Hey, it's David, welcome back to a changed mind, a sanctuary for your spirit, a place where each and every episode I will remind you of the certainty of the goodness future. I am your friend, your host, your guide, your personal and business growth Sherpa. And I am so excited for today's episode. Today we're going to be talking about how to create unbreakable discipline. Discipline has become an enigma for so many people. I don't know about you, but certainly so many times in my life, I rigorously committed to do something, whether it was a morning routine, starting to meditate on a daily basis, changing my diet, going to the gym, consistently doing the things that I knew I needed to do in order to grow my business that I had been procrastinating and delaying around. And yet I still don't do those things that I commit to myself do. And then as a result, we beat ourselves up, we feel like we're not good enough, we're not as far along as we should be. And man, more than ever today, there are external influences reinforcing that idea. It only takes a moment to see something flying through your newsfeed that shows you that someone else is making more money or having a more extraordinary life or pushing a little bit or grinding a little bit more than you and they're achieving more. And then we've got a generation now of Navy SEAL based military style motivation and inspiration on the internet telling us that we just need to hustle and grind even more. And so we end up feeling like we're trapped in this Chinese finger trap, right? One of those little toys that my grandfather gave me where I was a kid where you'd put your fingers in and you'd start pulling and the harder you pulled, the tighter it got where we can't go backwards and give up, but we can't move forward when we end up in some sort of anxiety ridden, fog permeating type of suffering purgatory that becomes our life. Now that's the bad news. The good news is we can actually break this pattern and I might be the first person to tell you there's an easier, softer way. Now this isn't woo woo. It's not new age. You know, it is not about just standing in the mirror and shouting affirmations at yourself, but I think there is a science of habit change that we're still really truly just coming to understand. And I'm going to share my experience in addition to what some other phenomenal experts have shared and what really motivated this was a recent interview that I saw with Chris Williamson from Modern Wisdom and Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. And they were having a conversation around how you become more disciplined. And you know, these are two guys that I don't know them personally seem like they're disciplined. I mean, certainly Chris has done an amazing job, you know, consistently producing phenomenal content through his podcast. Stephen just seems like the kind of guy who's really, really disciplined, even though he's shared his stories around struggling to get into his DJ hobby and the strategies that he used in order to put the things he wanted to get done in front of him so that they were easier to do rather than having his turntable sitting in the corner of his room. In fact, they talk about it again in this episode, but I want you to hear what Chris shares when Stephen says, Hey, what do you need to do in order to start building discipline in order to start building self-confidence? Because really there are sort of these this constellation that has these components of self-love, self-discipline, commitment, self-confidence. And for so many of us, the absence of that is what is holding us back from achieving our full potential, from operating in alignment with the person that we aspire to be, from achieving really extraordinary goals that we set for ourselves. So I could repeat to you what Chris said, but you may as well hear it from the expert's mouth. Take a listen to what Chris says in response to this question by Stephen Bartlett. So I love the metaphor that Chris used here, this idea of if you had a friend who was going to meet you for dinner and time after time after time, there were an hour late, right? You would lose trust with them because they're breaking their promise with you and that we've lost trust with ourselves. That's why we don't have self-confidence, that why it's why we don't have self-esteem. That's why we don't have self-love and self-appreciation or discipline because we build a momentum almost anticipating the next time that we're going to break a promise with ourself. We say that we're going to do things, whether it's, you know, cold plunge every day or get in the sauna, or like I said, consistently apply effort to the things that we're passionate about and we don't do that. And so we break these promises and we fall out of trust with ourselves. And I am in agreement with Chris that the way forward is through action, right? That action creates undeniable proof that you're willing to do the things that you said that you would do. And so as you build that foundation of proof for yourself, then you become a confident person. But what I would also say is, and Chris speaks to this, you can't lead with positivity, especially if you have this crippling self-criticism that's going on, this mental dialogue. You can't just immediately move to positive attitude and feeling fantastic about yourself. But what I would say is there's another nuance there that is critical if you want to create change and that is not being positive, but letting go of the negativity, right? We have to learn how to let go of the negativity. Even in that interview, Stephen Bartlett follows up with, well, hey, the advice that you're giving right now is sound advice, but we know that only 20% of the people who hear it on this podcast actually do it. They will actually set these micro goals and go achieve them. What about the other 80%? Why won't they do it? And Chris says, well, habits are hard to change, but they're hard to change because there is so much negativity around us and so much negative momentum that we have, as I mentioned before, begun to anticipate that we're going to break this promise to ourselves, and so then ultimately that becomes our reality. Now let me explain what I mean here through a story. You may know that part of my history was in addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, pornography addiction, sex addiction, pretty much whatever I could get my hands on in order to check out of the rising emotional discomforts inside of me I was using in order to not have to deal with the pain, right? The pain of what? Pain of childhood trauma, pain of unresolved limiting beliefs, pain of unresolved emotional misunderstandings that had built up throughout my teens, into my 20s, into my 30s, and that culminated when I finally hit my bottom and ended up started working a recovery program. So when I got into a recovery program, there were promises that I made to myself, and those promises were made in tandem with therapist, in tandem with sponsor, and those promises look something like this, and we call it your bottom line in recovery. I'm not going to violate my bottom line, meaning I'm not going to smoke cigarettes, I'm not going to drink alcohol, I'm not going to have sex outside of a committed relationship, I'm not going to engage in self-sex or watching pornography, and I'm not going to smoke marijuana because those were the things that I was addicted to, and so that was my commitment. Those were the promises that I made to myself, and I ended up early on in my recovery, and not really just early on, but for quite a while, probably up until 18 months into my recovery breaking my promise to myself, and so what did that look like? That meant I would come up with this plan, this was my recovery plan, two days later I find myself drinking alcohol, or smoking pot, or I'm online looking at pornography. And so in recovery, when you achieve a certain level of sobriety, say 90 days, six months, nine months, one year, five years, 10 years, you pick up what's called a sobriety medallion. You get a chip, it's to celebrate the fact that you've held this promise to yourself, and so I was in 12-step meetings with people who were having one-year anniversaries, three-year anniversaries, 17-year anniversaries, 30-year anniversaries, but there's another chip, and it's called a white chip, it's a 24-hour chip, and that's for people who break their promise to themselves, and so I sort of became known as White Chip Dave. I went to a meeting two or three times a week, there was about a 90% chance at any meeting I was picking up the white chip to reaffirm my promise to myself, and to get back into my recovery plan to do those things that I committed to doing, which in recovery was really not doings, right, it was not doing those things that I shared, and I just found it was almost impossible to keep the promise to myself, until one day my sponsor said, look, here's what we're gonna do, you're gonna keep working your plan, and you are 110% committed to your plan, and here's the strategy, when you feel like having a drink, you're gonna phone someone else in the program, you're gonna call me, right, there was a variety of tools that I had access to in order to make sure I kept my commitment to myself. He said, you're gonna be 110% committed to that plan, but here's the other thing, if you don't stay committed to the plan, and you violate it, meaning you break your promise to yourself, you're gonna be 100% okay with the fact that you broke your promise, and then we are gonna get back on the plan with that full commitment again, and we're gonna exit. And he said, what's happening to you right now is every time you violate your bottom line, you're ending up in some sort of shame or guilt spire, and it was true. If you look at, and fortunately I didn't experience this specifically, but there are people who have many, many years of sobriety for drug abuse, alcohol abuse, whatever it is, and they end up losing their sobriety, meaning they break their promise to themselves, and they violate their bottom line. They go out one night, and they end up drinking and getting hammered, and as a result of the shame and the guilt, they end up on a bender, right, that's where they just continue to get drunk, they continue to use drugs, they continue to go out and have sex for days and days and days, weeks and weeks and weeks, months and months and months, and for some people a year. And I've heard these stories in the room, it just took one time, and as a result of the negativity, which is the baggage that we carry around us when we don't honor the commitments to ourself, it was just holding them underwater. There was no way to get back up above water and get oxygen, meaning to get back into recovery or get back into habit change or a new discipline. And so I think the missing piece in this conversation, and not just the conversation that Chris and Steven were having, where they made some phenomenal points, but the missing conversation around discipline is if you want to become a more disciplined person, if you want to be more consistently doing the things that you commit to doing, if you want to more consistently show up as the person you know that you're capable of being, then what's really important is that when you actually don't do that, that you're 100% okay with it. Now, this is a real paradox, and some people might say, well, wait a minute, if I'm okay with it, then what motivation do I have to do anything? And let me be very, very clear, you are 110% committed to whatever it is that you're doing, waking up five days a week and meditating, changing your health habits, going to the gym and having a rigorous workout four days a week, putting in a consistent five hours a day into your business if you're someone who's been procrastinating for a while. We're going to talk a little bit here in a moment about how to set yourself up for some of these wins. You're 110% committed to that, but at the same time, if you find that you break your promise, you spend zero time and energy in shame and guilt because that shame and guilt builds up a negative momentum where you are more likely to break your promise to yourself the next time. That shame and guilt becomes weight bags around you that weigh you down and prevent you from creating the type of change that you're wanting to create. I work with entrepreneurs and I coach entrepreneurs, and oftentimes I have an entrepreneur who comes to me, they're stressed out with their business, and they say, look, I'm stressed, I'm procrastinating, I'm not doing the things that I know I should be doing. Now my business is in a more difficult place. Perhaps I'm in some level of financial insecurity. And so my answer to them is don't do the work. Don't do the work. No one told you you had to do this business. No one told you you had to be an entrepreneur. No one else is looking at you. You're the only one, so don't do it. Stop putting the pressure on yourself to take this behavior or to engage in this behavior or take the action, because the pressure itself is what's crippling you. It's the same thing with changing the way that you eat. Don't eat differently. Don't go to the gym. Don't wake up in cold blood. And what's so fascinating is that as soon as we give permission or help entrepreneurs give permission to themselves to not actually take the action in their business, maybe for a day, two days, couple days, a week, two weeks tops, they don't take the action. There's no more pressure and shame and guilt, and so they end up flipping into some sort of inspired productivity. Because you almost get bored with the fact that you're not doing something because you truly do want to do it, but what's keeping you stuck in the middle, the Chinese finger trap, is the fact that you believe you have to do it and that you've broken the promise to yourself before and all of the anxiety and guilt and shame that is included around it. In Denver, they did an experiment in 2021 and 2022, in fact, I still believe it's going on, where they gave 800 people who were homeless anywhere from $50 to $1,000. And what they discovered was, and a lot of people would say, well, you can't just give money to homeless people because they're just going to use that on drugs or on alcohol or on something else. Well, what ended up happening was it cleaned up the homeless problem in Denver. And the reason for that is now people could actually support themselves. They were no longer living in extreme fight or flight for fear of not being able to have a home or shelter, which is a basic human need. The basic human need was met and it was taken care of regardless of whether they worked or they didn't. What ended up happening was because they were no longer living in a primal state, a consistent state of suffering and fear because their basic needs were met, they became inspired to actually take the next course of action, which is to get a job and start earning for themselves and to start taking courses, educating. Alan Watts talked about this, one of the great spiritual teachers in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. And Alan, I listened to a video of his the other day where he said, hey, at some point the technology is actually going to take over and it's going to replace the jobs of people and we're going to have to pay people to stay at home. And this is this idea of universal income. And he said, you know, number one, people are so offended by this idea because we've become so indoctrinated into this concept that we have to actually work hard just to survive. He said, really, why shouldn't our basic needs just be taken care of without us having to do anything? If you want to have an extraordinary life, then perhaps you need to go above and beyond, right? You have to do something extra, create value into society. He said, but the other practical point is that if you've got technology replacing all of these jobs and you don't actually pay people whose jobs have been taken to do nothing, then who's actually going to buy all the products that the technology is now building? So there's a practical element to it. But I think the really important distinction here is that we need to take a look at what's truly creating the resistance around our habit chain, what's truly creating us from being disciplined. And what I would suggest is it's not so much taking the action, it's the shame and the guilt around not taking the action. And if we can remove the resistance, then there's nothing that's holding us down anymore, right? And so what are the things that we do? Again, the game plan is you set some goals, you choose to do some things, you create some changes in your habits, and you 110% commit to it. Just like 110% I committed to not drinking, not smoking. Maybe you're 110% committed to meditating every day, 110% committed to taking more consistent action in your business, 110% committed to changing your dietary behavior. You're committed to it. Go towards it. And then if for whatever reason you break your promise to yourself, you are 100% okay with breaking your promise to yourself. Because the last thing you want to do is insert that resistance, that negativity. We're not talking about putting positivity into the mix. We're talking about not adding in more negativity because the negativity is the thing that becomes suffocating. It builds momentum. It deepens your lack of self-esteem, your lack of self-confidence. This perception of yourself that you have no discipline, that's the energy that starts to permeate your entire life. And so if we can remove that, then what we find is that over time, you kind of become tired of breaking promises to yourself, and you actually end up fulfilling on those behavioral changes. So what are the changes that we should make? There was another great episode that came out recently. It was an interview with Andrew Huberman and David Goggins, and Andrew Huberman, you're going to see, was so excited to share this information with David Goggins. Because David Goggins has talked about, hey, when you really push yourself physically, you develop a mental resiliency. You develop a level of kind of like hashtag beast mode, whatever your next level is, and that this is very, very important. And I found this to be true in my own life. It's why I put myself in the position, or I've started to even more so recently, to do uncomfortable things. I train hard four days a week. I get into the sun at extreme temperatures because it's uncomfortable and I don't want to be there. I do the cold plunge every morning, and as I've started getting more acclimated to my cold plunge, I actually drop the temperature down below where it is. And by the way, I didn't start trying to do all these things at once. I set some goals for myself that were achievable, but Andrew Huberman talks about the neurophysiology of this resiliency, of this self-confidence, about how it's almost like a muscle that we can build more toughness into ourselves. And so I want you to hear this because it speaks to the rest of this discipline recipe, right? So now we've got this thing, this anterior mid-singular cortex, this part of our brain, we've always had it. It's what I love about Andrew Huberman is he helps us understand the neurophysiology that justifies a lot of the concept and philosophy that we come to understand to be true, right? Goggins' concept and philosophy and Andrew Huberman, right, is able to back it up with science. And so if you combine everything that we're talking about, what Chris Williamson said in terms of start making promises to yourself and keeping them, what Andrew Huberman is talking about in terms of being able to build resiliency by coming up with things and intentionally putting yourselves in circumstances or situations that you don't want to be in, and you combine that with what I'm saying, which is be 100% committed to whatever the habit change is, the goal or the outcome, but also if it doesn't occur, spend zero time shaming and guilting yourself and get back onto your plan and 110% commit to it the next time, you've got sort of a formula. And that formula is come up with a list of things that you want to do, but you kind of don't want to. Like I liked the idea of cold plunging, it was anti-inflammatory, helped with my sleep, you know, increases human growth hormone, gives me dopamine hits, but I don't like doing. And so pick something like that, but make it easy, right? It's not cold plunging every single day for 10 minutes at 39 degree temperature. It's cold plunging three days a week for three minutes at 49 degrees, something manageable. It's not meditating every single day for the rest of your life. It's deciding to meditate for five minutes a day, five days during the week, Monday through Friday using something on your app, right? And again, it's really important to just set yourself up for these small daily micro wins in recovery. We refer to it as one day at a time. We don't say we're not going to drink for the rest of our lives. That seems insurmountable. Especially if you're just coming out of being an active alcoholic, right? We say just for today, I'm not going to drink. And so maybe it's exercising. You're going to exercise four days a week for 15 minutes. You're going to go to the gym because you want to choose something that makes you uncomfortable that you don't want to do, but that you do want to, right? And you go and do that thing. So what happens? Your anterior midsingular cortex starts to grow. You start to build neurophysiologically, more resiliency and toughness inside of you. You put together a string of promises that you've kept to yourself, as Chris Williamson talked about. And then what I'm suggesting is you release the negativity when it shows up. If for whatever reason you don't do it, no problem. Apply what my sponsor taught me to apply. Take a look at the thinking that preceded you breaking your promise to yourself. Because that's just the logic that your mind has used to keep you in the status quo. You know, your brain likes the way that it is. And so it's going to develop a form of thinking and convincing and stories that's designed for you to remain the person that you've been, but you want to expand. And so it's important to start to develop a relationship with the way that you think. So when you break your promise to yourself, take a look at what the thinking process was, recalibrate that thinking so that next time it doesn't catch you and give yourself permission. In that moment, no shame, no guilt, then recommit to your program, right? That is the formula for unbreakable discipline, and I'm sticking with it. And what's really important to understand is that if you don't have this back end piece, I said I was going to do something and I didn't do it. And if you don't give yourself some grace, if you don't make it okay, if you don't say, you know what, this isn't who I want to be, it's not who I'm going to be long term, but I'm not going to shame and I'm not going to guilt myself because I understand that that is just putting more weight around my weight belt and keeping me underwater. I'm going to learn from the experience and I'm going to recommit 100% to get back in that cold plunge tomorrow morning to do my meditation, to consistently apply action and activity towards my business and also realizing you don't have to do it. No one told you you have to do it. No one's watching you. No one's spying at you through your phone. Well, that's not true, but nobody's looking at you through your phone, checking to see if you're doing this new behavior that you promised yourself that you would do. So it's just you and you don't have to do these things, but you want to do these things. So do these things. Set yourself up for success. When you have a failure, don't beat yourself up and continue to move forward. That is the formula for progression. That is the algorithm for creating unbreakable discipline in anything that you want to do or create. So if you love this episode and it was valuable for you, and I hope it was, do me a favor. If you're watching on YouTube right now and you see me in the studio and you see that there are no sleeves in the David Bear studio, subscribe to the channel, leave me a comment, like the video. This is an opportunity for us to engage and if you're listening on one of the podcast platforms, Apple or Spotify, and you're a first time listener or you've enjoyed several episodes, do me a favor, leave me a rating, leave me a review. It's the way that I can get this workout to the world. And I'm excited for you because this two millimeter distinction of just having a little bit of grace for yourself is going to yield a multiple and exponential return on your discipline, your self-confidence, your self-love and your self-esteem. I'll see you in the next episode.