Happy New Year everyone!
Where a typical new year’s blog might venture down the alley of goal-setting or goal-getting, I thought I’d go down a different route taking on board that so many of the goals and intentions we do indeed set at this time, fall over within just a few short weeks or months. The reason/s for this may well be a few, but it strikes me that without the key ingredient of discipline to follow through, little will come to pass.
Here’s an interesting quote to consider:
‘You may need to do that which you’re not so keen on at times, to enjoy more of that which you are keen on ultimately’.
Yes, you read it right, and while seemingly paradoxical - it’s oh-so-true. And to follow through on the ‘what you’re not so keen on’ will often involve your exercise of discipline. Discipline could then be viewed as your ally towards getting more of what you want despite how it may seem at the outset.
Now let me clarify something up front here. The self-discipline I’m talking about here is not about taking the punitive whip out. I’m referring instead to the training that you give yourself to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour, even though you might prefer to be doing something else.
It was Zig Ziglar who put it rather nicely:
‘when you discipline yourself to do the things you need to do, when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do, when you want to do them’
When discipline becomes a way of life for you in all areas, you can produce some incredible results. Remember the quote – ‘nothing comes from nothing’ - well discipline fits right in here as it’s often the missing ingredient to many a person’s success. Action is the vehicle through which you create the changes you seek, but without the discipline to ensure you actually take consistent action, nothing ensues and you might just continue to just dream about it.
New Habits
It’s Different in all Areas
It’s likely that your discipline is different across different areas of your life. You may naturally exert more in some areas and less in others. You might be very regimented and structured in some things, and rather free and easy in others. Some may take your priority while others are less so. Consider this example with the late Pavarotti. He was renowned for his supreme discipline when it came to his voice and his music. Yet his wellness discipline was clearly less of a strength, as evidenced by his extreme over-weightness.
The thing of note here is that it’s not so much a question of what you do or don’t do, as much as how what you’re doing or not doing, is serving you and supporting you in living the life you want to be living. If it’s working and you’re happy with your results – then great. But if you’re not – you may like to consider being more disciplined with taking a new kind of action towards that desired and different outcome.
It’s all about Conditioning
Self-discipline is really all about conditioning. My favourite comparison is to that of training a muscle for greater strength. If you’re training a muscle to lift a weight, it’s most likely to start as a rather clunky, uncoordinated and even uncomfortable experience. Not terrifically enjoyable as something to do. However, the more you train it, the stronger it gets. And just like with muscles, the less you work your discipline, the weaker it is. It’s just like a muscle that you have to train. Just think of it as emotional muscle 😉
A little bit begets more. It takes some self-discipline to build more self-discipline. So begin by tackling things that require some self-discipline, are do-able and push you not past, but close to, your limit.
Back to the muscle example. Lifting a weight that’s too light doesn’t build new muscle strength, but likewise trying to budge a weight that you simply can’t move, won’t work either. It needs to be do-able, but stretching. It’s about progressive training. When you succeed a little, you can increase the challenge to succeed some more and so on. Think building blocks!
Aerobic exercise routines use this methodology. The instructor teaches a base move and then layers on another move and by the end of the track you have a whole routine going. That is only possible by stepping through it piece by piece. If you witnessed the whole thing from the start you may decide, like many gym go-ers…’I’m just too uncoordinated to get that!’ and probably give it a miss altogether. So when you’re making change, tackle a few new disciplines and just like aerobics, layer new ones over the established ones.
If you fail to challenge yourself in life, you won’t gain more self-discipline. But you need to start where you are and keep it realistic. The only comparison remember, is YOU to YOU! Just look at where you are now, and aim to get better as you go forward. As you get stronger, the same weights will always seem lighter and lighter.
A common experience
It’s a synonymous result that you will experience a growing sense of ‘self’ as you grow your self-discipline. When you follow through on something that you set out to do, intend to do or have had a desire around doing, you generally feel better about yourself. And when you don’t take action, you don’t. That’s why procrastination feels awful, for instance. You’re not following through, among other things.
(In keeping with all the fitness examples), when you finally begin exercising for instance, you not only gain from the outcomes of the exercise but you also gain as you begin to take on an I can do it attitude about yourself which is both confidence and self-esteem building. So that little bit of new discipline helps you to step forward into other things that you can now put a new I can do it frame around too.
It becomes a positive spiral of success and self-belief. Remember the old quote – ‘whether you think you can, or you can’t – you’re right’. Or put another way – ‘if you think you can, you can, and if you think you can’t, you can’t’. Applying a small amount of self-discipline leads to the door opening on the room called ‘I can’.
Consider your Standards
The standards we hold for ourselves and our lives relate to our disciplines. They will usually impact the degree of discipline you choose to apply.
If you have a professional standard of ‘the customer is very important’, then you may have a discipline of always maintaining a presentable office, answering calls within 3 rings, returning messages within 24 hours, personally signing all of your letters, and the like.
See what you think of this quote:
‘The difference between a successful person and others, is not a lack of strength and not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will’
Would you agree? Often-times, it does in fact come back to just that. A willingness to go longer or harder or faster or even at all, as the case may be.
If you were to scale the different areas of your life as they stand right now, what would you give yourself out of 10? What if you could even just push that score up by 1 or 2 – what sort of an impact could that have on your life?
It’s worth the thought and remember, you don’t have to move mountains for it to count. Pick the low-lying fruit and just begin somewhere do-able. Then keep doing it. As you habituate new behaviour and exercise your discipline muscles more, you’ll reap many a reward beyond just the outcome-related changes. As you begin to align more with ‘I can’, you’ll be revving your (inner) performance engine into a higher gear that you’ll (maybe surprisingly) realise was always there, waiting to be called on 😉
And so it continues. The proof is in the pudding, so I urge you to really give it a go.
Take Nike’s advice - and Just Do It!
Over to you then!