I am not one to change easily & realized I lacked self-discipline. It was evident in many aspects of my academic life but I imbibed a habit that has helped me in the long run.
In case you are wondering, self-discipline is not about beating yourself up over something you didn’t do, rather, it is about preventing too much spontaneity and giving you a little bit more control of your life in school.
Self-discipline and planning go hand in hand.
Don’t get me wrong, a little spontaneity is good, it makes life a little bit more interesting. However, too much of it can mean you are just a leaf in a storm, you can be blown anywhere and anyhow by the wind.
Self-discipline is knowing when to say no to a party invite, knowing when not to eat out so as to save money, attending classes on time and doing assignments.
Self-discipline is about setting your priorities right (scale of preference), you have to forgo some things to create room for more important things.
1. Self-Discipline Improves Academic Performance
Being disciplined is very paramount for excellent performance. Students who are disciplined tend to get better scores and perform excellently than their peers.
Education becomes incomplete without learning discipline. It is often said that discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
To be a successful student, you will need to be ready to pay a price, either by sacrificing your time, energy, sleep, money or even food, to attain that height. Success never comes by chance. It comes to those who deserve it.
And once you become an excellent student, you automatically set yourself up for graduate opportunities and scholarships. This video below shares some insights.
2. Helps To Prevent Future Problems
Discipline would help you to avoid unnecessary running around to get things done.
At the early stage of your life as a student, the penalty for delayed submission would be punishment or rejection of assignments. However, you must take note that as you go further in life, it may not always be so.
Mistakes and non-challance could be easily forgiven but a time might come when you would wish you had done better. Such regrets may last for a lifetime. It’s a bitter truth a lot of students fail to accept.
What discipline does is that it helps to prevent the aftermath attracted by failure to carry out a particular task at the appropriate time.
Self-discipline is a driving force that would compel you to do that which you think you can’t do now. By doing so, you would have saved yourself a lot of drama.
Read 9 tips you need to succeed in a competitive exam
3. Helps You To Be The Best Version Of Yourself
As you strive to succeed each day, discipline would help to bring out the best in you. It will speed up personal growth and improve your life.
You would never want to settle for less, hence, you will always have a push to be the best among the best.
4. It Leads to a Stress-Free Life
A student who embraces discipline will definitely live a stress-free life. You are probably wondering what this means.
Disciplined students would do their assignments and submit them promptly without waiting until the last minute’s rush. To enjoy such, you need to begin preparation for examinations and tests from day 1 of your resumption to school.
This would make you avoid the overwhelming stress of burning the midnight candles trying to cover so much in a few days. When you’re disciplined, you will avoid the stress of going to beg a teacher or lecturer to accept an assignment that you should have submitted in time.
On the contrary, a student who lacks self-discipline would have no choice but to dance to the tune of stress.
There are many reasons for students’ failure but discipline reduces them to a very large extent. Endeavour to reap the benefit of discipline on time and avoid being inadequately prepared.
5. Self-Discipline Boosts Your Self-Confidence
“ Confidence comes from competence” by Dan Lok. This saying can not be doubted in any way. Discipline and success work hand-in-hand. A disciplined man would never succeed.
Success is never achieved by mere wishes but it is a conscious effort. Discipline is like a driving force that compels you to take that decision even when there’s no external motivation.
As you strive to do better each day, your self-esteem and confidence are being built. As a result, other people would believe in you, your fellow students can confidently bring a difficult task to you for assistance, your lecturer can also call on you to represent the school in a contest.
Note that confidence here does not imply unnecessary overconfidence and pride.
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6. Helps One To Stay Active
Disciplined students, often stay healthy and active throughout the whole day. What do I mean by this? Their choices and decisions are usually taken after careful consideration of important factors.
A good number of disciplined students have their activities and schedules for the day already outlined.
At the end of the day, there is little or no time at all for aimless roamings or unprofitable discussions.
As a disciplined student, you will know what is good or bad for you. You will know what time of the day you can study and assimilate easily.
You will also know a good time to engage in other extra-curricular activities. You’ll study, eat, rest, sleep and wake up on time. A disciplined student is never caught off guard during exams.
Hence, you will remain active and healthy the entire day. Thus, discipline encourages students to remain healthy, active and dynamic. This is a very important tool for the development of the body and mind.
You end up with an atmosphere where the brain relaxes at the right time and performs better when necessary.
7. Helps You To Achieve Mastery
To achieve mastery with a particular course, subject, skill or talent, you must have spent quality time, studying and practising. This is what differentiates a successful student from a failure.
In your schools and tertiary institutions, you would have probably admired some students who organize tutorials on some ‘dreaded’ courses that even your lecturers cannot totally break down to your knowledge.
How do you think they became so acquainted with all the methods for solving these problems? Practice.
Constant practice, a product of discipline, helps you to research, study different textbooks by different authors and become a master in the field. All of these would never be achieved in the absence of DISCIPLINE.
8. Helps In Effective Time Management
A disciplined student would have enough time at his/her disposal. You would agree with me that the student who does the assignment promptly, would have enough time for other things compared to the one who does it a few minutes before the deadline.
If you continue to postpone tasks that could easily be done now, the whole work will become a burden. Hence, it becomes harder to carry out the next task.
To achieve efficient management of time as a student, you must learn to discipline yourself to do things at the appropriate time.
9. Creates A Good Name For You
By the time people know you for a particular thing, maybe your study time or anything else, they would have no choice but to respect that time.
A time will come whereby your roommates would tell where you are at a particular time of the day. It becomes what you are known for. Why? You have created a good name for yourself consciously and unconsciously.
If they know you to be the type that doesn’t stay out later than 7, they would raise an alarm to the school authorities, if there ever comes a night they don’t see you at the said time.
10. Helps Students Become Role Models
Like I said earlier, everyone wants to identify with a successful student. Only failures are isolated. Disciplined students are admired by their friends, coursemates, and even teachers/lecturers as well.
Of course, who wouldn’t admire excellence?
Statistics have clearly shown that disciplined students have grown up to be top leaders in society. They exhibit the basic qualities of a leader.
They become role models everywhere they go. Their fellow students aspire to be like them and some would go as far as making them their private tutors, the cost notwithstanding.
Lecturers also go ahead to make them class monitors, prefects, course-reps, etc. Why? because a disciplined student will, more often than not, excel in other aspects of life.
11. It creates consistency
I am sure you’ve once admired great and successful men and women who have, in one way or the other, distinguished themselves among others.
Don’t conclude wrongly that these people were born with some special intellects different from others. Every man or woman, boy or girl who became really great worked for it.
Success would never be achieved without discipline. Discipline gives you a sense of urgency that makes you stand out.
While other students close their textbooks, you are just beginning. Continual study and persistence do the ‘magic’.
Consistency helps you to see the need to ask questions and seek help from your teachers and excellent seniors when you’re stuck.
You remain consistent with whatever you are doing and you don’t ever want to give up, yes! That’s what discipline helps you to become. Only this quality of consistency, would help you to achieve your goals and become a true success indeed.
12. It Primes You For The Next Amazing Opportunity
As a disciplined student, you would not want to stop at just reading to pass an exam, you study to get informed. This will help you to acquire more knowledge and become an expert at whatever you do.
Discipline makes you strive towards being perfect. Of course, these preparations would make you stronger for the future. As the saying goes, “Proper preparation prevents poor performance”.
On the contrary, a lack of proper planning and preparation would only allow one to make a fool of one’s self whenever an opportunity arises.
A disciplined student is able to identify good opportunities when they see one.
13. Helps You To Be Focused
You will agree with me that the youths and students of this present generation have faced and still face the biggest distraction that the world has ever known.
This is as a result of the rapid development in science and technology.
A lot of electronic gadgets have been invented to make life easy for ‘man’, but these gadgets come with positive and negative effects.
If we must be honest with ourselves, phones, laptops, gamepads, e.t.c., have, in the long run, drifted the attention and focus of a lot of students.
It takes a disciplined student who understands that there is time for everything, to control these distractive measures and give the appropriate time to study. Only the focused can become the focus.
14. Creates A Habit In You
Your success is a function of your habit. It’s as true as that. Whatever you desire in life, you must work hard to get it. Some students just want to keep wishing and wishing. Don’t forget that “if wishes were horses, slaves would ride on them”.
Laziness is a habit, likewise hard work. You must take cognizance of the fact that habits can either make you or break you.
Self-discipline helps build a habit of hard work, consistency and persistence in you. This is what attracts success to you.
15. Helps You To Overcome Your Weaknesses
There is no 100% perfection on earth. Every great man or woman that you admire and aspire to be like, is not without a weak point.
Their ability to discover the weak point, and work harder to control it, is what makes up an achiever.
Note – a discovery first before control. You need to take time to study yourself to know what works for you and what doesn’t. This is how to know your weaknesses.
Only a disciplined student would go through the process of putting in conscious efforts to become better.
16. It increases willpower
17. You get better at avoiding temptations
“Out of sight, out of mind” works when you’re studying, too. When you need to focus, turn off your phone. Sign out of your email and eliminate any other distractions from your environment.
This works as you actively fight it. When discipline depletes, you easily give in to temptation.
It’s important to keep your temptations far away from you or make them inaccessible by making a plan, finding your motivations, focusing on one goal at a time and believing you can. That’s discipline.
Conclusion
Self-discipline and its importance cannot be overemphasized.
It is a vital attribute for studying, learning, skill development, and achieving success in all facets of life.
Self-discipline gives you the ability to avoid unhealthy excess of anything.
It is also the ability to reject instant gratification and pleasure in favour of some greater gain.
It helps you to stay focused until you achieve your goals. Self-discipline gives you the gumption to stick with difficult tasks and makes you a role model to others.
This journey helps you to become someone who would grow up to achieve success. Not necessarily limited to academics, but in all facets of life generally.
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I think that I lack self-discipline. I understand its importance, and I understand that some limitations lead to positive results. But in practice I find many excuses to take a break instead of writing an essay, to spend money on tasty and unhealthy food instead of eating what I made yesterday, and so on. I guess it shows me as a weak-willed person who might not accomplish anything in life. But still, I am working on improving myself. And I think that in critical situations I can show self-discipline.
I’m glad to know you’re already working on improving yourself. Please keep it up.