Discipline: The Hidden Blueprint for Achieving Goals

By Future PoetPersonal Development

Discipline: The Hidden Blueprint for Achieving Goals

Over the past few months, I have been trying to create a new lifestyle by adding some personal goals to my daily routine. I was previously balancing parenting, studying for a degree, my business, Future Poet, and working full-time, However, I’m now balancing parenting and using my degree at work and within my business. My personal goals of eating healthier, exercising more, and having a sleep routine to name but a few were all I could think of when studying.  However, the sweet dreams of what I would do with all my free time were quickly diminished, as I could not find it, and felt like I was cramming too much into a day. I was quickly reminded that I had sacrificed sleep when studying, and I am now getting 6 hours instead of 2-3.

Photo by Katrin Bolovtsova

Aiming to achieve small personal goals can lead to unexpected failures, which become lessons we were not looking for or asking for. These failures hit differently because they are solely about you and there is no one to blame but you. When we fail, we don’t always self-evaluate and consider the excuses we have made to ourselves for not doing what we were supposed to. Those day-to-day receipts of excuses are nowhere to be found and hardly remembered when sitting with our failures. The goal could be something as simple as being inspired by someone to wake up at 5:00 am because you became excited about what you could achieve with your day if you did this.

Photo by Stat Knop

The goal is to wake up at 5:00 am. Excitedly you set your alarm but still go to bed after midnight because one more episode of Law & Order SVU won’t hurt. In the morning you snooze the alarm until 6:00 am. You’re irritated but say to yourself, you weren’t ‘really’ ready and will try again tomorrow morning. You repeat the process that night and the following morning. Irritated again, you promise yourself to be in bed at 10:00 pm, which you honour, and feel proud of your achievement as you snuggle in. Unfortunately, your brain didn’t get the memo even though it created the plan. It is behaving erratically and won’t rest to enter the sleep stages. Random thoughts, scenarios, ideas and questions pop up and show out on you. You fight the urge to Google something or grab a pen and paper to collect the gems suddenly unravelling. You pray to remember some of it in the morning. You check the time and see it’s close to midnight. Damn! For another hour if not more, you’re tossing and turning considering all the things which could make you sleep, until you sleep. Before you know it, the alarm goes off, it’s 5:00 am. Exhausted,  you get up, with no elation about meeting your goal because of what you went through to achieve it. You grimace at the thought of managing the day ahead tired. None of this is what you had envisioned during your excitement when you were inspired to set the goal. Self-doubt steps in and your self-talk entertains it.

Photo by Jéssica Maria

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” – Jim Rohn. Many of us lack discipline but also despise personal failure and lessons. We submit to our feelings of low confidence, low self-esteem, low motivation etc and quit. We refuse to torture ourselves to push through the first phase. We want to get it right the first time, the way we planned it, for immediate results. So rather than maintain discipline, exercise patience and tailor the plan to the realism of our life to stay on course, we diminish the goal with reasons of why it was a silly idea in the first place or no longer viable or important to us. We stand in our own way and then give up on ourselves.  Sometimes months pass and we become inspired all over again, so try again, but fail in the same way.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. ~ Jim Rohn

So how do we become disciplined to achieve our personal goals?

Make every goal a SMART goal no matter how small: Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals increases your chances of achievement.  It sounds too business-like for small personal goals like waking up earlier but simplify it and you will see that it works. You know what you want to accomplish (wake up at 5:00 am); you can measure your progress (keep a diary); you have a realistic goal which can be achieved (it is nothing you are not capable of ); the goal is relevant to helping you achieve other things (the things you were excited about); a deadline can be set to attain it (give yourself a full calendar month).

Setting boundaries: We love our children, friends, family etc. but we must set boundaries with them. We cannot be everything to everyone and hope that there is a little left over for ourselves. Setting boundaries is easier said than done but it is achievable. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, on average we sleep for about 420 minutes (7 hours) which leaves us 1,020 minutes to work with. Take at least 20 of those minutes for yourself.

Learn from your failures: Instead of beating yourself up or being vexed with yourself, acknowledge where you failed. Be real with yourself and consider what you could have done differently. Only dwell on your failures for as long as it takes to figure out where you went wrong and the changes you need to make. Then positively implement the change and be patient for the outcome.

Accountability partners or support systems: Share your personal goal with someone you trust and who will understand the importance of your accomplishment for you. They should want to see you win, and if it means calling or texting you at mutually arranged times to make sure you’re on target, they will be happy to do so. You could also find like-minded people, who may share your goal within community groups (in-person or online). If sharing your goal is not for you then listen to relevant podcasts or read blogs, or books by people who inspire you or have achieved the goal you are trying to meet. Consider having inspirational affirmations or positive quotes around you for motivation. Alternatively, write your goal on a post-it note and put it where you will see it daily.

Be open to learning about yourself: We will learn things about ourselves we may not have been ready for. We will see our strengths and weaknesses,  what drives and slows us down. That self-awareness is personal growth, embrace it. All of the above is easier said than done but achievable. Those who inspired us in the first place showed us. So when self-doubt steps in consider this, you never know if your journey and accomplishing your goal will inspire someone else. So don’t quit on yourself because we are all trying to be better than we were yesterday.