

So, what can you do about that? Well, you can determine in your mind to play video games less often and therefore be more productive with your time, or you can remove video games entirely from your life. That means you are removing temptations.

This may sound drastic, but it has drastic benefits. If there are no video games in the house and you have no easy access to video games, you are very unlikely to waste a couple hours playing them. Do this with any temptations in your life that you know are dangerous for you.

For instance, if you are trying to stop eating so many sweets, you can eliminate sweet foods from your grocery shopping. That way, they are not easily obtainable at home, and you must go out of your way to get them.

The Benefit- You spend less time being tempted by things you want to avoid and more time having victory in your life and doing what you have determined to do.

Develop a Schedule

Disciplined people have an order to their life, and they do many of the same things every day in the same way. They tend to get up simultaneously and not hit the snooze button. They accomplish most or all of what they plan to do each day. They waste very little of their time. Part of how they do this is by crafting a schedule that is right for them and their personal lives and then sticking to it.

What should you write down on your own schedule? You will want to set a time to wake up, go to bed, eat meals, clean the house, go to work, prepare food, run errands, and do anything else you need to do daily. You should also schedule time to stop working if you do some work at home, and you will want to schedule time with your family.

Your schedule should have some flexibility in it, but there should be greater flexibility in those things that are not very important and less flexibility in those things that are of great importance.

Be prepared to make changes to the schedule as needed, like using Imagine Maids Services when you only have time for light house cleaning. You may need to change the time you wake up or exercise if you are travelling, but at the same time, do not ever eliminate those things from your schedule that you are determined to do as a self-disciplined person.

The Benefit- A schedule can be life-changing from the very first day you implement it. It can help you do more and work more effectively, keeping you focused on your tasks and less likely to waste time.