Two Minute Offense

Self-Discipline » Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog

It’s a mistake to try to push yourself too hard when trying to build self-discipline. If you try to transform your entire life overnight by setting dozens of new goals for yourself and expecting yourself to follow through consistency starting the very next day, you’re almost certain to fail. This is like a person going to the gym for the first time ever and packing 300 pounds on the bench press. You will only look silly.

Once again, how much do I love Steve Pavlina’s blog? A lot.

I recently came across some other articles on concentration, which I consider an important part (no really a part, per se, but close relative, perhaps) of self-discipline. I won’t link to it, because I don’t have the link any more… But the point is that I think using concentration techniques is a great way to start out building your self-discipline. Things like:

• Counting every four steps (1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4) [or five or six steps] when walking
• Counting the number of bites when chewing food
• Counting inhales/exhales [up to ten] on public transit (while commuting, essentially - I wouldn’t recommend doing this in the car without praticing elsewhere first, because it requires a suprising amount of concentration, at least for me, the Scrawny Concentrator)

It seemed kind of ridiculous to me at first, but I believe that doing these things (I started about 2 weeks ago) has actually improved my ability to concentrate, and helped me in my quest to stop biting my fingernails (of course, the psychology behind that, I think, is a whole different thing that I am still trying to figure out).

I saw Steve’s post, and thought it was a great, so I wanted to provide a few ideas of how you can start your self-discipline training regimen. I started with the walking one, and found it the easiest. Just make sure you’re actually counting steps, and not just counting to four while walking. I like these particular ideas because you can (or rather have to) do them while you’re doing something during which you can’t really be doing anything else (I can’t send email while I’m walking to work; I could do something on the train, but it’s nice to relax and count breaths in the mornings - after all, I got the idea from a Zen meditation book).