1. Consistent Timing

Set aside specific time constraints for one given activity. E.g. showering from 8-8:15. If you do this every day your brain and body will get accustomed to it and crave showering every time 8h comes around.

Why? Because our brain loves routines. By blocking out times for work, food, and exercise, you can develop healthy routines that will stick around for life.

2. Use Rewards

You never learn self-discipline by randomly do things you don’t want to. You need something to motivate your brain; otherwise it’s way too easy to quit. Without a reward your brain gets lazy. It doesn’t feel like working, because there’s nothing positive to look forward to.

Even if you have great aspirations, you still might feel like your work isn’t worth doing. Either way, you can use small rewards to slowly train your brain. The reward can be anything, but shouldn’t be unhealthy. Besides this, the only actual rule is that you only get this particular reward after finishing your work. In psychology this is called **operand conditioning**.

3. Write it Down

If you have difficulties in achieving your goals, write it down. Writing down your goals gives you something physical to keep you motivated. If the goals are all in your head, you might ignore or forget them. By creating a list, you bring your goals to life.

Once your goals have some sort of physical form, they become much harder for your brain to ignore.

4. Share your Goals

You can also trick your mind by sharing your goals with others. No matter what your goals are, this strategy can have a tremendous impact on your motivation and discipline.

Why is this strategy so effective? Because you can easily justify laziness to yourself, but it’s much harder to explain your failures to someone else.

5. Forgive Yourself

Failure is an important piece on your way to success. Without it, you’ll never learn, innovate or grow.

If you don’t forgive yourself failures, you might never take risks, because you’re scared of messing up again.

Every goal or project is a learning experience, so practice forgiving yourself and discover how you can improve.

6. Start Over

Have you ever finished a project that just doesn’t feel right? Deep down, you know there are bigger problems, but you probably don’t want to fix them.

Sometimes it makes sense to put the project aside, start over and come up with a new perspective. Il’ll require more work, but starting over will show you the flaws in your first draft and help you create a better product.

7. Remove Distractions

You can trick your mind in being more effective by removing all distractions. Leave your phone in a different room. The key is to put it somewhere where you can’t see it. Once it’s out of your sight, it will be out of your mind.

Why does this work so well? Because it reduces the number of things you have to think about. To create the best product, you need to focus on one thing at a time only.

8. Don’t Wait

There’s never a perfect time or environment to work, especially if you tend to procrastinate.

Push through your laziness and create something you’re going to be proud of. Why? Because it teaches your brain that it’s more rewarding to work instead of stall. It also builds your tolerance for uncomfortable emotions like boredom or frustration.

Both of these are crucial for a disciplined mind, so keep this up each time you start procrastinating.

9. Create Willpower

To build discipline, you need enough willpower to restrain your unhealthy impulses. Willpower stops you from eating another cookie, it keeps you from browsing hours social media or watching TV.

Where does willpower come from? You determine how much willpower you have, because it’s actually a physical process. It’s our body’s natural reaction to conflict. When we have to make a decision, willpower overrides your destructive urges and redirects energy to the productive parts of our brain.

So how can you control it? You can improve willpower by improving sleep, food and stress relieve. If you want to fool your brain into working harder, get a good night’s sleep, eat right, and keep stress to a minimum.

10. Follow A Plan

Plans help you achieve discipline by reducing the number of choices you have to make. Choices create opportunities to get you distracted.

Luckily, there’s an easy solution. Write out a plan and stick to it. At the very beginning, you should establish what you want to get accomplished. Figure out the steps you need to get there. You can even write down how much time you allocate for each task.

The best part about plans: good plans create a start and a finish line. So when you cross that finish line, you know you’re done.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash