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The Art of Self-Discipline: Beat Procrastination, Break Bad Habits, and Achieve Your Goals
Discover the awesome power of self discipline—practical strategies, helpful tips, and insights
Cultivating self discipline is the key to unlocking your full potential and achieving your personal and professional goals. The Art of Self-Discipline can show you how to find focus, overcome obstacles, and ultimately, attain the lasting success you’re searching for.
From growing your career to fostering more rewarding relationships, this essential guide to self discipline delivers useful strategies to help you get organized, build self-confidence, and become your best self. Through expert advice and effective exercises, this book offers straightforward guidance on how to break the negative cycle of failing to change your life and get on the path to self discipline.
The Art of Self-Discipline
Conceive & achieve—Dive deep into developing self discipline in key areas of your life, including personal health, emotional regulation, time management, personal relationships, career growth, money management, and more. Simple approach—Explore clear, clever insights into how you can reach your long-term goals in an easy-to-follow and easy-to-understand way. Break barriers—Get powerful tips and tools for tackling roadblocks along the way like fear of failure and procrastination.
Gain a competitive edge by learning to use self discipline with The Art of Self-Discipline.
Cultivating self discipline is the key to unlocking your full potential and achieving your personal and professional goals. The Art of Self-Discipline can show you how to find focus, overcome obstacles, and ultimately, attain the lasting success you’re searching for.
From growing your career to fostering more rewarding relationships, this essential guide to self discipline delivers useful strategies to help you get organized, build self-confidence, and become your best self. Through expert advice and effective exercises, this book offers straightforward guidance on how to break the negative cycle of failing to change your life and get on the path to self discipline.
The Art of Self-Discipline
Conceive & achieve—Dive deep into developing self discipline in key areas of your life, including personal health, emotional regulation, time management, personal relationships, career growth, money management, and more. Simple approach—Explore clear, clever insights into how you can reach your long-term goals in an easy-to-follow and easy-to-understand way. Break barriers—Get powerful tips and tools for tackling roadblocks along the way like fear of failure and procrastination.
Gain a competitive edge by learning to use self discipline with The Art of Self-Discipline.
- GenresPersonal Development
156 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 21, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 19, 2020
“The goal is never perfection. When you strive for perfection, you will inevitably fail in some way or make a mistake, and that is how new habits are abandoned. You do not want the suggested strategies in this book to take over your life, as that as extreme as well, and your target is to achieve balance between making positive choices and enjoying life.”
THE ART OF SELF-DISCIPLINE provides a nice foundation for developing more control over one’s life. Each chapter is packed with easy to implement suggestions. The Path Forward section at the end of each chapter provides a succinct summary of the material covered. The book contains an introduction, instructions on how to use the book, resources, references, and an index. The nine chapters cover an overview of self-discipline, personal health, emotional regulation, time management, personal relationships, career growth, money management, learning/creativity/spirituality, and tips on successfully implementing the strategies.
The book is well organized and appealing to the eye. The soft pastel colors and design are elegant and soothing. Each chapter begins with a quote from people such as Julie Andrews, Deepak Chopra, and Carl Jung. There are no absolutes or tough love in this book. Instead the book provides gentle guidance and understanding. The focus is not perfection, rather the author suggests adopting a practice of “failing forward,” which acknowledges failures as part of the path to success. I love that there is no judgement and chastising one’s bad habits and unfavorable situations.
Much of the material was familiar (e.g. mindfulness and gratitude), but those bits are nice refreshers. My favorite chapters were the ones that tackle emotional regulation and personal relationships, which includes scripts for dealing with conflict and removing a negative person from one’s life. I would have liked a bit more depth in some areas, yet I liked that the concepts didn’t feel overwhelming.
Reading this book is a positive act of self care and much more palatable than a giant tome of information. This book would also make a nice gift for a friend who is struggling. I think the title, with the word “self-discipline” might imply that the contents are more absolute and harsh than the gentle, uplifting material within.
THE ART OF SELF-DISCIPLINE provides a nice foundation for developing more control over one’s life. Each chapter is packed with easy to implement suggestions. The Path Forward section at the end of each chapter provides a succinct summary of the material covered. The book contains an introduction, instructions on how to use the book, resources, references, and an index. The nine chapters cover an overview of self-discipline, personal health, emotional regulation, time management, personal relationships, career growth, money management, learning/creativity/spirituality, and tips on successfully implementing the strategies.
The book is well organized and appealing to the eye. The soft pastel colors and design are elegant and soothing. Each chapter begins with a quote from people such as Julie Andrews, Deepak Chopra, and Carl Jung. There are no absolutes or tough love in this book. Instead the book provides gentle guidance and understanding. The focus is not perfection, rather the author suggests adopting a practice of “failing forward,” which acknowledges failures as part of the path to success. I love that there is no judgement and chastising one’s bad habits and unfavorable situations.
Much of the material was familiar (e.g. mindfulness and gratitude), but those bits are nice refreshers. My favorite chapters were the ones that tackle emotional regulation and personal relationships, which includes scripts for dealing with conflict and removing a negative person from one’s life. I would have liked a bit more depth in some areas, yet I liked that the concepts didn’t feel overwhelming.
Reading this book is a positive act of self care and much more palatable than a giant tome of information. This book would also make a nice gift for a friend who is struggling. I think the title, with the word “self-discipline” might imply that the contents are more absolute and harsh than the gentle, uplifting material within.
August 11, 2020
The self-help industry is filled with books that tell people nothing but what they want to hear, and the result is that nothing ever really improves. This book, better than average for the field, still suffers some of the same issues, but more than any flawed advice within its pages, it suffers from its own brevity and omissions.
I was not familiar with the author prior to reading this book, so I came to it with a completely fresh perspective, but hoped that a PhD might have some interesting psychological insights. There are those who will argue that declaring one's doctorate on the cover of one's book is tacky. Personally, I disagree. However, when you write a book about psychological topics and your doctorate is actually in holistic nutrition, one might be forgiven for thinking it's a bit of a sleazy marketing ploy. Ordinarily I'd forgive such a thing as just marketing strategy, but the fact of the matter is the book is incredibly light on psychological insights.
To be sure, much of its advice is sound. By all means, the key to self-discipline involves things like writing a detailed calendar, finding exercises you're actually willing to do, and managing the relationships in your life. But we already KNOW these things, don't we? And that's the problem. The book offers perfectly sound (for the most part) advice, but all of it is self-evident. Where it should then follow-up with psychologically sound techniques for actually achieving those goals, it instead moves on to another topic.
There are two areas in particular where the book desperately needs and does not possess psychological insights. First, self-discipline is only partly a collection of learned behaviors, as the book implies. It is also a personality trait. Personality psychologists will tell you that the personality traits are not completely immutable, but they're much harder to alter than mere habits. If someone is particularly low in trait conscientiousness (which is basically the term used in personality psychology for self-discipline), that doesn't mean they're completely doomed to an undisciplined life, but it does mean that they need to understand why they will struggle more than others in this department and find ways to cultivate micro routines both that they will actually follow and that will help them become more disciplined in their particular areas of interest. This book completely neglects any mention of personality psychology, instead preferring to tell everyone that "you can do it," when the reality (ugly as it may be) is that some people are going to have a MUCH harder time of it than others for reasons largely beyond their conscious control.
Second, the book falls into the trap so common in the self-improvement literature of focusing almost entirely on positive emotions. Negative emotions, when they're mentioned at all, are considered only as things to be overcome. This is a dangerously naive position. Perhaps we can take it as axiomatic that we'd all prefer to maximize positive emotion and minimize negative emotion. Still, negative emotions often serve a purpose. To be sure, they can become over-expressed, and a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist can help you manage them if that's your case, but in other cases, they function in much the same way as physical pain: as warnings of something harmful. Feeling good about yourself all the time might sound good, but there is a good reason we feel bad about ourselves when we fail. This negative emotion serves as a motivator to do better next time. It's all well and good to say we are often more productive when experiencing positive emotions (and that may be true in many cases), but negative emotions are useful tools to be carefully managed, not merely swept under the rug.
Aside from these glaring omissions, the book is also largely devoid of practical advice regarding how to actually manage the various tips it does offer. For example, budgetary advice consists of a charge to buy only things you need and limit buying things you merely want. Sage advice, and I'm sure no one could possibly think of that on their own. As self-evident as it may be, though, it is sound advice, but it's also easier said than done. If one is overspending, it's often not as simple a problem to correct as simply exercising enough willpower to spend more responsibly (if we could all do THAT, there'd be no need for self-help books on building discipline!). Rather, these behaviors can be indicative of any number of psychological mechanisms at work, and the book doesn't really tell us anything about how to distinguish one from the other, or even how to manage them in such a way that we're likely to actually follow the author's advice and stop overspending.
As underwhelming as the book is, however, it's not all bad news. For those struggling with self-discipline, a short book that can be read in a single sitting might be desirable. And that's exactly what this is. In fact, though it clocks in at a little over 100 pages, it's filled with enough section headings, large print, and white space, that a complete read-through only took me about twenty minutes (ironically, while I was procrastinating from writing a book of my own). Perhaps that's the perfect way to start if you lack the self-discipline even to read a larger book, but you'll want to take whatever information you can glean from this book and apply it to building the discipline necessary to read a more detailed (and ultimately more helpful) book in the near future.
(Per site policy, I must declare that I received a free copy of this book for purposes of review.)
I was not familiar with the author prior to reading this book, so I came to it with a completely fresh perspective, but hoped that a PhD might have some interesting psychological insights. There are those who will argue that declaring one's doctorate on the cover of one's book is tacky. Personally, I disagree. However, when you write a book about psychological topics and your doctorate is actually in holistic nutrition, one might be forgiven for thinking it's a bit of a sleazy marketing ploy. Ordinarily I'd forgive such a thing as just marketing strategy, but the fact of the matter is the book is incredibly light on psychological insights.
To be sure, much of its advice is sound. By all means, the key to self-discipline involves things like writing a detailed calendar, finding exercises you're actually willing to do, and managing the relationships in your life. But we already KNOW these things, don't we? And that's the problem. The book offers perfectly sound (for the most part) advice, but all of it is self-evident. Where it should then follow-up with psychologically sound techniques for actually achieving those goals, it instead moves on to another topic.
There are two areas in particular where the book desperately needs and does not possess psychological insights. First, self-discipline is only partly a collection of learned behaviors, as the book implies. It is also a personality trait. Personality psychologists will tell you that the personality traits are not completely immutable, but they're much harder to alter than mere habits. If someone is particularly low in trait conscientiousness (which is basically the term used in personality psychology for self-discipline), that doesn't mean they're completely doomed to an undisciplined life, but it does mean that they need to understand why they will struggle more than others in this department and find ways to cultivate micro routines both that they will actually follow and that will help them become more disciplined in their particular areas of interest. This book completely neglects any mention of personality psychology, instead preferring to tell everyone that "you can do it," when the reality (ugly as it may be) is that some people are going to have a MUCH harder time of it than others for reasons largely beyond their conscious control.
Second, the book falls into the trap so common in the self-improvement literature of focusing almost entirely on positive emotions. Negative emotions, when they're mentioned at all, are considered only as things to be overcome. This is a dangerously naive position. Perhaps we can take it as axiomatic that we'd all prefer to maximize positive emotion and minimize negative emotion. Still, negative emotions often serve a purpose. To be sure, they can become over-expressed, and a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist can help you manage them if that's your case, but in other cases, they function in much the same way as physical pain: as warnings of something harmful. Feeling good about yourself all the time might sound good, but there is a good reason we feel bad about ourselves when we fail. This negative emotion serves as a motivator to do better next time. It's all well and good to say we are often more productive when experiencing positive emotions (and that may be true in many cases), but negative emotions are useful tools to be carefully managed, not merely swept under the rug.
Aside from these glaring omissions, the book is also largely devoid of practical advice regarding how to actually manage the various tips it does offer. For example, budgetary advice consists of a charge to buy only things you need and limit buying things you merely want. Sage advice, and I'm sure no one could possibly think of that on their own. As self-evident as it may be, though, it is sound advice, but it's also easier said than done. If one is overspending, it's often not as simple a problem to correct as simply exercising enough willpower to spend more responsibly (if we could all do THAT, there'd be no need for self-help books on building discipline!). Rather, these behaviors can be indicative of any number of psychological mechanisms at work, and the book doesn't really tell us anything about how to distinguish one from the other, or even how to manage them in such a way that we're likely to actually follow the author's advice and stop overspending.
As underwhelming as the book is, however, it's not all bad news. For those struggling with self-discipline, a short book that can be read in a single sitting might be desirable. And that's exactly what this is. In fact, though it clocks in at a little over 100 pages, it's filled with enough section headings, large print, and white space, that a complete read-through only took me about twenty minutes (ironically, while I was procrastinating from writing a book of my own). Perhaps that's the perfect way to start if you lack the self-discipline even to read a larger book, but you'll want to take whatever information you can glean from this book and apply it to building the discipline necessary to read a more detailed (and ultimately more helpful) book in the near future.
(Per site policy, I must declare that I received a free copy of this book for purposes of review.)
August 25, 2020
If you've ever done one of Kimberly Olson's (aka The Goal Digger Girl's) many trainings you know she brings incredible value in a no-nonsense, yet incredibly likeable, way. Her #getLIT (Learn, Implement, Take Action) style is meant to keep you moving forward instead of absorbing a ton of content and then getting stuck because you don't know how to implement it.
If you want to be coddled, or told that it's okay not to reach for your dreams, this book is not for you.
But if you are looking for real ways to become more self-disciplined with bite-sized, actionable steps and encouragement, The Art of Self-Discipline is the book to read.
You don't have to be in the Online Marketing arena to reap the benefits of this book, either. Kimberly addresses the following categories:
Chapter 1: Understanding Self-Discipline
Chapter 2: Personal Health
Chapter 3: Emotional Regulation
Chapter 4: Time Management
Chapter 5: Personal Relationships
Chapter 6: Career Growth
Chapter 7: Money Management
Chapter 8: Learning, Creativity, and Spirituality
Chapter 9: Road to Success
(And if you want to talk about a no-nonsense plan, she even gives you a script for breaking up with "friends" who only bring negativity to your life and refuse to accept the boundaries that you set!)
This book can be read from cover to cover, or you can bounce around as fits your needs. If you're struggling with self-discipline and want to learn from someone who proves day after day how self-disciplined she is in the online space, pick up a copy of this book!
If you want to be coddled, or told that it's okay not to reach for your dreams, this book is not for you.
But if you are looking for real ways to become more self-disciplined with bite-sized, actionable steps and encouragement, The Art of Self-Discipline is the book to read.
You don't have to be in the Online Marketing arena to reap the benefits of this book, either. Kimberly addresses the following categories:
Chapter 1: Understanding Self-Discipline
Chapter 2: Personal Health
Chapter 3: Emotional Regulation
Chapter 4: Time Management
Chapter 5: Personal Relationships
Chapter 6: Career Growth
Chapter 7: Money Management
Chapter 8: Learning, Creativity, and Spirituality
Chapter 9: Road to Success
(And if you want to talk about a no-nonsense plan, she even gives you a script for breaking up with "friends" who only bring negativity to your life and refuse to accept the boundaries that you set!)
This book can be read from cover to cover, or you can bounce around as fits your needs. If you're struggling with self-discipline and want to learn from someone who proves day after day how self-disciplined she is in the online space, pick up a copy of this book!
November 25, 2022
This is not a groundbreaking book, but I liked the way the information was presented. It’s not aggressive in it’s approach. It’s reasonable. I found the journal exercises particularly useful and will be referencing this book in the future. It’s a great way to dip your toes into self-discipline.
I received a digital copy of this book from Callisto Publisher’s Club in exchange for an honest review.
I received a digital copy of this book from Callisto Publisher’s Club in exchange for an honest review.
August 13, 2025
Good overview of how to develop self discipline
I enjoyed listening to this book on my Kindle. There’s more content that I need to actually sit down and look at and take notes on so I’m going to listen to it again. And pause the chart and graph to take notes. I recommend this for anybody trying to develop self discipline in their lives. I have encouraged my family to read this as well.
I enjoyed listening to this book on my Kindle. There’s more content that I need to actually sit down and look at and take notes on so I’m going to listen to it again. And pause the chart and graph to take notes. I recommend this for anybody trying to develop self discipline in their lives. I have encouraged my family to read this as well.
November 29, 2021
Quick read but I felt it was too high level and didn’t give me any new information or fresh ideas that others hadn’t previously written about. I thought the subtitle was a bit misleading as well. I bought the book to “beat procrastination and break bad habits” using self discipline and felt this was barely touched on.
October 13, 2025
Starting with the positives, this book has a very uplifting tone and makes a couple of good comparisons, analogies, and points. The problem is most of these are platitudes that provide little insight or substance. The ending starts to get repetitive, and if you’re an anxiety-inclined person, you might feel overwhelmed reading the whole thing in one go.
October 19, 2021
I enjoyed this book and it's simplicity. It taught me quite a few new tips and tricks on how to conquer my goals and make it past my procrastination bumps. Definitely a great read if you're having troubles staying consistent and need some insight.
April 4, 2024
This book was insightful. I like how it included major life topics such as career growth, finances, health, etc. My favorite chapter would be "Money Management"! You can read this in order or topically. While reflecting on this book it really did feel like cognitive behavioral therapy in my hands.
July 30, 2021
I couldn't even finish this book. Anyone who doesn't mention ADHD or mental illness in a book about self discipline, I can't take seriously.
April 1, 2023
飞快读完，又一本拼盘神棍成功学，无甚惊喜，没有读的必要。
July 25, 2021
I really like Kimberly Olson but found this to be lacking. It needed a good editor and a better way of tying everything together. It just felt too all over the place. The formatting for the Kindle was also terrible. The font is a strange, light shade that makes reading hard.
January 26, 2021
I really loved this book. I will refer to as I need it. It gave practical nonjudgmental advice on how to develop self-discipline.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews