I have been assigned a task to create content by a marketing consultant who is organizing my scattered ideas, half-written thoughts, word documents, snippets of articles, and random musings into a project management organizational app called Notion. The app is supposed to increase my efficiency and productivity by coordinating deadlines, objectives, and assignments.
I’m staring at the computer screen browsing the neatly looking rows of all my ideas but can’t seem to find anything that would interests me enough to start polishing the pieces for publication.
The material that I have been collecting in fleeting moments of inspiration during the past year, now feels dull, repetitive, even boring, and uninteresting. Are you kidding me? Now, that I finally hired someone to help me build a habit of creating cohesive content from these bursts of creativity, and have an app to help me organize, edit, and publish, I don’t seem to find anything worth writing about.
Is this the dreaded writer’s block, or am I just procrastinating? Why did my well of inspiration dry out suddenly?
While agonizing about my inability to see myself as an organized social media content creator, I remembered a podcast I listened to a while ago. This was Jake Davey in his Influence podcast interviewing Giovanni Dienstmann about the topic of mindful self-discipline. I realized that in my attempt to be in the flow and only follow my passions, I may have inadvertently let my self-discipline go down the toilet along with my meditation practice. Quoting one of my spiritual teachers Colette Baron-Reid “I have fallen into a spiritual narcolepsy”. This is when our self-awareness of staying in the moment gets distracted by our environment and we start acting from our conditioning. Figuratively, we fall asleep on the wheel of our lives and start running on mental autopilot.
When I started my journey as a part-time business owner, I felt exhilarated! I told myself that now I have time to meditate every day, I have time to exercise, I will oversee my own schedule and can enjoy the benefits of spending my days doing the things that are good for me. The things that I enjoy the most! I have time to focus on fulfilling my purpose and building my business. But now, only a year after I started with a bang bursting with enthusiasm, I find myself feeling less and less inspired to create this new life that I had in mind. The excitement of starting to carve out my life purpose has turned to frustration, tiredness, and doubt. While I was so good at starting something, I now seem to stall, unable to take my vision to another level. I find myself skipping the meditation practice, creating excuses for not exercising, finding ways to avoid the tasks I want to get done. I have started to project my uncomfortable feelings and disappointments to my environment and to the people closest to me. I have started nagging and complaining. Nooo…!
With all the training and my ongoing practices of self-awareness, I know it’s not anyone or anything outside of me that I’m frustrated and angry with. It’s me being frustrated and angry for my lack of clarity and direction. And my inability to do the things I don’t enjoy doing. Those tasks that I’m not good at but need to get done nonetheless…
In addition to me becoming slightly irritable, I have the fiercest need to change something, or to be somewhere else. Re-vamp my environment, go on a trip, modify my job description, change my approach to my business, you name it. I even colored my hair darker, just to feel a bit different when looking in the mirror. Like changing my environment or my looks would take me away from the cold truth that I just may be lacking self-discipline to carry out the “boring” tasks, such as organizing my thoughts to create, edit, and publish content.
Have you ever been there? When things don’t seem to work out, you first blame everything around you, and then you want to see some change in your circumstance to have at least some kind of a resemblance of progress. You may seek to assert yourself in something or someone around you, because deep down you would like to have a bit more control over yourself.
Not to say that changing your environment is bad. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need, so don’t get me wrong. I’m all for tossing out the old items, clothes, and mementos from your sight, if they remind you of things, people, and times you’d rather forget. Nor do I encourage anyone to stay in bad relationships, jobs, or environments any longer than necessary. But sometimes it’s good to take a stock of what is coming from me, and how do I deal with it. And in these cases, changing the environment doesn’t really bring us the progress we seek. At the end of the day, we can’t escape ourselves.
So now with surrendering to the awareness that I may suffer from procrastination connected to loss of self-discipline around the boring tasks, I went ahead and listened to the podcast again hoping it would help me in starting my content creation.
What resonated with me while listening to the podcast were few points:
Self-discipline is a skill that we need for accomplishing anything, in any area of our lives. Whenever you have a goal, whether it be losing weight, learning to play an instrument, or gaining a degree, to reach that goal is a process of transformation from where you are now and where you want to be. There are always going to be obstacles of the way. You will get distracted with things that are not important, and this is where you need self-discipline to keep going.
To me, this statement makes sense, but the word discipline bothers me a bit as it sounds like I need to give up on the fun stuff. Giovanni continues though.
Self-discipline is not self-punishment; it is you keeping your promises to yourself. Self-discipline is there to empower you to get to your goals, not to limit you. It’s not a prison. Self-discipline is not just another topic of self-development, it’s the core of it.
I realized that I have developed a discipline around my morning routine that includes me sipping my coffee while reading my oracle cards and then journaling about what comes up. This is my non-negotiable and the discipline around this has truly been the core of my self-development journey. However, I don’t always feel like doing something that is not as much fun as reading cards. So, what about the exercise piece?
Not doing the work is more complex than people just being lazy, or not wanting something bad enough. Because #1 priority for the brain is survival, we need to preserve energy, so our inclination is instant gratification. We seek pleasure and avoid pain, not because we’re lazy but because we’re wired to survive, hence preserve energy. So, to get to our goals we need self-discipline, but we live in a world of distractions that take away from our self-discipline.
I do recognize how the distractions come in between me and my treadmill. Happy hour at work, a late dinner, a long, good conversation with your spouse that you don’t want to end because it’s time to go exercise. I start seeing that distractions and excuses have something in common.
We need awareness and will-power to not slip back to our habits. Fully focusing on willpower doesn’t work for everyone. Meditation is a practice of both awareness and willpower. When we notice our focus shifting, we consciously bring our focus back to breath. The process is to first become aware you’ve slipped and then use willpower to get back on track. This is mindful self-discipline. If you develop awareness, self-discipline comes much easier.
Knowing that I have fallen off from my meditation routine, I get that my awareness is not necessarily spotting the distractions that take me away from my task at hand, and I’m finding it hard to re-focus as I’m not training my mind through meditation.
Planning and having routines are essential for you to keep moving toward your aspirations. Design your day so that there’s not too much stress. Whatever is relevant to your aspirations? If you want to build a side business, spend 40 minutes to read something, work on it every day. If you want to get fit, spend 40 minutes on exercise, and so on.
Planning is not my strong suite. This is one of the reasons I hired someone to give me structure around planning. As Giovanni says, it’s great to have an accountability partner which can be a coach, friend, spouse, social group, or anyone you can share your goals with and who checks up on your progress every so often. Feeling grateful for my marketing consultant. However, I’m still not convinced I can just decide to do a 40-minute workout every day and keep at it.
So how about procrastination? Why do we avoid doing the things that we know are good for us? What Giovanni suggest using pain as our driver. He says that heart of the issue in procrastination is avoiding pain. Mental, physical, or emotional pain. Asking ourselves the question ‘What pain am I running away from?’, may give us more ways to use this awareness to our benefit. He talks about three ways to overcome procrastination.
1. Can we make the action less painful or not painful? What is the first step that you can take, the baby step and take that. Maybe it is not as painful as you thought it would be.
2. If your task won’t be less painful. Can you make not takingaction more painful by thinking of the consequences of lost income, wasting time, health problems etc. Can you dig out the pain. He mentions that when the perceived pain of not taking action is higher than the perception of the pain involved in taking action, we usually get off of our butts.
3. The third way to get rid of procrastination is to just boldly go ahead and embrace the pain. Here we can use our sheer willpower or embrace the pain by awareness with meditation to accept it and not run away.
But pain. Why pain? Aren’t we all aspiring to have less pain in our lives? So, what happens when I realize there is pain in something that is critical for me to reach my goal, and I just don’t want to do it?
Giovanni knows that people will avoid pain but when we sometimes need to push ourselves through to the other side. And personally, knowing that reaching a goal, say starting a business is not necessarily easy no matter how much you want to get there, and we may struggle not just with the emotional and mental pain, but sometimes even physical pain when striving for our aspirations, I’m wondering what you can do. Giovanni suggests following Never Zero-rule which means that you make a commitment to yourself to do one little step that moves you toward your purpose every single day. Not 99% of the time. He says that when it comes to things we naturally steer away from, it’s easier to commit to doing these 100% of the time with no excuses, than to be in a situation where you can bargain with yourself if today is a good day to skip the practice.
When I think of promising myself to do something every single day, I cringe. How about spontaneity? What if I’m traveling, what if something critical happens. I can’t promise myself to exercise every day. But then again, I have been able to keep the card reading routine that gives me joy. I must admit that I’m hesitant to adopt anything that demands this kind of perfection, but he calls this habit building, and this is the key to experiencing the emotion that you’re making progress. Herein lies the key to seeing yourself disciplined in your own convictions.
Self-discipline is about living your life according to your own design. Our own center of gravity comes from the awareness of ‘this is the person I want to be’. Positive balance, more steps towards the goal than away from your goal. You will be content and feel fulfilled knowing you’re getting closer to what you’re aspiring.
His suggestion is to focus on things that really matter to you, and you will reach your goals. You can make it a “game” in your mind by imagining two versions of yourself. The one that had self-discipline to lose those pounds, get that business running etc. The amazing version. And then version that didn’t develop self-discipline and who’s living reactively to past conditioning. The game is to give yourself points every night. One plus point for a commitment fulfilled, and one minus point when you let the distractions pull you away from your promises to yourself. As we all are human, you’ll get the minus points too, but the idea is to be on the plus side every night and this is how we get closer to our aspirations. Being on the plus side, we’ll feel accomplished at the end of each day and have the overall sense of fulfillment since we’re working toward our aspirations, purpose, and goals little by little every day.
Giovanni has an inspirational message: The result of a life lived with self-discipline is fulfillment. The result of a life lived without self-discipline is regret.
As my own personal motto goes “No regrets!”, I had to get off my butt and write this piece!
