Episode 027 – You’re NOT Lazy! The Science of Building Unbreakable Self Discipline

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

I don’t know about you, but there have been so many times in my life that I’ve rigorously committed to doing something – whether it was a morning routine, meditating on a daily basis, changing my diet, going to the gym, doing the things that I knew I needed to do in order to grow my business (but had been procrastinating) – and yet, I didn’t follow through with them at all.

If you can relate, you know that this typically results in beating yourself up, judging yourself, feeling like you’re not good enough, and otherwise experiencing debilitating levels of guilt and shame that only serve to perpetuate the cycle of NOT doing the things we want to do and know we should be doing.

It doesn’t help that we’ve got so many external influences reinforcing these limiting beliefs and emotions – seeing other people on social media that are making more money than us, have better bodies than us, and otherwise seemingly living much happier lives than us.  You’ve also got the Navy SEAL style motivational “gurus” who are telling us that we’ve just gotta hustle harder, grind it out, and be more disciplined if we want to accomplish our goals.  But how do we actually do that when we can’t seem to get the things done that are right in front of us?

The good news is that changing your habits, cultivating self-discipline, and keeping the promises you make to yourself CAN be done – simply, sustainably, and without sheer willpower or brute force.  Today, I’m going to share with you my experience of doing exactly that and introduce you to the 3-part formula for creating unshakeable discipline in your business and life.

Step One – Keep The Promises You Make To Yourself

Part of what motivated this topic is a recent podcast I listened to between Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom and Stephen Bartlett of Diary of a CEO where they were discussing the topic of discipline.  Stephen asked Chris something along the lines of: what do you need to do to become more disciplined and build self-confidence?  The answer was really impactful – and you can check out the episode yourself for the full conversation – but a key takeaway was this idea that when we break promises to ourselves, we lose trust with ourselves – and that erodes away at our self-confidence.

We tell ourselves that we’re going to do things, like some of the things I mentioned earlier, but we don’t do them.  In essence, we’re lying to ourselves.  And much like having a friend who lies to us, which causes us to lose trust in them, when we lie to ourselves we lose trust in our own words.

According to Chris, the solution is through action – and action alone.  Taking action and actually doing the things we tell ourselves we’re going to do creates undeniable proof that we’re willing to live up to our word and the promise we make to ourselves.  Do this consistently, and we build a foundation of proof, which incrementally increases our confidence.

One thing I’d add to Chris’ insight is that we won’t rely on positivity, inspiration, and motivation when it comes to taking action, especially if you have this internal self-criticism that’s running on autopilot and preventing you from taking action in the first place.  But more so than that, we need to let go of the negativity that’s holding us back.  Because when we’re so used to breaking the promises we make to ourselves, resulting in self-judgment, guilt, and shame, it’s difficult to get ourselves out of that negative loop.

Step Two – Escape The Guilt & Shame Spiral

Now let me explain what I mean here through a story.  You may know that part of my history was in addiction – drugs, alcohol, pornography, sex, pretty much whatever I could get my hands on in order to check out the rising emotional discomforts inside of me. I was using something in order to not have to deal with the pain.  That pain came from various childhood traumas, unresolved limiting beliefs, and unresolved emotional misunderstandings that had built up throughout my teens, twenties, and thirties, which culminated when I finally hit my bottom and ended up working a recovery program. 

When I got into recovery,  there were promises that I made to myself in tandem with my therapist and my sponsor to not going to violate my bottom line, meaning I’m not going to smoke cigarettes. I’m not going to drink alcohol, I’m not going to have sex outside of a committed relationship. I’m not going to watch pornography, and I’m not going to smoke marijuana – because those were the things that I was addicted to. 

Early on, I found it almost impossible to keep those promises.  I became known as “White Chip Dave” in my meetings for constantly picking up the 24-hour recovery chip, when other people were celebrating one month, one year, and ten (or more) years of sobriety signifying that they’d kept those same promises they’d made to themselves.  

Things began to take a turn when my sponsor told me that, moving forward, I would stay 110% committed to my plan and use the tools at my disposal – like calling him or someone else in the program – when I felt myself slipping.  But on top of doing everything in my power to commit myself to my recovery, my sponsor also told me that if I didn’t stay committed and violated the promise I made to myself, that I was to be 100% okay with it.

Essentially, he wanted to help me from falling back into the never ending spiral of guilt and shame that we all face when we break our promises with ourselves – and the easiest solution for that was to have acceptance with my shortcomings, to be okay with myself.  So to add to the insights gleaned from the interview between Chris and Stephen, I’d say that if you want to become a more disciplined person, if you want to consistently do the things that you commit to doing, and you want to consistently show up as the person you know that you’re capable of being, then what’s really important is that when you have a misstep, you remain 100% okay with it.

There’s a paradox here, because if you’re just okay with breaking your promises to yourself all the time, what motivation do you have to do anything at all?  The distinction is that you should remain 110% committed to what you want, but to spend zero time or energy spiraling into guilt, shame, and self-judgment.  Why?  Because that spiral builds up negative momentum that’ll keep you feeling stuck and make it more likely to continue breaking your promise in the future.  The key is eliminating the negativity.

Step Three – Do The Things You Don’t Want To Do 

I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and, quite often, one will come to me and tell me about how  stressed out they are, how much they’re procrastinating, and they’re not doing the things they know they should be doing.  Usually, they find themselves in a difficult place with the growth of their business as a result of their behavior.  My response to them is simple – don’t do the work.  

Counterintuitive?  Maybe.  But nobody told any of us that we had to go into business for ourselves.  Nobody told us we had to become entrepreneurs.  Nobody said it was going to be easy.  We put the burden on ourselves.  So if the pressure to perform is creating discomfort, the simplest solution is to stop putting the pressure on ourselves.  To take a step back.  To stop trying to do the things that are only causing more stress and overwhelm – at least for a short period of time.

What’s fascinating is that as soon as we give them permission to not take action in their business, maybe for a day, two days, two weeks tops, the pressure, guilt, and shame begin to dissolve on their own.  They end up flipping into some sort of inspired productivity, because they get bored with the fact that they’re not doing what they know they should be doing.  But what keeps us stuck  in this “Chinese finger trap” of overwhelm is typically the fact that we believe we have to do it.

The important distinction here is that we need to take a look at what’s truly creating the resistance around our habit change and what’s really stopping us from being disciplined.  What I would suggest is that it’s not so much taking the action, but it’s the shame and the guilt around not taking the action.  If we can remove the resistance, then there’s nothing that’s holding us down anymore.  Then, what we find is that, over time, you become tired of breaking promises to yourself and you actually end up fulfilling those behavioral changes.

I listened to another interview recently between Andrew Huberman and David Goggins.  Huberman shared a new scientific discovery around a part of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex which he described as the “seat of willpower” in the brain and possibly the “seat of the will to live”.  Essentially, when you do difficult things that you don’t want to do – the key being that you DON’T want to do them – this area of the brain grows.  Stop doing those things, this area of the brain shrinks.  Start enjoying those things, this area of the brain shrinks.

If you hate doing cold plunges, but you do them every day, this area of the brain grows.  The same goes for NOT enjoying working out, meditating, going in the sauna, running, making sales calls, creating content, or pretty much anything else you can think of that you DON’T want to do, but know you should do.  When we consistently push ourselves through the resistance of engaging in these activities, science shows that this area of the brain keeps growing.

The Formula For Unshakeable Discipline

We can now see that there’s a formula for becoming more disciplined and, ultimately, more confident in ourselves.  If you take this idea of keeping the promises you make to yourself, combine it with intentionally doing things you don’t want to do, and add in my proposal of being 110% committed to the change, but also 100% okay with your shortcomings as to reduce the build up of negativity, then you’ve got a blueprint for creating discipline.

If I could add one more distinction to this formula it would be to take a look at your thinking process in the moments when you break your promise to yourself.  Because if you can become more aware of the thinking that preceded you NOT doing what you told yourself you would do, you can begin to recalibrate your thought process so that next time you can catch yourself before you have a misstep.

In recovery, we have a motto that says “one day at a time” and it’s applicable to any changes you’re wanting to make in your life.  Whether you’re wanting to get in shape and lose weight, grow your business, improve your relationship, quit a vice, or anything in between, it’s important to make the change incrementally and accumulate small wins over time.

Just remember that any change you’re wanting to make is a decision that YOU and you alone are making.  Nobody is forcing you to do anything.  But the formula is there  – keep the promises you make to yourself, do the things you don’t want to do, stay committed, and avoid the negative spiral of self-judgment, guilt, and shame along the way.  Give yourself some grace in the process and realize that no change worth making happens over night.  Take it one day at a time – the only competition you have is yourself.