Many say they aren’t disciplined or need more discipline and think that this magic discipline is holding them back from achieving more. Often people are wasting a lot of cognitive energy berating themselves for not being disciplined.
This is also having leadership implications where leaders are making life hard for staff by telling staff they just need to be disciplined about certain things without showing them there is an easier way to get results.
Yep – discipline is hard.
It’s hard because it takes a lot of cognitive energy. Think about all the things we try to be disciplined about (and society isn’t helping our cause)….
Getting up and exercising first thing, eating right, doing the hardest tasks first at work, or worse, locking ourselves away to do a whole day of hard tasks. Choosing to spend less time on social media when the algorithm has better ideas. Arrgh, eewww, life is too short for constantly trying to make disciplined choices. These are all just draining our cognitive energy way more than we need to
But here’s the good news. You really don’t need discipline.
And I’ll let you in on a secret, most people think I’m really disciplined. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I’m definitely not disciplined and in fact I actually consider myself to be quite lazy.
Yet I do love me a lot of achievement.
So how does that work?
Well here’s what we need instead…
Well we actually need a few elements, but trust me, these are way easier!
- Goals
- Reasons why the goals are important
- Then we just need great habits that work with our natural cognitive energy flows designed to help us to achieve those important goals.
So let’s unpack these in a little more detail…
Goals are important so that we actually have a reason to set the habit up in the first place. And it’s important we get really clear on why the goal is important. It’s easy to set plenty of goals, but only the ones that are truly meaningful to you are really worth the cognitive energy required to actually get it done.
Let’s face it, sitting on the couch is way easier than exercising, so unless we are pretty clear on the outcomes we want from exercise, you’re unlikely to actually get it done (with or without discipline).
Habits are then important to set up to help us achieve the steps needed to achieve those goals. But when setting up a habit we need to be mindful of our cognitive energy so that we can make a habit even easier to stick with.
A habit is based on basic behavioural psychology principles. A habit has three elements. There is a trigger which could be something like a time, or location, or situation, or emotion or even the people that we’re around. This results in an action (something we actually do in response to a trigger) and then a reward. So we get a hit of dopamine for doing the action.
Many people who think they have bad habits just need to make a few tweaks to use the habit loop for good instead of evil.
You can’t just ignore the habit loop as the trigger will often always be there.
So let’s give some examples of what we mean here
Bill Gates once said “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because the lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
So maybe we can revise the quote slightly to being about a lazy person who loves achievement. But either way I think he’s onto something!
The more than we can be aware of, and use our natural cognitive energy to set habits, the better.
I have one client who had a habit of scrolling social media for 30 minutes when his alarm goes off. He wanted more from his business goals but he hadn’t defined them properly, and he thought he needed discipline for those undefined goals, and was therefore berating himself for not having discipline, which then spiraled into social media as escapism – especially first thing in the morning.
So what’s happening here? The trigger – the alarm goes off. The action – scroll social media. Reward – put off dealing with his perceived lack of discipline with work for a little longer.
How did we tweak this? Well in a couple of ways. Firstly it’s quite hard to choose not scroll social media – that takes discipline. However if you have a good old fashioned alarm clock to provide the trigger to get up, you can leave your phone in another room. No choice required of not scrolling social media in bed. You actually can’t do it. Once up, we replaced the action of scrolling with taking doggo out for a walk straight away. A much better way to get him ready for the day ahead.
He also wasn’t properly connected to his business goals so we got these more clearly defined so that he knew why he set up the new habit in the first place.
Another habit that has worked for many of our non-morning people is to just work on light cognitive work first thing and only schedule heavier cognitive work for the time when people have the right cognitive energy to do it – much easier than using “discipline” to get up and do the hardest task first. That would just lead to procrastination and then nothing would get done – not even the productive light work!
Every day there are more and more ways in which this world can drain your cognitive energy, it’s important that we use as many habits as possible so save those valuable energy credits.
The great thing about habits – you just respond to the trigger with pre-determined actions that will support your goals in the easiest way possible. Don’t think – just do. It saves way more cognitive energy.
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here.