Visualization – An Important Tool for Discipline

Every year, like countless others, I too make new year resolutions.

Every year, like countless others, I too fail before the end of January.

“I want to get more fit”

For the past two years, I diligently put this on my resolution list – and failed!

When 2020 came around, I decided to take a different approach; I did not make a list of commitments for the year. Instead, I wanted to focus on using habit-development tools to get organized first.

Since January, I have been part of The Enterprise India Fellowship. Through the fellowship journey, I was forced to be more organized and I learned tools for the same from my teammates and mentors. I was especially focused on learning the use of different tools to achieve my long-term fitness goals.

I slowly implemented tools like Kanban board and Trello board in my daily life. These visual tools helped me keep track of the small steps I needed to get to my big goal. Finally, in August, I felt confident that I’m more organized than earlier.

On August 3rd I decided I was now ready to make some resolutions. I went ahead and made a list of commitments that I will follow for the next 365 days without fail.

I can’t believe that it’s been over a month and I’m achieving all my daily tasks around my enterprise project, family business, and my diet! I believe that this change is because of the fellowship environment which instills values of self-discipline. Now, upon reflection, I can clearly see that I lacked discipline in my previous attempts at following my diet. More importantly, the discipline must be ‘self’ discipline and not externally motivated discipline.

Since childhood, I always wanted to lose weight because in school, my friends would tease me to the point that it hurt me a lot. Even my relatives always judged me and criticized me for my weight. I would get irritated listening to their judgments and I would want to prove them wrong – on days when I feel ready to quit, I visualize each and every one of these comments and just keep on going.

On days when I feel tempted to cheat on my diet, again, I use visualization to keep me on track. Above is a picture from my 2017 diary (when Bhaag Milkha Bhaag just released). Looking at this picture helps me remember why I started and where I started from.

A past experience that I always visualize to keep myself accountable for my fitness goals revolves around a skating competition in school. Due to my weight, I wasn’t able to beat my friend in internal competition. One day, I decided that I would do whatever it takes to beat this friend. I bought my own skates and started doing practice at home. For 15 days, I continuously skated hail, rain, or storm! Due to my discipline, I won that competition!

I learned from that, you can achieve anything with discipline – it is so simple, just show up!

Now, I’m under the ‘healthy body type’ but I want to level up and develop a shredded physique. Keeping this in mind, I joined a 100 days body transformation challenge on 15 August.

Slowly and surely, the power of visualization is giving me the discipline to achieve my dreams.