582: The Shortcut to Becoming Self-Disciplined

Hello and welcome to the Achieve your goals podcast. The show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level. As well as interview world class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves. And we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.

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Hello, my friend. Welcome to the achieve your goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod. And today we are talking about the ultimate super power, and that is self discipline. It's the ability to get yourself to do what you need to do, when you need to do it, whether you feel like it or not. And think about that for a second. The biggest difference between where you are right now in any area of your life and where you want to be is doing what you need to do, when you need to do it on a consistent basis, whether you feel like it or not. But most people don't do that. Most of us give into our laziness or our lack of motivation. We're looking for the feeling that we need to achieve what we want and if we don't feel like it, we don't do it. But if you look at high performers, people who seem to get more done and accomplish more and achieve more, it is not because they they're more talented or even more motivated than you. It is because they've trained themselves to be self disciplined. And today I'm gonna teach you exactly how to become a highly disciplined person. Even if you've never been one before, even if you have a history of not following through with things, or you start things strong, maybe a new habit or a new routine, but you lose motivation and eventually stop. Right? Can you relate to that? Do you struggle with consistency? Most of us do. And now if you are already a high performer, you already consider yourself to be a highly disciplined person. Stick with me. I'm going to also talk about what I call the degrees of discipline. In other words, there's levels to this. I'm going to share with you what I think is the most effective strategy that top performers use to continually uplevel their discipline and get more done and get better results. Right. If you are a top performer. Right. The best athletes in the world, they're always trying to get better and better and better because human potential is unlimited. All right, so how do you become a disciplined person, even if you've never been one before, even if you have a history of not following through with things or lacking motivation or being inconsistent, or maybe you're like a lot of people where you're disciplined in some areas of your life, this is probably more likely. You're disciplined in certain areas, right? But you're undisciplined in others. Like maybe you crush it in business, but you struggle with your health and your fitness or vice versa. If you're going to relate to any of that, you're not alone. You're in the majority. Human nature is to do what is easy. It's to take the path of least resistance. So today I'm going to break down the difference between motivation and discipline, why discipline is a superpower, and how to actually become a disciplined person one simple decision at a time.

Now, first, I'm going to share with you how I got here. Okay? Growing up, I was not self disciplined. Now, I knew kids who were self disciplined. They got good grades and they were dedicated athletes and they followed through on all their homework and their commitments, whether they felt like it or not, without needing to be constantly nagged or reminded by their parents. I was not one of those kids. In fact, I was the opposite. I had major ADHD was what wasn't diagnosed until my mid-20s. And I have mixed feelings on if ADHD is even a disorder, if it's really just the way your brain works and there's pros and cons. But that's another topic for another time. But I didn't get good grades. I was always in trouble with, you know, I had 80, I was talking in class, I always got detention, I never played school sports. And I viewed myself, my identity was as a lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined and inconsistent person. Maybe you can relate to some of that. Now all of that began to change for me when I was 19 years old as an undisciplined teenager, right? Late teens, I got a job selling Cutco knives. You probably know that if you listen to the podcast. But I was very fortunate that the person who hired me was Jesse Levine. Now, I say that like you would know his name. I'm sure you probably don't, but the reason I say his name with that emphasis, he was the number one manager in Cutco's 50 year history, right? So obviously he knew a thing or two about leading leadership, about getting the best out of people. And Jesse taught me how to develop self discipline, which led to extraordinary sales results and income for this mediocre Lazy kid that I was and eventually to achieving other goals and dreams beyond what 19 year old me could have ever imagined. Okay. But knowing what I know now, there is a shortcut to developing self discipline. That's what I'm going to teach you on today's podcast. But let me explain my journey. Okay? So I started selling Cutco. Jesse did something on day one that was incredibly powerful. He systematically held me accountable. And the way he did that is part of my job. And it was not just my, it was everybody's job. Obviously that worked. There was that I was required to call Jesse every single morning. I think it was between 7 and 8am I'd have to call in and I'd have to check in in the morning. Now he would start by being all, you know, he's hyped up and fired up. Hal, good morning. We're gonna make it a great day, right? I'm still in my be my covers on my cell phone, like just barely awake calling him because I'm supposed to. I had no motivation. I didn't feel like working. But here's what would happen. Jesse would ask me to commit to making 10 phone calls. He'd say, Al, can you make 10 calls and then call me back and let me know how they go? Okay, can you do it in the next 30 minutes? I'd go, oh, okay, yes. So I do it now not because I was motivated or I felt like it, but because I didn't want to let Jesse down. See, Jesse understood the power of accountability to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, but because I'd make the 10 calls and then I'd call them back, Go, Jesse, hey, I set two appointments now. I'd get motivated, I'd get energy. As I was getting results, I'd start to feel more confident. So I'm making calls, I'm booking appointments now I'm making sales day by day, calling and checking into Jesse, getting on the phone and making my calls, calling him back. Then he'd usually say, hey, why don't you make 10 more calls and call me back. And little by little, doing the hard things got easier. I was becoming a disciplined person. However, this is important. I wasn't yet self disciplined because I didn't see myself as a disciplined person. I was what I call discipline dependent, meaning I only got results when I had Jesse holding me accountable to do the things that I didn't feel like doing. I wasn't self disciplined. Right? You take away the accountability and I'd go back to My lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined identity. So he'd essentially hold my hand, right? It's make the calls, call me back. And I did it because. Think about that for a second. If it wasn't for Jesse and that accountability, him saying, hal, will you make 10 calls and call me? I mean, what am I going to say? No, Jesse, there's literally nothing else I can say. I'm working for Jesse. I look up to Jess. I respect him. So when he says, will you make 10 calls and call me back? Of course I do it. But if it wasn't for that accountability, I would have woken up that morning, I would have not made those 10 phone calls and the 10 that followed after I called Jesse back and he asked me to make 10 more, I would have done what human beings do. I would have procrastinated. I would have put those phone calls off and I would have potentially not made any calls that day. Because I'd be like, I'll just make them tomorrow, right? And we've all done that, right? Well, I'll make them tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. Then tomorrow comes, you don't do it the next day because you literally become a perpetual procrastinator by saying, I don't want to do it right now because it's uncomfortable. I'd rather do nothing and experience that sense of relief that comes from procrastinating. Because of Jesse's accountability, I made the 10 calls and I made 10 more day after day after day. So now this is both powerful, it's also, it's problematic. And here's what I'm talking about now. This was the beginning of my transition from undisciplined 19 year old to a highly disciplined 19 year old. But it wasn't overnight. In fact, it took months for me to develop the daily discipline with Jesse's help. But it took years for me to move beyond being dependent on Jesse to being self disciplined, self reliant. And that's because I had to shift my identity. I viewed myself based on the first 19 years of my life as an undisciplined, unmotivated person. That's who I saw myself as. That's who I was. So if I didn't have Jesse saying, make your 10 calls and call me back, I would get away with not making 10 calls and he wouldn't know about it. And that's how many of us act like children, by the way, right? Where we're like, when nobody's looking, you look around, there's a cookie in front of me. But I don't think mom and dad are here and nobody's gonna know. So I'm gonna reach in the cookie jar and I'm gonna eat it. And we never grow up out of that. Like, we literally wake up and we're like, what can I get away with today? My boss doesn't know what I'm doing. I don't have any accountability. But what you realize is when you understand the power of accountability, and this is gonna be one of the things we talk about today. But accountability is not the key to self discipline. It's the key to two things. Discipline dependent, right? Becoming discipline dependent, where you're dependent on the accountability to follow through, that's the problematic version of accountability. But then accountability, which we're going to talk about is actually, it's that strategy that top performers use to become more disciplined and more effective and take their results to new levels. That's why executives hire executive coaches. That's why the world's top athletes credit their coaches for their results. Right? Michael Jordan, one of my favorite basketball players of all time, he used to always credit his success to his high school basketball coach and his college coach. And then Phil Jackson, who was his coach in the NBA. So let me break this down. I'm going to break down my journey from undisciplined to disciplined in four parts. And then I'm going to share with you the shortcut. I'm going to share with you the shortcut, which is simply a rearranging of these four components. Because knowing what I know now, I realized that I took the long way to develop self discipline. I was discipline dependent for far too long. And that showed up in many areas of my life where I was disciplined when Jesse held me accountable and I would do the things whereas other people would quit. That's the difference. By the way, it's better to be discipline dependent via accountability than to be completely undisciplined, which a lot of people were so undisciplined that they're like, this is too hard. I don't want to have to call Jesse every day. And I don't want to have to make my calls and get rejected on the phone. So I'm just going to quit. And the majority of Cutco salespeople, they quit. And only those that are like, really committed to becoming the person that they need to be to achieve not just Cutco success, but success in other areas of life, right? They stick with it. And this is true for any sales position, network marketing, you name it any sales position. All right, so my journey from undisciplined to discipline. There are four components. Okay. If you're taking notes, which I always encourage you take notes like, otherwise you're going to forget most of what you learned. But don't write these down yet. Wait till I rearrange these for your shortcut. Your journey will be slightly different than mine. But my journey. Four components. Number one was intentionality. Number two was accountability. Number three was activity. And number four was identity. And I'll break each of these down. So intentionality. What does that mean? It means I made a commitment to Jesse that I would do whatever he led me to do. Whatever, you know, he said, hey, Al, you want to be successful? It's going to be challenging. It's going to be difficult. You have to do things you've never done before. But if you're willing to commit to do the things that I tell you to do, because I know what it takes to be successful, you can be really successful. Will you commit to that? That was my intentionality. I said yes. I made a commitment to become self disciplined, to do the things that Jesse asked me to do that he taught me to do. That was number one. With intentionality, yours will start the same way. Number two, though, was accountability. Like I talked about, I became discipline dependent on Jesse to hold me accountable. Again, not a bad thing. It's better to be discipline dependent than undisciplined. Okay, but it's not ideal because when the accountability is gone, then your discipline typically isn't there. It's not present right. You're just getting away with whatever you can get away with. You want to be self. Emphasis on the word self. Discipline. Number three, activity. I did the things that Jesse told me to do. I made the phone calls that he asked me to commit to make. And here's the point of activity. By doing those things, even though I didn't usually feel like became easier and easier and easier to do them.

Goal achievers and members of the miracle morning community. I just wanted to remind you or invite you to check out the miracle morning routine app in the app store and the Google Play store. It is free to download and comes with a robust assortment of features including templates to create your affirmations, a built in journal, customizable timers for Your Savers, the Savers 101 guided track where you complete your miracle morning in 13 minutes by simply hitting play a miracle evening guided track to help you go to bed at night and a lot more. And then you always have the option to upgrade to the premium version, our most popular version of the app, which you can try for a seven day free trial. And it gives you access to over 500 affirmations, a library of nearly 200 guided savers tracks so that you can click play and complete your savers in different areas of your life. You want to improve your mental health, you want to improve a relationship, you want to make more money. There are specific savers tracks, guided or designed, I should say, for each of those outcomes that you want to achieve in your life. So you can again literally click play and complete your miracle morning. Plus over 200 journaling prompts and a lot more. And the app now has over 2,900 reviews averaging 4.9 out of 5 stars. You can download the app now in the App Store or Google Play for Android users. Either way, I hope the app enhances your mornings and your life.

I don't know if I said this in the beginning, but today's focus I'm going to give you a 30 day challenge. I'm going to encourage. You can start with seven days if you want. Obviously there's seven days that lead to the 30, but within 30 days you can completely transform your level of self discipline. Even if you're totally undisciplined or at least that's how you see yourself. Or then that's you're like, no, I don't just see myself that way. Hell, that's how I am. Like I'm not a disciplined person. Okay, great. If that's you, I within 30 days you can completely transform your level of self discipline. And I'll unpack that more here when we get to the next phase of these teachings. So activity, right? So we had intentionality. It's where it started. I made a commitment. That was my intentionality. Jesse held me accountable. It was the accountability. Then the activity reinforced like the discipline. It made it easier and easier to do what I needed to do even when I didn't feel like it. Although I was relying on Jesse's accountability, it still was getting easier and easier and easier. And then number four, identity. It took me years to upgrade my identity and see myself as a self disciplined person. Even though I was doing the things and making the sales and scheduling the appointments, I didn't want to, I didn't feel like it. I was dependent on Jesse to do the things. So knowing what I know now, I would have upgraded my identity first so that my being disciplined wasn't dependent on accountability from other people. But it came from within and that's what I'm gonna walk you through right now. So your journey, that was my journey again. Intentionality, accountability, activity, and identity. Those are the four components to becoming a self disciplined person. Now, your journey will be slightly different. Number one is the same intentionality. And if you're taking notes, this is where I encourage you to take notes. By the way, if you're not taking notes, what do you do? You're gonna forget this, pause this and take notes. If you're in the car, like, look at the timestamp, see where we're at in the podcast and like, make a note of that. Or send yourself a text, like, go back to this part and take notes. Okay. All right. So your journey starts, number one, intentionality. It starts the same with, as it did for me, with a commitment to become self disciplined. By the way, quick bonus. This morning I wrote an affirmation for you for this podcast, my Daily Self Discipline Affirmations. So I'm going to tell you now in case I forget later. And if I don't forget, I'll tell you again. But to access those, go to miracle morning.com582. This is episode 582. You can always access the show notes. Well, any episode, the audio and the show notes by going to miraclemorning.com.

In this case, 582. But it's whatever the episode number is, this is episode number five, eight, two. And you can download these daily discipline affirmations. I highly encourage you to do this because I literally took everything that we're talking about and I synthesized it into a one page affirmation that you can read that affirms your commitment to being self disciplined. It reminds you why it matters, what's in it for you to follow through. And then number three, it gives you four specific daily actions that you can do every day that are universal for all of us to reinforce self discipline and make it a part of who you are, a part of your identity. So before I forget, miraclemorning.com582 okay, so number one, your journey to self discipline starts with intentionality. Number two for me was accountability. Yours is going to be identity. The fastest way to become self disciplined is to focus on your identity first. It's seeing yourself as self discipline. And to do that, use those daily self discipline affirmations. Okay? And so every day you're reinforcing that. You're committed to being self disciplined. You're reminding yourself why it's a must for you. And you're clarifying Four specific repeatable actions that you can do every single day. That's the activity part, right? To ensure that you're actually becoming self disciplined, you're not just thinking about it, you're not just imagining it, you're not just affirming it, but you are turning your affirmation into action. Or in this case, number three, activity. So commit the activities into your schedule. So number one, intentionality. Number two, identity. You're reinforcing the identity through daily affirmations. Remember, what you affirm repeatedly becomes your internal reality. And I want you to just think about not applying these steps, by the way, like, and just listening to this podcast, being like, oh, yeah, that was a great podcast. I totally wanna be self disciplined. But you don't have a daily affirmation that reinforces it every single day. Like, what are the odds that you're gonna remember this and that you're going to actually do the things right? You've got to have daily repetition that you've probably heard the quote, repetition is the mother of skill. It means that repeatedly doing something consistently is what gives birth to a skill. Well, repetition is also the mother of mindset, right? When you focus on something every single day, you give birth to, to a new mindset. And this is why, it's why you can change or transform any area of your life in a short amount of time through daily repetition. 30 days is a very nice round number every 30 days by you focusing on one specific either mindset or habit behavior, activity, goal. And you, every day, you focus on it, you affirm it, you remind yourself of what you're committed to, why it's important to you, why it matters, and which actions you're going to take to follow through. Like, you can do anything. But think about it. 99.9% of people, that's maybe, maybe it's 95%, but it's a majority of people, they don't do that. They set a goal and they don't look at it. They make a decision. They kind of make a decision of something they want to change in their life, but they don't focus on it every single day and reinforce the mindset that they need every single day and reinforce their commitment every single day. And if this is sounding overwhelming, like, you're like, hal, dude, slow down, man. Like, every single day, remember, it becomes easier and easier and easier to do this. Anything that you do repeatedly becomes easier and easier and easier to do. And that includes self discipline. All right, number four. So your journey, four components. Mine was intentionality, followed by accountability. And I became discipline dependent on Jesse. Then activity and identity, your four same components, different order, intentionality, identity, activity, and then number four. And in some ways it's optional. In some ways it's optional. It's accountability. And here's what I mean. While you don't want to become discipline dependent on accountability from other people, like we talked about earlier, leveraging accountability as a strategy is what even the most self disciplined people use to uplevel their discipline even further. Again, this is what I refer to as degrees of discipline. It's not like you either are or are not self disciplined. It's that you develop discipline and then you become more disciplined and then you apply discipline to other areas of your life. Like maybe like for me, I started being disciplined at work with Jesse's help and his support and accountability, right? I wasn't disciplined in my diet, I wasn't disciplined in my exercise. I wasn't disciplined in any other area of my life. I was very solo. Like there was one area of my life that I was disciplined in. So there are degrees of discipline. Eventually it spread to every area of my life. And I can say today, very confidently, humbly, however you want to say it, like, I am extremely disciplined in my diet. I'm slightly less in my exercise, but I'd say like, in my diet I'm probably like a 9.5 out of 10. I try to eat with impeccable integrity in terms of like what goes in my body. When I, with exercise, I kind of like, you know, I exercise like three to five days a week. Sometimes it's five, right? So there's like, I'm less disciplined in that area of my life. But the point is, in every area of my life, I try to implement a high degree of self discipline, but accountability is how I take it to the next level. And again, I said this earlier, it's why top executives that are highly self disciplined, they hire executive coaches to take it to the next level, to take their discipline and their results to the next level. It's why the best athletes in the world credit their coaches for elevating their mindset and their work ethic and their discipline and ultimately their performance. I'm giving you just a quick measurable example. So for five years in my Cutco career, I was disciplined, even became self disciplined to do what I needed to do to sell $100,000 of Cutco per year. That was from age 19 to age 24, I believe, right in that range. So I was averaging about $100,000 a year. In Cutco sales, right? One of the top sales reps in the company. Like top 10 every year. Pretty disciplined. Then I hit hall of fame with the company and I'm like, all right, I'm out of here. I'm done. And at my very last conference, I was like, I can't leave. I never fulfilled my potential. I just coasted at $100,000 a year. In year six, I decided I needed to finally fulfill my potential. In order to do that, I had to increase my degree of discipline. And so that year I went on. I went from 100k the year before, the year before that, to 200k, $200,000 in sales in that final year. And how did I do that? I increased my degree of discipline. Specifically, I went from averaging 10 calls per day throughout the year to averaging 20 calls per day. I increased my degree of discipline by 100%. Right. I simply doubled the amount of phone calls that I made. And then I was able to double my income as a result. So I promised you one thing that I would talk about the difference between motivation and discipline. I want to do that before we wrap up here because a lot of people are mistakenly thinking they need motivation. Motivation is a temporary emotion that makes you feel excited to start something again. We've all felt that excitement to start. And I think Jim Rohn. It was Jim Rohn. One of my favorite quotes around this, he said, motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going. Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going. Abraham Lincoln, a great quote from Abraham Lincoln. He said, discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. I'll say that again in case you're taking notes. Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most right now. We always want to do the easy, the fun, right? Like the pleasurable thing. Of course we do. That's human nature. But if what you want most is beyond this temporary, short lived pleasure that you're going to get from procrastinating or eating the junk food or right, making the decision that's not healthy for you or doesn't take you to the next level, what you want most, if it's success and fulfillment. Discipline is choosing to do what you need to do now that will move you in the direction of what it is that you want most. So motivation is that temporary emotion and it comes and goes based on external factors. Could be mood or sleep or stress or weather or whatever. Discipline, we already said it. It's the ability to do what needs to be done even when you don't feel like it. So it comes from an internal decision, not a fleeting emotion. And that's crucial to understand because this is important. It's one of the reasons that a lot of people don't see themselves as disciplined. Like, I didn't see myself as disciplined even when I was disciplined. Even though, like, it's like, anybody from the outside goes, hal, you're making your calls every day. You're one of the top 10 sales reps in the company. Like, of course you're disciplined. Well, no, but I don't want to make the calls. For me, I thought that to be disciplined would mean I wanted to do the things that I had to do. I was confusing motivation and discipline. So what it was is I wasn't motivated. But again, motivation comes and goes. We are falsely believing that what we need is motivation. No, we don't need motivation. Like, yeah, you can sustain motivation by, like, using affirmations and focusing on things that get you excited and exercising and moving your body and doing Tony Robbins power moves. Right? Like, all of those, there's valid ways to get yourself excited to start or continue something. You can pump yourself up. That's great. But discipline is an internal decision.

Not a fleeting emotion. When you make a decision, it's like, oh, the alarm goes off on my phone at 8am it's time to make my phone calls. I don't even ask, do I feel like it? I don't check in and go, huh? Do I feel motivated to make the calls right now? Do I feel motivated to go to the gym? Do I feel like writing, working on my new book this morning? Like, I don't even ask myself that because that's me searching for motivation. No, discipline is. I decided that I'm gonna do what I commit to do whether I feel like it or not. A big part of that is time blocking in my schedule. Like, I put what I'm committed to doing in my schedule, and then I look at my schedule, I go, okay, it's 8:00am this is what I'm committed. I'm committed to workout right now. Okay, it's 8:30. What am I doing now? Oh, that's what I'm. I literally, I commit in my schedule to the time blocks, right? A block of time that from this time to this time, here's what I'm committed to doing, whether I feel like it or not. And as you do this, it gets easier and easier and easier. All right? So if you want to download the daily discipline affirmations, I wrote these literally this morning as I was outlining today's podcast episode. So it will help you to reinforce these concepts and to become the self disciplined person that you are capable of becoming and that you deserve to be. And again, maybe you're already pretty self disciplined. So let's take advantage of the degrees of discipline and take it to that next level. So your journey to becoming highly self disciplined or going from where you are now on your discipline degree to the next level Intentionality number one Number two Identity number three Activity number four Accountability. Make the commitment. See yourself by daily repetition of affirmation as a self disciplined person. Do the things that you're committed to doing, put them in your schedule, do the activity. And if you want to uplevel beyond that, accountability is what the top performers utilize to take their results to the next level. All right, goal achievers, I love you. Thank you today for listening. I appreciate you so much and I'm excited. I'm excited for you to implement this and to hear results. Send me an email. Supportiraclemorning.com actually you can go, I think go to haliraclemorning.com or leave me a comment. Miraclemorning.com 582 that's where you can download the daily discipline affirmations. Miraclemorning.com 582 all right, love you so much. I'll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening. To learn more about the Achieve your Goals podcast and again access today's show notes, transcript and exclusive content from hal Elrod, visit Halelrod.com podcast thanks again for joining us. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of the Achieve your Goals podcast.