How to TAKE CONTROL of Yourself (Best SELF DISCIPLINE HACKS!)

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can improve your self-discipline.

Have you ever struggled to be more disciplined? You know you got that paper due next week, but you don't do anything all week even though you know it's coming. Or you set up a brand new habit that you're so excited about that you know can improve your your relationships, or your work, but you don't stick to it? Or you started that workout routine, you got really pumped up, fired up into it, you lost a couple pounds, but then, you know, 3 weeks later it was gone, and what did you blame? You blamed your discipline. You said, "Ah, I wish I was more disciplined and everything would be great." And the reality is it's true. You know, discipline is one of the most important things we can develop in our lives because without that ability to be sort of self-reliant and willful to get things done on a continual basis, we never get that great amount of momentum and progress towards what we really want. And I bet there's a lot of areas of your life that could really benefit from being more disciplined, whether you're eating healthier or working out more often or being more disciplined about doing your art on a consistent basis or contributing or even being more disciplined about just speaking up for yourself when you know that you should. So how can we help you find a goal and be more disciplined? That's the topic of this video.

Oftentimes people will come to me for advice on fitness, on building their businesses, in their relationships, whatever the case may be. And often the place that they're dropping the ball is in bad habits or not building productive habits, because it's very difficult to just get up and change your life, just change the way you do things. People like to say that all the time, hey, just stop doing this or start doing that. They like I like to give advice, but the underlying factor is that our friend, our individual, whoever's asking the question, is not disciplined enough to actually put that thing into action, get that thing done. So, the thing that I have always told my students and my clients is to start with a small win. Begin with something small. So, for example, if you wanna lose weight, I often tell people, just start walking every single morning. Don't worry about counting calories. Don't worry about complex workout ideas. Don't worry about anything that anyone is telling you, just get up and walk every morning, right? Now, it's not the walking that's actually gonna make that person successful. Now, it will add to your success because getting up and walking, fresh air and exercise is going to support you in losing weight, but we all know that there's far more factors to consider. But what it will do is create the virtue of discipline, commitment, Right, commitment and discipline sort of go together. And the fact that that small win associated with getting up every single morning is under your belt, you're going to feel the courage, the confidence, and you'll have the ability to begin adding other things to your ability to grow stronger. So now that you know, it's been 60 days, 90 days, and it's like you got that pattern down pat. You get up every morning, you just walk, that's it. You don't think about it, it's become a habit. You now can use that tool of creating habits and instilling discipline with the next one, which should be a little bit more advanced. Perhaps only drink water with your meals. Don't drink any soda, don't drink any juice, just drink water. That's the next one. And then the next one becomes more complex, and the next one becomes more complex. Now it might seem like this is tedious and slow, but I guarantee you that after 90 days of tiny wins and the revamping of your character, you will be the type of person that can get anything done at any time. And the long-time perspective is going to be a successful one for you. Start small, have big wins with these little things, and then use that new version of yourself, that new character tool, to attack bigger and more advanced things until you reach your goal.

Now, once you've decided on the discipline you're going to develop, the key is for you to launch strongly on your new discipline. Resolve to never allow an exception until it becomes permanent. If you fall off the wagon, immediately restate your affirmation as a command to yourself and begin trying it again. This is the only way you can develop the habit of discipline in that particular area. The best part of this process of developing disciplines is a direct relationship between self-discipline and persistence. The more you persist in any endeavor, the greater self-discipline and self-confidence you'll develop. It's been well said that persistence is self-discipline in action. The more consistently you practice your chosen disciplines, the more you will like and respect yourself. You will feel more confident and optimistic. You'll become more effective in every area of your life.

Well, you've gone from looking out of windows at classrooms to having a very regimented timetable on the weekends. How did you develop such a good self-discipline?

I don't know. I am very disciplined. That's all I can say to you. Very, very disciplined. A creature of habit. What's that thing? Is it called OCD or something like that? If you look at my desk, you'll see all the pens lined up like that and the piece of paper over here and the cup over there and all that. So I am just very disciplined. That's it. And I think in business and in life, I've work on the, work on the principle of clear my desk every minute or every day. And so answer emails immediately, answer people's questions immediately. That's been my success in running my company, that I'm there to, like a springboard if you like, for employees to tell me what their issue is and and then to give them a quick resolution to it so they can get on and deal with it. So that's my discipline, and I would heartily recommend it to all of you. If you decide to become— you should be disciplined. You should discipline yourself because it's not a bad way of life.

I've never met a person who was not successful that didn't have a great amount of self-discipline within their life. Self-discipline and being able to perform and being able to keep your life on schedule and being able to keep commitments and promises and meet deadlines is essential to success. None of us, none of us can afford to have a life that is controlled by someone else or a life that is basically controlled by our emotions. I learned many years ago that there are two kinds of people. There's the type of person who says, "I'm going to wait till I feel like it before I do it." And then there's a person who says, "I've got to do it so that I feel like it." One will never get anything done because they're still waiting to feel the moment to move. And the other person says, "No, I need to move and then I will begin to feel the moment." Sanya, self-discipline. Is essential in your life and in my life if we're going to get things done. So I have a challenge for every one of you this weekend. The challenge is simple. As you go through your weekend, and sometimes it's kind of a, hopefully, an easier time of your week, ask yourself, am I practicing self-discipline in my life? Am I doing the things that I should do because I need to do them, or am I kind of waiting to Feel the moment. Do like our friends Nike say, just do it.

You gotta set up some social rewards. You know, it's hard to stay disciplined at something if you're never getting any payoff from it. You know, we can take that first step I told you about, about visualizing something, but if you get some small wins along the way and you're never celebrating with other people, then your brain says, ah, this isn't benefiting me. And I really mean that. You have to do it with other people. You have to have that connection with others to celebrate, to keep your will intact, to keep doing the thing you're supposed to be doing. It's so important for you to do this. You know, if you're a writer and you finish a chapter, call up a friend and say, hey, you know what? I finished this chapter I was supposed to finish today. Let's go out for a drink. If you've accomplished something at work you said you were gonna do, get everybody together, say, hey, you know what, lunch is on me today. Let me take care of you guys for lunch. If you finally achieved something that you've been working towards for so long, you need to take some time to go out with friends and family and just talk about the process, talk about them, how it felt to finally complete this thing. See, if we're never celebrating, we're never going to develop real discipline. And it's funny because too many people think those are opposite things. They think discipline can't be fun, that discipline can't be joyful, but the masters of this life have proven that doing things in a disciplined way can also be doing things in a joyful way. And if you think discipline has to be this hard, awful, terrible thing, maybe you're never going to have discipline because you're constantly trying to fool yourself into doing things you don't want to do. And it's time to find the things that you do want to do.

So my quick take on this, I see two things. One, I like having a schedule. I like having routine. I like having a calendar. I like having a list of habits. I like having a schedule for what I'm going to be doing every day, and I, and I live and die by my Google Calendar. I think it's really important. I think it keeps me on track. It keeps me focused, keeps me somewhat regimented, and I like that. I like that self-discipline that it imposes on me. I think the other side of the coin though that a lot of people don't pay attention to is You have to love what you're doing. You have to love the process because you can only force yourself to do things that you don't like for so long. If you hate the idea of working out or going to, you know, make those cold calls or creating content for YouTube, if you hate doing it, you can create a calendar and a schedule and a routine. You can put it on Google Calendars and you can say, I have to get this done every day, and you'll do it for a certain amount of time, but at some point You know, you can only do something that you hate for so long before something breaks, before something gives and you have to change. And so yes, the schedule and the tools can help you, but at the top you have to actually love what you're doing. And if you don't love it, then find another way to stand. Find something that you do love. Find something that makes you come alive, because it's way easier to stay disciplined about something when you love the process and not just the end result. So thank you guys so much for watching. We made this video because Dice Rolling asked us to. So if there's a topic you'd like us to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and we'll see what we can do. I'd also love to hear which of the points that you heard in this video had the biggest impact on you, what changes you're now going to make in your life or business because of watching this video. Really curious to find out if you want to leave a comment below. And one last thing, my goal is to get a million subscribers on this channel. So anything you can do to help out, to share it with friends, tell people about it, tweet it, put it on Facebook, add it to playlists, whatever you can think of, I'd really truly amazingly appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.

Self-discipline carried Wilbur and Orville Wright through a multitude of failures and enabled them finally to give the world its first practical airplane, an achievement which has made the world smaller and changed the entire trend of civilization. Self-discipline helped Helen Keller to triumph over deafness, blindness, and dumbness, a combination of afflictions such as most people never experience. Self-discipline helped me to carry on through years of heartaching discouragement, and defeat, and give the world the first practical philosophy of success based on the know-how gained by hundreds of men and women who spent a lifetime by the trial and error method in discovery of the principles which lead to personal success. Self-discipline is among the top-ranking features of all the great religions, including of course the Christian faith. And there are some people who believe that our major purpose on earth is that of developing wisdom through struggle and self-discipline. One thing is certain: no one ever becomes very wise without the aid of self-discipline, and no one ever finds peace of mind and happiness without the strict exercise of self-discipline. Self-discipline is the only means of transmuting sorrow into faith. It is the only means by which we may transmute hatred of others into the milder emotion of sympathy for them. It is the only means by which we may reveal and profit by the seed of an equivalent benefit which comes with every adversity and every defeat. It is the only means by which we may shut out of our minds the deadly effects of past experiences of suffering and unpleasantness. And it is the means by which we may discover that other self we carry around with us. That self which has great capacity for belief and does not become influenced by failure and defeat. Self-discipline can give us freedom from the fear of death, the most difficult to master of all of our fears. It can free us from the disease of hypochondria, the fear of imaginary illness with which so many people suffer and sometimes die. Self-discipline is the means by which we may think our own thoughts, live our own lives as we wish to live them, and remain forever free from the evils of fears and limitations which we have inherited from the dark ages before the dawn of civilization.

Care more than normal and more than necessary about your results.

That's it.

Learn to care. Start developing inside of you this adamant feeling, this desire to care more than normal and more than necessary about the results that you want. You see, most people don't cross the finish line with their goals and their dreams, not because they don't have the ability or the resources or the relationships, more often than not, it's because at some point they allow themselves not to care more than normal and more than necessary. Just think about an example in your own life when you decided to take action on some desired outcome, but ultimately you gave up on it. You'll notice, if you're honest, that at some point along the way, you allowed yourself off the hook because you gave yourself permission to no longer care. You see, having the conviction about your outcome, about your result, is so powerful, and it is enacted when you allow yourself to care about that result more than normal and more than necessary. You see, when we allow ourselves to care more than normal and more than necessary, that something becomes a priority. Authority in our life. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about the science of small wins. And, uh, in a nutshell, he just says in order to be successful at creating a new habit, you must allow yourself to experience small consecutive wins that support the behaviors you want. I call this winner's momentum. When you decide to care more than normal and more than necessary about your desired outcome, even if you don't even believe in that moment that you're able to accomplish it, just by caring, having the conviction about the small little steps along the way creates a winner's momentum that ultimately catapults you across the finish line. And before you know it, your winner's momentum is looked upon by other people as discipline.

I tell people you overcome laziness by having a goal. Like, there has to be something greater than the laziness. So, so if you really want to do something bad, you're going to do that instead of chilling. You don't want it badder than you want to party. You don't want it as much as you want to be cool.

You—

most of you don't want success as much as you want to sleep. Some of you love sleep more than you love success. And I'm here to tell you today, if you're going to be successful, you've got to be willing to give sleep. But if what you want to do is not as important as sleep, then you're gonna sleep. You're gonna procrastinate. You gotta want it as bad as you want to breathe.