discipline is the key to self love. here’s how to stay disciplined.
There are so many things I wish I could do on a regular basis: make my bed, journal after I wake up, drink enough water throughout the day, go on solo dates once a week, eat healthy and exercise five times a week.
But, unfortunately, my lack of consistent discipline makes that difficult.
Discipline is ultimately the key to self love because you’re able to focus on bettering your health, goals and ambitions.
Stay disciplined by making your intentions clear, avoid relying on motivation and recognizing your triggers.
make your intentions and goals clear.
When we create goals, we tend to keep them vague, such as eating healthier or spending less money.
The vagueness hinders our level of discipline and amount of success because it’s harder to measure and keep track of.
Instead, set clear intentions and goals.
If you want to eat healthier, set a certain number of vegetables and fruits you want to eat in a day. Come up with the number of fast food meals or amount of times you eat out that you don’t want to go over.
If you want to spend less money, create a budget and a plan for staying on track with your spending. Set aside money that you absolutely can’t touch, and allow yourself money that you can spend during the week or month.
Having clear intentions and tasks to work toward allows you to stay disciplined because you can envision the path to what you’re working toward instead of a vague goal.
don’t rely on motivation.
I love feeling motivated. It drives me to finish an assignment, start a project or hobby, go to the gym when I don’t feel like it, etc.
But you won’t always be motivated. You have to find the reason why something needs to get done, and remind yourself of that reason over motivation.
It’s okay if you value motivation, but craft that feeling into something you can ignite every day.
For example, put your goals into a mood or vision board to look at every day. Change your phone wallpaper into your “why” or a list of goals.
Play your most motivating songs when you’re stuck. Save the podcast that makes you want to get up and be active. Prepare an incentive ahead of time to motivate you.
The difference in relying on motivation versus discipline is the ability to still achieve what you want on the days when your motivating factors aren’t working.
additional content: how to set self love intentions every month
recognize your triggers.
When I go out and drink alcohol, I tend to want to eat fast food at the end of the night.
When I listen to certain songs, it reminds me of my ex-situationships and makes me want to reach out.
When I stay up late on my phone or watching TV, it makes me want to cancel my early morning workout class.
These are all behaviors I recognize and can see coming a mile away. They are my triggers that prevent me from succeeding with my goals.
I convince myself in the moment that I can stray from my good discipline habits because I’m hungry, tired, sad, etc.
I know those feelings will arise, and I know I’ll fold because I’ll tell myself “I’m listening to my body.”
And that is important, and you should definitely listen to your body.
But you should also pay attention to what you can avoid and what triggers you can eliminate in the process of staying true to your intentions.
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stop putting so much weight on success & failures.
Try not to put so much weight on your success versus failures. At the end of the day, it’s not all that matters, and oftentimes there isn’t a single measure of success for your goals.
For example, if your goal is to eat healthier, it’s hard to measure success versus failure. Do you automatically fail if you eat one bad meal? No.
Putting pressure on yourself can lead to a fear of failure, which could make you not even want to start. There’s so many times that I’ve been left feeling anxious and like I didn’t want to start a task or project at all because of the what ifs.
Try to be proud of the steps along the way. Make mini goals or objectives that can allow you to feel good about yourself and your journey.
The outcome is obviously the larger goal, and we all want to achieve greatness.
But allow yourself to not put so much weight on it, if you know that you can be extra hard on yourself and get upset if it’s not exactly what you were hoping for.
additional content: how to stop tying your self worth to productivity
remain disciplined with other people.
Besides self-discipline within your own life, you may want to stay disciplined in your interactions with others.
You may want to stick to boundaries you put in place with other people, which takes discipline.
If you set boundaries, and then inevitably break them or let someone or something slide when you shouldn’t, that may be due to a lack of discipline.
It takes true discipline to be able to communicate effectively about what you will and will not allow, and then to take it a step further by standing on what you have communicated.
In cases where you’re going no contact, it takes discipline to stand on your decision to not have this person in your life and limit interactions.
In situations where you want to go off on your boss or professor, it takes discipline to stay calm and professional.
staying disciplined with self love.
When you’re on a journey to improving your self love and self worth, you may notice it feels overwhelming and complicated. It’ll take discipline to stay on track with your own needs and priorities with self love too.
Breaking up your self love journey into monthly intentions can be helpful, but it takes discipline.
What do you want to achieve in the upcoming 30 days? What self love activities do you want to partake in? What goals do you have for yourself this month?
Dividing intentions down into monthly, trackable action items can help you realistically improve the relationship you have with yourself and make bettering your self love a reality.
To stay disciplined on my self love journey, I find and devote personal time to planning what I want to achieve over a certain amount of time.
I’ll focus on one goal at a time, such as improving confidence, being more kind to myself, trusting my intuition more, body positivity, etc.
In our self love 90 day planner, we give space for you to stay disciplined through a weekly and monthly recap. It’s important for me to reflect on what I’m grateful for, how I can improve, what the week/month taught me, how I’m proud of myself, etc.
