1. Acknowledge Your Weaknesses – Whether cookies are the downfall to your diet, or you can’t resist checking your social media accounts every two minutes, acknowledge your pitfalls. Too often people either try to pretend their weaknesses don’t exist or they try to minimize the negative impact their bad habits have on their lives. For example, many smokers think, “I could quit if I wanted to,” because they don’t want to admit they’re hooked.

2. Establish a Clear Plan – No one wakes up one day suddenly blessed with self-discipline. Instead, you need a strategy. Whether you want to increase good habits like exercising more often, or you want to eliminate bad habits like watching too much TV, develop a plan that outlines the action steps you’re going to take to reach your goals.

3. Remove the Temptations When Necessary – Although we’d all like to believe we have enough willpower to resist even the most alluring enticement, it only takes one moment of weakness to convince ourselves to cave to temptation. Making it difficult to access those temptations can be pivotal to increasing self-discipline. If your weakness is Facebook, turn off the internet while you’re working. If you can’t resist overspending when you go to the mall, leave the credit card at home and only take a small amount of cash.

4. Practice Tolerating Emotional Discomfort – It’s normal to want to avoid pain and discomfort, but trying to eliminate all discomfort will only reinforce to yourself that you can’t handle distress. We can usually stand a lot more discomfort than we think we can. Practice allowing yourself to experience uncomfortable emotions like boredom, frustration, sadness, or loneliness and increase your tolerance to the negative emotions that you may experience as you increase your self-discipline. (more…)