Rewarding Self-Discipline and Delayed Gratification

Setting up milestones for reaching your goals is important if you want to succeed. Equally important is setting up a reward system that allows you to enjoy and celebrate each milestone you’ve fulfilled. 

 

But what kind of reward should you give yourself? Should you go out and buy the latest $1,000 iPhone? Or would you settle for self-praise and a pat on the back for a job well done? 

 

The right reward for your hard work

 

Choosing the right reward is important if you don’t want all your hard work to go to waste. If you’ve worked hard, and succeeded, in losing 10 pounds over 2 months, then you don’t want to reward yourself by going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. 

 

In fact, your self-discipline will dictate you to stay away from places that will encourage you to eat more than what’s good and healthy for you. 

 

Instead, you can reward yourself by buying a slice of chocolate cake just to get that sugar craving out of the way or you can choose to buy exercise equipment that will help you lose even more weight.

 

Achieve more with delayed gratification

 

When you’ve achieved a certain milestone, you might want to consider adopting a delayed gratification system. Instead of immediately rewarding yourself, try extending your reward to the next milestone. This is called delayed gratification.

 

For example, if you’re trying to lose weight and you’ve set every pound lost as a milestone, then you might want to consider making it 2 pounds instead. This means that when you’ve lost the first pound, you’ll be pushing yourself to lose the second pound quickly so you can finally get your reward (and no, you still shouldn’t reward yourself with an outing at your favorite buffet restaurant). 

 

Delaying gratification is a great exercise to push yourself to do even more. Your self-control and self-discipline will come into play and allow you to focus on completing more tasks so you can finally reward yourself. You just need to egg yourself on, encourage yourself to put one foot in front of the other because your destination is right around the corner. 

 

Lastly, it’s important to point that when practicing delayed gratification, you must have a ‘punishment’ in place as well. So, this means if you don’t achieve the milestone you’ve set for yourself, then you don’t get any reward. It’s really that simple. However, if you’re disciplined and committed, then you’ll do everything in your power to achieve your milestones and get your reward.