Permission Sans Discipline
I can’t tell you how many times I hear that the missing piece to someone’s success is ‘discipline’. And yet after engaging in some curiosity instead of taking things at face value, rarely is that belief true.
Most commonly, what’s missing is permission to not be disciplined. When strict consistency plays such a big role in our definition of success, it secretly becomes the goal rather than the thing you’re trying to be consistent WITH. “I want to go the gym 5x a week.” Well, it’s not uncommon for “5x a week” to become more of the focus than “going to the gym”.
When it comes to creativity of any kind (I’m talking about creating an art piece, a recipe, or a schedule), the first step is exploration. If you go from theoretical (“This is a good idea”) to concrete (“so I will do it”), we miss the important step that either sets us up for success or disappointment: taking yourself into consideration. Want to wake up every day at 7am? Well, have you considered the fact that your brain doesn’t wake up until 10am even if your body does? Want to eat healthier? Well, have you identified healthy meals you’ll actually be excited to eat?
Without this important step of curiosity, some random metric becomes the thing we set our sights on rather than the benefits of the change we’re trying to make. So here are the steps I propose:
Explore: have a general idea of what you want to implement and generate ideas of ways you (important!) are most likely going commit to it.
Evaluate: Start doing it! But without expectation of getting all the components ‘right’. This is the testing stage. Make educated guesses and welcome educated mistakes. If it were as easy as simply claiming it’ll happen, you probably would have done it already.
Establish: After you’ve found what works for you (what, where, when, how, why), then make a well-informed plan that keeps the purpose in mind rather than the need to ‘achieve it’.
That’s it! I stand by its simplicity. Most things are hard because we complicate it by looking for an easy answer.
