My mother nearly beat the habit of self-discipline into me and for years I resented her for it. She regarded punishment as the best reinforcer of behavior change. Which it is, if you don't care about a good relationship with your kid, anyway! My view.
I remember sitting at the piano and peeking at the clock, sometimes with tears rolling down my cheeks, while I slogged away at my lessons knowing that I wouldn't be allowed, under pain of death, to get up until I had completed the allotted exercises and time.
But it has turned out to be a valuable trait to possess in my adult life. And I imagine it is a crucial skill for a flighty INFP.
So, maybe since that was the way I first learned how to discipline myself - by someone else disciplining me until it became a habit, I often announce to a close friend a goal I have.
Then I use that friend as a guide to check in with me now and then to see how I am progressing.
It helps me to have someone else to be accountable to to keep me on task.
I refrain from imposing upon my friend to give me a spanking, if I don't meet my goals, however.
So the interesting note here is that you enlist the help of a friend to give you feedback to help with a change you are trying to make. Seems like a generally useful technique.
It would be a function of basic cognitive makeup - neuroticism and extroversion... and so anything that one does to control it would be about identifying the reactions in the moment and learning to step down. Meditation was effective for me, to some degree. It's not the sitting still though, it's the mental hoops you work through.
I've come to realize how much cognitive therapy touches on these things, so that's what I suggest reading. Essentially you need to be self-aware enough to see the emotions forming, then actively stomp down (normally through replacement), to link certain things together.
For example, if you tend to get emotionally charged with political items, you need to trace back the reaction and replace it with a reaction you have to... say... math problems. By doing so, you restructure/bypass the existing emotional wiring and are able to tone down the impulsive reaction.
You can work on this by replaying the same pattern - the one you want to short cut - over and over. That's not quite meditation, I suppose!
Yeah. That's the type of thing I was getting at. It seems like most books on self-change talk about being able to observe (and usually record or measure) your thoughts, feelings, and other reactions in various situations, and then replacing those reactions with the one that is desired.
This, along with Anja's technique, and another of simply not putting oneself in situations that lead to undesired behavior, seems to cover the all the elements of the "A-B-C" model of behavior. That is that
Antecedents lead to
Behavior which then yield
Consequences that feedback to create a reward or punishment for the behavior.
If we utilize the A-B-C model, then we have three main places to modify results.
1) Placing ourselves in situations that lead to desired behavior while avoiding situations that lead to undesired behavior.
2) Replacing undesired responses with desired responses through repetition and practice.
3) And setting up a way to correct or enhance our feedback based on consequences so that incentives for desired behavior is better than that of undesired behavior.
Which it is, for a dog.
I don't mean to offend you, I mean that the stick and carrot thing really is not for anyone who believes in human rights. I think self-discipline should start with the kid choosing a goal and the parent reinforcing the child's will to keep to it.
The "carrot and stick" is a way of talking about incentives in a negative light. Incentives are used all the time without violating human rights. If you are yourself in charge of your incentives, it seems even less like a "human rights violation."
This is a good topic.
My mother struggles with self-discipline when it comes to eating. I got fat in high school and burned it all off with exercise over about a year or so, so I give her the following speech:
Lots of people think that they must wait until they have discipline to embark on some project. It's a mistake, imo. You learn discipline through balanced but sustained effort. You don't get discipline any other way. It's supposed to be hard and it's supposed to suck until you start achieving some payoff. Usually that takes a while. You just have to fight the urge to slack off over and over until your will naturally gets stronger. There's no magic secret to discipline.
I think that's a good point. That it is by practicing self-discipline that one achieves it.
Seems so easy.
I don't know. I don't believe in the "just do it" mentality. I've done things this way before, and the tendency for me is to
over do-it initially and then burn-out.
Also, there are somethings that some people will be able to just naturally do with "willpower," and other things that people will have a harder time doing. It varies from situation to situation and from person to person. Unfortunately, attempting to "will" ourselves in all situations will work sometimes, and not others, and we won't really know why there is a difference.
I think our chances of success are much higher if done with a concrete plan (which we adjust when the initial ones don't work), and if done in moderation and appropriateness to our own environment, habits, and values.
In this model, we can find out why we succeed at somethings while struggle with others, and may even be able to transfer some ques from successful situations to less successful ones.
But now I am thinking, even with knowledge about all this, it seems like we could actually work on some core skills that will benefit us on many situations.
For instance, if we are able to keep a "journal" through any single attempt at self-change, that may help us in using "journaling" for other situation.
Keeping a journal would then be a concrete learn-able skill that we could transfer from situation to situation, to help in particular for identifying the Antecedents of our behavior.
Mentally rehearsing or practicing our replacements to particular thoughts or behavior would be a generally useful skill to have that directly affects our Behavior.
Enlisting the help of friends to keep ourselves accountable is a way of affecting the Consequences of our behavior. Also, it seems like if you have a group of friends who support each other through self-change, then this group will be helpful to each other in many situations.
So already, we've come up with three fairly general (yet fairly concrete) things we can do to improve our self-discipline overall. Nevertheless, even doing these three things will require self-discipline in themselves.
Are there even more "basic" (read concrete but fairly universal) things, then, that we could do to aid in our self-discipline?