A 7-Step Plan To Improving Self-Control

Self-Control is the root of your future successes.

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To achieve great things, I often talk about motivation and willpower in my articles. For me, these are clearly two essential components to develop in order to achieve high goals in life. However, motivation and willpower do not do everything. Indeed, it is also necessary to build good habits. By building a daily routine of good habits, it is much easier to keep all your energy for work.

Developing good habits necessarily requires great discipline and above all great self-control. Without great self-control, it is very difficult to remove bad habits from your life and integrate only good ones.

To help you move up a gear by developing good habits in your life more easily, I offer a 7-step plan that will help you improve your self-control.

1. Setting Goals

The first thing to do for improving self-control is to focus all your energy in a specific direction. How do you get your whole mind concerned about one and the same thing?

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The solution is to define goals that will guide you in your work. Defining specific goals will allow you to have a guide for each of your choices. This will motivate you to achieve your goals. It will be much easier to maintain a high level of self-control in any situation because your brain will be guided solely by the pursuit of your goals.

Of course, each of your goals must be SMART, i.e.: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely Defined.

For example, if one of your goals is to lose weight, it should be broken down into a subset of SMART goals such as: “Walk every day 45 minutes”, “Eat at least 5 fruits and vegetables every day”,…

2. Developing Your Motivation And Willpower

Once your goals have been defined, you will naturally have a greater motivation in life because you will want to achieve them. This motivation will guide all your future actions. It will allow you to make the necessary efforts and sacrifices to achieve your goals.

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In addition to unfailing motivation, you will need to develop your willpower. What is willpower? Willpower is your ability to work hard without ever relaxing your efforts regardless of the results achieved.

By having a maximum willpower to succeed, you will have the millionaire’s mindset and you will have a much higher level of self-control. You will know how to consider obstacles as opportunities to be seized. In addition, failures will appear to you as a springboard to your future success. Indeed, you will learn from your failures and mistakes to adapt and succeed in your future attempts.

3. Self-Monitoring Your Progress

Since you have taken care to define SMART goals, you will be able to measure your progress along the way to achieving these goals. Measuring your progress will help you improve your self-control.

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Indeed, you will be motivated, if necessary, by your progress while keeping fully on track towards your goals. All your mind will remain focused on achieving your goals.

Finally, measuring your progress will allow you to take a step back on what you are doing on a daily basis to achieve your goals. It is always something beneficial.

4. Transforming Your Stress In A Positive Way

Stress is something very special because it can be used in a negative or positive way depending on the individual. When a person does not know how to manage stress properly, it will turn out to be negative for them. Stress will block this person preventing to maintain self-control.

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Of course, this must be avoided at all costs. You must therefore learn to transform your stress in a positive way. To do this, I advise you to train by doing relaxation exercises.

Focus on your breathing and make sure you slow down your heart rate. In this way, you will be able to relax by focusing on your breathing and the vital functions of your body. Repeat this training frequently to improve your breathing control.

In situations of intense stress, you only have to repeat this breathing exercise to lower the pressure and prevent stress from paralyzing you. You will then be able to keep complete control and make the right decisions.

Greater self-control will naturally come from your new ability to transform stress in a positive way.

5. Defining A Plan But Be Ready To Change

Loss of control occurs more frequently when unforeseen events occur. Your job will therefore be to keep these unforeseen events to a minimum. A good practice to adopt is to define a plan of your actions. Following this plan will reassure you and allow you to maintain complete control of the situation.

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However, planning a specific plan does not mean falling into the opposite direction, i.e. losing control of yourself as soon as something unexpected happens and undermines your initial plan. You must always be ready for change.

Prepare a main plan or even a plan B but be aware that something unexpected can happen. Welcome this unexpected event positively. This is probably an opportunity to seize to do something even better than you imagined.

By keeping your mind open to change and adopting this “opportunity to seize” approach, you will always be in control of yourself.

6. Removing Temptations

Once the first five steps of this plan are in place, you are on the right track to achieve the highest level of self-control. However, you still need additional help to move to the next level.

You will help yourself by removing the temptations around you that could lead to loss of control. This applies regardless of the area in which you want to improve your self-control: on the professional or personal side.

7. Forgiving Yourself And Trying To Be Better Next Time

Losing control can happen to anyone. The important thing to develop greater self-control is to know how to forgive yourself and try to be better next time. By implementing step 2 of this plan, you will know how to react in the event of loss of control.

Indeed, the failure that this will represent will not take away from you the motivation and willpower to continue improving in your quest for greater self-control. So you will be able to adapt yourself and do better next time when a similar situation arises.

And that’s what counts when you want to improve in any field: to be resilient and continue to improve a little more every day.

Conclusion

Developing greater self-control is essential in life for anyone who wants to achieve great things. Indeed, without self-control, there is no possible discipline or building of good habits that put you in a positive spiral to reach success.

It is therefore in your best interest to work on your self-control to improve it and never lose control again in any situation. The 7-step plan I have just presented to you will guide you in your approach.