This week we’re talking about discipline and why it’s crucial if you’re ever going to be successful at maintaining optimum health.
So here’s the scenario: the big bank holiday is approaching. You’ve been planning it for weeks with your mates. What you’ll wear, where you’ll go and most importantly how much you’re going to binge!
You’ve been training hard for weeks, but “fuck it!” right, you only live once and “eating is cheating” when you’re on a sesh. There’s the ‘getting ready drinks’, and the ‘pre-drink drinks’, the ‘on the way to town drinks’, and the ‘quick half while you wait for the others to arrive’ drink. All of this happens before you’ve even got into the main event and you have single-handedly consumed quite possibly a week’s worth of calories in less than an hour. All sense of reason and discipline was gone – in seconds.
But you’re motivated, right? And Monday signals the start of a new week of beasting, you don’t mind 6 am classes as long as you can binge, but then it gets to Monday and you’re still hungover, so you arm yourself with excuses as to why not going is okay. The issue is that a cycle of unrestrained behaviour means you lack discipline and here’s why that’s a problem.
Motivation is great, it’s the internal reasoning that allows you to maintain focus on your goals but discipline is the thing that keeps you showing up and giving it 100%.
Not just in the gym session, but disciplined in the choices you make about the life you want to create, discipline is the thing that will keep you maintaining that body once you have it by keeping at three sessions a week.
We all have a dream, be it to live in a certain place, pass a certain exam or be our own boss, but all of it requires discipline.
To live in a certain place, you have to be disciplined with looking into that area, those house prices, and saving enough to make it a realistic and attainable goal. Lots of teens have the motivation to pass their driving test, but discipline is required to revise for the theory and take driving lessons consistently in order to meet the standard needed to pass.
Discipline and motivation are two sides of the same coin you might say, but motivation without discipline means there is no follow-through on what you hope to achieve.
Jim Rohn was an American entrepreneur and author, he focused his life’s work on discipline in business and leadership. In one of his books, ‘The Power of Ambition’ he said “It’s easier to go to bed late, sleep late, show up late, leave early…It’s easier to do just enough than to do it all.” So how can we take small, actionable steps towards being disciplined that aren’t overwhelming?
Well, the easiest option is to plan ahead.
While going wild thinking about the fun you’ll have with friends, really set some boundaries about what the fun will look like for you.
What are the sticking points for you that tend to get you in trouble? How can you plan for them now?
What kind of excuses do you usually use to justify your behaviour and the troublesome UBER orders at 1 am?
You need to make those plans part of your discipline survival guide and admit to yourself that life is for living, but not to the detriment of cutting it short for a temporary derailment. If having fun has to equal complete loss of control, maybe it’s time to look a little more deeply at why.
To be supported on your way to living the good life, check out our online shop or follow us for daily updates.