Without self-discipline, your success as an entrepreneur is compromised. You may well be setting business goals, but if nobody is around to hold you accountable, do you procrastinate and lack focus?
Many entrepreneurs are guilty of this. We often depend so much on the guidance of others that we don’t do a very good job of policing ourselves.
Then we begin the rationalisation process and convince ourselves that it’s not our fault we didn’t accomplish what we needed to. After all, the person who usually guides our actions was not present, so of course we were going to fail.
This type of thinking creates an unhealthy habitual process where we look for reasons to fail. Our failures mount, our self-love and self-esteem plummet, and we crank up the amount of stress in our lives.
That’s a shame, because self-control can be taught. The human brain is a powerful computer which can be programmed through commitment and self-discipline.
There are steps you can take to become more disciplined and take control of your life.
What is Self-Discipline?
The definition of self-discipline is as follows:
The ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses.
Oxford Dictionary
So basically, it’s about setting routines, habits and processes which you commit to following. This keeps distractions and laziness from hindering your productivity and helps you to achieve the things you want in life.
With #selfdiscipline most anything is possible - Theodore Roosevelt Share on XWhen you discipline yourself and govern your own actions, accountability needs to happen. You need to be responsible for what you do today, tomorrow, next week and next year, and its a given that you’re going to be tempted and distracted along the way. If you have things you want in your life that you have not achieved, self-discipline can help you get them.
Self-discipline is all about doing what is necessary, even when you don’t want to.
Self-control is so important for everyone, especially in this day and age when everyone is wired and plugged in 24/7. Distractions are everywhere and this gives you with plenty of excuses for not doing what you need to do to meet your goals. To give you reasons for working hard on becoming a determined, focused, self-disciplined entrepreneur, let’s look at the benefits this type of conscious living can provide.
You Are in Control of Your Destiny
Whether you want to become more successful in business, or simply achieve more of the personal rewards you dream of, self-discipline is going to be required somewhere down the line. Life is not always easy but self-control can lead to determined, conscious action that turns a rough patch in your life into rich rewards and self-pride.
The realisation that YOU are in control is huge. If you constantly feel that you are at the beck and call of others, you are certainly not alone. Most people struggle with the feeling that they do not control their own lives. The more often you can take control of the direction of your life and ignore external influences which try to control or distract you, the better.
There is only one person on this planet that has your best interests at heart, while simultaneously being able to control your actions … and that is you. The more self-discipline you develop, the more you take command, rather than letting others guide your way through life.
Here are 5 key benefits of self-discipline:
1: Self-Discipline Boosts Self-Esteem & Self-Love
When you feel good about who you are, you automatically find yourself with a better life. This is because self-esteem and self-love depend on you creating the life that rewards your values. This is going to require self-control. The world will not automatically hand you a goal-achieving and value-fulfilling destiny. Sometimes it requires work, and this means self-discipline.
Think back to the definition of self-discipline. It requires doing what you need to do, even if you don’t want to do it. When you work through difficulties and keep laser focused, you’ll find yourself achieving goals and important milestones more frequently.
How good did it feel the last time you had to work very hard to achieve something you really wanted? It was an awesome feeling, wasn’t it? This is how conscious self-discipline makes you feel good about yourself, improving the self-esteem and self-belief that lead to future rewards and achievements.
2: Your Path to Success Becomes Easier… & More Rewarding
Unless you have been left a hefty inheritance from a long-lost relative and you don’t need to work for a living, this benefit is huge. You have seen how self-confidence increases your chances of success at anything.
The idea that success breeds success is well-known in business. This means that the more successes you achieve and goals you meet, future goal achievement becomes easier and easier.
3: You Become Unconsciously Better
As your self-discipline continues to improve the level at which you succeed, your brain notices. You have so many choices and decisions to make every day. Whenever it can, your brain tries to automate those decision-making processes.
When you got your first pet as a child, you had to remember to feed it every day, change its water, play with it and clean up after it. After a while, this became an unconscious habit. You probably found yourself feeding your furry friend without even thinking about the process. When you first attempted to ride a bicycle, you fell down a lot. You got cuts and bruises and probably cried too. It took a lot of self-discipline at that young age to get back onto that bike. Eventually, you became better at riding a bicycle, to the point where you don’t even question your ability to do so.
Self-discipline makes you better at so many things. When your proficiency increases, the amount of time it takes for you to accomplish the task decreases, meaning you free up more time to do what you love. The talented but lazy athlete will eventually give way to the hard-working, self-disciplined competitor that has less natural talent. This is because self-control makes you more accomplished and capable.
4: Your Relationships Become Healthier
It’s hard to keep promises to others if you can’t keep promises with yourself. This means if you want to enjoy fuller, healthier relationships with those people that are important to you, you can … you just need to develop more self-control. It is easy to predict how you will treat others by looking at how you treat yourself.
A person who has self-discipline and self-control is admired by others for those qualities. This means you attract people who, like yourself, want to become better at taking command of their lives. Your reliability becomes apparent, and your relationships become healthier.
Self-discipline also helps improve your relationships in another way. It allows you the strength to move on from those people who are keeping you from enjoying life to the fullest and living a fulfilling existence.
5: Your True Priorities & Values Begin to Appear
There are a lot of stories about entrepreneurs who chased money at the expense of everything else in their lives. Many of these stories include a change of heart. The person that placed everything secondary to making money realised this did not align with his or her benefits, and self-control got them back on the right path.
When you have a disciplined approach to self-government and self-direction, you begin to look at all of your behaviours comparatively. You learn to think before taking action, and this reveals those things that are truly important to you.
Self-discipline is a wonderful way to discover those things that really mean something in your life. Sometimes you will find that what you think you value highly is actually not what you naturally and desperately desire deep down inside.


Are you going to make a commitment to be more self-disciplined? Comment below.
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