Discipline

I thought I would share some advice I gave to someone a while ago, in case it helps anyone here. 

“I’ve been on this journey of building discipline..not just habits, but like real, intentional, soulful focus. It was going great for a while, but lately I’ve felt off-track. Emotionally foggy, mentally tired, distracted. I want to get back into my groove.. not force it, but reset gently and with purpose. How do you reconnect with your discipline when you feel lost?”

My advice to anyone trying to get back on their feet after falling behind is to introduce a beginners mindset. The first step is to acknowledge that when we’re overwhelmed we shut down. 

So don’t immediately hold yourself to the same standard you were before. Embrace starting over and acknowledge any step ahead from where you are now is a step in the right direction. Among all the things you were able to do before, pick one, and focus solely on the consistency of that one thing. Make it difficult enough that it requires discipline but easy enough so that you don’t fail. All this mental fog and emotional distress is your brain trying to prioritise and allocate energy, so if you suddenly add on more stress by encouraging heavy discipline, your brain won’t consider it worth the price. 

The best way to re-introduce discipline into your life is by raising the baseline. i.e imagine a depressed person who struggles to brush their teeth, making it their goal to do it 7 days a week. Let’s say they fail on day 4. They could either take that failure wholly and quit entirely, or they could treat the failure as their new baseline and tell themselves okay, I can’t handle 7 right now, but at the very least I’m going to brush my teeth at least 4 times. Eventually 4 times will feel like nothing then 5 times will become their new baseline. 

The whole point of a baseline is to make sure that even on your worst days, you can still hit your minimum. If you can do more, great! Anything more than your baseline is a bonus, but what’s most important is never going below the baseline. That’s why it needs to be easy enough for you to be consistent. Once hitting that minimum becomes as easy as breathing, you raise it. At least 3 times a week turns to 4 times a week; 4 turns to 5, and eventually, you’re at 7 times a week!

Great discipline isn’t about heights you reach, it’s about what you fall back on. The aim of the game is to raise the bar of what you fall back on ever so slightly until it’s a new comfort and eventually it’ll be as high as your goals. Never forget that discipline isn’t about raising the ceiling, it’s about raising the floor. 

“I have always liked going to the cinema”