So here are some specific steps you can take to develop self-discipline:
1. Get your calendar and a box of stars.
2. Decide what discipline you want to work on. Let’s say you want to eliminate your habit of worrying.
3. Check your motivation level. If you’re not fully committed to breaking this habit, you’re wasting your time.
4. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, or what the stars mean. This dissipates the energy. But do make a private coded note to yourself in the upper left hand corner of the calendar, so you can look back and evaluate your progress in each habit you’ve worked on.
5. Keep your calendar where you’ll be certain to check it every day.
6. At the end of each day, take a look at your calendar and think about your day. If you were able to nip each worry in the bud as soon as you became aware of it, pull out a gold star and place it in the appropriate date box.
7. Always start on the first of the month and go through to the thirtieth. If by the end of the month you’ve got stars on each and every box, you’re on your way. Studies have shown that it takes twenty-one days to change a habit pattern. If that’s true, then three weeks would work as well. But a month is such a convenient block of time. You start on the first of the month, and end on the thirtieth, and there you are.
Also, if it’s now the fifteenth of the month, and you’ve decided to break a bad habit, you still have roughly fifteen days to indulge yourself in the old one—or until you have to start on the new one.
If you don’t have a star in every box, congratulate yourself for the stars you do have, but realize you’ll have to start the process all over again next month until you have an entire month with stars on every day.
If you miss a few days in between, don’t make the mistake of thinking, “Oh well, I’ll just wait until the first of the next month and start again.” No. No. No. That won’t work. If you stop to wait for the first of next month after missing a couple of days, you’re only kidding yourself. You need to do a motivation check.
Even if, by the end of the month, you don’t have stars on every day, you’re still working at it. Once you’ve got stars on every single day, then you’ve broken the back of your habit. (It recently took me three months of constant vigilance to eliminate a bad habit.)
8. Once you’ve achieved a level of self-discipline in one area, go to the next habit you want to work on. Soon, you’ll have established a pattern of self-discipline you can easily apply to any area of your life.