Word Of The Year: Discipline

It seems like a lot of folk have trouble with discipline, and I am no exception. From the outside, I appear to people who know me as a very dedicated and hard working person, and this gives people the impression that I am also disciplined. My own assessment is quite different.

I’m writing this entry off the back of a long and vulnerable conversation with a good friend of mine who is also my personal trainer. He’s also a natural therapist and life coach, though that’s not officially what he bills for. He and I know each other very well by this point, and he’s been instrumental in helping me understand where I am with regards to living my dream of designing and publishing board games. Throughout this conversation, the concept of discipline came up in many different guises, and I believe my understanding of, and my relationship to discipline deepened.

It’s All Too Big

Strict bed times, exercise at 6am every morning, eat no refined sugars, practice meditation or yoga for an hour a day… The list of ‘desirables’ goes on and on. Obviously this is already a subjective list based on what I’ve been exposed to over my lifetime as what I ‘should’ be doing in order to achieve discipline over my mind, body and life. Your list might look very different. In any case, and with any set of aims, acquiring and maintaining discipline can be a hard ask. One of the biggest reasons for this, I believe, is that we conflate the idea of discipline with the totality of all aims, rather than with specific ones.

It’s easy to feel like it’s all too big, or it’s all too much to think about. It’s easy to compare our own situations with others who we perceive to have their shit together. It’s easy to look at where we are now and compare that with where we want to be and feel like all our efforts aren’t getting us anywhere. Why do we do this to ourselves?

One reason is that we’re generally pretty bad, as humans, at intuiting how to calm the comparative part of our brains down. This is a skill in and of itself, and requires a certain kind of discipline to develop. I think one of the most powerful ways to enhance your own discipline, or at least your relationship to it, is to practice breaking down your ultimate aims as a human into smaller chunks. That vision you have of yourself, whatever that may be, is probably unachievable if you try to be all aspects of that vision all at once. For instance, if you’ve never played the piano before and you set yourself the aim of performing a really hard piece of music within a year, very likely you’ll fail. Instead, we would be encouraged to do finger exercises, learn scales, play simple pieces, learn good technique, and also to learn how to practice all of those things. We learn that we will play that really hard piece of music when we have the tools to do so.

When we see that vision of who we want to be, it’s very tempting to lump that vision into one big idea and to attempt to be that vision all at once, when really we need to break that down into its separate pieces and to further break those pieces down into separate steps.

Let’s say you want to get up every morning at 7am and do exercise before you have breakfast. You currently wake up at 9am and don’t really get going until 10am, and in addition you don’t normally exercise. There’s a chance that you’re in the small minority of people who can decide to wake up at 7am and exercise, but there’s a much larger chance that you’re in the group of people who can’t. There’s nothing wrong and a great deal of good in being slow and steady. Break those aims down.

In this example there are two different aims, namely sleep cycle and exercise, and they should be approached as separate entities.

If you don’t get up early in the morning and you would like to, then start by setting your alarm ten minutes earlier but find an absolutely foolproof way of making sure you get up when your alarm goes off. Put your alarm in another room of the house for instance. Steadily change the alarm to an earlier and earlier time over the course of a month.

If you want to exercise but don’t do much right now, first of all find a time in the day where you don’t have any responsibilities or engagements and set yourself the task of doing ten minutes of focused exercise. Get comfortable doing so until ten minutes doesn’t feel like you’ve done much - this may take a week or a month, or perhaps a couple days if you’re lucky. Don’t immediately try and do exercise in the mornings.

Don’t make the success of each aim dependent on the success of both aims. Succeed at each individually first.

Practice Being You

Another barrier between you and discipline is a lack of understanding of what you personally need from day to day in order to be and feel like you. This might be the largest shift in my understanding. Your awareness (and implementation of) your personal needs are critical to attaining discipline.

This is for the very simple reason that we have inbuilt gratification systems at the baseline level of existence. Everything we do provides some form of reward, or perceived lack thereof, and we use that as part of our assessment of that experience. We might be excellent judges of our experience, or we might be massively kidding ourselves, but that’s not what this blog entry is about. Let’s assume that we’re competent at assessing our own experience.

We have baseline needs to chemically function, gained through water and foodstuffs. We have baseline needs to physically function, gained through exercise, shelter and sleep. We have baseline needs to societally function, gained through social interaction. For a lot of people the list might stop there, and to technically function as a human maybe that’s all you need, but this ignores a whole range of non-baseline needs that are essential to the quality of our existence, not just the assurance of our survival. And it is these things that provide us with the opportunities to control the order of our lives.

I understand now that I need one evening a week that is mine, and that doesn’t relate to my partner at all. That thing has become Dungeons & Dragons with a group of mates, in which Jessie (my partner) has no interest at all. Although I’ve missed many evenings in the past, I now understand that this has to be a non-negotiable part of my week in order for me to feel like I have the power to show up to other parts of the week. In other words, I have a specific need that can be fulfilled by raving geekdom, and that keeps one of my personal needs topped up until next week. If I have that need satisfied then I am far more likely to be able to be disciplined with everything else that I have going on.

I consider this another of the baseline needs, and we can call it the baseline need to effectively function, gained through the experience of rewarding activities.

For you, this could be one thing, or multiple things. It’s important to understand what is non-negotiable and what is a bonus. Separate those out, and make sure that your non-negotiable activity happens at least once every week.

The Year Ahead

I have so many aims for my life, let alone the year ahead. It’s been a tumultuous year with all sorts of changes to my priorities and lifestyle, and with that has come many successes as well as lapses. My personal health and wellbeing and my dedication to my home has taken the back seat in favour of investment in my new career path, my personal dancing has paused whilst I’ve been helping to run a successful dance school, amongst many other tradeoffs.

Nothing here is inherently good or bad, everything is an adjustment. There is, however, no reason that I couldn’t do everything. In the examples above, I have the ability to maintain investment in my own dancing whilst helping to teach, and I can prioritise health, fitness and the wellbeing of my home despite being obsessive about game design. A lack of discipline is to blame. There is plenty of time in the days to do it all. I know what it is that I need to do in order to achieve this and much more.

I want to leave you with some parting words of encouragement, and some advice that was given to me.

The first is to give yourself a break, but don’t stop. Stop giving yourself unrealistic goals that set you up to fail, stop comparing yourself against some ideal which is far off in the future, stop making yourself feel bad. There’s a saying that goes something like “if you’ve been shot by an arrow, don’t then turn your own bow on yourself”. In this instance, in comparing yourself against some far off ideal, you’ve already been hit by an arrow, so don’t shoot yourself with another by judging yourself harshly. This is a choice, be under no illusion. You have the power to choose how you see yourself right now. Give yourself the best chance of seeing yourself in a good light by comparing yourself against how far you’ve come to be where you are today, and not how far you have to go.

The second is to not lose sight of the vision. Take the time to get to know who you really are, and to know why you want to get where you want to be. This is the best possible investment in your happiness. This may seem in direct contrast to the first point, as, how can you not compare yourself against the end vision if you’re not supposed to lose sight of it? Great point, that’s the tight rope to walk. It requires strength of mind to know where you’re going but to feel happy about where you are right now. This is where the advice on breaking aims down into parts and steps becomes essential. Give yourself the best chance of achieving your goals by breaking the ultimate aim down into things that can be achieved day by day, or week by week.

The new year is a traditional time for reflection and the setting of intentions. Instead of being specific about my resolutions for the new year, this year instead I am going to use discipline as a kind of mantra. I know what kind of person I want to be, and I understand now how to break down the distance between who I am and who I want to be, and I will use discipline as a tool in my armoury.

What are your aims for this year and beyond? And how are you going to implement discipline to help you attain them?

As always, thanks for reading.

Benjie x