It’s Easier To Procrastinate When You Let How You Feel Influence Your Productivity

It’s going to take a lot to accomplish the types of goals that change a person’s life. Not only will it take significant effort, but it will also take some time. It is important for anyone that decides to pursue a goal to find an effective way to maintain the effort they put into making progress.

Being motivated to work on your goals might seem like something you should always work on. But it’s not. In fact, I believe it’s something you should never really focus on. Be grateful if you get motivated, but don’t shut down if you don’t. Motivation is about feeling good. It should never influence your productivity.

Instead, you should focus on developing self-discipline.

Motivation appeals to your emotions. It’s more about how you feel. While discipline appeals to logic. Which is more about what is important to you. You can’t build success on motivation alone. But you can definitely build greater success on discipline alone.

Any personal goal you set will be a result of the habits you adopt and the discipline you enforce to stick to those habits. I don’t find it “exciting” to work on my goals every single day of my life. It’s a lot of work that has no daily rewards. I do it for the long-term benefits.

If my feelings led my pursuit… I would have quit a long time ago.

You probably understand and appreciate that success lies beyond your areas of comfort. Developing discipline, such as making sure you work on your goals every single day, is one of those qualities that initially lie outside your comfort zone.

You need to be hard on yourself the same way you can easily tell if someone else is either lazy or productive. By default, we tend to defend our actions or inaction. When we work on our goals for a few hours every day, we think that we are productive. When we don’t work on those goals, we excuse ourselves because we are way too busy on other urgent matters.

But from the point of view or perspective of your goals, only one thing matters. Are you moving closer to your goals? Never give an emotional response to this answer if you are truly serious about making progress towards what matters most. Instead, give an honest and objective answer.

Okay… so self-discipline is important. But how does a person develop it?

There are many ways. One interesting way is to have an accountability partner. Someone who can keep checking up on your progress and who doesn’t go easy on you.

This is what makes having personal trainers effective for people trying to develop physically fit bodies. They don’t tolerate excuses.

Another way to develop discipline is to be around disciplined people. It is said that you are the average of the 5 people you constantly surround yourself with. If you know productive and disciplined people, it is worth emulating them.

To develop the discipline you can also read about those who are in your industry. Don’t read about their success. Read about how they work. Learn about how they lived day to day, how they set goals… etc. You are bound to discover effective ways to cultivate habits and disciplines that will help your pursuit.

Lastly, another way to develop discipline is to track your actions. Keep a journal of your daily life. At the end of the week, month or year, you will be able to review and clearly see how you got to where you are. This is similar to having an accountability partner. The point is to objectively evaluate your efforts.

Any goal that may initially seem like it’s a little far from your reach, can be attained with discipline. Without discipline and commitment, even the simplest goal can seem like a great challenge to accomplish.

It’s important to remember to always be results-focused and to not be feelings-focused when pursuing goals. That will drive the need to develop self-discipline.

#makeProgressNotExcuses