What’s the psychology of discipline? How can you maintain discipline in hard moments?
In their book The Tools, authors Phil Stutz and Barry Michels emphasize that discipline is easy to lose because we tend to get too comfortable. It’s important to stay motivated and keep pursuing your goals.
Learn more about the psychology of discipline below.
Why Discipline Falters
One reason we lose discipline is because we feel unmotivated. Life’s relentless difficulties can make us feel like our strategies for self-improvement have failed to help. We may also just feel exhausted and unconfident.
If our strategies pay off and we succeed in achieving our goals, we may think we’ve grown past the need for discipline. By explaining the psychology of discipline, the authors warn that once we feel like we’ve reached a good place in life, it’s easy to get too comfortable and abandon the healthy habits that brought us there in the first place.
Finally, Stutz and Michels explain that the main reason we lose sight of our goals and let discipline fade is because we falsely believe our lives are eternal. This causes us to take each present moment for granted because we feel like there’ll always be more time to pursue our goals. When we believe that there’s always another tomorrow to get started on our goals, it’s easier to justify slacking off in the present.
How to Maintain Discipline
How can we create a sense of urgency to accomplish our goals and be who we aspire to be? The authors prescribe a thought exercise: envision yourself on your deathbed and imagine all of the regrets you might have because you didn’t live in the moment more and strive to fulfill more of your potential. Let your fear of ending up in this regretful place spur you into action.
(Shortform note: Along with visualization exercises, consider using a “Memento Mori” (Latin for “remember that you will die”) calendar that displays the number of weeks in an 80-year life as boxes on one page. You can check off these boxes as a visual reminder of the time you likely have left to live. This functions as a literal “dead”-line.)
