Discipline isn't motivation or willpower, it's following through on commitments regardless of how you feel. Build it with four things: automatic habits, tiny starting actions, an environment that makes the behavior easy, and someone holding you accountable. A short home workout you actually do beats an ambitious gym plan you skip.
Let's be honest, no one feels like doing the hard stuff all the time. Let's take yesterday as an example. I didn't really feel like swimming yesterday. It was a bit of a hassle getting to the pool in the first place. I hate the first few moments of getting into a cold pool, and honestly, it can just get a bit boring swimming. But I did it anyway. I also didn't feel like fasting for most of the day and staying under 1,500 calories. But if I'm gonna hit my calories and my macros this week, it was really important that I did exactly that. So I did it. And also, I didn't particularly wanna hit my step count. I don't know, I just didn't feel like walking and I didn't have a convenient space to get a lot of steps done yesterday. But I pushed through it. I creatively made the space and I got them in. Now, I did all of these things despite how I was feeling. And it's because I've built something far more important than motivation into my life. And that, of course, is discipline. And by the way, I'm going to share a few practical tips for building discipline at the end of this short video. But first, I want to unpack how it actually fits into real life. Now, once you understand what real discipline is and how to build it, everything gets way easier. So to start with, have you noticed people with discipline, they really stand out? And actually, when someone compliments you for being disciplined, it feels like one of the best compliments you can get. Now, discipline has a lot of different definitions, and I've thought a little bit about it, and I would define it as this: discipline is the ability to follow through on what you said you'd do regardless of how you feel in the moment. You know that feeling when you follow through on something you said you'd do and you really needed to do it? It just feels goddamn great, right? And the flip side, there's, there's almost nothing worse than ducking out of something you know you should have done and you needed to do. And you want to build more of the first feeling in your life and way less of the second feeling. And the good news is it's totally possible. Now here's one of the biggest realizations I've had trying to build more discipline. It's not about motivation at all. It's much more about systems. And sure, motivation feels amazing when it shows up, but it's actually pretty inconsistent. Same goes for willpower, and also the same goes for— so the same goes for trying to get in touch with your why. These are all nice when they— when you can get them going, but they're not very reliable at all. If you want to be consistent, here is what you need to focus on. You need to build simple habits and routines that can run on autopilot, things that just feel effortless and kind of happen second nature. You also have to start really small. Start small, maybe sometimes for quite a long time, and then scale up once you're feeling that you've got it under control. You also want to set your environment up for success. You don't want to make it harder than it needs to be. And then lastly, you want to find someone who can either coach you or hold you to account. You've got a much better chance of success if you can focus on these 4 things, and that's certainly where I've had the biggest breakthroughs. Let's take a simple example, and you know, the gym is obviously one that's close at home to me, and it's also something that I think a lot of people struggle with. So a lot of people kind of have this as what they try and achieve. They might put in a full day's work, they then have to come home and then they might have some dinner, and then they have to go to the gym. And that usually involves a drive to the gym, getting ready, like, you know, changing. You then take on a full workout because you're an ambitious person, and you usually have like an hour's workout that you want to kind of grind through. And then it's a matter of getting changed, shower, drive back. Like, all of that is actually quite a lengthy thing, and it's actually really hard to sustain multiple times a week. Now imagine if you went for something a bit more like this. Imagine if you designed a much shorter, simpler bodyweight workout which you could do at home. Now what if you decided that you would do it for, say, 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and you would do it before work, so you would get it in the bank early on? Or maybe in your lunch break, you could do it for 20 minutes and then have 40 minutes for your lunch break if you had an hour's lunch break. So maybe you squeezed it into your lunch break or before work. And then also, what if you worked with a coach or a personal trainer, or maybe you had a friend that was expecting you to show up? Now, that scenario is so much easier to stick to than the full-blown version I explained before. And look, I get it, starting small and keeping things simple, it all feels quite unambitious, particularly if you're a Type A personality type of person. But look, here's the truth. Consistency at a lower level beats inconsistency at a higher level every single time. And I've seen this play out in my own life so many times. So start with something you can actually do pretty easy and then build from there. Now, this approach, it takes patience and it takes letting go of your ego too, but it's always the best long-term strategy. So look, here's the bottom line. Discipline matters an awful lot, and anything meaningful in your life that brings real happiness will at some point require you to do something you don't feel like doing consistently. So if you want to build more discipline, pick one thing you want to be consistent with and then go back to the 4 things that I mentioned earlier. Keep it simple and don't overcomplicate it. Start really small. Set your environment up for success. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. And find someone to hold you accountable. It could be a friend, a coach, a colleague, whatever works. Start with these and then build from there. And before you know it, discipline won't just be something you see and admire in other people. It'll be something other people see and admire in you. Good luck with it.
