Building Discipline for the Unmotivated

December 27th, 2008

Most will agree that discipline is a requisite for success. You need to be able to control yourself in order to achieve your goals. How can you get in shape if you scarf down a bag of chips at every opportunity? How can you get your finances in order if you max out your credit card every month? Without some self-control failure is the norm.

Motivating Discipline

Discipline can’t just happen once in a while. It must be performed as a habit, a way of consistently living your life that brings you success. As Aristotle so famously put it:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

This habituation Aristotle spoke of does not come easily; just consider the rigorous routines militaries use to impart discipline on soldiers. Since most of us don’t have a drill sergeant barking at us daily, we need to find a way to motivate ourselves to endure the discomfort of breaking bad habits.

Unfortunately for many, motivation and discipline tend to travel together and encourage each other. If you’re missing both, there’s only one way to get started.

The Preemptive Strike

Using a two-pronged approach it is possible to shift your habits from bad to good, without much motivation:

1. Make bad habits harder
2. Make good habits easier

If you’re unable to resist the temptation of bad habits 100% of the time, you must eliminate that temptation altogether. This is the only way you will be able to gain a foothold and start on a better, more disciplined path. Find what it is that restrains you from your goals, remove it completely, and ensure it doesn’t return. In a sense this is the antithesis to discipline since you are eliminating a bad habit rather than performing a good one.

Now, replacing that bad habit with another one would get you nowhere. You must in turn make it easier to perform a good habit in its place. This is where the vital step #2 comes into play. Fortunately this step is easier to employ as it focused on rewarding, rather than depriving.

While this change is easiest to implement after a “rock-bottom” experience, it can be put in place anytime. And as they say, there’s no time like the present.

For Example

Every situation calls for a different application. Here are a few examples directly from my life:

Productivity:

1. BAD HABIT: Plopping myself on the couch after work and watching reruns for hours.
   MAKING IT HARDER: Attached a small combination lock to the TV’s plug so it wasn’t possible to plug into a power outlet. Later I gave up television altogether and have happily not owned a TV in years.
2. GOOD HABIT: Organizing my to-do lists in the Getting Things Done (GTD) fashion.
   MAKING IT EASIER: Switched to web-based task management software so I could update my to-do lists from work or a Smartphone. I have been using the same service religiously for years now.

Fitness:

1. BAD HABIT: Was ignoring how long it was since I last exercised.
   MAKING IN HARDER: Employed Jerry Seinfeld’s Don’t break the chain technique and had others check on my progress. I did this for a long time and now I exercise consistently without fail.
2. GOOD HABIT: Recording weight and body fat progress.
   MAKING IT EASIER: Purchased a cheap handheld voice recorder to quickly and easily track measurements. Having reached my target weight I now only need to measure periodically.

You can see how these techniques can work in practical applications and tend to make themselves obsolete as your problem fades. It takes time before everything feels natural and normal, but once a bad habit is replaced with a good one the system you use to discipline yourself becomes less vital to success. In other words, these measures are only required to get the ball rolling.

I had a colleague who racked up a $3500 cell phone bill. This was particularly amusing as her cell bill was worth more than my car. While I suggested she ditch the cell phone altogether or consider a VoIP account, she felt this was impossible and continued racking up the bill. The cell company eventually did the job for her, severing her network access until she paid a sizeable amount of her bill or risk calls from collections. When bad habits get completely out of control, life tends to cut you off automatically. You might as well do it on your own terms, not someone else’s.

Tough Love in Times of Strength

Fortunately, bad habits are clearly identifiable. If you don’t notice them, the people around you do. Many of us want to change, but aren’t motivated enough to actually do it. That’s where a little tough love towards ourselves, usually performed in our stronger moments, can help. Whenever you think you can’t break a bad habit, follow this two-step process to steer yourself in a better direction and do it with gusto: crazier and more extreme solutions tend to work better than conservative ones. Remember, falling off the self-control wagon destroys your progress so consistency is paramount. Make you solutions a) radical and b) difficult to circumvent and you’ll find your own success motivating.