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This lesson is about why we lack self-discipline.
For those of us who historically have a hard time with self discipline:
- Why do we lack self-discipline?
- Why is it so difficult to form?
- How is it hurting us?
We need to start here. Why do we lack self-discipline? Imagine that you have about 20 choices of things you can work on. It could be exercising to get in shape, doing a hard work task, checking Facebook, checking email, etc. So you have many choices but you do not want to do something that takes a little longer. You make the choice to check email. Maybe you take a quick break and watch t.v. to unwind. Those choices are easy to make because there is some kind of reward. There is no uphill battle. In the moment, that one choice is not so bad. What happens when we put off the hard stuff to do the easier stuff, is that it gets harder and harder to get out of that groove. Getting away from what we have built into a habit is a challenge.
We lack self-discipline because we make comfortable choices or fast choices that don’t take a long time. We have some kind of rationale to choose things that are easier, more fun, or more pleasurable. Then we get stuck in that groove. The comfort zone is hard to break out of. Who wants to go into discomfort? There has to be a really good reason to want to put yourself into that discomfort. These are our choices everyday. We can choose the comfort or discomfort.
How does this hurt us? We know that we are not as disciplined as we want to be. Our health habits may not be as great as we want them to be. Our health habits can become worse and worse over time. Changing our diet may become more challenging over time because we trust ourselves less. We have a hard time changing our tastebuds over the years because you identify with our habits.
It can be hard to change health, relationships, or productivity habits. It harms potential. It can also harm your finances. You put off making the smart, frugal choices. These are all symptoms of a lack of self-discipline. We continually do our old habits. We avoid the difficulties and it can cause harm to our relationships as well.We can become dissatisfied with ourselves and it harms all our relationships.
All of these things are major problems. If we can turn that around, how amazing that would be! I’;m not saying this is a quick fix or that I can solve all of your problems in one course. But, if you commit yourself to practicing in this course, you can start to change things around.
You can start to build the self-discipline muscle. It does take work! It is not easy and you will need to motivate yourself. You are capable of doing this. Commit to the 5 minutes a day. Even if you slip up, do not get discouraged. Keep going, Do not let yourself be derailed and absorb the bumps on the road.
The Challenge:
Pick a self-discipline task to do for 5 minutes a day (write a book, focus on Most Important Task, pushups, run, meditate, yoga, drawing, language tapes, etc). It should be something that will improve your life a little (or a lot). Commit to do it regularly, and something you can do every day in the morning. Share your experience in the Slack channel.
Why do you think you lack self-discipline? Why is it so difficult to form for you? How is it hurting you? Please share in Slack.