A few days ago I participated in an awesome Twitter chat hosted by the lovely Carey-Lee Dixon of ForWomentoWomen.com and Tonya Rapley of MyFabFinance.com. The chat centered on money and what we as 20- and 30-something women can do to get our finances in order, but an interesting theme that kept coming up was self-discipline.

How many of us can attest to struggling with having self-discipline when it comes to our finances? #fwtwchat

— For Women to Women (@ForWomentoWomen) November 19, 2014

A4: A lack of discipline with your money leads to a myriad of negative emotions. Stress. Depression. Worthlessness. Failure #FWTWChat — Tonya MyFabFinance (@MyFabFinance) November 19, 2014

@MyFabFinance yes!! Everything involves self-discipline from your finances to losing weight. #preach #FWTWChat

— Candice Marie (@Candice_Mari3) November 19, 2014

And that’s something many of us STRUGGLE with. We LACK discipline @thinkngrowchick @MyFabFinance #fwtwchat — For Women to Women (@ForWomentoWomen) November 19, 2014

[symple_divider style=”dashed” margin_top=”20″ margin_bottom=”20″] The concept of self-discipline is near and dear to my heart because (#1) not enough people focus on it when trying to achieve their goals and (#2) a lack of self-discipline is something I struggled with FOR YEARS. Since we’re nearing the end of 2014 and I know you’re probably already thinking about the goals you didn’t hit and how you can do better in 2015, I decided to make a podcast sharing what it takes for you to become a disciplined person. You can listen (and read the full podcast notes) below:

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For the full audio, please check out the podcast on iTunes and Soundcloud

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Podcast Summary

Why You Lack Self Discipline

I have a friend who is not good at following through on things. When I first met her, we hit it off because she told me about all these amazing things she was going to do. She said she was planning to move to a new city, start a business, start a non-profit, and do a whole list of other cool things which got me really excited because I LOVE meeting other go-getting women!

Little did I know, most of these amazing plans she had were just that — plans. Apparently my new friend had a track record for not following through on things. In fact, a mutual friend of ours pulled me to the side and warned me not to get involved with anything she was planning, because she rarely keeps promises.  And sure enough, a few months later when I checked back in with her, she hadn’t even started anything she said she was going to do.

Recently, me and this flighty-friend reconnected. After catching up with her and learning about what was going on in her life, I told her about all the projects I was working. She immediately got excited and told me that she has an amazing connection that I just had to meet. According to her, this contact of hers could sky-rocket my business goals; she said she was going to set up a lunch meeting for all of us to meet right away.

Do you think she ever set up that lunch date or introduced me to her connection? No…and I didn’t expect her to. In fact, I didn’t even clear my schedule in anticipation of this meeting because I was pretty confident she wasn’t going to come through! I remembered her track record from earlier so I didn’t trust that she would keep her promise.

I tell you that story not to dog out my flighty friend but to prove a point: if we don’t trust other people who break their promises, how much less can we trust broken promises made to ourselves?

At its core, self-discipline is all about self-trust. If you are having difficulty with self-discipline, it’s probably because you have a track record of promises you made then broke TO YOURSELF. What looks like self-sabotaging behavior is actually self-protection. When you consistently make, but don’t keep, promises to yourself, there’s a part of you that REMEMBERS your TRACK RECORD and will kill your plans before you even start! It’s as if your subconscious mind does not believe the things you consciously say you will do, and as such, it withholds the emotional energy, motivation, and drive you need to help you actually achieve your goal. In short, if there’s a part of you that doesn’t trust what you say, that part will protect you from your own flakiness.

My Story

I say all this because I lived this. A lack of self-discipline brought on by a string of broken promises was my literal life 4-5 years ago. In my back closet, I have a box full of old journals that I can’t even look at, let alone re-read. Doing so would be too painful. Many of the pages of these journals are crinkled from old tear stains, as I remember crying as I wrote about how I had no self-discipline and felt like I was this completely ineffective person. No matter how hard I tried to work on a major project or bring a dream to life, I would end up procrastinating, wasting time, and just generally squandering my opportunities. For a dreamer like me, this was HORRIBLE for my self-confidence. I started to get depressed because I couldn’t will myself to do the things I needed to do.

I had obliterated my self-confidence after nearly flunking out of college. I’ve told this story many times on the blog and even wrote about it as I was going through it here, but to be brief, a string of bad decisions left me without my scholarship, withdrawn from school, and with a mountain of credit card debt. Up until the point I almost flunked out, I had spent 3 years breaking every promise I made to myself (“I will be a great student”, “I will graduate with my degree”, “I will keep my scholarship”) and it finally caught up with me. At that time, I had NO self-discipline to speak of because my track record was so poor that I didn’t trust myself or take myself seriously.

How to Increase Your Self-Discipline

Making and breaking promises to yourself is a lot like depositing and withdrawing money from your bank account. You can only make so many withdrawals before you have nothing left. To regain my self-discipline, I realized I needed to start keeping promises to myself so that I’d have a better track record for my subconscious mind to trust. Remember, there is no self-discipline without self-trust.  To start, I promised myself I would re-enroll in college and go to class; I did exactly that. Next, I made a promise to stop using my credit cards so I cut them up then called the credit card company and struck a deal for them to freeze my interest for a year so I could begin paying them off. Next, I decided I would get back in shape. I was really out of shape at the time so I bought two 5 pound weights and Jillian Michael’s “30 day Shred” DVD from Target and worked out in my living room for 30 minutes everyday. Right around this time, I was really getting my confidence back because I could see how all the little promises I was making and KEEPING in my life were starting to add up.

If you want to gain self-discipline in your life, the #1 thing you need to do above all else is start making and keeping your promises to yourself. Get some small wins under your belt! You have to develop a track record so your subconscious self can  start trusting your conscious self and stop sabotaging your plans in an effort to protect you from you! As you go about building a track record of KEPT promises to yourself, keep these three things in mind:

Demonstrate your commitment. You can start to make “deposits” in your “kept promises” account by immediately taking action in the direction of your intentions. A lot of things we set out to do will take a lot of time, but we can still build self-trust right away if we do things that demonstrate we are serious about our commitment. In my case, simply re-enrolling in school and actually going to class everyday did wonders for increasing my self-trust (and thus, my self-discipline) even though it still took me a few more years to actually graduate. A strong series of steps in the right direction can be just as powerful as actually completing the thing we set out to do.

Start small. As I said during the For Women to Women twitter chat (#FWTWChat), self-discipline is like a muscle that has to be built up.

Yup! Self-discipline has to be built up just like anything else. It’s a muscle you have to train @ForWomentoWomen @MyFabFinance #fwtwchat

— Think & Grow Chick (@thinkngrowchick) November 19, 2014

Just as I had to start with 5 pound weights before I could train my body to handle heavier weight, start disciplining yourself on smaller tasks and goals before you try to take on bigger things. Which leads me to…

Protect your word. Also known as: do not make promises that you know you can’t keep! If you know you only have 1 or 2 free hours everyday because you are so busy, do not make 4 hours worth of promises to yourself because you know you’ll have to break something. Your word — doing what you say you will do — is one of the most precious things you have! Don’t give your word casually to things without first counting the cost. Every promise you break to yourself, your subconscious self WILL remember and it will undermine your ability to be effective in the future. Self-discipline starts with your word — protect it at all cost. (For more on honoring your word, check out this interview and Google Hangout I did with Stacey Flowers on her quest to “honor her word” by paying off $160,000 in student loan debt! Talk about self-discipline…)

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