The way in which you communicate to yourself influences your behavior and performance. It is important that you tell yourself positive messages so you motivate yourself to succeed. These positive messages, or affirmations, will enhance the ability you have to influence yourself to take actions and complete tasks.

What communication process should I follow to enhance my self-discipline?

The way in which you communicate with yourself can enhance your self-discipline by modifying your attitudes about your abilities. Use the following guidelines to improve the affirmations you communicate to yourself:

• Create specific affirmations

Your affirmations should be specifically worded to help you meet your goals. Your affirmations and goals should be realistic and attainable, and they should reflect your skills and talents. If your affirmations and goals do not meet these criteria, you will set yourself up for disappointment.

For example, the following affirmation is too vague to be useful: ”I will manage my time better at work.” Instead, you should include a specific goal in the affirmation: ”I manage my time at work by filing during my down time.”

• Create empowering affirmations

The way in which you word your affirmations is important. You should use the present tense and incorporate your feelings in the affirmations to make them more empowering. For example, imagine one of your goals is to become more organized at work. You could use the following affirmation to encourage yourself: ”I am pleased to have more organization in my work environment.” A less empowering affirmation for the same goal would be, ”I will be more organized at work.”

In addition, you should always make affirmations about actions you are taking, instead of actions in which you will no longer participate. Therefore, the following statement is not an effective affirmation: ”I am not going to allow myself to become distracted while writing reports.” Instead, you should tell yourself, ”I am focused while writing reports.”

• Create personal affirmations

You should use only affirmations that apply to you since you cannot change the behavior of others. However, as you modify your own actions, people will begin to respond to you differently. Therefore, your interactions with people will change.

For example, the following affirmation is not helpful: ”I will not allow John to criticize my reports.” An affirmation that focuses on your behavior is more effective: ”I learn from constructive criticism and ignore insults.”