I found a great article when I was perusing one of Eric Brown’s latest posts - ‘6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline’.Recession may be making you doubt yourself, or create a drop in motivation, or perhaps you’re feeling unloved by your boss. Or perhaps you’re just overwhelmed and you’re cutting corners. There are many reasons why your discipline drops.What do you do about it?

Leo Babauta on his blog Zen Habits tells us that there are some small things we can do that can make a big difference (ain’t that true of most problems?)My favorite of his list is the first one: Forgive Yourself. If you don’t do this then all the other things won’t really make much difference - at least in the short term.This is what Leo has to say.

Forgive yourself. You aren’t perfect. No one is. Realize that beating yourself up will only make things worse. Take a few slow, deep breaths and let it go. Forgive yourself. And move on.

To be honest, I am not good at this. I am my own worst critic. I set high standards for myself and a lot of time, I fail them. I won’t stop doing this, but I must learn to not be so hard on myself when failures happen. In truth, it takes a while for me to recover!

But one realization I’ve just been through is in fact Leo’s point number 2: Realize that discipline is an illusion. Discipline doesn’t have shape or form, it is a concept of the mind. Because of my high standards, often I don’t see discipline where other people do. So I am not necessarily going to be persecuted by other people if I feel I lack discipline. It’s my problem… nobody else’s!