be more disciplined

18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick

Useful article that could definitely help with this goal.

Being more disciplined also has to do with being responsible and being more aware. These days I’m beginning to see a connection between how my body feels and how that affects my mood. When I’m tired or stressed, I’m more prone to being in a bad mood, and when I’m in a bad mood, I can let things slide. It has a domino effect. If I want to be more disciplined, I’ll have to check myself and make some things more like mechanical processes so that I can get to doing them because they need to be done regardless of what I’m feeling. I’ll also have to admit to myself that I’m tired or hungry or whatever and then do something about it so that it doesn’t affect my moods too much.

I’m not sure if that makes perfect sense, now that I’ve written it down. Hehe. Bottomline is that being disciplined is so many things meshed together; if I want to really tick this goal off my list, I’m going to step it up and improve on other areas of my life as well.

I’ve often come back to my list and wondered how I’d go about this goal because I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Does it have to do with motivation? Sometimes. Willpower? Sometimes, too, I guess.

One thing I did discover, though, is that it has to do with habits and with making things easy to do. Let me start with something I go through regularly. I go to the gym three times a week and there will definitely be days when I’m not feeling like going even if I know it’s going to be good for me. Since I know that’s going to happen, I pack my gym bag ahead of time so that when I know it’s time to go and I’m feeling lazy, I just pick up my bag and leave; the only thing left for me to do is to psych myself, which is easy once I get started on something when I get to the gym. Point being, I don’t have to go through packing my bag during which I’d have extra time to justify why it’s okay for me not to go on that particular day.

I’m still figuring out this discipline thing, but I suppose one big key for me is to make something as easy and as uncomplicated (and of course as fun) as possible. I’m sure everyone’s read this somewhere at one time or another, but I never really understood it fully until I had to put it into practice.

In my case, being disciplined also means that I’ve got to be organized (which I am generally not). I figure that I’ve got to know exactly what I need and want to do first; the discipline bit is in following through all those things. So as a means to put my life into order, I downloaded Mozilla Sunbird, which is a free, opensource calendar.

It’s all good so far. I’m loving all the colors and such.