Everyone struggles with self-discipline in some form or fashion. Many people will cite a lack of willpower and discipline as a barrier to change.
Why is something that is simple to understand and essential to achieving goals, rare in practice? Because it is hard to be self-disciplined.
If it was easy to be self-disciplined everyone would already have achieved their goals and be living the life of their dreams. But you know this is not the case.
Self-discipline often requires that you forgo short term rewards, or endure short term discomfort, in pursuit of a long term goal. Author Samuel Thomas Davies writes:
“Self-discipline is about leaning into resistance. Taking action in spite of how you feel. Living a life by design, not by default. But most importantly, it’s acting in accordance with your thoughts – not your feelings.”
It’s easier to avoid adversity than overcome it. But success lies on the other side of resistance. Self-discipline is the key to success, but you need to cultivate it.
Cultivating self-discipline is more than just having more willpower and forcing yourself to do things you hate. It is about learning how to systematically take action to get things done despite adversity, temptation, and straight-up ‘not feeling like it.’ To understand what it means to be self-disciplined it is useful to look at its core components.
- Have a goal – The purpose of self-discipline is to help you get things done and achieve a desired outcome.
- Control impulses – As you pursue a goal there will be distractions and temptations that come up: things you would rather be doing. The trick is learning to control those desires and exercise restraint so you can stay focused on your goal.
- Take consistent action – Resisting temptation and distraction once is a good step, but to achieve your goals you must learn to be consistent and stay the course over time.
- Be systematic – You must align your thoughts and behaviors with what needs to be accomplished. Prioritize important tasks and adapt to changing circumstances so you can stay on course.
“If you want to transform your life in a positive way, that transformation will not happen by itself. You need to make it happen. You need to do the work…You need to get on the path and stay on the path—the path that leads to the positive transformations, the path that leads to a better you, the path that leads to freedom. And that path is the hard path. The tough path. The relentless path. It is the path of Discipline. And the path of Discipline is the only way. Discipline Equals Freedom.” – Jocko Willink
Cultivating Self Discipline In Your Life
Learning how to become more self-disciplined isn’t complicated. If you don’t think you are self-disciplined right now, that’s okay. Like any other skill, self-discipline is something you can learn and develop.
While implementing self-discipline isn’t easy, there is no need to make it harder than it has to be. Here are some practical suggestions to help you cultivate self-discipline.
Start with why
What is your reason for wanting to be self-disciplined? Having a compelling reason behind why you want to do something is the first step towards completing your goal.
The path to a better you is often through delayed gratification – making short term sacrifices in favor of long term rewards. Reminding yourself why you are doing something, can help you overcome impulses that could derail your progress.
One way to help delay gratification is to visualize the results and rewards. Envision what it feels like to experience the rewards of completing your task and staying disciplined. Similarly, imagine what it would feel like if you didn’t practice self-discipline and failed your task. You can do this for anything, but it could be finishing a workout, turning in a homework assignment, or resisting an impulse purchase.
If the feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment you’d get from staying disciplined do not positively influence your actions, your reason why isn’t compelling enough.
Remove temptation
Temptation will never go away. So you need to learn how to deal with it.
If your instinct is to grit your way to temptation by resisting it, you may want to rethink your approach. Trying to resist your weaknesses or desires may make it more difficult to resist future temptations.
A better strategy is avoiding temptation because it can help you better maintain self-control and stay disciplined. For instance, if you are trying to lose weight, do you think it would be easier to resist the temptation of a snack if it was on your counter or hidden away? When food is visible it is more tempting and influences your eating behaviors.
You can take this a step further and remove the temptation entirely. John Berardi, the founder of Precision Nutrition, said:
“If a food is in your possession or located in your residence, either you, someone you love, or someone you marginally tolerate will eventually eat it.”
Food is just a proxy for temptation. You need to understand your weaknesses and what obstacles stand in between you and success. Rather than putting yourself in a situation where you will have to make a conscious decision to resist an impulse, you can avoid it entirely and eliminate that risk.
Show up
Showing up means staying the course, taking consistent action, and not waiting until you ‘feel like it’ to do something.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks about what it means to be a professional and how to combat resistance. In one passage he writes:
“Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. ‘I write only when inspiration strikes,’ he replied. ‘Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.’”
Resistance will always be there, but a professional chooses to show up and do the work every day. This is self-discipline.
Like anyone else, the professional lacks self-discipline when they started, but they develop it by consistently showing up.
Think of self-discipline as a muscle. It fatigues from use in the short term, but it grows stronger from consistent use over time. Training this muscle strengthens your self-discipline and improves your ability to exert self-control in the future.
However, there’s a catch. You do not grow stronger by doing things that are easy. You can’t go through the motions and expect to see results. You grow through stress adaptation by taking on challenges that are outside your comfort zone.
It feels natural to want to avoid discomfort, but this will not help you cultivate self-discipline. Think of every time you embrace discomfort as a rep that strengthens your discipline.
One way to do this is to practice voluntary hardship: choosing to do things that are hard. You don’t have to take on monumental challenges to build discipline. Start small. In The Discourses, Epictetus said:
“We should discipline ourselves in small things, and from there progress to things of greater value.”
You can build your self-discipline by starting with small voluntary hardships and working your way up to greater challenges over time.
Plan ahead
Your behaviors are the key to achieving your goals. Desired behaviors bring you closer to your goal, while unwanted behaviors take you further away. Planning improves your odds of engaging in desired behaviors when temptation arrives.
Without planning you may be left wondering what to do. When you are aimless you more easily succumb to tempting distractions. Planning bridges the gap between your intentions (goals) and your behaviors (actions). An example is blocking time to work on your goal. Dedicating time for disciplined action helps you focus on the task at hand and resist impulses.
You can also use the technique of implementation intentions to help ensure your behaviors move you towards your goal. Implementation intentions are essentially statements that guide how you will act in a given situation. By predetermining how you will respond to a future situation or cue, you automate your behaviors rather than having to rely on motivation or willpower to make a decision in the moment.
Implementation intentions generally follow this format, “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.” Here are some examples:
- I will go to my neighborhood gym at 6 a.m. to workout.
- If someone offers me a drink at the party, then I’ll ask for water instead.
- I will get out of bed when my alarm goes off instead of hitting the snooze button.
Implementation intentions turn abstract goals into concrete actions. By planning ahead you can align your intentions with your behaviors and will be able to more reliably stay disciplined in the pursuit of your goals.
Create rewards
Rewards and positive feelings can help you stay disciplined in the long run. Willpower is helpful, but not entirely reliable. Author Mark Manson explains the emotional problem with the willpower approach to self-discipline:
“You can will yourself to go to the gym if you don’t feel like it for a few days. But unless the gym ends up feeling good in some way, you will eventually lose motivation, run out of willpower, and stop going. You can will yourself to stop drinking for a day or a week, but unless you feel the reward of not drinking, then you will eventually go back to it.”
Work with your emotions and use them to your advantage rather than fighting them. The goal is to feel a greater emotional benefit from doing the goal-directed behavior than giving in to your impulses and not doing it. When your desired behavior feels better than the alternative it is easier to be self-disciplined.
One way to make your desired behaviors feel good is through positive reinforcement. Rewarding yourself for disciplined behavior provides emotional benefits and makes you more likely to follow that behavior again in the future.
These strategies can be used in conjunction to help you stay on the path of self-discipline. Let’s walk through an example of how they can call work together to help you achieve a goal. Let’s use the goal of living a sustainable healthy lifestyle and improving your body composition: losing fat, gaining muscle. The goal is vague, but that’s not the point of this.
- Start with why – Decide why you want to live a healthy lifestyle. You might want to be able to move around with ease, feel more flexible, go on hiking trips, complete a race, or want to feel stronger. Envision what it feels like to be healthy and strong, the satisfaction of accomplishing your goals. And then imagine what it would feel like to fail – feeling winded going up the stairs, being unable to join friends on active trips, always feeling tired and sick. Your why is your emotional fuel.
- Remove temptation – To stay disciplined in pursuit of your health goals remove temptation from your life. If there is food you don’t want to eat, keep it out of your house. If you stay up too late watching TV in your bedroom, move the TV someplace else so you can sleep better. Removing distractions and temptations makes it easier to stay on course.
- Show up – If you aim to go to the gym each morning, 5 days a week, hold yourself accountable to that. If you wake up feeling tired, go to the gym anyway. Even if you don’t have a great workout, your action of following through on your commitment strengthens your self-discipline.
- Plan ahead – Set implementation intentions that align with your goals. Like above, say “I will go to my neighborhood gym at 6 a.m. to workout.” When you set this intention ahead of time you are more likely to get out of bed and go to the gym than hit the snooze button. Another one could be, “When I go to the cafeteria for lunch I will get my meal from the salad bar.” If you wait until you get to the cafeteria to decide what to eat you are more likely to give in to temptation.
- Create rewards – The goal is for your healthy behaviors to feel good in some way, to experience emotional benefit. This could be the feel-good chemical rewards of endorphins that are released from exercise. You could find a gym buddy and get to experience social connection each time you go to workout. You can set up a reward system for following through on your desired behavior. If you go to the gym 5 days a week you may get a treat during the weekend. If you go 20 times a month, you could go get a massage. Find some way to reward yourself for following through on goal-directed behaviors.
You can do this same thing for any goal. As an exercise, pick a goal you have and see how you could apply each strategy to it.
Self Discipline on Autopilot
You are more likely to stick with your goals when you do not have to rely on conscious willpower. If you can automate your behaviors you reduce the risk of giving in to temptation.
The key to automatic self-discipline is aligning your behaviors with your identity. Author James Clear discusses how your identity shapes your habits and behaviors in his book Atomic Habits. He provides an example that illustrates how differences in identity influence behaviors.
“Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, ‘No thanks. I’m trying to quit.’ It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs.
The second person declines by saying, ‘No thanks. I’m not a smoker.’ It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.”
Identity change is about choosing the type of person you want to be and then consistently acting like you are that person. Simply showing up regularly is essential. The cultivation of self-discipline through repeated, consistent action can shape your identity.
Think of your identity as your set of personal standards about how you think and behave. Your standards guide your choices and actions. While you can be self-disciplined in the short run with changing your identity, lasting discipline depends on aligning your behaviors with your personal standards.
Footnotes
- Steven Pressfield’s passage from The War of Art is found in Book Two.
- James Clear discusses the relationship between identity and habit change in Atomic Habits chapter 2.