One of the tenets of personal development is to bring about a behavior change. If you want to develop yourself, you need to change your behavior to some degree.
It is not necessarily overhauling yourself, but it's still a change.
The whole reason of self-improvement is to improve upon what you are. Some of things are not working for you, because the necessary behavior is absent.
Or you just want to improve upon things. And you need new skills to achieve this improvement. Behavior change could also mean learning new skills.
When you learn new skill and actually apply new skills, the behavior change has taken place With this change, you exploit the benefits of the new skills.
So how does one change behavior? At the root of changing behavior is our capacity of self-discipline. This is also called self-control or willpower.
You can have all the knowledge in the world. But if you don't have the self-discipline to incorporate that knowledge in your behavior, the knowledge is of no use.
For example, you know that you are not supposed to do certain things. But if you do those things anyway, what is the point of the knowledge?
Personal development experts will tell you this: you have to set goals, divide tasks into sub tasks, prioritize tasks, write journals and have a positive attitude in spite of setbacks.
But if you don't have self-discipline to put all this advice into action, you won't succeed! And it may lead you to blame that expert advice doesn't work.
What is self-discipline though? It's the eternal conflict between the dual self. We always have a self who is conscious about long-term goals. He gets and remembers what is the right thing to do for us.
Then we have the other self which is impulsive and indulgent. This other self is always getting distracted towards the guilty pleasures that we should not explore. This other self is the one which blocks us from taking the initiative that we really should take.
The impulsive self is wanting a sweet treat, be lazy and just watch TV. While the better self is aware that those are bad things. And one should really be eating healthy in general, exercising and focusing on making that phone call and writing that journal.
At the deepest level, the impulsive self is a primitive self, who is impulsive, craving and desires things. The better self, is our analytical self. This is the neo-cortex in action. This is the recent part of our brain which engages in complex functions. This part of the brain has big picture, it weighs different options and knows what is right versus wrong.
Who doesn't want success, good relationships, health and well-being? Who doesn't want to be happy? And all of these can be achieved through proper self-discipline.
The fundamental reasons, most people don't succeed even after reading books, taking courses and attending seminars, is the failure to exercise self-discipline and giving into the impulsive self.
The root of all personal problems lies the failure of self-discipline. The fundamental reason people are not able to achieve success is because of them not able to keep up self-discipline.
Self-discipline is the biggest human strength.
You may wonder, if it's possible to increase self-discipline.
And the answer is a resounding YES.
One can definitely increase the levels of willpower he or she possesses.
Willpower is a limited resource. In other words self-discipline will deplete. Right after exercising self-discipline, your willpower will deplete and if you later have to exercise your willpower, you don't do that well.
Yet if you practice self-discipline over and over, it improves. This may sound counterintuitive. We just said that using willpower depletes it, but on the other hand we are saying that using it over and over, improves it.
The best analogy to understand this is that of muscle. Right after use, muscle is fatigued and painful. But if you keep exercising repeatedly, your muscle strength and tone improves.
If you intentionally practice self-discipline again and again, you'll build it up You will increase the level of self-discipline.
What are the ways to improve willpower?
Last decade of research in human psychology has revealed many ways in which one can improve the willpower or the self-discipline. A Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, identifies following four methods of improving the willpower.
Get enough sleep.
One of the most common ways to improve willpower is through more sleep.
Lack of sleep actually prevents us from operating at most willpower capacity. If we are sleep deprived, our prefrontal cortex doesn't activate enough, which means our restraining mind is not in action and we easily give in to the impulses.
It is important to get a good night's sleep. For most people 7 hours is what is required. If you haven't slept 7 hours and even if you don't feel sleepy, your cortex is still not working full capacity. Hence its very important to sleep 7 hours.
Meditation is one of the tools that can be effectively used to help with the increasing amount of sleep you can have.
Forgive yourself.
We are usually critical of ourselves. Especially when we have a setback, we tend to criticize us.
Scientists found that for reasons we don't fully understand yet, when we criticize ourselves or when we are harsh on ourselves for setbacks, we tend to repeat such setbacks or the indulgent behavior.
On the other hand when you forgive yourself for the setbacks, it seems to have an effect of preventing future relapses.
So learn to forgive yourself for setbacks along your journey.
Be mindful of distracting urges.
One of the most important tool for boosting self-discipline is the awareness of your urges and impulses.
If you can cultivate the mindful awareness of the distracting impulses, it becomes easier not to succumb.
When you're struck with a distracting impulse or craving that will spoil your goal, you have to become mindful of that impulse.
We feel different types of impulses. You may feel like procrastinating and you won't start reading the book. Or you may feel like delaying that important class registration. If your goal is to lose weight, you may feel the impulse to indulge in high calorie food.
Here is what you do.
Notice the feeling that you're experiencing. Observe the thought that is going through your mind. Notice the impulse. Observe the itch.
Become aware of the impulse. Feel the impulse, what is it? What is the feeling? Where is the feeling? Is it in certain part of the body?
Attend to this inner experience. Acknowledge the experience and then accept it. Don't try to run away from the experience. Face it head on and then accept it.
Once accepted, take a deep breath and pause. Give your body a chance to slow down and plan.
Once you have intimately observed the inner experience, bring your attention to your goal. Think of action that will help you achieve your goal.
This in essence is being mindful of your urge or impulse, then accepting it and moving on to what is the right thing to do.
This may be easier to do for food impulses. It is harder to be aware of your habit to put off things. But you can get better through practice.
Visualize the roadblocks.
Generally people believe that you've to imagine success to become a success. Run of the mill self-help gurus will tell you that you've to imagine success to achieve success and not failure.
But exhaustive research proves that, just imagining the success is not enough. Yes imagining success is a good idea. But a better idea is to regularly imagine failure! You may think that will prime you for failure, but that's what doesn't happen in practice.
One scientific study compared two groups of people. One group just visualized the end goals. They visualized achieving the end goal.
Another group visualized the end goal along with the process of going through the journey to achieve success. The visualized ups and down of the process, they visualized the incremental improvement and progress that they were making along the journey.
The group that visualized the journey as well, was twice more likely to achieve the actual results.
So the journey towards achieving the goal is more important than the goal itself.
What is that you are going to inevitably face along the journey? Lots of setbacks. And for a faint heart the setbacks will demoralize him and make him abandon his goal. There won't be just one setback, there will be plenty of them.
Failure is inevitable. And visualizing the failure prepares you for failure. After having repeatedly visualized failure along with the progress, when you're actually struck by the failure, it's no more a shock. You are already ready for it.
So everyday visualize the journey and visualize a failure.
Make friends with your future self.
We don't normally think a lot about what would happen to us in future. We don't visualize our future self. Apparently our perception of our future self could be very influential when it comes to willpower.
If you think of future self as being totally different from your current self, in other words if you completely dissociate your current self from your future self, the future self becomes like a stranger and you wouldn't care much about future self.
In such cases you don't bother to take care of future self as for all practical purposes future self is a stranger for you.
Different people have different perceptions about their future self. Some think of them more like their present self. Many think of their future self as very different.
The ability to disconnect from the long-term consequences of your choices primes you to be more impulsive. Even in the cases where choices are not relevant to future consequences.
In such cases, you become less attuned to your future concerns and plans. In reality we know that we need to take care of our future self. We need to save for retirement and we should take care of our future by taking care of our future self.
The key is how we can associate more with our future self? One interesting tool, researchers used effectively, is letter writing. Write a letter from your future self to your present self.
Or you can write to your current self, note down about who you are and what is going on in your life. Chronicle your current struggles. Then reply from your future self to current self.
The idea is to connect with your future self through correspondence. It is better to be optimistic in the letter that you write to future self than being completely pessimistic.
The purpose of this exercise is not to view this process as if you are fixing things for your future self. It is more about being able to feel that the future self is real and it is going to be you.
It's not so much that it's going to be same person that you are now.
Even if you start imagining doing mundane stuff in the future. Like driving to work, or going to shop or talking with friends or doing chores in the household. Imagine vividly what it's going to feel like many years down the line.
Here is the Summary.
Self-discipline is the biggest human strength.
One of the biggest reason, people fail is due to lack of self-discipline.
Willpower can be increased.
Sleep well.
Practice forgiving yourself.
Cultivate mindfulness of your impulses and distractions.
Visualize the roadblocks and failures.
Practice connecting with your future self.
Hopefully you will be able to use all these techniques to increase your self-discipline.
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