Weekly Training: The Secret To Discipline

Welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beadon. All right, we are going to talk today all about discipline. I'm going to take a bit of a different approach here because I think whenever I see people talk about discipline, it's like the five ways to be more disciplined or, you know, the habits that you want to cultivate during discipline. And I want to take a bit of a different approach to talk about why discipline is so important because I think a lot of people talk about what discipline is and how they should do it, but a lot of people don't talk. A lot of people miss out on telling you why discipline is so bloody important. So I'm just going to put it out there. And I think the reason why I'm using this framework is that it goes back to the same. You know, a man with any why can withstand any how. I can't remember if that's Nietzsche or if that is Viktor Frankl. I may have botched who that actually is entirely. So you might want to look it up. This is something. Cite the quotes. But in many ways we need a why. And for most of us, the reason why we struggle with discipline is because we don't have a good why. We see discipline as a form of punishment. We grew up in an environment where discipline was used against us, used to control us. And for anyone, that kind of discipline is not going to work because it's shame based, because it's control based, because it is. In some ways it feels like we are trying to manipulate or coerce ourselves. And just like other people don't like to be manipulated or coerced, neither do we. And we don't like to feel like we're having to manipulate or coerce ourselves. So here's why discipline is so important. Discipline is so important because it is the strongest form of self love. It is the strongest form of self respect. It is the strongest form of self leadership. It is the thing that is the doorway, the access point if you choose to walk through it, if you choose to embrace it as a practice, as something that you can aim towards every single day, not as the weapon used against you, not as the, as the thing that you get to shame yourself for not having, but as the practice that you are moving towards. It is the thing that, that cultivates self love, self respect, self leadership. And it is the thing that allows us to feel a sense of belonging within ourselves. Why is that? Why is that? Well, in many ways it's because we ignore sometimes current pleasures for bigger rewards to come down the road. And in those moments we teach ourselves that the rewards externally, that the rewards outside of us are less meaningful than the practice, that of being the practice of connecting to who we actually are, to our authentic selves. And that that's the sort of quote unquote reward in the long run. I remember reading probably the most famous study on this is the marshmallow experiment where they have, you know, 3 to 5 year olds or 3 to 6 year olds sit down and, and they put a marshmallow in front of them and they say, you can have the marshmallow now. Or if you wait for the adult to leave the room and leave the room for two minutes and come back in, you can have two marshmallows or three marshmallows or six marshmallows. And the kids who, you know, as soon as the adult leaves the room, snatches up the marshmallow and stuffs it in their face versus the kid that waits for the adult to come back and gets, you know, multiple marshmallows for waiting for being disciplined. What a lot of the research has shown is that the kids that wait have a higher likelihood of being successful later on in life, have a higher likelihood of enjoying the success that they do have, enjoying things at a deeper level. Because what they learn in those moments, I believe is in many ways that external gratification is not the be all end. All that external gratification and what comes from outside of us is not the thing that we should hinge our self worth on. It's not the thing that we should rest our happiness on. It's not the thing that we should allocate our own validation, respect, love, happiness, etc. On. And so many of us have been struggling to cultivate this sense of discipline in our lives because we have grown up in an environment that has taught us that discipline is something that if you don't have it, you're bad or wrong or you're broken. And so we shame ourselves. And so discipline becomes this, this doorway not of accessing self love, but of blocking it. Not of accessing self respect, but of destroying it. And not of accessing, not a doorway for accessing a depth of self leadership that allows us to move through life in a strong, grounded, compassionate, loving manner, but in a way that deeply erodes our sense of self respect. So that's why discipline is important. Discipline is important because it is the gateway. It's the gateway for sobriety, it's the gateway for clear mental health. It's the gateway for us being mindful in it is the doorway. It's a doorway that we need to walk through every single day. And that's the catch. Discipline is not about finding ourselves in a spot where we have finally conquered it. Right? This is the problem with a lot of how discipline is presented to people through self help and motivational videos and whatever, that at some point you're going to reach this place where you have complete control over yourself. And, and that's the illusion that we need to drop the illusion. And the aim for us as human beings is not to have complete control over ourselves. There's no such thing. And we actually miss out on the ability to feel empowered when we are trying to enact control over ourselves. Because when we are trying to control ourselves, we're playing games, we're trying to manipulate ourselves, we're trying to coerce ourselves either into things, we're trying to talk ourselves into healthy behaviors, our healthy habits or the good relationship or whatever it is that we're after. And that shit just doesn't work, right? I mean, think about how many people in your life that have said that, you know, they resisted being coerced, they resisted being manipulated. I mean, think about the times where you felt like you were being coerced or manipulated. You, you certainly resisted it. And yet when it comes to discipline, we try and enact control. And this is the illusion that we need to drop. This is the false belief, it's the false narrative, it's the false story that we have to let go of in order to actualize, in order to step into our real sense of discipline. If you want to be disciplined and you want to get your ass out of bed every Single morning at 6am, you want to go to the gym, I guarantee you a lasting method is, is not to shame yourself or control yourself or coerce yourself or manipulate yourself into doing it. It won't last. I promise you, it won't last. I tried. I've tried to go down that path for years and it didn't work. And even when it did work for a little while, it didn't last long. But when I have approached discipline as a practice and I've allowed myself to move into a space of connecting with developing self respect and deepening a connection to self worth and self love and knowing that I'm going to fail and knowing that it's not about me controlling myself, it is about me coming into contact with my own power. Is it about me learning how to give myself and move towards the things that I feel I'm capable of? Being, becoming and executing on, creating the developing, building. And so when I start to do those things, then I'm in moving in the direction of actualizing my potential. The other direction is shame based, right? When discipline is a form of punishment, when we are trying to control ourselves into being disciplined, it's shame based. And you know that it's shame based because all you have to do is listen to your thoughts. All you have to do is feel into your body and feel into the emotions when you are trying to control yourself to be more disciplined. And you know, you know in that moment you're like, man, I am. I mean, I just hate the way that this is happening. You know, it's like, why can't I just do this naturally? Why can't I just get up in the morning? Why do I feel all this resistance? It's like, oh, such a battle. But when we approach discipline as a practice, it becomes the thing that we are growing down into. It becomes the thing that as we practice it and we know that we're going to fail and we accept some of those failures and we realize that it's not about punishing ourselves when we screw up and that it's in those moments that we realize that we are practicing truly, that we're developing a skill set. I want you to hear that you are developing a skill set when you are practicing discipline that maybe you were never taught. I was never taught. I wasn't taught how to study. I wasn't taught how to take care of my body. I wasn't taught how to eat well. I wasn't taught how to get up early. None of those things were instilled in me as a child because there was no discipline in that sense in my household. The discipline that I got personally growing up was the form of punishment that when I screwed up, I'd get yelled at, I'd get spanked, I'd get grounded, I'd have things taken away from me, I'd get verbally abused and punished. Those were the modalities that were used to discipline me. And what that led to was me not having any structure, was me not having any order. And so I had to teach myself. I had to learn those things. But the biggest obstacle, the biggest obstacle that I bumped up against in that endeavor was realizing that discipline is not about shame. It's not about shaming myself, it's not about controlling myself. And as soon as I started to let go of that, I gave myself permission to start to cultivate discipline slowly and intentionally and with compassion and with self respect and with self strength and self leadership and self honoring. It was in those moments that I stepped into a very powerful form of discipline that I now embody and inhabit today. And it took years. It really did. But it is a practice that I try and teach and train everyone on today. And so I hope that this message landed for you. And what I'm going to leave you with are the words of David White. It's one very simple sentence. So he says, alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. And I love this, because what we need to be alert to or alert of are the parts of ourselves that want to shame our lack of discipline, are the parts of ourselves that are trying to be controlling in our discipline and to be more alert to how we are wanting to honor ourselves, why we are wanting to respect ourselves, how we are wanting to appreciate ourselves when we do get the practice right. Because this is a practice, my friends. Life is a practice. Life is a practice. The whole thing. The whole thing. And some of us are just practicing shame. Every day we wake up and we practice shame. We wake up and we practice letting ourselves criticize ourselves. And eventually the part of the game, part of the, I think the human game is to find some better practices, to wake up in the morning and to be able to practice awareness of how do I want to respect myself today? I want to respect myself by eating healthier. I want to respect myself by going downstairs and working out. I want to respect myself by putting on my gym shoes and going for a run, even though it might suck because I haven't done it in months. That's how I want to show up. That's why I want to practice discipline in my life and that's how I want to practice life. So thanks very much for tuning in. Please do send this to somebody that you know is going to enjoy it. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.