How to make a person disciplined

Do you want your children to be more disciplined? Maybe they are all over the place, and you’ll just like for them to take more responsibility for their actions and get a lot more serious with what they are doing. There is a lot of value in discipline, and it's the foundation for every success we obtain, so by all means when you want to have success then you most be disciplined. We want success for all of our loved ones, so one way of achieving that is instilling into them as much discipline as we can, so that even if we aren’t there, we are sure they are going to be alright. Literally success is associated with discipline, that's the guaranteed way of achieving success, when you are disciplined, then success is just a matter of time. Of course, it still depends on how you apply that discipline, if you apply it to the wrong things then you can’t expect much but even the slightest thing you do with tremendous discipline then you can expect to be successful somewhere down the line.

Now let me take you through the process of making a person disciplined

Prerequisite: build an emotional connection

Its very important to build an emotional connection between the person and what you want him to become responsible for. A simple example will be, if you want your kid to take responsibility for the dog, make sure the kid loves the dog and enjoys playing with that dog, let it become his best friend, and he must care a lot for that dog. Now something more complex might be when you want your kid to become responsible for his education, you have to build an emotional connection between your kid and his books, the way you can do this is by placing something he likes as the connection between both, maybe his video games or entertainment. You have to link his studies to his video games and make it clear in his mind that both are interrelated, make him love the video games so much to the point he needs it on a regular basis, now its time to reel him in.

The emotional hook

When there is something that he cares about independently of the will of everybody else, something he goes to with or without permission, it could be video games, food, or TV, then you have to link that directly to what he has to become responsible for. Make it clear that in order to have that pleasure, he must first go through that responsibility, either he has to do his assignments or his chores before he can have any fun. This shouldn’t be an optional event he can just skip, but both things should be interdependent, and this is where most parents fail. They relax on these efforts or simply just neglect it and in the end the kids don’t feel any obligation to put in the work in order to be rewarded with the pleasure, but that's what life turns out to be in the end, we have to go to work in order to buy the things we want or have the fun we need, except that we didn’t grow up with that discipline and now it feels like a new experience for so many persons.

It's important for every parent to teach their kids the relationship between work and reward, the reward shouldn’t come before the work or be independent of it, when you learn this rule then you truly build a sustainable discipline in every child, one which they can do supervised or not. Your goal should be for your kid to want all the please, enjoy the pleasure and crave it as much as he can but for it to be behind a wall of work. If you don’t give him or her that work ethic then life is still going to do it for you at some point, there is just no escaping it. The difficulty in life often comes because we grow up escaping from all the work and responsibilities while chasing all the fun we can have, now when we become independent we realize that life is designed for happiness to be behind huge walls of work and responsibility and there is no escaping that.

Self Disciplined

Once you have built that deep connection in the between happiness and work then the responsibility shapes itself in the person and there isn’t much you have to do anymore. Your kid knows how to put in the work in order to obtain the gratification he craves, nobody has to tell him to go do the dishes or take out the garbage, he doesn’t even do it for you, he does it for himself because he understands that its what needs to be done in order to have video games. I have difficulties explaining this from the perspective of books but take the Dog example, when he becomes responsible for the dog, he is conscious that if he doesn’t feed the dog, it will die and now because of all the love he has for the dog, he will always ensure to put in the work to cook to ensure the dog doesn’t die. That kind of relationship should be developed between the kid and his studies, at a young age they don’t realize the importance of studying or consistency, so one way of going about it might be to say, for every hour of studies, he gets 30 mins of game time. Make sure its something he deeply cares about and wants to do, not just a random thing he might want or not to do, thats why the emotional connection is vital in order for this to work.

My experience

I had a friend who was always very playful, he spent his nights out with friends and every occasion he got all he thought about was to have fun as much as he could. He also had junior ones, a couple of them and when their parents weren’t there anymore, I was sincerely impressed at how responsible he became, he literally became a father for all these kids and the once irresponsible person I had known became a father figure. You can see here that the emotional connection he had with his junior ones pushed him to become a responsible person in order for them not to suffer, he became a hard working person who strived to bring money to feed his junior ones. The key here was the emotional connection he had with them and thats the emotional connection you want to harness between your kid, his happiness and his work, thats what builds long lasting responsibility and discipline.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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