144: A New Year Of Self-Discipline And Focus - #GrowYourLife

Hello, everybody. Happy holidays and thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski. We just got off the Christmas season. We're coming into the new year, and I want to talk about something I know is going to help you going into the new year, something that I have received dozens of messages from people and calls with people about the last two weeks, and I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't talk about this topic. The topic is about self discipline and focus, and it's not a sexy topic. But to be honest, every single person that I'm working with, that I'm coaching, they need this message. And so I'm gonna start pivoting a lot of my content around this. You hear me say, take imperfect action. You hear me say, do the hard things, all this type of stuff. But self discipline is really the catalyst that lets you do that, the focus to do it when you don't feel like it, when you lack the motivation. I did a podcast episode a couple weeks ago about when you lack motivation. But it really boils down to developing the self control, the control inside yourself to do things when you don't feel like it. And we're gonna dive into a framework of what I've used to develop this myself. Some great books that I've read on the topic. One of them is called Indistractible by, I think it's Near Patel. Is his name indestructible? I'm gonna look up, look it up right now. Near. Near Il, not Patel. Near Il, that's how you say his name. And Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Those are two incredible books on the topic, as well as Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud. You hear me talking, talk about that book all the time as well, so check those books out in your own time. But I'm going to give you my framework of what has worked for me over the last year and a half to develop this self discipline and focus inside of myself. You know, I thought that I was really kind of a self disciplined guy until I had to start my own business and didn't have a boss telling me what to do. I'd always worked for somebody else. I'd always been very successful, but had always had somebody else telling me what I needed to do every single day. When it got to me being responsible for my own work, I realized how much I lacked in self discipline and how much I was relying on my feelings every single day to get stuff done. One of the biggest Things that helped with that six months talking with a therapist was a great help for that. Betterhelp.com is a resource that I recommend to everybody to check out. It was only 250 bucks a month to talk with a therapist once a week on video chat. And so I highly recommend that. But you don't need to do that. That might be a good thing for some people, especially if some of your issues are dealing with trauma, past memories and things like that. But I'm going to work with you today on some strategies, some strategic things that you can do that are going to change your life, that are going to help you start to develop that self discipline. And one of the first ones is realize this. Listen, I know a lot of you that listen to me. You've tried to be successful in the past and things didn't go how you wanted them to, or you had expectations on how things would go and they didn't turn out how you wanted them to. And you've been grinding for a long period of time. Realize this, that it can be your level of motivation is going to start to dip the more times that you fail at doing the same thing because you're not as motivated every single time. So you have to be intentional to actually develop that motivation. One of the fastest ways is remind yourself of why you got started. Why did you start building a business? What is your reason? Do you want to pay off debt? Do you want to take your family on vacations? Do you want to have an impact on the world around you? Do you want to be better than everybody else and make more money than everybody else? Do you want whatever it is, whatever your reason is, do you want to be famous? Whatever your reason is that got you started, remind yourself of that and remember that the first day that you got into business, what your biggest motivator was for you, that got you so excited, that got you out of bed in the morning. Remember these things. The other thing too is remember who you are. Your level of self esteem, how much you believe in yourself has a huge impact on your self discipline. Because if you don't feel like you are worth enough to be disciplined and focused, then you won't be. And that relates to how you view yourself. If I view myself as worth a million bucks and somebody that is worth treating like a million dollar business owner, I'm gonna show up every single day like one. Instead of acting like an amateur, I'm gonna act like a million dollar billion dollar CEO. By the way, I got a chance and opportunity this past summer to Work with a billionaire CEO and founder, and I got to notice some of his habits. And the man's one of the most disciplined people I had ever met in my life. And I thought, huh, there's something to this. And I grabbed onto what I had observed and how he operated. This guy built businesses to billions of dollars. What's different? And I think whether you want to build your business to 10k a month, 20k a month, 30k a month, we can still borrow from what the top dogs in business do. Discipline is one of the number one things. Discipline and focus. Bill Gates says this, Warren Buffett says this, Elon Musk says this. And I'm not saying that you have to work a hundred hours a week like those guys do. If you love working that way and can figure that out, great. But I know that that's not practical for most of the people that listen to me. And so that's fine. But the discipline to just do one hour a day or 30 minutes a day, now that's what you can develop. That's what you can do daily. Self discipline. And you have to remember what. Why you got started us in success does not always look how we planned it to be. How things went when you set out to build your business isn't how they're going right now. And that's okay. Sometimes we have to process through that. It's okay that things didn't work out. Accept the reality of the past and then move on to, to learn. What's the new way to do things in the future? By learning to develop self discipline and the courage to take action when you don't feel like it. Now that, my friends, is how things will start to work out for you. Listen, I know that you've tried this before. I know that many of you have tried to build your businesses before. You've tried things, you've tried stuff and it didn't work out. It didn't go how you wanted to. But I want to encourage you to change your perspective on this. Did you lose or did you learn? And what did you learn? And don't say that you learned that nothing ever works out. That's a cop out. But what did you learn? We can either win or we can learn. I heard Sean White say this on a podcast with Ed Mylett, that when he fails, he actually doesn't lose. Now, sure, he doesn't win a gold medal, but he can either win or he can learn. And he can learn what needs to change. And when we change our perspective to where we no longer Lose. We only ever learn from our failures. We only ever learn from our mistakes. And we develop the tenacity to do hard things and to get back up again when we don't feel like it. That's what allows us to develop that self discipline. I'm going to give you some of those step by step strategies here in a minute, but I have to lay this foundation for you of what I think mentally blocks people from this. One of the biggest things is this. You know, I was reading a book by Brene Brown called Rising Strong. Rising Strong is a book that is all about. It's a little bit of a hard to translate book. I had to listen to it twice to really get the point of the book. So I'm gonna kind of sum it up here for you. Some of you guys can read it on your own time. But. But the gist is this, is that when we, when we think that we're going to have a level of success, we fall flat on our face and we fail and things don't go how we wanted them to. How do we rise back up again to have that same level of tenacity? Because that's what I believe that you need to develop. That's what I believe that every single person listening to this podcast needs to grow in is that even when things didn't work out how they expected them to, that they developed the tenacity to get back up again, to do it again. And what the biggest thing is is that they found is learning to give yourself the opportunity to process through the stages of grief. And this is one that most people don't think about when it comes to business. You see, if you had a plan, an idea of how you thought things would go, you're gonna have to grieve the death of that situation. You had this whole idea of what you expected things to go and it didn't work out. And so you have to grieve the fact that that reality didn't go that way. Now you're here where you are. And when you process through those stages of very similar to when a family member dies or you lose a friend, grief is more than just death or loss. It's also loss of future. It's loss of what we think, how things should go. And so when we give ourselves the opportunity and the chance to grieve how things didn't go how we wanted them to, and really giving yourself the chance to work through those things, to process through the grief and then to accept it. Listen, I had things that I thought would go a certain way in my life and they didn't. And one of the hardest ones was, took me three years to work through the stages of grief on one of them. And as I work through that, I feel more powerful, stronger, have more self discipline and more courage to go out and do things again with the wisdom that I learned along the way, with the tenacity by developing that tenacity. We develop that tenacity by learning to process through the stages of grief and then saying, okay, I'm not gonna let this experience control my life. I'm not gonna let this feeling change my destiny. I'm not gonna let how things didn't go, how I wanted them to dictate my future. And that's one of the first steps that I think can really help a lot of people. If you're struggling to have self discipline, processing through that, learning to rise stronger and rise above your situation by giving yourself the opportunity to process through the hard things so that you can go ten times further with less effort the next time. After we do that, here's the strategy, here's the strategy for developing self discipline. One of them is learn to keep the promises that you make to yourself and your commitments. One of the biggest reasons why we lack self confidence while we lack self esteem is we don't trust ourselves because we don't do what we say we're gonna do. Because we have a track record where we lack the ability to do that. If you're somebody that does what you say you're going to do every single time that you do it, you will have unstoppable self esteem. I have people yesterday had it had a group of millionaires telling me that I couldn't accomplish what I am setting out to do. But see their words no longer affect me because my track record of what I've done and the promises that I keep to myself have no ability to allow their words in. And that's why we no longer worry what other people say and think about us. I have no reason to care or worry what other people say I can or can't do because I know that I keep the promises that I make to myself. Year ago, two years ago, still lacking in that. And I wasn't as confident and I didn't have the same level of self esteem because of my own track record of how much I was not keeping the promises I made to myself. And so when you develop the self discipline, it affects your self esteem, it affects what you think about yourself, it affects how you see yourself, it affects how you go about your day. And so learning to keep the promises and commitments that you make to yourself and other people changes everything. Now, here's the second part of that. Have boundaries on your commitments and promises. Learn to say no and be okay with that. When other people say, hey, I think you should do this, I need you to do that, learn to say, no, I can't right now. I have these other obligations. Because you'll start to respect yourself and respect your time greater than how much you think other people should. And you'll show other people how to respect your time by how you respect it. When you learn to say no, when you are unwavering in your boundaries, other people will show up to respect you the same way that you respect you. One of the biggest reasons why people walk all over us and don't respect our boundaries, because we don't respect it ourselves. And the book Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud goes into this topic. When you learn to say, hey, sorry, I can't do that right now. And for some of you, that's going to be the hardest thing that you've ever done. You see, because when we're. When you're a pleaser, when you. When you're a people pleaser, when you're somebody where the only thing that you care about is making everybody happy around you by doing everything that everybody else thinks that you should do, the hardest thing is saying no, because it can upset people. When you realize it's not a bad thing to do that. Because when you respect yourself, you can't be all things to all people and show up at all times when everybody wants you to. And you have to learn to prioritize and move things around in your life and pick and choose what you're going to do. It allows you to create the life that you want instead of letting life create your life for you and you being a victim to your life, you're the one that's in control of the way that your life goes with boundaries. And then the next one is learning to control your distractions. And that's why the book Indistractable by Nirhael is so good on this. Because we learn. Why do we distract ourselves? One of the biggest reasons why we distract ourselves is there's usually some kind of pain or anxiety or unsettledness or overthinking that we're trying to avoid. Because when we're not distracted, we come face to face with reality that we're not trying to look at. And so when we distract ourselves, it gives us an opportunity to not pay attention to what's really going on. And when you can learn to have the self discipline to no longer allow yourself to be distracted. Which by the way, I, I still love playing video games, I still love watching Netflix, I still play with my VR headset. So I'm not saying not to have fun, not to have time for yourself where you do those types of things. I'm not saying that. I'm saying when you set out to go build your business for an hour a day and then you find something to distract you 10 minutes later on social media, and then, oh, an hour passed by, oh, didn't build my business today, that type of thing. To where you learn to give yourself that blocked time. If you don't create the time in your day, your day will create it for you. There will be voids in your day to where time will pass you by and you won't be able to get done the things that you want to get done. You won't be able to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish because you're letting everything else around you control what gets done. And so learning to control your distractions by not letting there be temptations for self sabotage all the time for you, by learning to remove the temptations for self sabotage, by learning to have the self control enough to say, no, I'm not going to be distracted by this. I'm going to build my business during this time. When you do this, listen, you're gonna, you're gonna probably get a little bit of pain in your, in your head, in your neck, maybe in your body somewhere. You're gonna feel uncomfortable, you're gonna feel like the wiggles going on. You're gonna feel maybe a little bit itchy, a little bit something. You are gonna feel that way. You ever notice that? That's what happens when we, and so we distract ourselves from whatever those sensations are. What you'll find is a lot of those sensations are things that we haven't processed through. Like I said, talking about grief, talking about therapy, talking about working through those things, doing the work. A great book on this topic is how to do the Work by Nicole Lepra. How to do the Work by Nicole Lepra is an incredible book on this topic of learning how to do the work in our lives. Learning to process through and heal different brain, recognizing your patterns, and it says heal from your past and create yourself. Nicole Leper, the holistic psychologist talks about this. She's got 2 million followers on social media learning how to power, how to harness the Power of Self and produce Lasting Change. That's an incredible book for you that if you find the discomfort when you set out to do things, learn to figure out why that discomfort is there and why you're self sabotaging every single day. That way then you can start to remove the triggers in your life. You can start to remove what tempts you, you can start to remove what self sabotaging you so that you can create new habits and routines. And that's really the secret. The secret of self discipline and more focus is having new habits and new routines in your life. Doing things a different way. If you want to live the exact same life that you've been living right now, keep doing what you've been doing every single day. Keep doing things how you've been doing them every single day. Nothing will change. But if you want something to change in your life, you are going to have to do things differently. And that starts by developing new habits, by learning, okay, I previously did stuff this way, I'm going to have to learn to do it this way a little bit differently. And that's going to help you grow as the person in your business that you want to be so that you can accomplish far more than you ever thought was possible. One of the best ways to do this for me that works is shrinking the size of your goals to realistic levels. What can I accomplish in the two hours today? What can I get done in the next seven days? We have these big goals and then we're constantly not hitting them because. And then we feel like a failure because we're not hitting them. If you shrink your goals down, take the goal, break it down into four bite sized chunks and say, okay, how can I get a quarter of this goal done? And then if you still can't get that done, shrink that down even more so that you can process it so that you can do things. Compounded effort over time is what produces results. Making time in your day to get stuff done is what produces results. And then learn to be honest with yourself about your weaknesses. Learn to be honest with yourself about what self sabotages you. Learn to be truthful with yourself about what gets you off track. When you can start to look face to face with what it's really your enemy is. What's the enemy of your success? What's the enemy of you doing the things that are going to help you reach your goals and what are the patterns that that you've been doing every single day that have stopped you from reaching those things? Learn to know yourself. Learn to know your weaknesses. Forgive yourself when you mess up. Don't beat yourself up. You see, this is one of the biggest ones and I think one of the hardest ones for people to do. You'll listen to 20 minutes of a podcast like this and then go out there and feel like you're the worst person in the world for not doing any of this stuff. My friends, you have to treat yourself with love and respect and honor and not beat yourself up when you don't do things, not punish yourself when you don't do things right. Instead, encourage yourself the way that you would encourage somebody else, say, hey, you know what, it's okay, we didn't do it right today, let's do better tomorrow. And then move on quickly from those mistakes. You see if you've lived a pattern where you've always beat yourself up, where you have always cussed yourself out every time you didn't do things, how you wanted to have the self discipline to no longer do that, to no longer be so negative towards yourself, to no longer be so critical towards yourself. When we learn to stop being so critical of ourselves and other people, we learn to accept our limitations and say, hey, listen, I. I'm growing in this. It's like a muscle, it's like a workout. You don't expect to squat £300 when you start working out. In fact, most people rarely ever get to that in the first place. And most people who set out in business rarely ever reach millionaire status. And yet I believe everybody can. But it's like an exercise, it's like a workout. You're going to grow these muscles. Self discipline is a muscle that you can grow. And so you have to give yourself the opportunities to fail, to mess up and to forgive yourself and to move on quickly and to not beat yourself up for it. Because then, listen, if you beat yourself up for it, you're going to avoid it the next time. You actually don't want to avoid making mistakes. You want to embrace them. You want to make more mistakes. You want to realize that your mistakes and your mess ups and the messes that you make are actually a good thing in your life so that you can learn from them. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're somebody that's getting started, if you're developing self discipline, you are going to mess up in the beginning and that's okay. And that's by design. And so learn to be okay with that as you develop accountability. One of the last things that's really helpful for people is find somebody to keep you accountable. Find a coach, find a mentor. Find somebody that can help keep you accountable and hold you to the standards that you have. If you've invested money into coaching somebody that you meet with every single week, they can say, okay, did you do the work? Okay, here's what we need to do and it can help you break it down into bite sized chunks. And that's what I do when I coach people. As I help them, I help keep them accountable. I help hold them to the fire and say, okay, are you getting this done? Are you accomplishing this and what can we do better next time, every time that we meet so that you can reach your goals. You can find out information on my website Jeremiah Krakowski.com all about one on one coaching with me so that we can work together and help you build your business. Listen, I do not believe that even if you've lived your life up to this moment in time as an undisciplined person that the next 10 years of your life has to be that way just because it's always been that way. You can grow. You can teach an old dog new tricks and you don't have to just accept this as your final destiny. When you remind yourself of why you got started in your vision, you start to keep the promises that you made to yourself. You start to learn the self control against distractions and self sabotage and create those new habits and start holding yourself accountable. Start knowing your weaknesses and start forgiving yourself and loving yourself and having that better level of self esteem. I promise you this my friends, you will start to accomplish more. Might not be as big as you thought. You might not become a millionaire in the next 12 months or six months or three months. But I do know, because it's my experience and the experience that I've seen of so many hundred thousands of people that you will start to see things change and transform in your life in the direction of your goals. Might be one step, might be two steps, might be five steps, but you're moving in the right direction when you accomplish and you work through the stuff that I just talked about today. So you can either decide am I going to stay right where I've been my whole life, keep complaining and be sad and be frustrated by it? Or am I going to make the changes, the hard changes, and do the work to get it done, to move into the life that I know is possible for myself, Grow your life, everybody.