Everyone knows that finishing what you start is possible only with self-discipline and willpower. But if everyone knows about this, then why do books still remain unread, projects unfinished, and a new article remains in the form of a plan? And this is always surprising, because at the very beginning there was so much zeal, desire and motivation. Where do these feelings go?
We believe that motivation is good, but motivation alone is not enough. And first of all, you need to train willpower and self-discipline, because these are the qualities that will not allow you to abandon what you started again. So, how can you develop the discipline to see things through to completion?
Why is motivation alone not enough?
Today, the Internet and social networks are literally overflowing with information about motivation: books are written about it, videos are made, online courses are developed, and so on. People are inspired by examples of successful people (even though this is often just a picture), they believe that they can do the same, they are inspired even more and... Nothing happens.
Why? Let's figure out what motivation is - objectively and without emotions.
The term “motivation” was first used by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who derived the “Law of Motivation”:
“Our volitions precede our actions, and the influence of the motive on the action is not known from the outside in an indirect way, like other causes, but directly and from the inside, therefore motivation is causality, considered from the inside.”
The word “motivation” itself is a derivative of the word “motive”. Soviet psychologist and philosopher Alexei Leontiev called the motive “objectified need.” In other words, a motive is what motivates action and sets the direction of activity; it is the ability to satisfy your needs. What is the difference between a goal and a need? Let's look at it with an example. Let's say you are hungry - this is a need. You want to satisfy your hunger - this is your goal. A plate of soup that you dream about when you are hungry is your motive, your motivation to action.
Motivation can come from both outside and inside. It’s easier and clearer to explain with examples: you read Leo Tolstoy’s books because you like them - internal motivation. You read Leo Tolstoy's books because they were assigned to read at university - external motivation. You go to the gym because you want to feel healthy - intrinsic motivation. You go to the gym because you want to please the opposite sex - external motivation. Most often, external motivators are money, the approval and admiration of others, career growth, and material acquisitions. Various factors are responsible for internal motivation: the desire for growth and self-development, pleasure, and so on.
Motivation can be positive and negative. Let's look at the examples again: you promise yourself that when you finish writing the article, you will go to a cafe for lunch - this is a positive motivation. And if you promised not to go for walks until you finish the article, this is negative motivation. For some, only negative motivation works; for others, it is important to praise themselves or receive praise from others. As in any other case, everything is individual.
Motivation is closely related to emotions. Remember your mood, energy and desire to immediately take action for success after reading an inspiring article or watching a motivating movie. In moments of euphoria, people predictably think only about the good, that their goal has already been accomplished, and they can rest on their laurels - and at this moment they do not think at all about the intermediate path, which often consists of routine and not very interesting tasks. Moreover, it is impossible to always be in an “active mood”; there are days when you want to give up everything and give up on your dreams. And when motivation stops working, it’s time for self-discipline.
The principle of gradualism
You can implement huge changes by breaking them down into small, manageable steps. The thing is, the anti-change “troll” living in your head won’t even notice that something big is happening. Resistance increases exponentially, rather than proportionally, depending on the magnitude of the change. This principle works in many aspects of life:
- Recruiting new spies is not “Hello sir, would you like to work for a foreign government to ruin your own country?” It's a series of relatively harmless and legal steps—dinners, small gifts, and requests for not-so-important information—that eventually result in serious treason.
- When filming porn films, producers do not ask a stranger from the street to lie down with five musclemen - it all starts with light nudity (“Honest modeling business, what are you talking about”), then everything goes on. Well, you understand.
- There are ominous examples from politics.
- There is a thought experiment about a frog in boiling water - maybe this is a lie, but they say that if you put a frog in a pan of water and heat it slowly, the frog will not jump out, because the boiling will be gradual. I don’t know why anyone would want to do such things, or even how true it is, but the principle is exactly the same - this is how you need to overthrow the internal saboteur troll. Boil him alive. Slowly, lulling his attention.
We want to use this same mechanism for good.
Do you want to start exercising more? Go for a walk. Do you want to go on a diet? Start by giving up the one thing that's most harmful to you—probably sugar. Do you want to quit smoking? Take today's "last" cigarette, break it in half and flush it down the toilet.
The next point follows from this.
Discipline and willpower
So, we have found that motivation is closely related and even depends on the emotional state. Discipline and self-discipline, on the contrary, do not depend on emotions and allow you to act without reference to your mood. Self-discipline is the ability to act according to a set plan without being tied to emotions.
Self-discipline is not an innate quality or natural talent. It can be trained like a muscle, that is, self-discipline can be pumped up and strengthened through regular training and a “diet” in the form of certain self-restraints. At first glance, self-discipline may sound boring and boring, but it is not. Constantly satisfying immediate needs, such as junk food, mindless surfing the Internet, sleeping until lunch (everyone has their own habits), will not make life happy and of high quality, and the ability to control yourself and not deviate from the intended path will help you achieve your goals and desired standard of living. Moreover, disciplined people actually enjoy the way they live: self-control allows you to achieve goals, and nothing motivates and inspires more than your own success.
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Self-discipline allows you to look at your life objectively, from the outside. Self-discipline helps you get rid of “garbage” in the form of bad habits or constant laziness: being a disciplined person, you can tell yourself that an evening on the couch watching TV will be pleasant, but you dream of six-pack abs, so the gym will replace “seal rest.”
But don’t think that self-discipline will turn you into a robot who lives strictly according to a schedule. Firstly, you can and should cut yourself some slack. For example, if you decide to eat only healthy foods from now on, but are desperate for a piece of cake, allow yourself to eat a piece every Sunday, for example. With pleasure and without remorse. This can also be a kind of reward for the fact that you have been eating only healthy foods all week. And so it is in everything.
Learning to overcome temptations
The next step towards our goals is to develop the ability to overcome temptations.
As the proverb says: “Out of sight, out of mind.” No matter how simple it may seem, everyone can appreciate the effect; psychologists recommend simply removing the objects of your affections from sight, this will greatly help in the development of self-discipline.
If you want to eat healthy, just don’t buy unhealthy foods; if you want to increase your productivity, turn off your mobile phone, get off social networks.
The fewer distractions, the more focused you are on achieving your goals. You need to learn to be focused on what you are doing right now. This is a large part of the success of any endeavor.
How a habit is formed
Agree, how great it is to have healthy habits, such as reading every day before bed or eating vegetables for dinner, and do them without thinking. How do you form a habit of doing something?
Let's start with the most common myth about 21 days: supposedly you only need to “endure” for 3 weeks, after which you will automatically live the life you want. This statement was made by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who noticed that it took his patients about 21 days to get used to their new appearance. In reality, this does not always work out.
Man is a rational being, so he tries to act and live in a way that will be the least resource-intensive and most enjoyable. Fear, inherent in us by nature, protects us from dangers and, in relation to modern life, from discomfort. That's why people quickly get used to junk food, lying on the couch, and so on - because this is the fastest and easiest way to get pleasure.
The more complex a habit you want to get into, the more time you will need. You need to develop something like a reflex in yourself.
Here's an example: you need to get used to jogging. Promise yourself to watch an episode of your favorite TV series after your run - this will give you more motivation, and you will be eager to start running as quickly as possible to get the reward. You should also create an atmosphere for yourself that will encourage you to go for a run: you can hang photos of athletes on the walls, join runner communities on social networks. Your environment should constantly remind you of your new habit, and then the process will go much faster and easier.
But remember that you should not force yourself to do anything through force. If you just can’t bring yourself to go for a run and turn it into your daily routine, maybe you should think about another sport?
Let's continue to learn how to form habits. If your self-discipline has not yet been pumped up to a level where you can easily control yourself, involve your friends in this matter. Share with someone in your circle that you now run every morning, and ask a friend to ask you for encouragement every day. A sense of responsibility and a reluctance to fall in the eyes of those around you will help with motivation for the habit. Ideally, of course, you would be such a friend to yourself, but everything has its time - we have just begun. There are also many apps that track your habit formation: Daily Habits, Habitica, iDoneThis, Productive, Coach.me.
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A common mistake that many people make is the desire to get “everything at once.” Let's continue to look at the example of jogging. For example, you decided to start tomorrow and immediately ran 10 kilometers. You have never run before. Of course, your body is in shock, all your muscles hurt, and thoughts about the next workout fill you with dread. Always start small, then a new business will be easier and without disappointment, and nothing motivates like your own successes, even small ones. The same principle applies to scientific papers. Do you agree that the phrase “write a dissertation” is a little scary and prevents you from getting started? And if you promise to write just a page a day, then things will go easier and, surprisingly, faster. But don’t forget that you need to write every day.
The main factor when forming a new habit is regularity. Skipping one day will set you back to the beginning of the journey, especially if you started the task relatively recently. What to do when days come when you don’t want anything at all? Give yourself some slack, but don't give up the habit entirely for that day. Can't bring yourself to go running? At least go for a walk. Do you want to watch TV instead of a book? Promise yourself that after reading 10 pages, turn on your favorite program.
Set clear goals and write a plan to achieve them
Stephen Covey, in his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, states:
that every person will feel truly significant if he realizes that his activities bring good to the world. He recommends clearly articulating your goals and mission. Goals are dreams with specific dates; a mission is what a person generally lives and acts for.
Stephen Covey argues that to truly be a highly productive person, you need to take full responsibility for your life and overcome the fear of looking “bad” in the eyes of other people. A purposeful person is a holistic person, he clearly understands the value of his time and the people around him.
So, first of all, write down your plans.
and goals on paper and then figure it out for yourself - why you need to implement them, what is the point of achieving them. It is also important to realize whether their implementation in life will benefit others, or is it just personal ambitions.
Training discipline and willpower
The stronger your self-discipline, the easier it is to form new, healthy habits. So let's talk about training self-discipline.
At the beginning of the article, we compared self-discipline to a muscle - regular training and a “diet” will make your self-discipline stronger and stronger each time.
Start by adjusting your daily routine , namely your sleep pattern. Train yourself to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. From the first alarm! Chronic lack of sleep leads to rapid fatigue, stress, emotional burnout and even neurasthenia - what new useful habits can we talk about here? You can also add a diet to your sleep schedule: firstly, eating at the same time is good for the body, and secondly, it will teach you to plan and have a daily routine, you will always know when you have time.
Take up meditation . Meditation improves your ability to concentrate and helps you immerse yourself in something completely. Determine a time for meditation - you can set aside 15 minutes in the morning after waking up, to set yourself up for the day, or before bed, to get rid of unnecessary thoughts. You can start with breathing meditation, this method is great for beginners. You can learn about breathing meditation here. You can also “meditate on an object”: choose an object in the place where you are and concentrate on it, without noticing other things and without thinking about anything other than that object. You can use technology to learn how to meditate. The Headspace app will teach you different types of meditation, the CALM and Insight Timer apps will create the necessary atmosphere, and Smiling Mind offers meditations for different ages and conditions. This article also describes the different types of meditation and the rules of meditation.
Keep an achievement diary - write down every day what useful things you have done today. Such a diary can become a form of self-control. It’s even more convenient to use habit trackers: a kind of calendar in which you write down whether you spent time learning a new language or taking a walk before bed today. The resource my.365done.ru offers a variety of checklists and habit trackers for different purposes, and you can also collect your own checklist there.
Work with your thinking . Try to push thoughts of procrastination or relaxation away. As soon as you feel laziness creeping in, switch your attention to something else. Don’t negotiate with yourself, say that from now on this is your lifestyle. Also try to think ahead. For example, you decide to lose weight and eat healthy, but you can’t get rid of the thoughts of cakes and cookies. Play through a possible scenario in your head: You eat a piece of cake and enjoy it for 2 minutes. But these 2 minutes will end, and most likely you will begin to scold yourself and reproach yourself for weakness, and this will also throw you further away from the goal. Always ask yourself: is it worth it?
Work with self-esteem . Often, we are prevented from starting a task or completing it by self-doubt and fear of failure. Have you ever had thoughts like “Why start, I won’t be able to do it anyway” or “It’s so difficult, I probably won’t be able to do it”? You won’t raise your self-esteem in one day, but regular work on yourself (you can find out about this here) will definitely be beneficial.
Create your morning routine
Morning routine
– an extremely important element of self-discipline. The time you wake up will determine how productive your entire day will be.
In Eastern psychology
and Ayurveda says that the earlier a person wakes up, the more ability he has to overcome difficulties in life. Getting up early gives a person health, invulnerability, willpower, calmness and determination.
The most optimal time for waking up in the morning is from 4 to 6 am.
In the morning hours it is very favorable to engage in meditative practices, do exercises, jogging, and eat light and healthy food.
How to fight the urge to quit everything and do nothing
What to do when no amount of persuasion works and you can’t get down to business? Most likely, you are tired, and if not physically, then emotionally. We are people, not robots, and from time to time you can allow yourself to be lazy or do something useless, but very pleasant. This will allow you to take a break and restore strength, as well as truly miss what you love. It’s an amazing fact, but sometimes when you choose to rest or “do nothing,” a great desire to get to work or just boredom appears from somewhere, which you want to replace with something useful.
If putting things off until later (or until the last moment) is your habit, you are most likely caught up in procrastination. We talked about how to deal with procrastination in order to finally start tasks on time here.
When you don’t want to return to your habit at all, or the volume of upcoming tasks is very scary, try to “agree with yourself” that you will work on the task for 15 minutes, and that’s all. Once you start, you may not even notice how you get the hang of it.
Here it is appropriate to return to motivation - after all, this is a useful skill. Today you can find a large amount of literature devoted to inspiration, motivation and, most importantly, the development of discipline and willpower. For example, “Developing Willpower” by Walter Mischel, “Self-Discipline. Personal Development by Michael Wilson, The Book of Challenges by Roseanne Kasper, Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
Discipline and willpower are qualities that are needed in any task, from getting up in the morning to writing scientific articles. Set yourself a goal that inspires you, believe in yourself and use our tips to always finish what you start!
Self-discipline: instructions for development
Achieving goals is impossible without self-discipline. It is an extremely important attribute required for the acquisition of any personal quality, sportsmanship, virtuosity in art and business or, as a result, outstanding work. Having self-discipline means being able to make decisions, take necessary actions and stick to your plan regardless of obstacles, discomfort or difficulties that may arise. But to develop self-discipline, it is necessary to create certain conditions. You will learn about them from this article. Read more…
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6.1. Additional working hours
At the age of 20, I suddenly became the manager of three cafes with a very obstinate multinational team that was absolutely not used to following orders. Naturally, the spirit of lateness reigned in the establishments.
After six months of struggling with them, I finally found an effective method - each late worker received 2-3 additional hours of work. Moreover, the employee had to work not at his workplace, but at the car wash or other places where workers are always needed. After the outbreak of discontent, lateness decreased sharply. And after a few weeks they became a rare occurrence.
Start
How to discipline yourself? To do this, you will need to decide on the time when the actions outlined in the first column will begin to be performed. Of course, you can plan for yourself any period and schedule any day. However, psychologists recommend not to delay this issue, because this will already be some kind of counterbalance to a person’s self-organization. But when a deadline is set, you absolutely must stick to it. Otherwise, all work will be ineffective.
For example, a person who decides to go to the gym simply needs to start doing it within the time limit set by him. Otherwise, the desire to practice will disappear and the goal will not be achieved. After some time, most likely, the person will decide to play sports again. However, at the same time, he will be tormented by remorse that he had not previously achieved his goal.
Why do some managers try not to notice violations of labor discipline?
I know that many new managers deliberately allow looseness in the team. What pushes them to such “ostrich” behavior?
A banal lack of management skills and fear. It is very difficult psychologically to oppose yourself to an entire team. Therefore, when employees begin to test the boss’s strength, he most often gets lost.
In such a situation, the “Divide and Conquer” method works well; it is described in this article >>>
In order to be considered modern and democratic, the young leader takes as a basis (sometimes unconsciously) the tactic of “ingratiation.” He indulges most of the whims of his employees, does not notice their antics in the hope that over time his approach will be highly appreciated by employees who will be imbued with respect for such a humane leader.
Unfortunately, this never happens. I myself stepped on the same rake when I took over the management of three cafes for the first time. The chefs of these establishments constantly gave me mini-strikes before important banquets.
I had to give them some concessions so as not to stop the work of the cafe. As a result, the work process turned into a real farce. I decided to fire the troublemakers and built relationships with new employees in a completely different way.
Online program “Mental self-regulation”
In this online program, in just 6 weeks, you will learn to cope with stress at work and school, difficult relationships in a team, anxiety and fear before important events, apathy, difficulty taking the first step and procrastination. We have collected scientifically and practically based techniques and presented them precisely from the point of view of real application in life, and also tried to give the necessary minimum of theory and more games, tests, and exercises that will allow you not only to gain knowledge, but also to develop skills. Find out more...
The ability to motivate yourself and control your mental states is a skill that requires a thoughtful and serious approach to master. We think that this collection of articles will help you find such an approach and bring it to life. We wish you success!
We also recommend reading:
- Storytelling
- How to learn a foreign language: a selection of useful materials
- Types of thinking
- Self-control: what it is and how to develop it
- How to control your emotions: rules and exercises
- Mastery of Self-Control
- Best of the year. Part two
- Self-control and self-motivation
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- Self-control: developing self-control
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Key words:1Psychoregulation
Is this necessary?
Many people believe that only those who are very lucky can achieve their goals. Indeed, sometimes it seems that the rapid rise of individuals, who yesterday were unknown to anyone, but today are at the pinnacle of fame, is nothing more than luck. Of course, such a factor as luck is present in our lives. And even psychologists do not exclude this. Nevertheless, even a happy accident is not able to help a person who is not ready to perform the actions that are required of him. But the acquisition of various skills is possible only when an individual has discipline.
In addition, self-organization is simply necessary for those who understand that they give up, give up, stop believing in themselves and succumb to the negative influence of various external factors, because all this interferes with achieving life goals. In the case when a person wants to achieve something, he must follow certain rules, which will allow him to solve the problem facing him. And it doesn’t matter whether he likes it or not. Only by following certain rules can you achieve what you dream of. How to become a disciplined person?
6.3. Substitution method
He helped me a lot at first. When I had three completely different teams in front of me, the question arose about effective management based on their characteristics. Here a very interesting method came to the rescue - I appointed a deputy to each of the teams, whose competence was to resolve general organizational issues, and report to me daily on the state of affairs. And they could also be delegated to me with a list of requests and proposals.
As a result, in six months I received a lot of useful information about my employees, was able to actually test their abilities and personal qualities, and also weeded out loafers and violators of discipline. It was very difficult for them to work in conditions where every offense was immediately visible to the deputy and did not go unpunished.
Planning
How to become a disciplined person? At the initial stage of working on this issue, it is necessary to allocate some time. And this will already be the first step towards self-organization. You need to sit down and calmly think about a plan that will allow you to achieve your goal. It should include the actions that will need to be taken to implement the plan. Psychologists recommend calling this plan. For example, “Discipline yourself.” Such a headline will become a person’s main goal. In addition, the plan must contain columns with specific names. These include: Actions and Getting Started, Possible Difficulties and Coping Strategies, and Report. Let's consider what the content of these columns should be.
