So the time of year has come round again when many people make new year’s resolutions.

Have you made one?

I’ve always liked to think about and plan the year ahead but I never used to make resolutions.

The last couple of years, however, I have started making them, although I prefer to call them experiments.

Last year’s, which I completed a couple of weeks back, was a whole year without any alcohol at all. No wine, no beer, nothing.

It was fun.

The year before I did no caffeine and started learning how to do freestanding handstands (I still haven’t finished that one).

I’ll probably do no ‘something’ this year too, but I haven’t figured out what yet.

Maybe sugar…

I like to do little experiments on myself.

The easiest way to do this is by either starting a new habit or removing an existing one. I like seeing how my body responds to each little experiment, and I learn something new with every one that I do. When I complete the time I set for each experiment, I decide if I want to continue doing it or not.

Some I continue doing because they give me some kind of benefit, and some I stop because they don’t.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

About six months ago, someone recommended I take cold showers, and so I’ve been taking cold showers ever since.

This person’s exact words were, “Adam, you have to have cold showers! They’re great!”

So I did.

Let me be the first to tell you that cold showers are not great at all.

If somebody ever tells you that, they’re lying.

It is true that you feel great after the cold shower, but that doesn’t mean that cold showers make you feel great.

It’s the same as if somebody were to slap you in the face repeatedly for two minutes. When they stop, it feels great. But the slapping isn’t nice.

Cold showers are the same.

But I still take cold showers.

“Are you stupid Adam?”

Well maybe, yes.

But I take them so I can practise one of two very important skills that are essential if you have a goal that you want to achieve.

Those two skills are motivation and discipline.

Motivation is something that promotes the desire or willingness to do or achieve something.

Discipline is what makes you act in accordance with rules. When talking about self-discipline, it means to act in accordance with whatever rules you put in place for yourself.

You can see that motivation is very closely related to emotions, as it talks about the thing that makes you want to do something.

Discipline on the other hand, is unrelated to emotions. It means you do the thing, whether you want to or not.

Popular new year’s resolutions are losing weight and learning a language.

But unfortunately, people often fail to achieve these things and then say that they are difficult.

But it’s easy to lose weight. And it’s easy to learn a language.

So why do people often fail to achieve them?

What’s difficult is not the task itself but keeping the habit of watching what you eat, doing exercise, or practising the language on a daily basis, come rain or shine.

The difficult thing is keeping the habit, not the task itself.

There are distractions, and if you don’t have the discipline to do what you need to, in spite of the distractions, then you fail.

It’s that simple.

Let’s imagine you want to take up running.

Now here’s a quick fact about running: when you first start, the first few runs are not nice at all.

They’re horrible.

You feel ill, you feel as if your head is about to explode, your legs hurt, your lungs hurt.

So naturally, afterwards, your brain says, “No way! That’s it. No more of that. We are never doing that again!”

Only one of two things will get you out of that door again: motivation or discipline.

If your motivation is stronger than your desire to not run again, that will get you out the door.

If your motivation isn’t stronger than your desire to not run again, then discipline will decide if you run again or not.

And if your discipline is stronger than your desire to not run, you will run.

If it isn’t, you won’t.

When you are faced with an action, any action, motivation will decide if you do it without thinking about.

This is logical. If you want to do something, you just do it.

If there is no motivation, (and let’s be honest, sometimes, for whatever reason, we just don’t feel like doing a particular action), then discipline will decide if you do it or not.

And this is where the internal battle starts in your head as you try to persuade yourself to do it.

“I need to do it. I know, but I don’t feel like it. I’ll do it tomorrow instead. Well…it can’t really wait till tomorrow. After the news then. But I really need to do it now…but I can’t bothered…etc, etc, etc…”

Who wins the battle?

Well, just like any battle: the strongest or smartest one.

You can learn all the theory you want about the thing you want to achieve, but if you don’t have either motivation or discipline, you will fail.

The fantastic news is: you can train both of these skills.

I don’t want to focus too much on the question of motivation. Almost all the literature about achieving goals tends to focus on the importance of motivation. They use sexy language like goal-setting, drive, belief, and a million other things that sound really attractive.

I also wrote some posts on motivation which you can read here, here, and here.

But if there is no motivation (and sometimes there isn’t and that’s ok), then discipline is the only thing that’ll get you from A to B.

Practising your discipline is THE best thing you can do to help you achieve absolutely anything you want.

Motivation sounds good and it feels good.

At some point though, you will need to fall back on discipline.

Not a lot is out there on the subject of practising discipline.

Why not?

Well because it’s not particularly sexy.

Discipline is boring.

It is, just as its own definition says, about doing things even if you don’t want to.

There’s not really a way to make that sound sexy or attractive.

Because it isn’t.

It is about doing something that you don’t want to do, and that doesn’t necessarily feel good. Then you do it again. And then again. And then…you get the idea.

But it is that easy to practise. To become a discipline machine you just do something unpleasant every day, whether you feel like it or not.

Eventually (and this is the best bit), you actually start to enjoy it.

Discipline breeds motivation.

When you start enjoying it, give yourself a pat on the back and find something else that you never feel like doing, and start doing that every day.

You have complete control over it. You force yourself to do it, even if you don’t want to. You decide to do it. And you just do it.

Long story short, that’s why I take cold showers.

I never look forward to it, and it feels horrible, but my discipline has improved dramatically as a result.

Why do I need to improve my discipline?

Because I want to help people.

I want to help frustrated language learners. And in order to do that, I have to write. But I’m not a writer and so I had to force myself to do it when I started.

Before this blog, I had never written anything.

I went from zero to writing a few thousand words every week.

In the beginning, I absolutely did not feel like writing. I realised that I needed to train my discipline as there was no motivation for me to sit down for hours to write.

After a while, I got into a habit and I started to enjoy it.

Now I have a motivation and don’t need discipline for writing.

Discipline breeds motivation.

If you’re trying to improve your English, take a few minutes every day to practise discipline. That will give you the superpower to practise the language even when you don’t feel like it.

And there will be times when you don’t feel like it.

One of the biggest favours you can do yourself is to train discipline.

It’s the superpower that will get you to your goal, whatever obstacles come your way.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]