Become So Disciplined It Scares Them

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1:28Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. So if that's what you're into, hit that subscribe button. Join me every single episode. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to become extremely disciplined. Because let me ask you a question. If I followed you around for 30 days and I wrote down every promise that you made to yourself, something like I'm going to start tomorrow or I'm going to go to the gym today or I'm going to wake up early tomorrow or I'm going to finally start that business or I'm going to start doing that habit.

2:10How many of those promises would actually happen? Because here's the part that most people don't really think about. Every time that you make a promise to yourself and you break it, your brain updates a belief about who you are. And that belief becomes something like, I'm somebody who doesn't follow through. And once that belief is instilled inside of your brain, discipline becomes almost impossible. Not because there's something wrong with you, not because you're lazy, but because your brain doesn't trust you anymore based off of all of the data in your past. And so most people think that discipline is about like willpower and motivation and grit.

2:52You've got to force yourself. You've got to push yourself. Yeah, that can be part of discipline. But really, discipline is psychological more than it's anything else. Like the deeper psychological mechanism behind it is something that's called self-consistency theory. And so there's a psychologist named Daryl Bem who proposed that humans infer who they are by watching their own behavior as if you're a person looking from the outside and watching what you do. And so, So in other words, your brain doesn't just decide who you are out of nowhere. It basically observes you. It observes everything that you do, everything that you say, everything that you don't do.

3:33And then it concludes who you must be. And so if you repeatedly watch yourself procrastinate and quit and delay and break commitments and and not follow through, and scroll when you should be building, your brain forms the identity of like, hey, this is just the type of person that I am. I am the type of person who says they're going to do amazing things, and then they find themselves scrolling on the couch instead. And once that identity forms, your identity of what you think you are, the craziest part about it is that your brain will actually try to protect it. Which means when you look at discipline, discipline isn't really hard because like you're weak or because of who your parents were or because the way that you raise.

4:19Discipline is hard because your brain is defending your current identity. Think about like, I really want you to think about this. Discipline is hard because your brain is defending your current identity. It's trying to keep you in the exact same position. The reason why change is so hard is because your identity, like the deepest part of who you think you are, is trying to sabotage you. Not because it hates you, not because it wants you to fail, but because it's trying to preserve its perception of itself, your perception of you. And that's what self-sabotage really is. When someone says, oh, I want, you know what I do?

5:02I do really good in the beginning of the year and I do my New Year's resolutions and I write down my goals and I do good for about three weeks and then I fall off. The falling off is your identity actually sabotaging you to protect itself and to keep you in the exact same position. Listen, I know how it feels. You feel like you have two different people battling inside of your head, don't you? Like you feel like there's, I really want to be successful. I really want to grow. And then there's this other party that's like, yeah, that's not who you are. And you're not good enough and you used to, you know, you failed so many times and you've had your heart broken and you're not good enough and you're a loser.

5:40And, you know, and so what you think about is like, there's, there's your conscious mind, which according to psychologists is about 5 % of the actual cognitive energy that you use. Like in that 5 % of you wants a better life. It wants to make more money. It wants to get in shape. It wants to wake up earlier. It wants to have the tough conversations to build a better relationship. That's 5 % of you though. And then you have your subconscious, which is where your identity lives. And once again, your identity is not who you truly are. It's what you think you are, who you think of yourself. And that lives in the 95%, the subconscious, which is rooted in old stories, in old patterns, in old habits, and it will fight to stay the same.

6:26And so if you're going to change your life, you've got to work really, really hard to change it because you've got your 5 % conscious mind battling the 95 % unconscious or subconscious mind. And so what happens is when we can kind of get stuck in these loops, and this is why it's so important to start noticing your patterns and paying attention and taking different action, is because the loop that we typically get stuck in is we say we're gonna do something, we don't do it, we break a promise to ourself, and that turns into weaker self-trust. and that turns into a weaker identity that we don't want.

7:02And that turns into, because it's a weaker identity, less discipline. And less discipline turns into more broken promises down the road. And so it's like the self-fulfilling prophecy of what we think of ourself is what we will actually keep creating. Like what you think of yourself in your head is what you will create in your life. And over time, this creates a psychological condition that's called learned helplessness. And so this was first discovered on studies on dogs. And so in the 1960s, they had these dogs that experienced repeated uncontrollable failure when they were trying to escape. So these dogs were trying to escape.

7:39They couldn't escape. They couldn't escape. They couldn't escape. And then eventually they just gave up escaping in the first place. And so even when escape became possible, that was learned helplessness. They just learned there was nothing they could do about it. They learned that they were going to be stuck forever. They learned that that's just the way that it was. So even when they could escape, they didn't. Humans do the exact same thing. When you repeatedly fail to follow through, to change your life, to become the person that you say you're going to be, you repeatedly stop following through on your commitments.

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11:03The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. And now back to the show. You stop believing that you can actually change and you just think, well, I've tried so many times in the past. I'm just not gonna be able to change my life. Other people are lucky. I must not be one of those people. And you actually stop believing that you can change. You have this learned helplessness and you're just going to stay there forever unless you change something. And that's when people say stuff like, oh, that's just who I am or I'm not disciplined or, you know, I always struggle with consistency or that's just, I've never been able to do those things.

11:43And so it must be for other people. Like those aren't personality traits. They're trained behaviors. They're trained beliefs about yourself. And now you're stuck in a loop where it's just so hard to break out of. And that's the loop that so many of us get stuck in. In real discipline, when you look at it, if I were to put into one sentence, Real discipline is your brain believes you when you say something, right? Like that's what we're really trying to get to. Most people are like, discipline is working hard and grit and force. And yeah, it could be categorized as that. But real discipline works when your brain believes you when you say you're going to do something.

12:18It believes you when you say you're going to work out. It believes you when you say you're going to build the business. Your bullshit meter doesn't go off and you can simply just do what you say you're going to do versus being like, yeah, I'd like to, but I'm not that type of person. That's it. Like that's the entire mechanism. When a disciplined person says, I'm going to wake up at six, their brain doesn't debate it. Their brain doesn't fight with them. It doesn't negotiate with them. It doesn't question the plan. It just says, okay, let's wake up at six. Now that's not something that they're born with.

12:51That's something that is built into a human. It's a skillset that we can all build within ourself. The brain says, okay, you know, he said he's going to wake up at six. We're going to wake up at six because history has shown enough proof and taught their brain. When this person says something, it happens. That's what self-trust is. And nobody in this world has gifted self-trust. Self-trust isn't something that you're born with. Amazon doesn't deliver self-trust to your door. Self-trust is earned through the actions that you take through doing what you said you were going to do over and over and over again until you have a massive library of proof that you will do what you said you were going to do.

13:34And that is when your life changes. And when you have self-trust, discipline becomes very easy because then you just do what you said you were going to do. And now you're just that type of person. And so when you look at consistency, one of the weird things that's really interesting, and I wanted to bring this into this episode because it kind it catches people off guard. When you start to become consistent, when you start to change yourself for the better, not always, but sometimes people around you can act strange. They start acting kind of strangely, not because your consistency is extreme, but because your consistency, you're working to become better, whether that be building a business or making more money or being happier, getting in shape.

14:18It exposes to other people that you're around how inconsistent they are. There's actually research on this. It's called the do-gooder degradation effect. And so when you look at it, it's a phenomenon where a person morally motivated behavior, like they're trying to become better, leads them to being perceived by other people negatively. So when someone behaves like with more discipline or more action or more responsibility than the group that they surround themselves with, not always, once again, don't think it's always gonna be this way, but sometimes people in the group criticize them instead of admiring them.

14:57Hmm. You got to ask yourself, why would this be a thing? Well, because that person threatens the group's identity and it threatens each person in the group's identity. Like your discipline forces other people to confront their own excuses. You losing weight convinces your other friends who have been saying they want to lose weight for 20 years to actually start to look at their own excuses. and most people, they don't like it. Even if they do want to lose weight, they would prefer not to look at their own life. So instead, sometimes what will happen is people kind of turn on you in a way that's, you know, they won't like force you out or hate you or, you know, light your house on fire, but they'll turn on you in a way where they start saying things like, oh, well, you're obsessed.

15:41You need to calm down a little bit. You work too much or you're too obsessed with becoming fit. You know, maybe you should, oh, you stop drinking. thinking, oh, you used to be more fun when you would chill and have a couple beers. You need to relax. Like you're doing too much, right? What they're really saying to you without even realizing it is that your action is making me uncomfortable with my unfulfilled life. So just saying this, I'm just saying this so that you're aware in case your change starts to trigger other people. People don't like change. And sometimes people will fight your change, even if it's for good.

16:15Okay. So when we go back to discipline, let's talk about something else around this, right? The discipline that actually changes lives is not some big, incredible event. It's kind of boring. Like there's no hype. There's no dramatic like transformation moment. Like there is in every single movie where the orchestra picks up. Like there's no, is there drama to it? It's no huge moment. It's just like quiet consistency. And it's fricking boring every day of doing what you didn't want to do. Like today I hopped in the cold plunge for the 15th day in a row. There wasn't like, there wasn't any applause.

16:53You know, it's like, I woke up, I was tired before I had my coffee. I was like, I don't want to get in the fucking cold plunge, but I'm going to. And I got into it because I know that the benefits mentally more than even physically are just what I'm working towards is pushing myself out of my comfort zone and getting that eight minute meditation every single morning inside of a cold plunge. It's boring. It's not sexy. I didn't want to do it. Day after day after day after day. And so, you know, there's a psychologist named Angela Duckworth, who studies grit, found something interesting. And she found that the most successful people weren't the most motivated people in the world.

17:29They were just the ones who are the most consistent over extremely long periods of time. And when I say long periods of time, I mean like years, sometimes even decades. Like it's more of like a quiet discipline versus intensity. When people think discipline, they think like intensity, but really quiet discipline is more like duration, right? It's more like an ultra marathon than a sprint. Listen, anybody can grind for 30 days, right? Anybody can do it if they really want to. They can force yourself to do something for 30 days and punish themselves to do it. But the person who shows up for five years, for 10 years, for 20 years, that's when the compounding becomes enormous in your life and it looks like not much is happening at first that's the crazy part like you don't make a lot of money at first you don't lose a lot of weight at first but you just have to keep going even though your results are not seen yet or they're very small but years down the road if you just stay disciplined and consistent the change is massive and so here's where kind of things get interesting when you look at self-trust right Self-trust, when you actually start to do this over and over and over and over and over again, it compounds exactly like money does.

18:44And so when you start keeping small promises to yourself, like the tiny promises, you just wake up when you say you're going to work out. You finish what you said you were going to finish. You just finish what you start. You do the workout that you planned. At first, nothing changes. It's just life is kind of the same, but now you're doing some different actions. But something like real subtle happens behind the scenes in your brain. Your brain, without you really even paying attention, starts updating a new identity. It starts thinking to itself like, oh, this is actually the person who does what they say they're going to do.

19:17Like this person actually follows through. This person actually shows up for themselves. In six months, 12 months, 18 months down the road, once that belief has formed, your brain starts helping you versus resisting you, which is what I talked about in the very beginning is most of the time it's resistance. But if you take different action for a while, eventually your identity has to shift. 12 months, 16 months, 20 months down the road, whatever it might be, your brain, once it starts to shift and the identity shifts, it starts helping you instead of holding you back. And your motivation increases and your focus increases and your energy increases because now your brain starts to see the effort as worth it.

19:58It starts to see the proof of who you are becoming. and it doesn't feel like you're lying to yourself anymore by saying, I'm somebody who follows through. I'm someone who's consistent. I'm someone who is successful. Like it feels like you're actually the person that you have been trying to build yourself into becoming. And once that happens, when you start to see who you're becoming and your brain starts to see who you're becoming, that's when your identity starts to shift. And when you get really locked in on that, that's when it's like game over. you become a different person because now you're not resisting yourself anymore and you're taking the right action.

20:35So when you start to look at it, most people, what they do is they try to become too disciplined with like, they try to hit a home run immediately. I'm just trying to get some base hits. If I'm in your position, you're trying to become disciplined, right? They start too big. Like they say like, I want to, I want to wake up at 5am every single day. I want to work out seven days a week. I want to write a book this month, but they haven't like built the identity infrastructure yet. And so what happens is they fail and every failure damages self-trust even further. And so, you know, when you look at, you know, behavioral scientist, BJ Fogg, he says that habits, you should start them extremely small, not because the action matters, but because the identity that you're signaling to yourself matters more than anything else.

21:15Every kept promise is evidence, evidence that the new identity is real. So like, think about it. Wouldn't you rather be consistent with small actions for a long time than be inconsistent with big actions because the consistency is actually what changes your identity over time and as your identity changes over time it becomes easier to take the action which makes discipline basically just something that you do right that identity shift is more important than anything else here because those actions that you're taking are just a byproduct of the identity of who you actually are and so when you start to look at it, what I really want you to focus on and understand is that you don't need your discipline to be extreme.

21:56You just need to be consistent, right? That's all you need to be. You need to be predictable. You need to be the person who shows up. You need to be the person who finishes. You need to be the person who follows through. You don't need any dramatic emotional speeches or to announce it to everybody else in the world. Just quiet execution is all that we're working on. That's what a good life is built on. So if you really want to become disciplined, there's one rule that I would adopt in your life. Never break a promise to yourself twice. You might slip up once. You're not going to be perfect. I promise you that.

22:27You might miss a day. You might miss a workout. You might fall off track, but never two days in a row. Because the moment that you repeat a broken promise two days in a row, your brain starts rebuilding the old identity. And that's not what we want here. So anytime you mess up, No shame, no guilt. Just use it as feedback and recalibrate and get back on track with the quiet consistency that creates the person that you want to be. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

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