If your New Year’s resolutions have already fallen by the wayside or you’ve taken an unplanned break from FitClub and your healthy diet, you may need to try to cultivate self discipline, which is critical to accomplishing your goals. A study cited by Forbes Magazine found that people with high levels of self discipline were happier than those without.  The subjects of the research spent less time trying to make decisions, better prioritized their goals, and never had to chastise themselves for making poor decisions.  You can’t buy or borrow self discipline, but there are a few tricks that can help you cultivate and maintain self discipline in your own life.

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1. Create an environment of success.  Eliminating any obstacles between you and your goals is the first step in creating self discipline. For example, instead of deciding every night whether to have a bowl of ice cream before bed, stop keeping ice cream in the house. The same principles can be applied to your workouts.  Laying out your workout clothes the night before you go to bed eliminates any excuses you might have when you’re running behind in the morning.  Making the right decision the easiest possible decision eliminates much of our internal rationalizations that lead to unhealthy meals or skipped workouts.


2. Fake motivation until it begins to come naturally.  No one is motivated to work out every day, but those that ultimately have plenty of self discipline do it anyway.  There’s never going to be the perfect time to start your healthy journey, and there are always going to be easy excuses that you’ll find if you’re looking.  If skipping your workout or eating unhealthy food is a habit, you will have to work hard to break it. Your body and mind might be resisting any change to formed habits, whether good or bad.  Knowing that this initial struggle is common and biological can help you overcome the urge to wait for a better time when you’re more motivated.  Starting now will save you weeks or months of putting off a healthier lifestyle until it feels like the right time.


3. Allow for rewards and failures.  It might be just when you start to feel like you’ve taken control of your life that you inadvertently slip.  You miss a few workouts, eat too much or too poorly, and start to slide back into your old patterns.  Instead of beating yourself up, allowing for mistakes and failures is the key to being able to start again with your changed lifestyle.  Looking for progress and signs of success and allowing for rewards along your journey is a better motivator than punishing yourself when you’ve fallen behind.  Schedule a massage at FitClub, hire a personal trainer, or take a new class. When it’s time for a reward, your brain will more quickly identify your healthy habits with happiness.

How disciplined do you think you are?  Does it come easily for you or is it a work in progress?