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How to Become Disciplined?

Some people seem to be born with amazing self discipline, while others have a harder time keeping themselves on track. If you find yourself in the latter category, don’t worry. Discipline can be taught. Below are some tips on how to become disciplined in your daily life.

Tips to Become Disciplined in Life

Accountability

Make yourself accountable to someone. It often isn’t enough to be accountable only to yourself, but if you can enlist another person to  hold you accountable then your chance of success increases dramatically. If you don’t have anyone who lives close to you who you can check in with (or who can check in on you) that’s okay. You can also do daily accountability checks over the phone or email.

Reward Yourself

We love rewards. While staying on track with the things you need to do is rewarding in itself, additional rewards are excellent motivation. For example, if you stay disciplined for the whole week, then you treat yourself to a movie you’ve wanted to see. For two weeks, perhaps a pedicure. If you’ve kept yourself on track for several weeks maybe you indulge in a new pair of shoes or an hour massage.

Enhance Your to do List

Most to do lists only include the chores and things you don’t want to do, but it is helpful to also include the things you want to do, like watch your favorite TV show or call your best friend. Just be sure to include some kind of prioritization to your list. For example, you need to get two things you don’t want to do before you can do one of your fun to dos. This is similar to the reward syste,m but is more instantaneous throughout your day.

Allocate Specific Time Blocks

Limiting how much time you will spend doing each activity every day helps ensure you don’t spend so much time on one thing and run out of time for the rest of the things you need to do. Some activities may take longer than you have allocated, but you should still move on to the other things on your list at the end of the time limit. That way if you have extra time later you can go back to it, but you’ve still gotten your other responsibilities of the day taken care of.

Practice

As with everything else in life, you get better with practice. Keep working at becoming more disciplined, even when it feels like it is not making any difference. You can start working on incorporating just one of the above techniques or all of them at once. Eventually you’ll realize your self discipline is getting better and better until you eventually won’t need to think about it at all.

Article by expert author ‘Emily Cordz’ for Outofstress.com