Self-discipline and happiness seem to be two contradicting concepts, and using them in the same sentence seems totally unacceptable. Self-discipline brings to mind the idea of “work and effort”, while happiness is usually associated with “pleasure” and the absence of work.

For most, self-discipline can never be the source of what makes them happy because the relationship with what it means to be happy is misplaced. 

Happiness is not the absence of work, it is the absence of guilt, shame, regret, anger, resentment, frustration, sadness, self-doubt, fear, boredom, stress, anxiety, loneliness, and all negative emotions.

Absence of work may give you momentary gratification, but the absence of self-discipline and wasting time with momentary gratifications ultimately results in un-ending negative feelings.

Importance of Self-Discipline

It is an established fact that without discipline, success becomes merely an untranslatable dream. Self-discipline allows you to develop problem solving skills, and helps you make the right choices. It also helps you cultivate strong relationships, and gives you the ability to manage debts, make use of opportunities, and develop a positive attitude towards your health.

This ability to make the right choices at the right time leads to a successful personal and professional life. No one can negate the fact that being blessed in your personal life and having success in your professional life guarantees a certain level of happiness.

Another aspect of being disciplined and happy at the same time is that self-control can help you avoid indulging in problematic situations, distractions, and poor habits. This can help you avoid making rash decisions that can cause regret, discontentment, stress, and resentments.

“When you proactively avoid tension by being disciplined, you are definitely earning happiness.”

As a disciplined person you are more likely to achieve what you want from life. Victory in life brings confidence and ultimately enables you to embrace the fact that you can achieve anything you want. Furthermore you become proud by the fact that you have achieved success through your own efforts.

“Being in control of the way you lead your life makes you more content, satisfied, and confident, and this creates happiness.”

A high disposition towards self-discipline enables people to experience fewer problematic desires, and set goals in favor of more virtuous outcomes, which in turn result in a happier life.

How to Become Self-Disciplined

The most tested and proven way to become self-disciplined is to remove distractions and temptations from your environment. If you want to eat healthy, unsubscribe from those fast-food promotional texts you get at lunch from the visiting food truck. 

If you want to focus on your project, turn off your cell phone or at least turn off the notifications when it’s time to get things done. Keeping your work desk clean and your files organized will also go a long away to help you become more focused. The fewer distractions you face the easier it becomes to stay focused on your goals and tasks.

The other step towards becoming more self-disciplined, is to have set goals and a clear plan to achieve them. By having an action plan that guides you daily towards your goals, you will never get sidetracked. A clear plan that outlines each step towards your goals, will help you stay focused. You can also keep a journal to keep tabs on your plans and use it as a way to check in with yourself on an ongoing basis.

“Your will-power is determined by your beliefs. If you believe that you have limited willpower, you are more likely to become exhausted.”

Will-power plays an important role in developing self-discipline. Will-power is elastic and can be stretched to infinity. You can train yourself to control your actions, rather than being on autopilot.

Improving your self-discipline means changing your not so great habits, which at first can be uncomfortable and feel awkward. 

“When a good behavior becomes a habit, your decision-making power embraces it.”

Changing habits takes time. Neuroscience says that it usually requires 90 days of repetitive brain-hacking of your beliefs. This is why mantras work so well as a way to reprogram your mind to become more disciplined.

Constantly self-regulating according to social expectations can result in living a dull, mundane, and joyless life. 

The fact is, self-disciplined people start feeling joy in doing things because they create a controlled environment. They are less driven by the need for immediate gratification, or pleasure. They have trained their minds to associate pleasure with the journey life offers.

“By balancing desires and goals with discipline, you have more good moods and higher levels of satisfaction, and this leads to sustainable happiness.”

Contrary to what most believe, disciplined people are not self-denying or unhappy, rather they are happier than many because they have mastered restricting impulses, and temporary pleasures. They have picked virtue over vice.

Self-discipline is about choosing virtues that deliver sustainable joy in your life, and embracing the journey as the adventure instead of the distractions.

Most people define success by some tangible effort and its consequential output based on favorable result. We think that our efforts concerning our outside environment leads us to success. It can be true for a few, but for most people success can only be achieved through an inward journey.

This inward journey includes some solid efforts towards self-awareness, with the courage to act while practicing patience with yourself. Diagnosing your greater purpose and discovering your strengths and weaknesses. Finally, giving yourself the respect and love you are worthy of.

Why an Inward Journey

The longest relationship you will ever have is with yourself. You should be the most important person in your life, even if your goals in life are focused on helping others.

“You can’t achieve any of your goals without being on good terms with yourself first.“

Being in a state of awareness and appreciation for yourself, supports your physical, psychological, and spiritual growth.

Your inward journey becomes most crucial when you get lost in unnecessary routines and habits that don’t serve your greater good. That’s when you find yourself pointlessly doing random things that keep you busy and stressed at the same time. That’s when you need to spend some hours with yourself to get to know what the bigger picture is you are striving towards.

Some good questions to ask yourself include:

Is every action pointed in the right direction? Is everything I am doing necessary? Am I proactively making choices, or reacting to situations? This simple session with yourself can help you channel your strengths towards those things that actually matter in your life.

The better you know yourself, the better your performance will be, as it happens in the case of any machinery. If you are familiar with all its features, you can get the best out of it. So, it is important to be self-aware and to channel your own “features” towards your own success. If the outcomes end up different than what you had planned, don’t take it as a failure.

“Every struggle is an opportunity to learn and this learning makes you grow, and growth gives purpose to your life.”

How to Get Started

To get you started on your inward journey, begin journaling and writing everything that comes to your mind. Writing your thoughts and then reading them helps you become more aware of what your mind and your heart is up to. 

If you find a repeating pattern of unfavorable thoughts as you journal over time — you will begin to see what you need to eliminate. You may come to know a different aspect of your personality through this practice, that can make help you leapfrog forward in your life.

Taking advice or listening to opinions of others is good, but not all advise is universal. Everyone is unique in their ability to see reality based on their own journey. If something was impossible for someone, it is not necessarily going to be impossible for you.

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ~ Maulana Rumi

To be more connected to yourself, the first step is to remove distractions. Eliminate all the unnecessary habits, and negative people with discouraging vibes.

We are constantly absorbing negative things, from the morning newspapers to the discouraging opinions of the people around us. Even those who love us can be a source of negative vibes, at times. Still, we hope to act positively and progressively.

It is important to be kind to yourself by eliminating all the negativity from your surroundings. The start of your day should be with on a positive note of either feeling gratitude, listening to a motivational speech, or looking at your progress so far towards your goals.

“Start each day with a sense of appreciation for your own journey, and always take in positive energies in order to have a solid and powerful foundation for the rest of the day.”

It is impossible to move forward in life if you are being weighed down by negativity, anger and resentment. To start a journey towards success, make a new start with yourself by forgiving yourself. By doing that, you permit yourself to let go and move on.

If you go through all these steps, you will soon find yourself holding and controlling the reins of your life and living it the way you always wanted to.

In the season two finale episode of my podcast Rant & Grow I spoke with Kacie Main. Kacie is a writer, podcaster, and author of the book “I Gave Up Men For Lent: The story of a jaded, hopelessly romantic, health-conscious party girl’s search for meaning”. She hosts the Better You podcast and talks with people who share stories of personal transformation. 

We spent time on this episode of Rant & Grow talking about breaking away from co-dependency, and the challenges we face to develop healthy habits. If you find yourself repeating certain unfavorable patterns in your life, you won’t want to miss this podcast and learn how to navigate through changes in a healthy and constructive way.

Just click on the play button below to listen to the podcast right here.

Psychology argues that being true to yourself induces meaning in your life. The drive to be authentic is present in all of us. Still, there is a lot of misconception about being authentic and genuine.

Some people think that having piercings, tattoos, punk hair, or listening to Coldplay makes you genuine, and that would be true if that’s’ who you are.

To be authentic, one needs to be honest with oneself. Self-awareness is the proper way to get to know yourself so you can be honest about what you actually are. If you are self-aware and honest to yourself about what you are, you don’t try to pretend to be something else, you are genuine.

Importance of Self-Honesty

It has been well established that you need self-honesty to be genuine. There are multiple advantages of being self-honest and genuine. For instance, you would not pursue a career as a singer if you simply don’t have the voice for it. You would seek to identify what you are strong in that aligns with your desires and focus your energy accordingly.

Furthermore, genuine people are sincere leaders and more effective. They inspire trust by being vulnerable, and admiration through their actions, not just words. People admire the ones who are self-honest and genuine. You won’t impress people by pretending to be a leader, rather you have to lead in practical and genuine ways. And this comes only if you practice self-honesty.

“Anyone can be a boss and manage with fear. Leaders inspire with honesty and vulnerability by setting people free to express their strengths on their own terms.”

Self-honest people speak in a confident and concise manner. Being aware of your capabilities and weaknesses at the same time makes you more confident by eliminating unnecessary fears of “being exposed”.

A genuine person would never be worry about appearance, style, and skills. They own their strength and are secure in themselves. They are not driven by the need to please people or look good — they genuinely have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of.

Self-honesty makes you open-minded. If you accept yourself as you are, you are receptive to contradicting beliefs, values, and points of view, instead of needing to be defensive. Having a receptive mind is crucial in the workplace for example, where you need to listen to others in order to make some crucial decisions.

This way of being brings greater satisfaction and pleasure in life. When you are honest with yourself you know what you are, and you don’t need to pretend to be anything else. You become inner directed by your beliefs and values.

How to Develop Self-Honesty

You can’t become self-honest overnight. You can try, but you’ll end up disappointed. It is a process that includes a consistent effort to become self-aware in accepting yourself for what you actually are.

“Most of us live our lives based on our aspirational truth. It’s the version we wish to become, instead of the version of who we are. Self-honesty is about being real in the present.”

It is genuinely the hardest task sometimes to admit your flaws, and forgive yourself for having them. It takes serious effort to become self-honest and genuine.

You need to access the elements of your life that speak the truth about you in the here and now. Spend time exploring your feelings and inclinations. Accept your failures and own the reasons behind them. Accept your life as is based on the choices you have made.

“There are no victims of circumstances on the road to self-honesty, there is only truth and acceptance.”

Once you are self-aware and honest enough to be who you are, don’t find excuses to delay what you have to do to bring alignment into your life. Put all your capacities towards being the successful person you are genuinely meant to be.

To bring more life to this topic I invite you to listen to a recent episode of the Rant & Grow podcast, as I speak with Adam Marcus. Adam is an American film director, writer and actor. He is known for writing and directing movies like Jason Goes to Hell, Texas Chainsaw 3D, and Secret Santa. However, Adam has spent most of his adult life as an acting coach.

We spent time on this episode discussing the power of vulnerability, authenticity, and the willingness for people to be honest with themselves in order to become better actors. 

Shining stars of the performing arts need strong self-awareness. The same holds true in any profession that deals with the public. If you are an actor, a marketer, a salesperson, a business leader — you won’t want to miss the life hacks shared in this podcast.

Just click on the play button below to listen to the podcast right here.

Champions in every field are generally curious creatures. Curiosity unlocks a drive and enthusiasm to learn and grow. It is a precursor to discovery and innovation. A curious mind is a mind that doesn’t accept the status quo, instead it longs for change.

If you are a curious person, it is natural that you are a person full of ideas. You might come up with tons of ideas before going to bed. Being curious and having a lot of ideas is a blessing, but mere ideas without action don’t come to life.

One must have the guts to translate ideas into reality to surreptitiously leap-frog the proverbial ladder of life.

“Ideas that compel you to work towards their realization can change your life, and the life of others.”

There are two major steps towards living a truly fulfilling life. One is to live curiously, and the other is to be in action to manifest your curiosity into reality.

Realizable Curiosity

You’ve heard the saying as a child: “Curiosity killed the cat”. We’ve heard of legends where curiosity led Epimetheus to open Pandora’s Box, and it resulted in chaos. We are not talking about curiosity for the simple sake of it, we are talking about productive curiosity. The kind of curiosity that gives life to positive ideas to improve lives. 

“It is extremely important to have a curious mind to achieve things of importance in life, otherwise life’s greatest questions would remain unanswered.”

Most problems facing humanity get resolved because human nature is thankfully curious. Curiosity is the only thing responsible for the evolution of human beings.

Curiosity is important but translating it into reality is the crux of success. Only the dreams remembered in history are those that ended up being translated into reality.

Translating Your Ideas

We have all gone through situations when we had an idea that seemed inspiring but never took any action towards it. We can also admit that there are people who are living their dream lives because they gave life to their ideas. There are factors that halt the translation of ideas into reality, and there are ways to get past those limitations.

If you want to make any idea a reality in your life, the foremost step is to fully acknowledge the importance of it. You need to calculate how that dream can add value to your life, and equally what you can miss out on if you fail to make it a reality. It has to have tangible meaning to you.

The next step is to acknowledge the potential benefit your idea can have for other people. Is it something that will dramatically improve lives? What problems does it solve in today’s society?

Finally, you want to be honest with yourself about who you are as a person. Is the manifestation of the idea important enough to you? Based on your personal values, would you consider it almost immoral to not pursue your idea? Is it important enough to be an example of excellence for your future family members to want to emulate? Does doing it establish your legacy, and conversely not pursing it rob you of your legacy?

“It is crucial to align your desires and ideas. You can only put all your efforts into an idea if you clearly know the value of that idea for your life, and the life of others.”

Commitment

After you’ve established the importance of going into action, you’ll need a way to hold yourself accountable. The best way to elevate your performance is by making yourself accountable to someone.

You can ask a friend, a family member, or a personal coach to monitor your performance and alert you if you are diverting or staying on track. That person should be someone you value and respect, because you are empowering them to hold you accountable.

Be careful of the tests that follow when you commit to being in action. Avoid naysayers. They are those discouraging you by saying that the dream is unachievable, or that you are not capable of achieving it. These naysayers could be in your surroundings, or even family members, and at times it’s your own internal negative self-talk.

Your own beliefs, experiences, lack of self-confidence, or failures in life would also halt your commitment to move forward. Hence, it is consequential to your success to override these beliefs that don’t’ serve you.

To change your belief, mantras are best. A well-structured mantra rooted in neuroscience can change your belief in just 90 days. You can create a mantra that reflects your gratitude about having such an impeccable idea and your confidence in yourself to make this idea a reality. Set reminders of this mantra on your phone and post notes of it on your laptop screen or work desk to motivate you.

On my recent Rant & Grow podcast I had a coaching session with Laura Bernhard. Laura is a marketer by day and podcaster by night. She hosts The No Formula Podcast. Laura lives curiously and as a result has many ideas.

She often finds it difficult to focus and commit to manifesting them. In this episode of the Rant & Grow podcast check out how I help Laura have a surprising breakthrough toward the realization of her ideas into reality in only 30 minutes.

If you are one of those people who struggles to bring your ideas to life, you won’t want to miss this episode of Rant & Grow and learn what Laura discovered about making her dreams come true.

Just click on the play button below to listen to the podcast right here.

You can change your life by changing your mindset. It is probably the most important asset we have as people, and a very powerful tool if used the right way. After studying the world’s most successful peoples like Gary Vee and Tony Robbins, you will realize that almost every successful person has an unconventional way of thinking.

They have developed a certain mindset that makes them consistent winners in their lives. It is obvious that having or not having a winning mindset is a decisively distinguishing factor that separates winners from the not in this world.

Mindset determines your attitude in any given situation. Your mind is powerful and it generates forces. You can only achieve your goal with a winning mindset. With a winning mindset you feel more confident and see challenges as opportunities, success as a step towards more success, and failures as growth opportunities to learning and developing wisdom.

Our pattern of thoughts has a profound impact on our lives. What we feed in our head reflects back in our moods, behaviors, and actions. A positive mindset with a winning attitude can take us to the horizons of success. Conversely, a fixed mindset keeps us in a comfort zone, fearing risks, failure, and embarrassments.

“Your mindset restores your belief in your abilities, capacities, and talents.”

A sure way to feel more confident about yourself, is to keep striving for small successes that can have a great impact on your self-reliance. Over time, these smaller achievements translate into your dream professional or personal life.

The great boxer Muhammad Ali says, “I told myself I was the greatest, even before I knew I was.”

Methods to Develop a Winning Mindset

Having a winning mindset doesn’t mean that you always imagine and perceive a win-win situation for yourself. You must realize that there are a lot of hurdles and almost everyone else wants to knock you out. You have to fight with all these opposing forces, let’s call them tests of your will, to achieve your goal.

“You must be aware of and willing to do the hard work to become a success.”

To put this kind of effort to developing a winning mindset, you’ll need motivation. It can be in the form of a reward or fear strong enough to keep you intact with the goal even for years if needed. For instance, an entrepreneur can stay motivated by the idea that achieving a specific goal would help the business flourish. On the other hand, the fear of failure could tarnish the business and submerge their career.

“Everyone of us is motivated by either rewards, or fear. The super successful use this self-knowledge to their advantage.”

You need to create strong momentum to keep developing a winning mindset. This momentum could be created by having a great purpose in mind. Various billionaires are working on what would be considered apparently stupid projects that most people would never think of doing. Like the “toilet of the future” project by Bill Gates.

They are working towards these projects because they have a great purpose in making the world a better place for all people.

“The altitude of your purpose defines your mindset. The greater the aim, the more you create a winning mindset.”

Another way of building a winning mindset is to push beyond your comfort zone. The stronger, tougher and better version of yourself lies beyond those boundaries. All the winners in this race of life step out of their comforts zones and take risks.

Be aware of the fact that life has only a handful of opportunities for everyone. Either you take them or lose them because you fear risk. Hence, you need to ditch your comfort zone to develop a mindset that opens doors for you.

In my latest episode of Rant & Grow, I discuss the power of a winning mindset with my special guest David Mor. He is a successful entrepreneur and host of the Level-up Podcast. David interviews entrepreneurs, like Dean Graziosi, who share their lessons from failure in order to help others avoid mistakes and develop a winning mindset.

Mindset shapes our lives. Let’s listen to what he has to say about developing a winning mindset.

Just click on the play button to listen to the podcast right here.

For a relationship to be successful, it is equally important to know yourself as it is to know your partner. You need to know all your abilities as well as weaknesses and embrace them. You must be aware of the things that agonize you, make you happy or sad, and above all you need to love yourself for what and who you are.

Our lives and relationships can get out-of-control pretty fast if we are unaware of how and under what circumstances our emotions are triggered. Consciousness enables us to take responsibility for the status of our relationship and offer immediate and practical solutions for a lasting and fulfilling relationship.

Consciousness involves paying attention to your emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

Importance to Elevating Consciousness

It is hard to stress the importance the role of consciousness plays in manifesting a successful relationship. First of all, it is an established fact that your feelings reciprocate in relationship.

If you don’t love yourself, you are unlikely to receive it. If you are judgmental of yourself, you will be critical of your partner too, and so will they of you.

“It is important to know yourself and embrace yourself for what you are, not what you hope to become.”

With less self-awareness you become critical of all your actions. A judgmental nature can dominate your love life and consequently create troubled relationships.

It is difficult to ask for what we want and need in a relationship when we are not clear about those needs yourself. When you are less self-aware, it is easier to get defensive, or even offensive in your interactions or arguments. This can prove highly disastrous in any type of relationship.

“The better we know our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, the easier it will be to communicate our needs and wants in a rational and mature way, and this leads to purposeful relationships.”

Consciousness also impacts our moods. When we improve our awareness of the relationship between thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, it becomes easier to regulate our feelings.

For instance, if you are having an overwhelming week with piled-up files, you may be more prone to try to release your stress by having an argument with your partner. With more self-aware, you could focus more on handling your workload, rather than unloading your stress on your partner.

Consciousness gives you the power to be brave and make the necessary changes in yourself, in order to improve your life. When you don’t know yourself, you are more bullish about your personality and rarely bother to evolve as a person.

Awareness makes it possible for you to use change as an opportunity to elevate and transform towards your best self. This kind of transformation within, will help to attract the right kind of relationships.

How to Elevate Your Consciousness

The ability to be conscious and self-aware is one of the most essential yet difficult skills to develop. It’s challenging because it requires taking 100% responsibility and accountability for the outcomes in our life. But it is possible.

We can do this by journaling about our feeling and triggers. For instance, if you tend to feel mistrusting, angry, or defensive when specific events occur, take that into account and come up see if you’ve been someone in the past that was dishonest, or not authentic with others. Perhaps your fear is tied to guild and shame.

Conversely, if you frequently mistrust your partner, solely because someone else formerly abused your trust, you could use this affirmation when those old feelings arise. “This is a new relationship and I can change what happened in the past and improve my relationship by trusting”. This is only possible when you are willing to be conscious of the difference between the two situations.

“Without consciousness we often lump history into the present, and project the future without fully observing the here and now, causing us to make unfounded and poor assumptions that become self-fulfilling repeated patterns.”

You and your partner can help each other to be more conscious. When you are in a relationship, your partner becomes the mirror of your personality. You can observe yourself from a different perspective, you may see parts of you never seen before.

With this kind of consciousness, the relationship can serve as a vehicle for self-growth, for expansiveness. The surest way to elevate your consciousness is to observe how you perceive the behaviors of those you are in relationship with.

The things that get under your skin are red flags of aspects about yourself you’ve yet to come to grip with, accept, and transform. The things that cause you to think “I can’t believe they have the guts to do that”, are typically those traits you wish you had within yourself.

For example, someone who is very open, perhaps has little to no filters, might come across as obnoxious to an individual who may have some past they are ashamed of. This is because they wish they were freer to accept themselves and be themselves.

Relationships are not something to be handled in “autopilot”. We have to put some effort to make them work, just as we put effort into our careers our business, making music, or art. We need to look at relationships the way you would go about writing a blog, or a book — the goal is to create a profound love story.

“Love serves to be the nourishment for the rest of our life activities.”

In my episode of Rant & Grow with Monica Berg we talk about the secret to finding purposeful and rewarding love. She is the author of Fear Is Not an Option, and her recently best seller is titled: Rethink Love. 

We spent time talking about the importance of elevating consciousness in a relationship, from the Disney fantasy to one of personal growth and friendship. 

If you’ve been sitting on the fence about finally having a committed relationship or want some great tips on how to make the one you are in more meaningful, you’ll want to listen in to this episode. 

Just click on the play button to listen to the podcast right here.