Episode No. 12
Where to listen:
What Inspired this Episode:
This episode was inspired by learning about self-discipline as I was wondering how to stay motivated. I quickly learned why we can't rely on motivation alone to take action and I discovered self-discipline. Since this is my first year practicing this concept, I wanted to share lessons from my burnout period. It is very easy to go overboard with self-discipline especially if you are someone who struggles with control. In the bonus content, I share my top 5 lessons that allowed me to recommit to goals instead of quitting on my dreams.
Questions I wanted to explore:
How can I improve my self-discipline?
What are effective ways to stay motivated for long-term goals?
How does compassion impact self-discipline?
What strategies can help me recommit to my goals?
How do I balance intensity and consistency in achieving my goals?
What is the difference between disconnection and dissatisfaction in goal setting?
How can I practice self-compassion while working towards my goals?
What are common reasons people struggle with self-discipline?
How can I adjust my goals without feeling like a failure?
Why is it important to understand your "why" in goal setting?
How do I stay consistent with my fitness goals?
What are some tips for balancing work and personal goals?
How can I track my progress effectively?
What role does self-awareness play in achieving goals?
How do I create a realistic timeline for my goals?
How do I develop a support system for my goals?
What are the best ways to celebrate small wins?
How can I visualize my success effectively?
Why is it important to allow yourself to be redirected and readjust as you go?
How do I maintain a balanced perspective on my responsibilities and circumstances?
How can I avoid burnout while working towards my goals?
What are practical tips for practicing self-compassion in goal setting?
How do I know when to let go of a goal?
How can I differentiate between a temporary setback and a sign to change my approach?
What is the role of flexibility in achieving long-term goals?
How can I create a routine that accommodates varying energy levels?
What are some common pitfalls in self-discipline and how can I avoid them?
How do I stay motivated when progress is slow?
What is the impact of external support on achieving goals?
How can I integrate self-care into my goal-setting process?
Episode Description:
The theme of the week is Self Discipline. Developing self-discipline as a new adult is difficult so Lay shares a story from her healing journey era to share lessons she learned that helped improve her self-discipline. The tips shared are mostly related to mindset. For an introduction to self-discipline, she shares that as a video on YouTube and will share a guide on building a routine to support your practice of self-discipline on her blog.
Stay tuned and please read the highlights to get a more direct version of what I am explaining.
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Music by Remil - Evening Tea - https://thmatc.co/?l=DFECB5D4
Section | Timestamp | Notes |
Introduction | 00:00 | -Published a video to as well on this topic (Intro to self discipline) - Wanting to add a personalized touch to the content -reformatted content |
Card Pull | 02:20 | -Moonology deck -2 card Pull -Confidence is your key to success (new moon in Leo) -Have Faith in your dreams (Waxing Cresent Moon) |
Storytime | 05:36 | -Healing era -start from covid -Old friend's ex-boyfriend -Better understanding of why things -Astrology -Leo rising and Cancer rising -Comparison between 2 best friends |
Lessons I learned to become more Disciplined | 11:16 | -Lesson 1: Be comfortable with no longer being the side character -Lesson 2: Self-awareness and understanding yourself on a fundamental level is key -Lesson 3: Remember the power of choice -The beauty in the light of the sun and the light of the moon -Lesson 4: Understanding that you need to stop waiting for permission to live your truth and have clarity on who you want to be - (Bonus at 24:35) Lesson 5: Learn how to contribute to what you want at different energy levels |
Self-discovery and more | 22:04 | -A huge part of self-discipline is self-discovery -Self-discovery challenge -Give yourself permission |
Conclusion | 27:37 | -Grateful for the support I've been getting -Have faith |
BONUS CONTENT
So when I created this podcast episode I was still on the New Year's high of being excited for a fresh start. Now we are over halfway through 2024 and I wanted to share what I learned about self-discipline. Regardless of the goals you have, discipline is more about the way you set yourself up to do your goal than the goal itself. It is about the actions you take which is why in the podcast episode I focused more on the emotional aspects while the video that is supplementary to the topic is a lot more related to an introduction to the subject and I have a blog post dedicated to building a routine. Now I want to focus on how to recommit after a period of feeling stuck or burned out. Being stuck or feeling like you are in a runt is more about disconnection. Burnout, on the other hand, happens after a prolonged period of mismanaging stress. Both of these things can influence the way you take action which is why I am sharing everything I learned to recommit to my goals.
What I learned about Self-discipline (so far)
Performing self-discipline from a place of compassion over shame changes how receptive you are to keep taking action
The first thing I learned when pursuing my goals this year was taking action takes recommitment (as do everything that you value). When I was burned out by February this year, there were so many moments of internal dialogue that mostly came from a place of not seeing results. However, the reason why after crying and feeling defeated - the next things I did were looking for resources to help me figure out how to keep moving, make three different Five-year plans and just re-examining if I took all the actions in this year that I could to decide to quit (the answer was no), is because my need to take action was fueled by compassion. I wrote my ideals out and there was only one that fully lighted up my soul to make me feel like it’s worth committing to as many times as it takes to make it happen (the 2nd one filled me with dread and the 3rd one sparked curiosity that made lead to a side quest at some point).
This is a thought I had written in a journal entry:
Goals and relationships are similar in the sense we have to recommit constantly. It’s not because these things are a struggle, but they do have moments of difficulty. When it gets difficult, you can either see it as “the problem” or you can see it as having problems worth figuring out because the way it adds to your life outweighs the difficulties. Recommitting is the act of love and the reevaluation of choice. It’s only when you have given it your best and recommitted as much as you could to know when to let go.
How many times have you heard people say that ____ just doesn’t work for ___ and to just accept whatever? In theory, this advice is supposed to make you feel better because it takes responsibility off of you, and reminds you that your life is okay and nothing needs to change. For some people, this may be more freeing. However, if you want to change something about your life, this sentiment may do more harm than good. When people see wanting to change something about them or their lives as a bad thing most times it’s because they either got shamed or felt ashamed due to previous experiences.
This opinion might be a hot take but telling people they can’t change what they want to change is just as harmful as telling someone to change the things that they don’t want to. And yes this is situational and some may be worse if the things we are talking about is on a macro scale (as in just don’t affect you and affect many people; so in this take, I'm mostly referring to personal choices on a micro-scale since everything we do as an individual contributes to the trajectory of society on some level)
If I said to someone “ I want to be an author (or some type of published writer)” or “ I want to be a CEO of an ethical beauty and wellness company” or “I want to be my own boss instead of trying to work for existing businesses ” and they replied with something like statically a chance of doing something because of my [race, gender, age, wealth class or any attributes to my physical appearance] that it won’t happen, I would absolutely come to conclusion that they are attempting to shame me for seeing something in myself that they can’t see. Even if something is unlikely for me, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
A place of compassion can acknowledge the statics and the circumstances without allowing it to be the reason to just settle. If it was something that I truly wanted on my own as opposed to something I THINK I SHOULD want, I am going to try different things to contribute to the goals and dreams I have. When doing something from a place of shame, it causes everything to feel a lot more difficult and can allow a person to be in a state of constant dissatisfaction and create an ecosystem of negativity that breeds anger, resentment, and envy for people who do still made the effort for their goal regardless of how unlikely it was.
Allowing yourself to be redirected and readjust as you go
This is something I had more of a recent thought about. I have a full video on YouTube explaining why, much to contrary beliefs, it is okay to backtrack especially since sometimes when we are so invested in our goals that we may get one-track-minded on how to fulfill them. The biggest reason people fall off from being disciplined is because they worry about showing up perfectly.
Let me give you an example of my health journey goal this year. I wanted to make my overall health a priority because I hated how I kept having energy crashes and I knew it felt deeper than just “being lazy”. I wanted to do things and attempting to do them wasn’t the hard part, the hard part was staying awake while doing them, not getting a migraine while doing them, and attempting to push through and feeling inadequate when it still felt like I was failing. So when that started happening, I made myself a promise to fight for my health and my confidence because a mixture of things was affecting that as well.
So this looked like re-starting my fitness journey. When I decided to do this, I was also re-starting my journey as a creative and may have underestimated the level of intensity for myself. So after trying to exercise 5 days a week for 45 minutes. I ended up exercising 3 days a week for 1 hour in the morning. When I got bored with that I decided to do a new challenge I named the 360 challenge. 3 days a week I exercised for an hour, the other 4 days it was 45 minutes and the focus was daily movement. However, I want to clarify that not every day looked the same, some days I would just stretch 20 minutes and then go on a walk, and other times it would be trying pilates or dance cardio or using my kettlebell set. This is an important factor because if I decided that I had to show up one way and always do things the same way then that would leave me closed off to all the the other opportunities that I have to fulfill the goal. The challenge for 50 days felt so energizing that I just started my next cycle for a new way to practice daily movement except for this time I am allowing a no-exercise day completely because of my new schedule doing volunteer work it would be unrealistic for me to have the exact same cycle.
There is a difference between intensity and consistency
This is a continuation of the last point but I explained this a lot better in a recent podcast episode exploring ideas on how to actually be consistent. Even when having different routines for your energy levels, sometimes we underestimate how intense our strategies are for our goals.
For my journey as a creative, I wanted to think of my main way of creating content (My blog, my podcast, and my YouTube) as my macro-content and social media as my micro-content. I didn’t realize how intense it is to contribute to all 3 macro-content platforms at once. Especially being the creator, editor, and designer, a lot of times I am working hard to make the content as well-researched as possible while mixing in aesthetics (infographics, the cover art, and quotes) and personal stories. I believe this makes content much more well rounded but at the same time being the sole person coming up with ideas, creating/executing, editing, and designing things to be supplementary while simultaneously trying to learn all things like how to read analytics, SEO, reviewing trending topics and seeing how they correspond with anything I was already thinking about from my own experiences, etc. while contributing to the other areas in my life for awhile made me so frustrated.
The problem is when I was creating I felt like I had to make multiple ideas instead of allowing each of the pieces to work together. Part of me had this perfectionist vision that I should be able to come up with different ideas so I wouldn’t need to get bored posting the same thing repeatedly. This thing I was doing was more intense than it needed to be and disturbed my ability to create because sometimes it felt like I couldn’t think. My brain would illustrate the ideas in my head as cryptography that I didn’t have a clue on how to decipher. Basically sometimes I would feel so scattered in my thinking that I couldn’t be consistent and with something like creativity, there has to be a flow.
If you are trying to do something and find yourself in the cycle of starting and stopping, it could be worth it to ask if you are pressuring yourself too much. The idea of “going hard” has been ingrained in us to push and motivate us, but at the will of someone else circumstance. Just because someone can “go hard and all in” doesn’t mean every area of their life requires the same level of that energy. Maybe someone is able to go hard with career building, but we don’t know what support they have that can allow for that to even happen. That statement is not meant to discredit them because a person can work hard and still acknowledge that support (whether it’s money, having more time, someone assisting them, or connections) does make a difference. Something that I am trying to unlearn is having help and support doesn’t make you inadequate because there are still hurdles a person may have overcome. My “easy” could be someone else’s challenge the same way that someone else’s natural abilities are what I need to improve on to be closer to my goals. The key takeaway is don’t allow the intensity to take away from your ability to be consistent. Having days that vary in the way you show up (one day might be 30% and another day 95%) is still better than having a few days or weeks of “going all in” followed by months of not contributing anything.
Allow yourself to take responsibility without assigning blame- you can acknowledge the circumstances without it becoming excuses
I wanted to add this because one thing I used to do is often blame myself when things didn’t turn out how I wanted them to and the other times I would blame things around me for why things didn’t work out. I believe understanding how your circumstances play a part in making things harder (but not allowing those to be reasons you don’t try) is important. It is also important to acknowledge how you can manage your responsibilities without self-blaming and putting everything on yourself to a point where you end up being your biggest critic.
Instead, try to approach challenges with a balanced perspective. Recognize the external factors that may affect your progress, but also identify the aspects you can control. Develop a mindset that focuses on problem-solving rather than self-criticism. When things don't go as planned, rather than asking "Why can't I get this right?" ask yourself "What can I learn from this, and how can I adjust my approach?" This shift in mindset can help you stay motivated and resilient.
In addition, make sure you are practicing self-compassion. Understand that everyone faces setbacks and that these moments are opportunities for growth. Give yourself grace and acknowledge your efforts, even if the results aren't immediately visible. Remember, the journey to achieving your goals is not a straight line, and it's okay to stumble along the way.
By balancing responsibility and self-compassion, you can create a more sustainable and positive approach to achieving your goals, without falling into the trap of excessive self-blame or externalizing all your challenges.
There’s a difference between disconnection and dissatisfaction.
Another thought from a journal entry:
If you are just dissatisfied with the results then be patient and if necessary change the strategy. If you disconnected from what you are doing, focus on your why, and if the why isn’t strong enough, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate if this is something you want to put away for another season of your life or if it is something you are ready to let go of as a dream.
Understanding the difference between disconnection and dissatisfaction is crucial for maintaining self-discipline and achieving long-term goals. Dissatisfaction with results can often be addressed through patience and strategic adjustments. This means that your goal is still relevant, but the approach needs fine-tuning. For instance, if you're working towards a fitness goal and not seeing the desired results, it might be time to tweak your workout regimen or diet plan. The core goal remains the same, but the methods to achieve it are adaptable.
On the other hand, disconnection signifies a deeper issue. It often means that the goal no longer aligns with your values, passions, or current life circumstances. This can happen for various reasons—perhaps you've evolved as a person, or your interests have shifted. In such cases, it's essential to revisit your motivations and determine whether the goal is still worth pursuing. For example, if you initially set out to become a professional musician but find that the joy you once derived from music has waned, it might be time to reassess whether this path still resonates with you.
This distinction is important because it helps you make informed decisions about your efforts and energy. Persisting in a state of disconnection can lead to burnout and a lack of fulfillment. When you're disconnected from your goals, every step you take feels laborious and uninspired, making it hard to sustain long-term commitment. On the other hand, recognizing dissatisfaction allows for growth and adaptation. It prompts you to refine your strategies, seek new approaches, and stay engaged with your journey.
Moreover, this understanding fosters a healthier relationship with self-discipline. It shifts the focus from rigid perseverance to mindful evaluation. By regularly evaluating your goals and motivations, you ensure that your actions remain aligned with your true aspirations. This alignment not only makes the journey more enjoyable but also enhances your resilience. When you deeply connect with your "why," setbacks and challenges become easier to navigate because your commitment is rooted in genuine passion and purpose.
Final Thoughts on Recommitting to Self-Discipline
Recommitting to self-discipline after feeling stuck or experiencing burnout is a multifaceted process that requires compassion, flexibility, and self-awareness. The path to self-discipline is not a straight line. It's filled with twists and turns, but by remaining compassionate and flexible, you can navigate these challenges and continue moving forward. Recommitting to your goals is an act of love—both for yourself and for the dreams you're working towards. Stay patient, stay focused, and most importantly, stay kind to yourself throughout the process.
Ps- Make sure to visit the previous blog post for more lifestyle content!
I hope you enjoyed this post and found it interesting. Also if you like my content it would mean the world to me if you would also subscribe to my YouTube channel, my Pinterest, and my TikTok account. On YouTube, I have the most inspirational content from Lifestyle Design posts to Digital "open when..." letters to boost your moods. I also keep a copy of my podcast episodes (which is also available on Spotify). I decided that I am honoring what feels right to me and continuously working on building the life of my dreams and helping others do the same. Don’t forget to share this if you feel inspired and I will have more content for you soon.
Until next time butterflies 🦋
Xoxo,
Lay 💋
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