Nwokedi C. Idika's Page

I recently gave a realistic method for increasing your discipline’s strength. In a nutshell, the method involves you ignoring the voice in your head. You know the voice. The voice is the one telling you not to move forward with your task. It’s the voice giving you all the excuses of why you shouldn’t continue. It’s often disguised by saying “just check out one more RSS feed and then get to work.” Or maybe you are familiar with the “check your emails before you get to your real work of the day.”

As your discipline strengthens, this nefarious voice in your mind takes longer and longer before it decides to rear its ugly head. The great thing about your mind is that you can control it (at least to some extent). You can condition yourself against the voice in your head by artificially creating a voice in your head that tells you not to do something or gives an excuse not to do something. Then while/after you have the voice tell you not to do something, all you have to do is do it anyway. Examples may make this clear.

Imagine you’re in front of your television watching the news. Then tell yourself, “I don’t feel like watching the Olympic trials.” After you say that to yourself in your head, go ahead and change the channel to the network showing the Olympic trials. When you’re about to call it quits for the night. Say to yourself “I don’t feel like cutting off the lights or the television” in your head. Then promptly proceed to cut off the lights and television.

The more you defy the manufactured voice in your head, the more you will be used to ignoring the authentic nefarious voice when it rears its ugly head. When you actually carry out this exercise repeatedly, you begin to feel a cool inner strength. I like to call it…discipline!

One good thing about the current recession is that it forces you to worry about the important few versus the trivial many. For example, while in the grocery store today after grabbing all my “basic necessity” items (e.g., bread, milk, water, paper towels), I saw that the store upped the price of some of my favorite cereal bars. This was, to say the least, displeasing to me. It displeased me just enough to say, “I can’t buy this stuff anymore.” Due to the new higher price, I no longer had the justification that “they are cheap anymore.” The cereal bars’ nutritional label wasn’t compelling either. The higher price mixed with the so-so nutritional value equaled me leaving the store void of my favorite cereal bars. But I definitely had all my essentials in hand!

This idea of choosing the essentials extends beyond just the current recession. If you were in a burning house, you’d probably try to grab the most important things on your way out if you could. If you have a critical impossible deadline coming up, you’re going to focus on the essentials. If there is any extra time remaining then you’ll worry about the “extras.” Maybe focusing on the essentials before anything else is always the right thing to do.