I think the best way to get yourself to be more disciplined is to remove as much temptation from your life as you can. Than, you don’t necessarily have to be srong willed, you just have to avoid thinking about it. Sort of like, out of sight out of mind. What I mean by temptation is really a new definition where you fall easily into a mistake you don’t want to make, instead of the classical definition of things that call to your baser instincts. The bad thing about falling into these mistakes is that they usuall snowball into more and more mistakes. Before you know it, the goals you where working so hard for now seems even further away. The key is to try to stop them before the start, so the snowball can’t take place, and the key to that is finding out why the mistakes are made.

Right now, I have several goals I’m working towards, and really haven’t been that successful so far. I’ve put a lot of thought into what I should be doing, and I’ve created some good plans and steps to get me where I need to go. Then, I’ll mess up, or revert to my old habits, and it seems like I have to start all over. So the question I have to ask myself is why do I mess up to begin with? Is there anything I can do to make it less likely for me to mess up? Thinking about these two quesions led me to think that I really do need to make it harder on myself to mess up. What I mean by that is that I need to try to find the triggers in my life that cause me to mess up, and try to remove them if I can. My biggest example is overdraft fees coming out of my checking account.

I’ve written on here before about my battles with the debit card. The debit card has cost me a lot of money since I started using it a few years ago. When I say a lot of money, unfortunately, I’m talking thousands of dollars wasted in overdraft fees. Back when I wrote the original article, I decided to take the debit card out of my wallet, and replace it with an ATM card. While that helped a little bit, I still would grab the debit card on occassion and sneak it back in the wallet. In the end, trying to keep it out of my wallet wasn’t enough. The temptation of grabbing the card and using it, even if it was only on certain days, was too great, and it ended up costing me money again. So, in response to that, I have removed the temptation all together. I’ve cut up my card and threw the pieces away. Now, I can no longer succomb to the temptation of using the debit card, because the debit card doesn’t exist.

I really do feel this action will end up giving me the ability to use the money I was spending on fees towards debt reduction instead. It turns out getting rid of the debit card made me feel pretty good, in that temptation is no longer there no matter what I do. I’m now forced to use more cash, and I sort of like that idea. Through all this, I found that getting an ATM Card without Visa or Mastercard attached was very easy, and I think that will help me manage my money a lot better. With the success of removing this little temptation from my wallet, I want to carry that over to my other goals. What else can I do to get rid of the triggers that make me mess up. I’ll have to find that out, and keep steppin towards my goals…

Filed under: self-improvement, goals, blogging