Improving Your Discipline
If you find yourself lacking discipline to follow through on your deepest desires, you’ll enjoy this.
You’ve been conditioned to think you are entitled to an easy life.
It’s partly due to systems of oppression where colonial powers and the Global North create ‘high’ standards of living through exploiting others and the Global South. It’s partly due to the mythology of capitalism, which argues every problem can be solved with a simple purchase.
(And it’s partly because life is actually quite easy but we like to make things really complicated for ourselves.)
I get quite a few clients who lack discipline and seek the easy life. To them, discipline means working in a job you hate for a company you despise and not complaining about it.
Instead, I like to remind them of the quotation from Gabrielle Roth: “It takes discipline to be a free spirit”. Then we can start a three step process.
1. Debunk discipline
Discipline to follow through on your deepest desires means firstly debunking myths around what discipline looks like – that it looks like hardship, compromise, a Victorian school room, denial and scolding.
2. Define discipline
Then you’ve got to work out what discipline looks like to you, uniquely. Not what school taught you, or parents, or capitalism, but YOU. What does it mean for you to practice discipline in the activation of your desires?
Useful tip: what’s most interesting to me is the discipline to follow your desires often looks like the exact opposite of what you think it does.
3. Do discipline
Finally, you create momentum by taking achievable, aligned actions that prove to yourself you can be disciplined AND enjoy yourself (because you can).
If you want to jump right in because, hey, you know you lack discipline, then I recommend starting small – much smaller than you think. Allow yourself to have small successes with simple actions.
And gently notice when you can’t be bothered to follow through on your deepest desires.
What does not being disciplined cost you, in this moment?