Im impressed with the intelligence and knowledge levels of people on here, I have a challenge for you guys! Get me/us motivated and self disaplined!

[robsmyth]

I don't know about you guys but I have a really hard time controlling myself, the primitive animal in me is much stronger than my higher logical self, unfortunately. I think its human nature to have a tendency to favour/be controlled by what has worked for millions of years to keep us alive. ie eat the high fat high salt high sugar food and don't eat the salad, it takes real self control to do the intelligent thing and not the instinctual thing.

 

Unfortunately for me I was never brought up with 2 strict parents to teach me discipline, and I was scolded alot for my failures/just generally. Giving me a combination of low self discipline/self control and negative self talk. Both hinder my motivation alot. On top of that by nature I/we are probably pre programmed to do/strongly want to do, the instant gratification instinctual thing rather than the logical smart thing.

 

Just think how much potential we have if only we could control ourselves totally, but that's not the way we are made Im guessing, but at the same time I think we have some kind of "plastic" ability to go against our nature and do the smart thing otherwise disciplined people wouldn't exist, and we have the ability to be very hard working etc when following our instincts too, some people cant stop themselves from working for example.

 

Ive read and tried to a certain extent alot of the usual motivational advice and some advanced techniques too, but nothing has worked for me yet. I challenge you to give me/us some advice or some techniques that will actually produce real world results in terms of increased motivation and self control.

 

I think this is a thread a lot of us could benefit from.

 

Many thanks and kind regards!

Edited January 6, 2015 by robsmyth

[CharonY]

Note that in the first paragraphs you invested a lot of space in making up excuses before getting to the gist of the post. Cutting down on fluff and get to the real issue helps with distractions. The simplest things to do for focusing is a) get interested in something. Really interested, not the superficial hype that burns out after initial confrontation. b) get rid of distractions like texts, emails, discussion fora (ooops) and compartmentalize your day as much as possible, so that you have time slots allocated to do one thing only (e.g. writing emails, reading, planning, boring routine stuff etc.). We suck at multitasking.