If we asked you to describe what discipline felt like, how would you describe it?
Would you say it felt harsh? Constraining? Cold? Rigid? Burdensome?
Or would you say it felt empowering? Freeing? Constructive?
As the Doc would say, how we view discipline is going to influence whether it triggers positive or negative thoughts in our minds.
What we want to make clear is, no matter how you view discipline, whether it’s positive or negative, the fact is discipline is as flexible as your mind is.
Discipline is what you make of it. If you find something difficult to do and you look at is as a chore, then it will require a tremendous amount of discipline to accomplish. That same difficult task can get done with much less challenge if you embrace the difficulty.
Part of what we believe makes discipline so difficult for so many people is the view that discipline requires you to be very rigid. Like most concepts we talk about in the Lab and Mastery With Science, it’s about having a structure, not about being incredibly rigid.
Think of a building in San Francisco. Chances are they are built to withstand strong earthquakes and that means they are meant to be able to bend and shift and move when the earth moves. Although there is structure to the buildings, they are not extremely rigid. If they were, they would collapse during earth quakes.
Discipline can and should be built into your life like a building in San Francisco. By embracing discipline but not making it too rigid you’ll enable yourself to have greater success at implementing self-discipline in all aspects of your business and life. Enabling self-discipline will make it easier for you to accept the difficult situations head on and make the challenges that much less onerous and that much more rewarding.
I’ll bring it back to having a routine. Every morning I like to wake up and go work out and exercise and then meditate. Now, that requires some discipline. There are absolutely mornings that I don’t want to get up and do this, I still do. But what happens when I CAN’T exercise in the morning? What happens when my schedule absolutely will not allow it or I’ve injured myself and I’m physically incapable of exercise?
If I’m too rigid, it will throw me off my game. Getting back on your game is a lot harder than staying on your game, we try to avoid getting thrown off as much as we can. In this instance, too much rigidity and the moment life happens, I’m SOL (sh*t outta luck for those of you wondering).
If I’m flexible I might turn around and say, ok I can’t workout and meditate this morning, but what about this evening or afternoon? Or, if I’m physically incapable of exercise, what else can I do to replicate the benefits of my exercise, or, can I double up on my meditation instead today?
As you can see, flexibility allows me to maintain my discipline, adapt and pivot to the circumstances thrown at me, all while keeping me, on my game.
If you want to learn more about discipline and especially discipline of strategy, go check out our conversation with Alex Brueckmann where we discuss how to apply discipline within your business strategy for greater results and success! You can check our conversation out here!
For even more news, if you haven’t joined yet, you need to get your butt into our lab and join some like minded people who want to empower themselves with more time, more money and look and feel 100x better doing it! You can join us here.