Motivation - if you’re relying on it to achieve your goals, the chance of you being successful long-term is slim.
This is where everyone goes wrong when working towards their success; they’ve bought into the lie that you need to be motivated to get things done and that if you’re lacking in motivation to work for something then that something is probably not worth pursuing.
The only way to ensure that you keep working towards your long-term goals is to break up with your attachment to motivation. Instead, it’s time to dive headfirst into a long-term relationship with discipline.
Now, for a lot of people, the word ‘discipline’ brings up a lot of negative emotions. If our relationship with discipline in the past has been a negative one then it can cause a lot of feelings of pain, heaviness, and avoidance - we don’t want to put ourselves voluntarily into that situation again.
This avoidance of discipline is not going to be conducive to your long-term success because as we’ve already discussed, discipline is basically the most important indicator of your ability to achieve said long-term success. So, let's fix that. Instead of seeing discipline as you currently do, would it be possible to reframe your thinking? What if you were to actually see it as the highest form of self-love? Instead of something you avoid, you begin to see it for what it actually is - you giving your future self everything you’ve ever wanted. If that isn’t self-love, then honey, I don't know what is.
So, we’ve come to the understanding that discipline is self-love - that’s step one complete. Step two is how to actually implement this in real life. It’s time to learn to self-parent.
What is self-parenting? It’s exactly as it sounds, it’s you taking on the role of parent figure in your life, making the tough decisions that put you in potentially uncomfortable situations in the present for the betterment of your future self. Getting the self-parenting aspect right is the key to keeping our new relationship with discipline a positive one. If you become the tyrannical parent figure, the harsh and unreasonable dictator in your own life, well that’s exactly why your views on discipline are as negative as they are. Instead, it’s time we became the “fair parent”. The fair parent is reasonable, has respect and obvious love towards their child but is no pushover. They set boundaries and they expect them to be upheld but they’re not a total monster - they only enforce situations when they know it’s what’s best for you.
So how does this look in reality? Well, the fair parent is all about open communication. So, it’s time to start having conversations with yourself. You will feel silly to begin with - accept it and don’t let it stop you. What might this look like? Let’s use me as an example:
I told myself that I would train today, my programme is set and there was no reason why I shouldn’t do it. Except that when I woke up today I realised that I’m sore, I’m tired and honestly training is not something that I feel like doing. I’m sure you could all relate to this feeling. Here is the perfect situation for motivation vs discipline. If I was relying on motivation, my session would not be happening. Instead, I opted to have the self-parenting conversation - it looked something like this:
“Hey Gemma, I know you’re tired. I know you’re sore. I know that in the list of things you feel like doing today, your training session is so far down the list it doesn’t count. BUT, I love you too much to let you sacrifice your long-term goals for what you feel like at this very moment. I know how much your goals mean to you, and I know that if you let this slide today, you’re not going to feel good about yourself and your decisions. So, I’m not going to let you do that to yourself. We’re going to train today regardless of your motivation.”
Loving and kind, but also firm. The fair parent.
Pick one area of your life where you’d like to become the fair parent. Remember, the fair parent allows for mistakes and learning opportunities but ultimately lets the child face the consequences of her/his decisions (remember the “I’m not angry at you, I just thought you’d make better decisions” chat). Once this becomes second nature, watch as your newfound discipline and self-parenting skills spill over into all areas of your life. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Look at you, parenting like a boss.
Remember, if I can, you can.