About Self-discipline
Self-discipline is the ability to push yourself forward, stay motivated, and take action, regardless of how you are feeling, physically or emotionally. Self-discipline encourages you to do activities that must be done, even when you want to do them least. Self-discipline will help you to be more consistent and lead you to achieve greater goals.
Why should you be Self-disciplined?
- It is what pushes you to do high-quality work, even when you don’t feel like it.
- It gives you the strength to stay professional with your clients, even when you are ready to throw in the towel.
- It helps you to stick with and achieve tough goals that you set for yourself.
- Enables you to keep going through to great success, despite what others might see as impossible task.
- It leads to improved learning and enhanced performance.
- Studies have shown that person with a high degree of self-discipline retain more knowledge than those without self-discipline.
- Researchers discovered that people with strong self-discipline are more careful in their tasks, which in turn improves their performance.
Are you struggling with self-discipline at work?
Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time and so developing it would take time and efforts. Here are some tips to improve your self-discipline at work:
- Punctuality: Self-discipline starts with punctuality. It is not just starting and ending your work in scheduled time but also respecting the time of others, it can be your clients or your colleagues. How would you feel if you want to meet someone on an urgent basis and if the other person never comes on time and every time comes up with a new excuse? Would you ever believe or want to meet that person ever again? The answer is NO. Being late to meetings is indeed a crime in today’s business scenario where your client has access to unlimited alternatives just at the click of a button. Thus, it is very important part of self-discipline to plan your day and follow time-schedules.
- Small self-control exercise: Pick-up a task you don’t particularly like and keep on doing it regularly. For example, checking your inbox in the morning. Even though you don’t enjoy it, do this task first thing on reaching the office. Then, make yourself a cup of coffee, as a little treat. After a week or two, you’ll notice how this assignment has become your daily habit, which you might even enjoy.
- Divide one large task into several small assignments: When you have one complex task on your plate, you may get confused. You probably won’t know how to start and what segment of your task to tackle first. To prevent such situations, it is best if you break that assignment into several smaller ones and then arrange them according to their priority or importance. Doing this, you will find it easier to complete the first task, and you will be motivated to continue with others. Besides, this motivation will help you to improve your self-discipline and you shall manage to complete all assignments on time.
- Avoid multitasking: We tend to believe that juggling several tasks at once will help us finish our work faster. However, in reality, when we switch between tasks (multitasking), we can only focus on task 1. At the same time, task 2 is just a distraction to task 1. Self-discipline helps you maintain your focus on work assignments for a longer time. Therefore, to aim your attention on one task at a time, you should avoid multitasking.
- Take Breaks: When you train yourself on self-control and self-discipline without any break, you will feel exhausted. Take regular breaks from work. By doing so, it is more likely that you will regain your focus after a brief period of rest. This is especially important on the days when you have to tackle a complex task, after which you are tired. In these situations, you can schedule a longer break after you finish that long difficult task.
- Try to fight with your distractions: Another way to build your self-discipline is to avoid workplace distractions at any cost. Whenever you are dealing with tedious tasks, it can be very tempting to pick up your phone and scroll down your social media accounts for 15 or 20 minutes. But, when you manage to fight this urge in order to finish your task on time, you will enhance your self-control (short-term win) and your self-discipline (long-term win). You can also write down what distracts your attention the moment you experience it. Keep a notebook nearby to note down various distractions, and you will notice some patterns. Thus, it will help you to predict your distractions and your own way to fight against it.
- Finish your workday by preparing for tomorrow: You should spend some time at the end of the day thinking about tomorrow. Since self-discipline means being able to get the job done, you should reflect on what you have accomplished throughout the day. Then, write down if there are some urgent tasks for the next morning. Note down all the priorities for the day ahead of you and divide larger projects into smaller assignments.
Self-discipline ensures that an individual behaves in an acceptable way at the workplace and also adheres to the rules and regulations of the organization. Individuals who are disciplined are not only successful professionally but also in their personal lives. Disciplined employees are liked and appreciated by not only their superiors but also other fellow workers. Such employees climb the success ladder quickly as compared to individuals who attend office just for the sake of it and they often find themselves out of the system in no time. If you are following self-discipline, keep doing the same and if not, start it right away to achieve your professional and personal goals.
