In life there are several things that tempt you to the dark side, that chocolate cake left inside the fridge, you know you shouldn't eat it. Filled with sugar it will purge your teeth but tastes so good. What do you do, well there are two options: eat it or leave it. I know I would go for the cake but what would most of us do.

Some may describe self discipline as the ability to control one's actions despite what their emotional state is and argue that it is extremely useful in life. Giving us motivation and allowing us personally to develop and make a conscious decision to follow through this goal and helps us accomplish it. Self discipline can become a powerful tool we can harness to partner with our other aspects and features to accomplish what we would like, for example you may set out to complete 3 pages of coursework within an allocated time. However without self discipline we may drift off becoming bored and logging onto facebook, procrastinate and fall into these addictions.

In an ideal world we would all have great amounts of it but everyone has different amounts, I personally like to think of it as a muscle which you can work out by using it which in turn makes it stronger and able to cope with larger amounts of stress or distractions. Like a muscle there is no point trying to build it by setting yourself an unrealistic goal, you can't go to the gym for the first time ever hoping to lift 60kg weights when your body can only cope with 10kg. So we start off with something we can cope with in order to build this discipline slowly raising the bar each week until it is stronger and better.

There are several different methods to develop this ability with several on the internet and other information sources, but I think being patient and training your brain by keeping away from those little things in life which may try to steer us off course in order to achieve the goal in the bigger picture will in turn be the ultimate reward.