Building Self-Discipline in a World that Wants to Destroy It

By a show of hands, how many of you can identify an area in your life you need to improve on, but never seem to find the willpower to start? Maybe you are overweight. Maybe you sleep too little or too much. It might be that your body and mind feel weak from lack of training them. Do you chronically struggle from procrastination? Maybe you struggle to say “no” to things that keep you from living each day to its fullest. I don’t know about you, but I have both hands raised!

To make things worse, we live in a unique time where almost anything we want is at our fingertips. We have instant gratification any time we want. Want to watch a specific movie? Hop on Netflix or rent it from Amazon. Need more groceries? Many grocery stores will now do your shopping for you AND deliver it to your home. Feel lonely? Jump on social media.

The advances we have seen in technology – especially the web – are a double edged sword. On the one hand it frees us up from doing mundane tasks that rob us of our time. On the other hand it makes us feel ever more disconnected and, I would argue, lazy. I'm not saying all of these conveniences are a bad thing, but as a society we have lost our gratitude in working for something we want or need. We no longer have to be patient for someone to return a movie to the rental store before we can watch it. We no longer have to network to find a potential relationship. We don't even have to schedule when we go shopping. We have made convenience our master, and because of that we no longer know what to do when hard work is the only solution. Even though we have the entirety of human knowledge and wisdom at our fingertips we struggle to find joy and contentment. On top of everything, the things that are truly important to our lives – health, knowledge, relationships, etc. – do not have a tool which removes the work. There are tools which aid in the work, but all of life's important areas still take hard work and investment in our time, and sometimes money.

So what is the solution?

Self-discipline.

I know many of you just slapped yourself in the forehead and said, “Well no crap, Sherlock! I could have told you that!” But if it was seriously that easy, then why haven’t you done it? Why do you still feel stuck in certain areas of your life? It’s because you know the remedy, but you don’t know how to find said remedy.

What is self-discipline?

When I talk to people about the steps I have taken to become more self-disciplined I always get something along the lines of, “Ya, but you were in the military, Jason. So self-discipline is easier for you."

BS! There are many men I served with who are some of the most undisciplined people in their civilian lives. I was one of those men for MANY years (and I still have my days). I also know many self-disciplined people who have never served a day in their lives. You see, many people confuse self-discipline with imposed discipline. Self-discipline comes from within. Self-discipline is used when there is no external motivating factor which drives you to action. Self-discipline is needed to obtain an outcome which no one but you cares about. In short, self-discipline is about controlling your feelings and overcoming your weaknesses. This means self-discipline takes courage!

The military are masters of imposed discipline. If they want something done, then they can get you to do it. The consequences for not doing what they want can make life a living hell. To take it a step further, if you don’t train your mind, body, and tactics how they want, it can mean death for you, or the person next to you, either in training or on the battle field. The consequence of not complying with imposed discipline is greater than the pain of the discipline itself. This is how many people act in their careers. If they don’t do what is being asked of them there is a chance they will be fired. This will ultimately affect their lives and those of their family. People do things out of fear rather than what is good for them or others. Although imposed discipline is a necessity at times, it is willingly enslaving yourself to someone or something external to you. Self-discipline on the other hand is submitting your feelings and weaknesses to your desires and needs. In other words, self-discipline equals freedom.

The only benefit of self-discipline in the military is the ability to see what your body and mind is capable of. It shows you how much pain and hardship you can endure before you break. It draws a solid line in the sand allowing you to know how far you can go.

How to find self-discipline

Now that we have talked about what self-discipline is, how can we go about finding it?

As Nike would say, "Just do it!" And very many times it is as simple as that. When there is some pain in your life which is greater than the action it will take to rid yourself of that pain, then self-discipline is a very easy thing to find. At other times you know what you should be doing and you make the choice not to. The pain associated from not being self-discipline has not yet been realized.

Food is a great example of this. We have to eat to survive, but many foods found in the store are engineered to give our taste buds extreme pleasure as we eat them. They condition us to eat based on our feelings rather than what is good for us. Like a drug, we get temporary pleasure from certain foods as they slowly kill us. Like a drug addict, we know we should be more mindful of what we eat, but the pleasure in the moment is much greater than the pain to come.

How about this scenario? The kids are running around the house making noise at the end of a long day, and it is easier to yell at them to shut up than it is to enter into their world and either play with them, or explain to them why their actions are not respectful of other people. In the moment it is difficult to see the damage we are creating in the relationship with our kids by getting the pleasure of silence in the moment. As a side note, I may or may not have yelled at my kids a few times as I attempted to write this post.

"Just do it. Just be more self-disciplined" is an easy thing to say, but in the moment we aren't thinking about the long term. Pleasure trumps pain most times. The best way to find self-discipline is by identifying the pain your actions (or lack of actions) will eventually cause, and then make that pain greater than any pleasure you may currently be getting from said actions or inaction.

With that in mind I want to offer some practical steps on how to live life with more self-discipline.

Take inventory of your life

Make a list of areas in your life which you want to improve upon. Be as specific as possible. As you take inventory of your life you may realize you need to get your health under control by exercising more, getting more sleep, and by eating less but better foods. You may realize to get the job you have always wanted you need to be reading or writing more each week. Doing this may require getting up an hour or two earlier each morning. You may realize that meditation is a practice you need to start in order to get the stresses of life under control. On top of that you need to balance all of those things so you have time to build lasting relationships with others.

It makes me slightly anxious just writing all that out. You may find this exercise to induce anxiety within yourself. This brings me to my next point:

Treat self-discipline like a muscle

I truly believe that self-discipline is like a muscle; the more you train it the stronger it will get. Just like your muscles, if you went into the gym for the first time and tried to lift a crazy amount of weight, there is a high chance you would get crazy hurt. Self-discipline is the same way. If you tried to do everything on the list you created you would burn out very quickly. It would be the equivalent of having never done a barbell squat, but then getting under 500 pounds the first time in the gym. That has disaster written all over it! 

Select a few areas to work on

After creating your list, begin prioritizing the items from most important to least important. As you prioritize, be aware of how one item may benefit others on the list. For example, as you go through this exercise you determine that managing stress is one of your top priorities. Getting your stress under control will not only free you up mentally, but will free your mind to do the reading and writing you want to do – which is also on your list. Managing your stress will also help your mind be more clear when you go to bed, helping you fall asleep quicker. Falling asleep more quickly will lead to a better night’s sleep, which will then help you get up earlier to work out when you are ready to start tackling that part of your list.

Since managing stress is near the top of your list, and it feeds the other items on your list, managing stress should become your number one priority. With your main focus in hand, where do you begin?

Find which steps are right for you

I don’t know if anyone else is like me, but when I finally discover an area in my life I need, or want, to take action on I go into research mode. I google the topic, watch YouTube videos, and search Reddit or Quora – with little to no fact checking. Half the time the information seems to contradict itself and I end up getting frustrated and confused. As I become overwhelmed I give up on my pursuit, or I halfheartedly start unsure of every step I take.

I have to remind myself often when this happens that the important thing is to just start. Starting small and building from there is key, so the important thing is to take the first step.

This is what I would do in the example above: I would give myself one day to get from discovering the area I need to take action on, to actually taking action upon that area if at all possible. If managing stress is my top priority I would give myself an hour or less to do a little bit of research. I would then ask one or two people close to me if they themselves have a practice in their life for managing stress. If not, I would see if they know of anyone close to them that does, and what that practice is. After going through that exercise, I might determine that mindfulness meditation is the practice that came up multiple times.

Now what? Start the exercise over again. This time my research will be on mindfulness meditation. Chances are some of this research will be done from your first round of research. From there, if mindfulness meditation is something I can fit into my life without negatively affecting other areas, then I will determine the best way to do it.

In my research I see that most people who practice meditating use an app. I start the process over and determine the best app to start with. The next morning I start my practice. Once started I can begin to do more in depth research to figure out the best way for me, but within a few hours I already have a plan of action ready to go.

Focus on the process, not the product

If meditated is something I  have never done before, 10 minutes may seem like an eternity, so I'll see what five minutes feels like. Maybe the next day I'll try six minutes, and the day after seven. Within a week I will be up to 10 minutes, while at the same time beginning the process of controlling my stress. Focus on getting one percent better each day – this will seem like a small task – and within a month you will be able to look back and see the large amount of ground you have covered.

If however, you begin to focus on a desired state of mind, or how long you think you should be meditating, you will begin to find yourself impatient or discouraged. If you become impatient, there is a good chance you will try to force a certain mindset and lose the intended practice of meditation. If you become discouraged, there is a good chance you will give up and quit. In both cases you halt your progress – or worse – you begin to move backward.

Focus on where you are now and the realistic additions you can make.

Give yourself grace - what to do when you fail

What happens on the day you go to your proverbial gym and the weight that felt good yesterday beats you down today?

We all get to this point from time to time. We are doing good eating well when a coworker brings in our favorite donuts. We oversleep past the alarm after waking up earlier for weeks. We are tired at the end of the day and yell at our kids out of frustration. I don't know a single person that lives up to the person they want to be every day of their lives. 

Let's say you have a friend that told you they were taking certain steps to better their lives and become more self-disciplined. They do well for a week and then fail one day. What do you do? Do you scream and yell at them? Call them a lazy, good for nothing, turd? Tell them they might as give up trying to be better because they can't even go a week without falling off the wagon? Of course not! If we had a friend in this situation we would encourage them. We would tell them "it was just one day and that tomorrow is a new day". Tomorrow they can start over. They did great for a week and one day won't set them back much. You would do whatever you can to help them back on the straight and narrow. At least I hope you would! If not, then I don't want to be your friend.

But what do we do when we find ourselves in the position of our friend? We do to ourselves what we would never do to a friend. We call ourselves names. We give ourselves a mental beat down. We make ourselves feel worthless and many times give up on our pursuits. We ask ourselves, if we can't even make it past a week, how do we think we are going to make it where we ultimately want to go?

These are the times we need to give ourselves an abundance of grace. We need to realize that when it comes to self-discipline it is not a race to the finish, but the journey itself. Self-discipline will help us reach our goals, but the goals should not be the focus. We need to focus on the process and not the product. When you find yourself in a situation where you find yourself lacking in self-discipline, you need to give yourself grace and try to discover the "why".

You need to pause and figure out what events, emotions, and physical sensations lead up to your failure in that moment. I am not talking about looking for a justification as to why you failed, but rather determining why you failed so you can guard against it in the future. Discovering why it happened may expose another weakness in a different area which needs worked on as well.

Remember that feelings lie - and tell the truth

The roles feelings play in our lives can be the most helpful, yet most confusing thing ever. Feelings are the greatest truth tellers, but also the greatest liars. This is where emotional intelligence comes into play (a topic for another post). In short, you need to become good at identifying your emotions and feelings, without judgement, and then acting on them correctly.

Let’s imagine you have been doing great with having the self-discipline to get to the gym each day. You are always excited to go, and you have the energy to give each workout your best. One day your alarm goes off and you feel like the life has been squeezed out of you. You know if you close your eyes you will fall back asleep. You have no energy or motivation to go to the gym. What do you do?

Emotional intelligence will allow you to understand the feelings you have in this moment, and then act on them correctly. The same feelings and emotions may lead to very different, yet right actions.

Before I talk about what those actions may look like, I want to clear up one thing: MOTIVATION is not a necessity! Motivation is not needed to carry out the things you want to do. If you think you need motivation to do the things you ought to do, then you will spin your wheels forever. That is why training self-discipline is so important. It will allow you to do the things you need to do when the motivation isn’t there.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, let’s go back to our scenario. What do you do the morning you wake up and your feelings and emotions are telling you, “It’s ok to skip the gym this one day. One day isn’t going to hurt. You deserve a break!”

The first thing you need to do is not judge those emotions. Emotions and feelings are there for a reason. Just as your body’s nervous system is in place to allow you to feel pain or pleasure, your emotions are there to allow your psyche to feel pain and pleasure as well.

Next, determine if your emotions are lying or telling the truth. It might very well be that your feelings are telling you that you need to take a break. To back off. If you have consistently made it into the gym for a while then it might be time for a break. This may mean that to stay on your path you need to still go into the gym that day, but you need to go a little lighter and just get the blood flowing that morning.

Your emotions might also be spewing the biggest load of BS ever. Your emotions and feelings may not NEED comfort – they WANT comfort. They will justify staying in bed that morning by spinning you the story that your body NEEDS the rest. This is where you will have to get up and prove your feelings wrong. Show up and have a great workout regardless. Will you get it wrong from time to time? Of course! But if you are giving yourself grace you will learn from this mistake and grow your emotional intelligence even more.

Stop and look back

Since feelings lie it is important to look back – not forward – on the days you feel like giving up. Since self-discipline is the process, and not the product of what you might be trying to accomplish, if you look forward to where you want to be the task may seem daunting. The distance might seem too far. However, if you pause and take a look back to where you started, you will be shocked by how much ground you have covered. When you realize how far you have traveled, why would you want to give up?

I’m not saying there isn’t importance in setting goals, but self-discipline is the vehicle to help you reach those goals. At times the journey will be boring, repetitive, and zero fun, but seeing the progress you have made will be a fulfilling experience.

Know when to drop a ritual/habit

Throughout your journey of making yourself better there will be times you need to stop and reassess what you are doing. Are you continuing to do a habit or ritual in your life for the sake of doing it? In other words, is that habit still serving your needs?

Let me give you an example. A little over two years ago I realized how chaotic my mind can be. I would always create stories of what could happen in my life, or I was reliving stories of failure or shame from my past. I was living in the future and past instead of the present. I knew it was something I needed to get control over. Two things I discovered which could help with this self-talk was meditation and journaling. I made both a daily practice, and both began to help keep the harmful self-talk to a minimum.

A month or two ago I realized that journaling was becoming more of a chore than a pleasure. As I reassessed why this was, I discovered that much of what I was journaling about were topics I wanted to share with others. Topics I could write about in posts such as this. Therefore, I could continue journaling at the expense of writing a blog, or I could control my inner voice by writing a blog in lieu of journaling.

I will still journal a few days a week, but I no longer need the self-discipline to do it every day. It no longer serves me the way it once did.

Have fun

Finally, have fun! Again, this is not a race. As you begin to give yourself grace within self-discipline you will begin to discover things about yourself that you may not have known. You may find that one area you had been putting off forever was actually really easy to get under control. You may find that other areas are more difficult, but the process is enjoyable and rewarding. Experiment! Play! Embrace the process! Have fun!

Final Thoughts

As I stated at the start, we live in an era where we have an abundance of tools to make our lives more convenient. Tools which can aid us in our journey to become more self-disciplined, but tools which can also rob us of our power to take control of our feelings and weaknesses. They train us to look for the quick fix instead of finding the power within ourselves. When we want to tackle something difficult we look for our next master, instead of becoming our own master.

A car is a very useful tool, but without the driver it won’t go very far. As you carve out your path to self-discipline use the tools around you, but always be the master of those tools, don’t let them master you. Take control. Be the driver. Live free!