The strength of your discipline.
At the heart of any successful person, is self-discipline.
Willpower: the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action.
Discipline: to train oneself to do something in a controlled and habitual way.
The strength of your discipline is often the difference between you achieving your goals or giving up. This is the same principle for all areas of your life, not just with your health or weight loss. Your thoughts, your emotions, your behaviours, and your habits. Willpower is what gets the engine turning over; discipline is what keeps it running once it’s fired up.
Are you struggling to get started in the morning? Or struggling to get started on something you need to do? You are not alone!
So, you think all health coaches just love getting up in the morning and going for a run? Nope, think again! I am not a morning person and I really despise that alarm when it goes off in the morning. But I have the willpower to get me up and the discipline gets me through the run.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “With self-discipline almost anything is possible.”
You can move from struggling to conquering. A lack of self-discipline is often what causes us to fail. You are probably aware that your discipline is lacking. So, what can do you do strengthen discipline in your life?
Self-discipline is developed by creating new habits. We need to change those neural pathways, this won’t happen overnight, habits take time to form and to break. Start small and try some of the following habits to help your path become easier.
Here are some ways to incorporate habits to develop discipline in your life:
Gratitude Gratitude improves our mental health, emotional health and wellbeing. We spend so much of our lives worrying about what we don’t have or what we want, and we forget about what we do have.The state of worrying and wanting creates stress on the body, which impacts our digestive, reproductive and immune systems.When you wake up, spend 5 minutes writing down what you are grateful for. Even if you think you have nothing to be grateful for, find something. You might just be grateful to be alive! The more you do this exercise, the more you will become grateful for. There are apps you can use to keep track of your daily gratitude’s.
Meditation and Positive Affirmations Meditation relaxes the body and calms the mind. This may seem daunting in the beginning but if you can stick with this habit, you will reap the benefits in the long run! If Oprah has time to meditate, you have no excuses!If you took 5 minutes every day to be silent and have some real contemplation, not grounded in worry, how would you feel? We spend every day of our lives keeping busy and filing up every waking space. "When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself," Eckhart Tolle writes. "When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world." Use a guided meditation if you are a beginner and start this habit either every morning or at the end of the day before you go to bed. Positive affirmations or mantras are also great for those who need some extra motivation. You can have something printed out that you read every day or use an app to listen to something new. The more positive speak you hear, the more you will start to believe it!
Daily Goal Setting In the evening, write down what you plan to achieve the next day. Having your goal written down, they are specific and measurable. You have a plan to achieve them. If you plan to get up and write out your gratitude’s in the morning, write that down. If you don’t achieve it, you can put an X next to it or highlight what you didn’t achieve for the day. Track your progress towards your goals and your successes.
Tell someone Sometimes when we are struggling to keep a new habit and discipline for a task, we need someone else to keep us in check. If we have told someone we plan to walk 10,000 steps every day, we are much more likely of achieving this goal if other people know about it. It keeps us accountable.
Habit Buddy Find someone who also wants to develop this new habit. Having someone else trying to develop discipline in the same area can encourage you to keep going. If you struggle to get up in the morning, find someone who also wants to make the most of the mornings. Make a pack to only give each other positive encouragement.
Eating Healthy, Exercise and Sleep These three habits have a HUGE effect on how we feel. Healthy Eating A large portion of our energy is used processing and digesting food (10-25% of it). If your diet is rich in highly processed foods, carbohydrates and fats, it can use more energy to process food.Opt for raw, healthy, plant based foods to give you the energy to stay focused.The amount of energy we have plays a large role in how focused we are. When we’re focused, we can approach our goals with discipline. When we’re too comatose from the food that we’ve eaten, this is far harder to achieve. We spend most of our time feeling too sluggish to get anything done. Exercise Exercise reduces your levels of stress and pain by releasing endorphins and neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. Exercise also improves health by increasing blood flow and oxygenation of the body’s cells, helping to fight off diseases and boost the immune system. And, of course, exercise increases our ability to focus on the task at hand, allowing us to lead a more disciplined life. Start small, there is no need to run a marathon tomorrow! Start with 5 to 10 minutes of walking every day. Sleep Studies indicate that people who are deprived of the proper amount of sleep on a regular basis are at a greater risk for certain diseases. The lack of sleep has a great impact on our immune system and our ability to concentrate.It’s important to get at least 6 hours of sleep, no matter what.
Health Coach This is what we are here for! Health and Wellness Coaches are professionals trained in helping you develop the right habits and discipline to carry them out.Health and wellness coaches help clients make positive and lasting changes to their health. The coach guides clients through the process of creating a vision for their health and well-being, developing a healthy mind-set and healthy habits, and encouraging them every step of the way until they accomplish their goals.A health coach is not a therapist or psychologist. While we can help clients to improve their mind-sets, we are not trained to work with clients who have psychological disorders. Here are a few questions to get you thinking:
Do you struggle with work-life balance?
Are you always low on energy and motivation?
Do you struggle to keep a calm and positive mindset?
Do you have trouble sticking to health-related goals?
Do you struggle to discipline?
Do you find it difficult to prioritise your health?
Do you rarely let yourself relax?
Do you want to make healthy changes to your lifestyle but you’re not sure where to start?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, a health & wellness coach would be a great option for you. Of course, this is a commitment like anything else, but the health results you will achieve will be beyond worth it.
Remember:
Start Small – you are not going to wake up tomorrow a completely different person. For best results, start by picking one habit to change. Don’t become overwhelmed with too many changes at once.
Decide – Identify what you want to do differently.
Make a List – Part of self-discipline is knowing what you need to do and then doing it.
Plan – Make your choices in advance and write them down.
Failure leads to success – Don’t make a mistake and then give up on day two. You will not be perfectly disciplined overnight, so expect some failure to happen along the way. Understand that you will fail from time to time, be kind to yourself. When you succeed, you need to celebrate.
Building self-discipline can help all areas of your life. Pick one habit to change and get started. Don’t stress about getting it perfect, don’t worry about your failures, just worry about becoming better at your habit each day. Gradually, over time, you will become more disciplined in that one area and you can move onto the next habit.
