Lack of Discipline is Costing you Money

Achieving success requires certain ingredients. One of these ingredients is discipline. Whether you are a pro athlete, dancer, banker or real estate agent, discipline is what sets apart the successful from the unsuccessful. Perhaps you struggle to get your calls in every morning. Or you find yourself easily distracted when working on a task. In this article, we share a few tips that can help you increase your discipline and boost your income.

Embrace Your Weaknesses

Know thyself. This famous phrase is the secret behind the successes of many. By knowing yourself, you can focus on what works and mitigate the negative effects of what does not work. Let’s say you need to make calls in the morning, but you find that every morning, you are stuck on social media or a news website catching up on what’s happening. If you know this is a weakness you have, embrace it and allocate time to do this in the morning. Once the allocated time is up, switch to your other tasks. This way, you can get what you want but still, build discipline into your routine.

Take One Step at a Time

Some projects can be plain overwhelming. It’s a new financial year, and you are back to square one in your annual home sale numbers. Your target is to sell forty-eight homes over the next twelve months. Such an objective can be overwhelming, leading to procrastination. The thing about massive-seeming goals, however, is that they can be broken down into small bite-sized steps that you can easily accomplish. Do this, and you will find you can get started on any large project without freezing up.

Create a Favorable Environment

Distractions, distractions, distractions. These are the enemies of disciple and productivity. If you work with one tab of YouTube open, it will be hard not to get sucked into the vortex of endless cat videos. To eliminate distractions and boost discipline, analyze your environment and optimize it for work. For instance, if you need to make calls, shut down all your apps and your computer put a printed list of numbers in front of you and then start. If there is nothing else to take your mind off the task in front of you, you will find it is easier to keep going.

Prioritize

Prioritization is a key component of discipline as it helps you know what you need to do when. If your priorities are all mixed up, chances are you will find yourself doing urgent but unimportant things and not getting work done. Prioritizing will help you take advantage of the 80/20 rule. The rule states that twenty percent of your work generates eighty percent of results while eighty percent of your work generates only twenty percent of results. Prioritization will help you identify which twenty percent of the tasks in front of you to focus on.

Cut Yourself Some Slack

This is perhaps the most important of all the tips in this list. Nothing works perfectly so one way or another, you will find yourself reverting to the old way of doing things. This is perfectly normal. Instead of bashing yourself or starting to stress about how the new system of discipline is not working, take a breather, recoup and then come back. What is important in building a disciplined routine is to get the trend going and keeping the momentum even in times when you feel you have fallen off the horse.