I am completely consumed by Classical Conversations Challenge B this year. I am directing it, and my oldest child is enrolled it. Many, many things are covered in Challenge B: categorical and propositional logic, the history of astronomy, creationism vs. darwinism, intro to Chemistry, Latin, current events, mock trial, math, persuasive writing, reading novels, reading short stories, and writing one of their own. But overall, what we are truly studying in Challenge B is discipline. All that school work? It is really just the tools we are using as we learn to become disciplined.
What is discipline? In a nutshell, it’s self-control. I sure have collected a lot of quotes about it to share with my class throughout this year. Here are just a few:
So I’ve been sharing these quotes on discipline and giving pep talks to these kids that if they just focus on discipline NOW, their entire lives will be easier because they will have already trained themselves to do what needs to be done, even if they don’t “feel like it.” And then I looked at my own life and said, “Oops.” I have gone way off track lately. And some of it can be excused–I was feeling really lousy for awhile there until I was able to see the correct doctor about some health issues and get my body working properly again. That took nearly six months of appointments, blood work, etc, to finally get to a point where I am a functioning human being again. Hooray! But while I felt lousy, I got lazy. And the thing about laziness is that sometimes it just becomes a habit. At first it was because I felt cruddy and couldn’t do anything. But then when I finally felt better, I looked around and realized that I was still doing NOTHING because that’s what I was used to doing. CC and especially the Challenge program is all about modeling for the kids what they should be doing. We don’t so much teach them and lecture them, we just show them what to do and hope they follow our lead (they usually do).
So here I am, halfway through Challenge B and just now deciding it’s time to be serious about developing discipline. And at first I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about that. I tend to get too crazy with my plans and schemes and then I can’t follow through.
I decided to go with a habit tracker. Here’s what mine is looking like at the end of January. Note: this is not color-coded. I just have a bunch of gel pens and grab whichever one is nearby.
I’ve purposely cut off the image so you can’t see what habits I am working on–every one is different and what I am focused on will not help you develop your own self-discipline at all. We don’t need to compare ourselves. However, I do have some advice on coming up with the items on your list and some general ideas of what I have on my list.
Make your habits clear, actionable, and measurable. Do not say, “eat healthy”. Because how do you define that? One day you may decide that having dessert after dinner is ok because you ate well all day and another day you may decide that you shouldn’t have had cake and therefore you can’t check off the “eat healthy” box. Instead, break it down. Drink 1 glass of water. Drink another glass of water. Drink a third glass of water. Eat a piece of fruit. Don’t eat chips. Don’t drink soda. Make EACH of these items, whatever specific things you want to qualify as “eating healthy” a SEPARATE item on your habit tracker. For one thing, you will be able to keep a clear definition of eating healthy. For another, if you have eat a serving of fruit, eat a serving of veggies, drink water, take a vitamin, don’t eat fast food, don’t drink soda all as separate items guess what? If you mess up on ONE of those items that day, you can see clearly that you did not ruin your entire day. So you drank a soda? Well, you didn’t eat fast food, you had an apple at lunch, and you drank about a gallon of water. One bad decision does not mean you end up making five more. When they are each separate items, you can fail on one and still conquer the others. If you had just put “eat healthy” well then, you are out of luck if you make even one teeny bad decision in your day.
I also don’t say “Do the laundry”. I actually make each step a separate item–wash a load, dry a load, fold a load, put it away. I am trying to develop the follow through of doing one load of laundry a day so that I am never behind on laundry. I have had a bad habit of letting a load sit in the wash until it smells funny. So having separate lines for each step has helped me get into the habit of completing the process.
The same goes for exercise as well. I put each small thing on it’s own line so that I do each thing. I don’t just say “Workout” because that isn’t clear or measurable. I say XX minutes on the treadmill. XX pushups on the Total Gym. XX pull ups on the Total Gym. And so on. Again, this makes my goals clear and then I can follow through on them.
Another category of items on the list have to do with home schooling. We got into a really bad habit of not doing our morning time together and so I put that on my list. We have only missed one morning since I added it to my habit tracker and it was the morning the little guy kept fainting, so clearly we had other priorities that day. The cool thing about this habit tracker is that in the past, I would’ve said, oh well, we broke our streak. Let’s quit because we weren’t perfect. But with this tracker, I am able to say, you know what? I didn’t do it yesterday but I can still get it done today!
I also have a category for blog work. Social media posts are a lot of work to remember and I’d all but given up, to be honest. But now that I put each thing on my list (post to Facebook, post to Instagram, comment on other home school posts on Instagram, pin to Pinterest, etc), I am really upping my social media game for the blog.
Don’t be afraid to have a LOT of items on your list. It may seem overwhelming at first but when you are breaking down “eat healthy” into 7 or 8 actionable steps and “do the laundry” into four steps, it’s going to seem like a lot but it’s actually just going to motivate your more because you get to check off more boxes throughout the day.
I’ve already mentioned a lot of reasons this works but I’d like to point out one more. When you get to fill in little boxes with pretty pens, you get a tiny little surge of “I did it!” and, after reading the book The Power of Habit, I know we need that little reward. That’s why I only use my special pens to fill it in. I personally buy them one at a time at the checkout at Michael’s, but you can buy a multi pack on Amazon. I’m obsessed with these pens!
I’ve also set goals for myself. I challenged myself to get 600 “points” this month. A point is a square filled in. I didn’t start until a little later in January so I didn’t have a full 31 days to work on it. But I’m still very, very close to reaching my goal. As of publication, I have 533 points and 3.5 days to go. I think I’ll make it!
Over the month, I have discovered some things that were flawed about my list of habits. A couple of things really only need to happen once a week and shouldn’t have been on a daily list. A few things I thought were good goals have turned out to be unreasonable (the amount of water I was aiming to drink, for example, is more than my poor bladder can take!). So I have decided to not be committed to this list for an entire year, but rather, I will edit it monthly to reflect what is going on and where my focus needs to be. Next month I am adding an item called “Do something from your weekly list” and then I will work my way through the tasks I need to get in the habit of doing once a week. More discipline practice!
I have a lot of big projects I’d like to be working on. I am trying to write a super detailed and awesome Disney Vacation Planning Journal. But I was getting so bogged down with my to do list every day that I was never finding time to get around to that. And part of me doesn’t want to get around to it because it’s big and it’s scary and I am afraid of failing at it. So I would just keep adding more chores to my to do list and never “find the time” to work on it. But using this tracker has made me say, “No, I’ve done the laundry, I’ve loaded the dishwasher, I’ve done school with the kids. I have plenty of time to sit down and focus on this project.” I have freedom to work on my projects now.
Wait a minute… the theme of Challenge B is Discipline. And the theme of Challenge I (the year after B) is… wait for it… FREEDOM. Oh. I get it now. LIGHT BULB MOMENT! Discipline brings freedom. Boom. Living that out myself so I can model it for my students. CC life at it’s best!
To make your own habit tracker, you can use notebook paper, graphing paper, a spreadsheet program, or whatever you have available. I use Numbers on my Mac, personally. Anything that allows you to make a list and have a space to check it off daily will work just fine. Keep it simple and follow through! Good luck!