Discipline: Cultivating Self Love
Discipline: Cultivating Self Love
Discipline is an act of love; When you are disciplined you take consistent daily actions out of a commitment of love for yourself.
For the past two weeks, I have been deep diving into each component of my formula for personal excellence, Mindset + Emotional Work x Discipline = Success.
In week one I talked about how Mindset sets the foundation and intention for all your actions.
Last week I shared my view that Emotional Work is the lynchpin of my formula because it unblocks the resistance and breaks the patterns that keep you stuck.
This week I’m going to dive into Discipline, which I believe is the multiplier that manifests personal change through consistent daily actions of self-love.
I call this practice of daily actions of self-love, Loving Discipline.
Loving Discipline consists of four actions.
Action #1 - Shift your Intentions from Control to Love
Action #2 - Disciplined Commitments
Action #3 - Practice Daily Rituals that Cultivate Love
Action #4 - Consistently Show Up for Yourself
When the four actions of Loving Discipline are practiced consistently the result is cultivating a sense of internal peace, harmony, and love within.
Action #1 - Shift your Intentions from Control to Love
Reflecting back on my weight loss journey I can see how in the past I was scared of discipline. I was scared of it because I mixed up being disciplined with being in control.
When I am driven by control, the intention behind my actions comes from a desire to achieve an outcome that I believe is necessary for my happiness or survival.
This leads to actions and behaviors that are:
Rigid; I don’t have the flexibility for life to happen around me. When something comes up that feels disruptive to my agenda I become anxious and grumpy.
Obsessive; My actions become the center of my world; For example in the past when I would diet it would consume my thoughts and it was all I would talk about.
Exessive; I push myself beyond my edge which always leads to burnout.
Perfectionistic; I am driven by a need to get it right, there is no room for mistakes or failure.
When I am being rigid, obsessive, excessive, and perfectionistic I think I am being disciplined but the reality is that I have become attached to the outcome I am seeking. Everything I am doing is centered around the outcome to which I have outsourced my happiness, love, and joy.
These behaviors leave no room for failure because I have outsourced my happiness, love, and joy to the outcome.
As a result, when I inevitably fail I am filled with shame. This shame creates a wall of fear that prevents me from taking further action.
A cycle of doing nothing perpetuates.
Breaking this cycle requires I shift the intention of my actions from trying to control the outcome of my life to cultivating love.
To shift to love I must practice the first two steps of my Formula for Excellence:*
Shift My Mindset so that the intention of my actions is aligned with my values
Do the Emotional Work to feel and heal what comes up.
*Note: If you have not read the first three articles of this series I highly recommend starting at the beginning with Mindset + Emotional Work x Discipline = Weight Loss Success
Action #2 - Make Disciplined Commitments
Once you have shifted your intentions from control to love the next step is to make disciplined commitments that when practiced consistently will lead to the accomplishment of what was meant for you.
In my case shifting to love allowed me to make disciplined commitments that would lead to health and vitality and a sense of peace and harmony within:
I push myself to my edge with physical activity every day, no further. I let the fire within come forward and manifest in my physical fitness.
I follow my fasting protocol and only eat within my allotted eating windows. I bring awareness to the emotions and thoughts that come up along the way.
I am compassionate with myself when I slip and fall. I listen to the inner child within. I provide him reassurance and a structure to come back to.
I write every day, be it a sentence or ten pages. I face the resistance that keeps me from my passion and I put ink to paper.
Practicing your disciplined commitments will mean you have given yourself a choice. A choice to ignore the pleasures of the current moment for the rewards of the future — but you allow yourself to make that choice not to control the outcome but out of the love you feel for yourself at that current moment.
“No one wants to tell us why discipline is so important. Discipline is one of the greatest forms of self-love. It is ignoring the current pleasures for future rewards. And it is (about) loving yourself enough to do what needs to be done, in the pursuit of what was meant for you,” - Charity Iwuchuku - Via Instagram
Action #3 - Find Daily Rituals that Cultivate Love
In my article on Mindset, I talked about the difference between routines and rituals.
Routines are something you do to accomplish an outcome, they are a means to an end.
Rituals are something you do to cultivate a feeling.
One of the greatest ways to sustain your commitment to discipline is to create rituals that cultivate love and then practice them on a daily basis.
There are going to be days on your journey when you just feel like “I don’t want to do this anymore”.
These are the days when daily rituals of love are so important. They become their own source of motivation and power by bringing you back to the love behind your commitments.
For example, when I first started off on my weight loss journey, I would write myself a love note every night and place it on the fridge so that I could read it in moments of weakness. In the moments when I wanted to give up and have a midnight snack to make myself feel better. In the note, I reminded myself what I could do instead of reaching to food for comfort, that “I got this” and that I loved myself.
Action #4 - Consistently Show Up For Yourself
Consistency is the glue that will hold your discipline practice together. If you do not show up consistently then you will not attain the results that are meant for you.
Consistency is more important than intensity. It is critical to only push yourself to your edge and no further.
For example, if your edge for physical fitness is a ten minute walk, then only do that much every day. Anything more than that would not be an act of love because you are no longer creating health, you are hurting yourself.
One of the greatest gifts I gave myself was starting off my weight loss journey while I was recovering from hip surgery. My doctor had given me physical limitations and boundaries that set my edge for me. I knew that I must not press beyond the edge he defined or I risked undoing what the hip surgery corrected.
This forced me to use the crawl, walk, then run approach to physical fitness. I had to take baby steps.
By showing up every day in small consistent ways I built the self-trust and confidence I had lacked in all my previous attempts at weight loss.
Learning that discipline is an act of love that requires consistent actions has been one of most important the lessons in my life
I’ll close today with an ah-huh moment I shared with the Men of the Alliance in February of 2022. It was my first moment of clarity, the moment I began to cultivate what loving discipline looked like for me.
Am I disciplined or am I at war with myself?
February 5, 2022
I used to think being disciplined meant I had to force myself to do what needed to be done to fix myself. I fought an inner war, a part of me pushing and yelling at the other parts to get in line to win the battle to destroy what was wrong with me. It was an act of self-hatred.
It came in the form of doing things in extreme. Not getting the results I want, I'll get up at 4:30 am instead of 7:00 am. Not losing weight fast enough, find some crazy insane diet and follow that. Wife mad at me? Dance around on eggshells trying to accomplish every possible chore and task under the sun.
I used to love to run, the pain of the grind. I thought this grind was a form of discipline, two labral tears in my hips later the collateral damage of my inner war keeps me up every night.
The problem with going to war with myself is that I create a state of "armed conflict" inside. War brings destruction, chaos, and pain. Inevitability my other parts would have enough of the inner turmoil and revolt. After every episode of going to war with myself, I would spring back in an equal and opposite reaction, inner chaos would ensue and any tactical gains would be lost. I would be overtaken by shame.
In the past year, I've come to see discipline as a form of love. It is a commitment to do what needs to be done to create inner harmony, health, and peace. It is an action in alignment with what is, acceptance of the current moment.
It looks like waking up 30 minutes early to do breath work and meditation but doing so without an agenda. Accepting whatever comes up, feeling whatever comes up.
Sometimes discipline isn't fun, it’s facing the inner resistance to doing what I don't want to do, but only doing so at my edge.
It looks like going for a 30-minute walk instead of some insane HIIT workout when the only movement I've had for the last six months is my office chair to the kitchen. It’s baby steps.
Discipline is picking myself back up with compassion when I slip and fall. It’s viewing each day as an experiment of aligning myself with my bigger vision.
It looks like meditation and reflection when I inevitably fail. It’s feeling the feelings that come up and giving that ten-year-old boy inside the reassurance he needs. It’s having a structure in place for those parts to come back to, but also being willing to tweak that structure when something doesn't work anymore.
Discipline is being flexible and open-minded. A willingness to bend but not break. A commitment to try out new things and accept that some things just don't work.
It looks like doing five minutes, even one minute of breath work instead of 30 when the morning has gotten out of control. It’s giving up the pattern of crazy diets that worked but really didn't.
Discipline is working with my inner parts. It’s understanding that the ten-year-old inside needs to be guided not yelled at and forced to comply.
It looks like love notes left to myself in a moment of strength to be read by myself in a moment of fear or frailty, reminding myself of my bigger vision and that I got this.
As I've been working towards giving up the inner war with myself and turning toward loving discipline my life is beginning to transform. I'm steadily working towards my greater vision, but doing so in acceptance of what is, surrendering to the current moment as I go. I am finding peace and happiness each day and in each moment.