The Magic of Self-Discipline (2)

Longfellow once wrote: “Those heights by great men, won and kept, were not achieved by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

Brian Tracy firmly believes that your ability to think, plan and work hard in the short term, and to discipline yourself to do what is right and necessary before you do what is fun and easy, is the key to creating a wonderful future for yourself.

Short-term gain; long-term pain
Tracy believes that there are two laws you fall victim to when you fail to practise self-discipline. The first is called the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” This law states that “the unintended consequences of an action can be far worse than the intended consequences of that behaviour because of a lack of long-term thinking.”
The second is the “Law of Perverse Consequences,” which says that “a short-term action aimed at immediate gratification can lead to perverse, or opposite, consequences from those at which it was aimed.”

For example, you might make an investment of time, money or emotion with the desire and intent to be better off and happier as a result. But because you acted without carefully thinking or doing your homework, the consequences of your behaviour turned out to be far worse than if you had done nothing at all. Every person has had this experience—usually more than once.

The common denominator of success
Herbert Grey, a businessman, conducted a long-term study searching for what he called “the common denominator of success.” After 11 years, he finally concluded that the common denominator of success was that “successful people make a habit of doing the things that unsuccessful people do not like to do.”

And what were these things? It turned out that the things successful people do not like to do are the same things that failures do not like to do either. But successful people do them anyway because they know that this is the price they have to pay if they want to enjoy greater success and rewards in the future.

What Grey found was that successful people are more concerned with “pleasing results,” whereas failures were more concerned with “pleasing methods.”
Successful, happy people were more concerned with the positive, long-term consequences of their behaviours, whereas unsuccessful people were more concerned with personal enjoyment and immediate gratification.

Motivational speaker Denis Waitley has said that top people are those who are more concerned with activities that are “goal achieving,” whereas average people were more concerned with activities that were “tension relieving.”

The habit of self-discipline
Fortunately, you can develop the habit of self-discipline. The regular practice of disciplining yourself to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not, becomes stronger and stronger as you practise it. You refuse to make excuses.

Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with. Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. And as Goethe said, “Everything is hard before it is easy.”

It is hard to form the habits of self-discipline, self-mastery and self-control, but once you have developed them, they become automatic and easy to practise. When the habits of self-discipline are firmly entrenched in your behaviour, you start to feel uncomfortable when you are not behaving in a self-disciplined manner.

The best news is that all habits are learnable. You can learn any habit you need in order to become the kind of person you want to become. You can become an excellent person by practising self-discipline whenever it is called for.

Every practice of self-discipline strengthens every other discipline. Unfortunately, every weakness in discipline weakens your other disciplines as well.

To develop the habit of self-discipline, you first make a firm decision about how you will behave in a particular area of activity. You then refuse to allow exceptions until the habit of self-discipline in that area is firmly established. Each time you slip—as you will—you resolve once again to keep practising self-discipline until it becomes easier for you to behave in a disciplined way than to behave in an undisciplined way.

The big payoff
The payoff for developing high levels of self-discipline is extraordinary! There is a direct relationship between self-discipline and self-esteem:
(1) The more you practise self-mastery and self-control, the more you like and value yourself;
(2) The more you discipline yourself, the greater your sense of self-respect and personal pride;
(3) The more you practise self-discipline, the better your self-image. You see yourself and think about yourself in a more positive way. You feel happier and more powerful as a person.

The development and maintenance of the habit of self-discipline are a lifelong task, an ongoing battle. It never ends. The temptation to follow the path of least resistance and the expediency factor lurk continually in the back of your mind. They are always waiting for an opportunity to pounce, to lead you astray into doing what is fun, easy and unimportant rather than what is hard, necessary and life-enhancing.

Napoleon Hill concluded his bestselling book of the same name by saying that “Self-discipline is the master key to riches.” Self-discipline is the key to self-esteem, self-respect and personal pride. The development of self-discipline is your guarantee that you will eventually overcome all your obstacles and create a wonderful life for yourself. The ability to practise self-discipline is the real reason why some people are more successful and happy than others.

Brian Tracy’s book, No More Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline, is divided into three sections for greater ease of use. Part I is entitled “Self-Discipline and Personal Success.” In these seven chapters, you will learn how to release more and more of your personal potential by practising self-discipline in every area of your personal life, including setting goals, building character, accepting responsibility, developing courage and backing everything you do with persistence and determination.

In the seven chapters of Part 2, you will learn how to achieve vastly more than ever before in the areas of business, sales and personal finance. You will learn why and how self-discipline is essential to becoming a leader in your field, to operating a business more profitably, to making more sales, investing more intelligently and managing your time for maximum results.

Finally, in the seven chapters of Part 3, you will learn how to apply the miracle of self-discipline to your personal life. You will learn how to practise self-discipline in the areas of happiness, health, fitness, marriage, children, friendship and the attainment of peace of mind. You will learn how to enhance the quality of your life and your relationships in every area.

In each chapter, he shows you how you can incorporate higher levels of self-discipline and self-mastery into everything you do. In the pages ahead, you will learn how to take complete control of your own personal and professional development and how to become a stronger, happier, more self-confident person in every area of your life that is important to you. You will learn how to break old habits that may be holding you back and how to develop the habits of self-reliance, self-determination and self-discipline that will enable you to set and achieve any goal. You will learn how to take complete control over your mind, your emotions and your future.

When you master the power of self-discipline, you will become unstoppable, like a force of nature. You will never make excuses for not making progress. You will accomplish more in the next few months and years than most people accomplish in a lifetime.

BY CAPT SAM ADDAIH (RTD)