Developing Self-Discipline the Easy Way – Part 2

In my last post, I discussed an easy way to develop self-discipline in the face of an impulse. Today, let’s look at the second piece of self discipline: doing what you feel you should be doing (even when you don’t necessarily feel like it).

When we’re talking about fitness, this is most obviously applicable to getting your workouts in. Sometimes it’s hard to summon the willpower to get to the gym or to get out of bed and jump on the elliptical on a cold dark morning. Having the ability to make those choices is key to being able to reach your fitness goals.

Goals - Don't Make Them Too Demanding. Everest Wasn't Climbed in a Day!

Goals - Don't Make Them Too Demanding. Everest Wasn't Climbed in a Day!

Don’t Be Too Demanding

First, you need to have set a reasonable expectation for yourself. We will look at this in more depth in my next post, but for now it’s enough to know that you should focus on one or two goals at a time and on only doing slightly more than you’re doing now. What matters isn’t getting where you want to be immediately, it’s succeeding in getting when you want to be. If you try to do everything at once and increase your chances of failing because of it, you’re much worse off than if you make incremental changes that result in you succeeding in the long run.

Just Five Minutes

The hardest part of doing something that you don’t want to do is starting. Make a deal with yourself to do only five minutes of whatever it is. If it’s starting your workout, take five minutes to put on your workout clothes and begin your routine. If, five minutes in, you really don’t want to do it anymore, give yourself permission to start, and pat yourself on the back for taking those 5 minutes.

It may sound pointless but there is a cascade of effects that result from doing this. For one, since the agreement you’ve made with yourself is that you will “start,” you will have kept your agreement, and nothing enhances your ability to keep promises to yourself more than feeling great about having kept a promise to yourself. You will have increased the connection between beginning a task and the emotional reward of “completing” your task (which in this case, simply means getting those five minutes done).

Some of the time (possibly even most of the time) you’ll find that the task that you were putting off really wasn’t nearly as bad as you had imagined it would be, and you will continue to do more, perhaps even all, of the task.

DON’T expect yourself to start the task and want to complete it every time. You won’t want to, and that’s fine. The important part is to begin the process of creating that self-discipline habit and of changing those procrastination tendencies. As you do that you will also begin to create those new rewarding feelings and they will come to be associated in your mind with the tasks you didn’t want to do. Essentially, you will be tricking yourself into actually liking the feelings you get doing those tasks, which will make them easier to begin and may, for some of them, even make you begin liking the tasks themselves.

Developing self-discipline can affect your fitness levels indirectly as well. When you learn to apply the skill of self-discipline to your fitness goals, you strengthen self-discipline in all areas of your life. You will find that the Just Five Minutes trick works in other areas as well.

How can this affect your fitness? Well, there’s no doubt that procrastination is one of the top time-leaks and that if we procrastinated even just a little less, we would have more time available to us. That’s more time to take your workouts at a leisurely pace; more time to go out for a walk on your coffee break; more time to park farther from the building and walk; more time to play tag in the park with your kids; and so on. On top of that, as we procrastinate, we create stress for ourselves as our deadlines taunt and threaten us. People who are stressed are more likely to overeat as well as to store that fuel rather than burn it off.

Certainly developing self-discipline takes time, but as we’ve seen, it really can be done with just a small trick or two. Don’t believe me? Try it for 3 weeks, as a personal challenge, and feel free to leave comments on how your experiment went below. I guarantee you will be surprised at the results!