5 Signs You're a Self-Disciplined Person
Don't measure your self-discipline against a stereotype.
You’re probably familiar with a “bro” image of a self-disciplined person. They eat plain chicken breast for the purest macros. They quote popular habits advice. They never miss a workout.
This particular stereotype is pervasive, but there’s much more to being a self-disciplined person than that cliche.
Let’s review five under-appreciated signs that someone (perhaps you) is a self-disciplined person.
1. You Can Keep Friends
Ill-disciplined people blow up friendships in a variety of ways.
- Running hot and cold on friends.
- Outlandish behavior, like drunkenness or “embarrassing” behavior in groups that puts people off.
- Not biting their tongue when they should and saying hurtful things.
- Flaky behavior, like not showing up to confirmed plans.
- Annoying behaviors the person can’t see or help, like one-upping their friends (their achievements are always bigger).
Being able to keep friends over the long term signals you’re not doing any of these things. It’s a signal that you've overcome a big list of ill-disciplined behaviors.
2. There’s a Health Routine You Currently Do That You’ve Maintained for Longer Than a Year
Our image of a self-disciplined person is often of someone who doesn’t have any chronic health conditions. The idea that self-discipline prevents these is over-represented in the stereotype, which is usually of someone young and ultra fit.
We can broaden our image to someone who responsibly maintains a health routine and has successfully done so for a long period.
Examples:
- You take a medication every morning and don’t mix it with what you’re not supposed to mix it with.
- You do the unsexy work of managing a chronic condition with standard evidence-based treatments, not unproven or trendy ones.
- You might not be managing a chronic condition, but you have a consistent health routine, like you put on sunblock or floss every day.
3. You Get Around to Doing Things You Want to Do
The idea that a self-disciplined person doesn’t do impulsive but damaging things verges on being the definition, but here’s a really interesting counter pattern that virtually no one considers.
Self-disciplined people actually do the things they want to do.
Consider someone who signs up for a popular bucket-list event a year before it will happen, and then follows through. It’s the person who has always wanted to watch swimming at the Olympics who already has LA 2028 tickets. It’s the person who wants to do a bucket-list train ride that’s only available by lottery who has entered that lottery every year for the last ten.
People who aren’t self-disciplined drift.
4. You Can Do Less When That’s the Better Choice
Sometimes people are so rigid with habits they do the habit when it’s not wise.
For instance:
- You keep doing the rest of your planned workout when you feel an injury because your plan calls for a certain number of minutes or sets.
- You run on your wedding day even though it adds a lot of stress and creates time-management pressure for the day.
- You put out your podcast on time to maintain your streak even when you have nothing to say.
It’s faux discipline if you feel like your discipline hinges completely on habits. This means you’re good at habits (an excellent skill to have itself). However, it’s not really evidence of excellent discipline exactly because habits decrease the need for discipline.
5. You Have Internal Standards That Don’t Depend on What You Can Get Away With
You’re the podcast host who rejects sponsorships that don’t meet your evidence-based standards, even if you think your audience would tolerate them.
The quality of your effort doesn’t depend on who’s watching. Your standards don’t depend on there being consequences for not keeping to them.
Don’t Measure Your Self-Discipline Against a Stereotype
Hustle culture (which incorporates optimization culture) would like us to measure ourselves against its stick. The confident and rebellious move is not doing that.
The stereotype of a self-disciplined person is one who excels at habits, but that conflates two different concepts. Having excellent habits is often influenced by the privilege (e.g., money, health, control over their schedule) to avoid and recover from disruptions.
I’ve mentioned five under-appreciated signs of self-discipline. There are plenty of others I haven’t covered, such as you don’t take outrage bait. You don’t have to measure yourself solely against my list either. In fact, there is value in you identifying more under-appreciated but valid signs of self-discipline as your own cognitive project.
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