Are you disciplined enough?
It’s happened again, the New Year’s begun and the gyms are bursting with people who have decided to get fit and or lose weight.
People were queuing to get into our local gym yesterday evening and when I mentioned this to the physiotherapist this morning he said; well everyone knows that by the end of February it’ll be quite again.
It seems that the moments such as the coming of a new year, significant birthdays, the end of relationships etc. when we “wake up” to the passing of time in our lives many people decide they want to take action on turning their lives around.
For you it might not be a health/fitness goal but the same thing could happen if you want to improve any area of your life.
If you do want to improve any area of your life and you have even a hint of an action taker in you then you might have even got as far as setting some form of goals.
Do you want to:
• End/find a relationship?
• Save more money?
• Go back to college?
If you want to polish up those goals then the article below will help you (but don’t click until you’ve read the rest of this article)
http://empiricalcoaching.com/blog/?p=13
But polishing up your goals isn’t want this article is about, this article is about helping you build and maintain momentum in sustaining the behaviours that will lead to your goal!
Let’s go back to the example of the people who for the next few weeks will be filling up the gyms across the developed world, only to slump back into their old habits after a few weeks or months.
I’m not knocking them, we all have to start where we are and these people are people who are taking action to change their lives. I just want to help you to maintain your focus after the initial burst of excitement has passed.
This is a big subject and I’ll only have space to give you a few key pointers but if you act on them they will make a big difference!
But first a hint Stephen Covey’s best selling book was called
“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”
There is something very powerful in that title that many people miss!
Stephen was talking about people who are very effective at creating the results they want in their lives. These were people who were already very effective and many people tried to emulate their results by doing what they did – It seems me that they missed the “hidden” point that made them effective.
Can you guess what it is yet?
The fact is that the people who go out and use lots of “will power” and discipline to copy the results very often failed because they missed the single biggest distinction that made these people so effective!
The book isn’t called “The 7 DISCIPINES of Highly Effective People” it’s called “The 7 HABITS…”
The key word is habits these highly effective people were following these behaviours habitually – if you’d asked them what they did that made them so effective, they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you.
So how does this relate to you and the countless thousands who are working to try and change their lives?
Well if you want to change you have to focus your efforts on the creation of habitual behaviours that will lead to your outcome by their very nature!
This means that if you want to change behaviour you first need to set a goal/outcome that will require you to perform the desired behaviour in order to achieve it.
Then work to make this behaviour a habit!
Luckily you are a habit making machine, you are hard wired to make consistent behaviours habitual (automatic and unconscious) I’ve read that over 45% of what you do it totally automatic and habitual starting with how you wake up and which sock you put on first!
So for now take a little time out and think about one specific habit you’d like to replace and what you’d like to do instead and in the next article I’ll give you some tactics to make this happen.
So what do you want to achieve, be or do this year and what habits that are holding you back?
And what would you like to do instead?
Bye for now,
Anth.
January 8th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Anth,
If you extend the title from discipline to its origins ‘disciple’ where a way of living is extolled you can look at if from a biblical sense.. and be a monk and wear a habit. It is a way of forming mind games with yourself if you like..
If you are biblically inclined, or even an atheist as I am, you can use the analogy of which disciple you are dealing with on any day or at any time, so you can form a habit based on an imaginary person - your own alter ego for the moment.
With Eben Pagan he uses time slots to do things and sets a target at the end of it, another way of treating it is to say to yourself you are [say] the ’self organising disciple’ for the next 90 minutes - what would he do? He would extoll the virtuous life of being self organised. Then you go about that role until your time with it is up and your mission achieved.. you can have as many disciples as you like, just don’t be a Judas to yourself. How to treat this is to attach the negative things that you do to that disciple - Judas, then if you see that you are slipping into Judas mode, you know the outcome will be nailing yourself to the cross, that is the result - a slow painful death from doing the wrong things to yourself, eg, smoking, excess eating, etc..
There are many other models of this kind of thing that you can employ to achieve your end goals, you can set yourself into the model of a military command system, where you alternate between roles of being the field marshall [planning and tactical control] all the way down to a private [who does the 'grunt' work] .. but take each role to heart at the time and be sure to act out that role with some level of vigour and sincerity - remember - it is for you. You assign a task to each rank and you time split between them for which ever role it is that rank carries.
Have you ever met a bureaucrat - you know - the ‘form nazi’, or the ‘parking nazi’, or the ‘paper nazi’?? Here’s another tack you can take with yourself.. a a for instance you can be the ‘tidy up your desk nazi’, where if your desk is not cleaned up within the next thirty minutes, ‘you vill be shot!’.
I had thought to put a parliamentary model, but that would most certainly be a failure - all talk and no action!!
These are all just mind games you can play with yourself to make things fun and to add some flavour to what might otherwise be a boring task.
Time bombs:
A good way to get things done that have to be done is to have a wind up timer with a reasonably loud clock system - one of those mechanical timers is good for this though they are becoming more difficult to find.
Having trouble making a decision? Start the timer and resolve your decision, surely each one should take less than a minute.. set yourself an obligation to start the timer and then make a decision - run a journal on it so you can see how many decisions you’re made, you’ll be surprised how long the list can get - 60 in an hour is good.
You can as I did make up a timer from an electronics shop - it isn’t that hard with a soldering iron and a 12v battery - see http://www.jaycar.com.au/productResults.asp?whichpage=7&pagesize=10&keywords=&CATID=&SUBCATID=&form=KEYWORD&ProdCodeOnly=yes&SPECIAL=&Keyword1=KJ8&Keyword2=KJ&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=
Hope this help,
Nicholas Tomlin. (C) 200901090636
January 10th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Hi Nicholas,
I agree with you on the sue of the timer I also admire your willingness to make your own - very proactive :o)
Using a timer is a great way to stay focused on one task and gives you the freedom to focus completely knowing that the timer will call you back to reality
I use several different types - I use a ticking one “chicken type” as in the earlier video like you for tasks which I want to remind myself time is moving on - so I don’t get drawn into things like checking emails/surfing the web for longer than I decided.
For 50-minute prime time slots I prefer a silent one and if I’m at my PC I use the free countdown timer available here:
http://www.poodwaddle.com/free11.htm
Other wise a mobile phone and wristwatch works just great for other tasks.
Have fun with your “time bombs”
Anth.