Do you want to be successful?

Do you want to be successful in everything?

The short answer is: "then, develop self discipline."

Short story

A young woman wanted to be successful in her life. She enters a hospital, makes a surgery, and gets out to be one of the most successful people, at least in her country. She became successful in both her personal and work life. Now, you would be wondering: Wow, what kind of surgery is this? It should be a special brain surgery.

Wake up

Come on, cutting off this dream, if it had been possible, almost all of us, or at least who can afford it, would have already done this. But, to be successful is not easy, there is absolutely no shortcut for that. Successful people don't born successful, don't have a brain surgery being operated on them or any kind of special surgery to become successful. Success needs a lot of, continuous, habitual hard work. 

Success is not about being lucky

Reality is, when you are in an unforgiving world, where un-fairness never takes a day off, you need the discipline to do all the right preparations, the cross checking, and all what it requires. Then, what does it require? It requires a lot of discipline. I mean, obviously, because you're going to move from one world to the other, from one state of mind to another, and from one inner-self to another.

Success stories

We all hear about success stories, what successful people do in the morning or before breakfast, have read 7 and 8 habits of successful people by Stephen R. Covey, or any type of habits of successful leaders at any time. We read such stories, we smile, we feel a little bit of rush in our blood ... then forget all about it. Again, to be successful, this requires a lot of discipline and hard work.  If you want to live a simple life, doing what is required from you to do in personal life and work, or even less, keep doing just whatever you are doing now. But, if you want to change, be better, achieve more, then keep reading, taking into consideration that discipline requires from you doing things differently, everyday. Again, discipline requires from you a change in your mind, way of thinking, and your inner soul. The outcome is that your life gets easier, I promise you of this. The degree you pass/succeed anything depends on the degree of your discipline.

Start to Change

So, think about a major dream or a major ambition that for some reason you're like "gosh I wish I really stuck with my sort of actions and routines more often". If you can have that in mind, then this is going to serve you. Lets talk about sports, you wanted to lose weight, become more fit and healthy. You start, you lost a couple kilos. But then you know, three weeks later it was gone and what did you blame? Yes, you blamed your discipline: 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 work on a consistent basis, or even being more disciplined about just speaking up for yourself when you know that you should.

But, enough of this long introduction, what is discipline anyway and how to be disciplined?

The three steps to self discipline:

1. Emotionally Engaged

Become emotionally engaged with that dream each morning of your life. A lot of people don't actually struggle with the discipline part in terms of doing the thing. In other words, we got a problem with motivation not necessarily just discipline, we have a problem with that once in a while, you hit it, you

do it, you do the work. But, a lot of times you fall off because you're not emotionally engaged in it. It's like if you want a lot of discipline you need a high level of emotional connection and focus on that thing that you want to work towards. So, every morning, just start a new visualization practice. When you wake up in the morning close your eyes think about the dream, the aspiration, the thing that you're really after in life and just visualize it and really get yourself emotionally attached, emotionally engaged with it. Think about how great it will feel for you to have that thing or be that thing or contribute that thing to make that difference. Just think about it, allow it to well up in your heart a little bit, get excited about it, remember the dream. Never lose the target, stay focused. You may choose to have it written in front of you on a board so you can see it all the time, or just make it your computer's background, again to keep it visual to you all the time.

2. Handle that Chaos

Then, do your work before you respond to the world. If you are constantly waking up in the morning and all you do is just reply to everybody and your time is replying to their text, needs and emails, all of the day is ripped away and you find yourself out of your own routine. But, if you set up your morning to win, or you set up blocks of time to win as we'll talk about in a moment, and you do your work first it's easier to stay disciplined. If you're saying, "this month I want to be more healthy." Great, get your health stuff in your way in the morning, create your shake, do your workout, create a healthy lunch to take to work, and you're off, and go into a good start. But, if you wait for the remainder of the day for discipline to strike it never will.

3. Block Time

Scheduled blocks of time where that discipline happens, everyday. And, that's the only thing that happens. Always do something every day towards your dream and if you believe that you can, be just something small, it could be doing a little bit of research, journaling, taking that action, creating that presentation, making that call... Whatever it is for you, you can do something every day. And, if you believe that, then you need time to do that, and that time is your "block time". You say, "okay today from 1 o'clock To 3 o'clock I'm only doing this thing that I need more discipline towards", and during that time you don't check your email, you don't do your Facebook, you don't browse the internet, all that happens during that time is what you're supposed to be doing. The reason a lot of people don't have discipline in their life is they're letting their day be ruled by randomness. They don't have "blocks of time" scheduled to do the thing/s they're supposed to do so they're counting on sudden will: "Oh you know, I'll get to that today or I'll get to that someday" and of course someday turns into never and then they start blaming their, discipline. It's not their discipline, it's the lack of a calendar that says do this now. So, schedule what you must make happen and you'll suddenly find yourself: wow I'm so disciplined.

4. Social Rewards

You know it's hard to stay disciplined at something if you're never getting any payoff from it. We can take that first step I told you 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 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 know you finish the chapter call a friend say "hey you know, I finished the chapter I was supposed to finish today, let's hang out, my treat." If you accomplished something at work you said you were going to do, get everybody together and say: "hey, you know what, coffee is on me today". Or, you can help a colleague or a friend with their work, goal, or whatever discipline they are working on, it pays a lot of appreciation, pay it forward (not the movie, ops).

Google example

One of the basic traits Google searches for when choosing great leaders, is that it looks for ROUTINE managers, means doing the same thing in the same way day after day. This serves two purposes. The first is concerned with our article, routine leaders means disciplined leaders. The second benefit is that routine leaders are predictable and consistent. If you can predict what your boss is going to do, that means you don't have to spend as much energy managing that relationship of the employer/employee with all its complications. At least this is what Google believes in.

Final words

With discipline there is nothing which you cannot do. Always repeat, "I never want to have to be lucky to live again, I want to live because of my discipline."

And remember, discipline requires a lot of choices, especially personal choices. Imagine yourself if you don't achieve your goal/s , feel the pain of that, it may be a 9-5 work employee, not quitting smoking, being more fit and healthy ... The pain of discipline is easier than the pain of regret. 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 can afford to have a life that is controlled by someone else or a life that is basically controlled by our emotions.

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