Are you someone who has a pretty good sense for what you need to do to improve your life, but can’t seem to get the ball rolling?
It could be that you have a great business idea, but you just can’t seem to create the momentum to get that going.
Or maybe you want to increase your social activities, have more meaningful friendships and get out more…but there always seems to be something else to do?
How about analysis paralysis? Who of us hasn’t tied themselves up in knots continually thinking about doing something but somehow not being able to actually get results?
Oh yes, and the big one! We all know what we have to do to lose that 10lbs of belly fat or tone our legs or arms, but man is it tough to stick to a disciplined schedule required to actually realize our desire isn’t it?
THE SECRET TO MASTERING SELF-DISCIPLINE FAST!
Look, we are all capable of moments of great progress – in other words, we have moments of self-discipline and that is how we get some things done, but the problem is we would like to have more of them – right?
So it isn’t that we aren’t capable of self-discipline or that we have to change into a radically different person, it is more a matter of tweaking the way we frame things in our life enough that we get far more self-discipline without the ongoing relapses into procrastination.
In the wonderful workbook Attracting Greatness, the steps and techniques that the most successful people in the world use to expand their self-discipline and live a life of constant achievement with tremendous fulfillment are extremely enlightening and useful.
When I applied these steps to my own life I developed my own system for mastering self-discipline, perhaps this will help you too:
1. Create, internalize and repeat daily your big WHY – what will a starting your new business bring you that you don’t have now? How will losing 10lbs make a difference in your life? What would having 3 more close friends do for you? How will this change YOU? How will it change the way people look at you and react to you? I like to write this all out – think of it as a YOU avatar where you have already achieved your goal. Reinforce this daily to keep that big WHY front and center.
2. Outline a clear, detailed, workable and measurable plan for achieving my goals. It must be detailed enough that on a given day when you just don’t feel like lifting a finger, you know exactly what you expect of yourself that day AND it must be measurable so you are kept accountable. Without this, #1 is just a wish or a dream, #2 will make it actionable
3. If/when I slip I like to have the negative side well defined – If I don’t achieve #1 what will life be like? This reinforces the pain of not making progress and that can be very powerful
4. Do what is MOST important first. I make the most progress when I take the outline in #2 and make sure I work on the major impact items first – that way if I slip further in the day, the impact is much less. I am most productive in the morning, so that is the time I protect at all costs and do the most important tasks first. Some days I take that energy right into the afternoon and evening, other days I just goof off in the afternoon, but either way I have completed the most important tasks rather than just cleaned my desk, checked email, watched a training video, etc…
5. Focus on ONE thing at a time. As busy people we take pride in how MUCH we can do at one time…multitask, but there is a huge cost to that – 1) We are less productive overall and 2) We exhaust our mental ability much faster leaving us drained…before we actually get the important stuff done.
Try this for a few days. Take one important thing and schedule 20 or 30 minutes first thing in the day and just see how much you can get done by just focusing on that one thing. Slicing your day out this way leads to much more productivity and much less exhaustion at the end of the day.
If you want to improve your self-discipline and craft your personal power plan, then get hold of Attracting Greatness and use it to quickly turn your days into fulfilling, productive, enjoyable experiences breaking free of today’s limitations.
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