How to Become a Disciplined Person

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you've muted the show, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. If we want to accomplish something in life, it usually takes a combination of motivation and consistency, because even a small step every day adds up over time. This is discipline and it's one of the most useful skills we can develop. It's also shockingly difficult to develop, at least speaking

personally. So today I'm joined by perhaps the most consistent and disciplined person I know, to help us figure out the secrets to becoming more disciplined. You know him, if you've listened to more than one of these podcasts, you probably love him, it's clinical psychologist, Rick Hanson, so dad, how are you doing today? I'm good and I am a little embarrassed and a little. I figured that intro would probably get you somewhere there, yeah. Yeah, it's really, it's a trip

to see you seeing me and so forth. So that said, I love this topic. I think of discipline as our great friend. And so how can we make friends with discipline? So I hope we can talk about that. And I think that it's really telling that that's your opening framework here. You know, the friendship with discipline, because I think that for most people, they just have an association of discipline with pain. If you just think about that word, like what happens, well, we're disciplined

by our parents into doing certain kinds of behaviors. And if we don't, we are maybe disciplined by the world because we didn't do those behaviors or we didn't learn how to perform them at a certain level. And so for most people, they just have a punishment framework when it comes to discipline, right? Discipline becomes about how much pain you can endure. This clearly is pretty negative framing. And while distress tolerance, which we're going to talk about today, is definitely a part

of discipline, it's not the only part. And I love how you are beginning here by highlighting this alternative frame. And you know, the friendship that you can develop with discipline, which I think is so present in your story here as a whole. So what I would like to do is I would like to kind of dig into observations I've had about you over our 36 years of knowing each other essentially, because you really have consistently been like such a high producer day after day for the better

part of 50-ish years. And I would love to connect some of those points to these big picture ideas. And that was literally my first one that I had on the list here that like you've been able to cultivate such a positive relationship with the work that you do, which I think is so interesting. Well, a bit about me. So I started out as not a highly disciplined, certainly not a compulsive kind of kid. And I had parents who were kind of old school. And so they were imposed routines

and wanted us to study and do chores and things like that. So the discipline was external. I think a little bit of a crab, where a lobster was an exoskeleton. Discipline came from the outside in. And then when I went off to college, I was left to my own devices. And I needed to gradually develop more of a skeleton from the inside. As that exoskeleton fell away. And one of the keys for me really was around learning to want things that I did not originally want, but which were good

for me to want. And I gradually, much as you said at the start, I clarified increasingly for myself what I cared about. And I let myself care about it. And coming into this, I thought for us about three disciplines. And before I say them, I want to go back to the origin of the word discipline, which is rooted in disciple. It's to be given over to a calling. Looking back on my life, in a way, I've gradually helped myself adopt three disciplines. What I could call the discipline

of the heart, the discipline of effort, and the discipline of learning. In terms of the heart, it's so much easier to consistently do things that you really care about, that have intrinsic meaning for you, or you understand how they're really going to help you. Even if you don't enjoy them that much, still they truly will get you to a better place. And you bring your heart to it. You can talk more

about that. Then there's the discipline of effort. That's a hard one for many people. It's a lot easier to sustain effort when you've already engaged the discipline of the heart and found things that really matter to you. And then there's the discipline of learning, which is so great, including things like learning that stuff you thought would be, oh, what a drag. Well, it's going to be horrible. It's going to take forever. Actually, when you just sat down and did it,

it took about 90 minutes. And then it was done. It wasn't so bad. Learn an opportunity for learning. Or other kinds of learning that when you start doing things that will serve you well in terms of what you care about, that you enjoy them and you enjoy the fruits of your effort. More and more, I think about discipline a lot, has frictionless contentment. Increasingly not having friction between you and the world. If there's a task to do, relaxing the friction, the resistance to it,

and surrendering to it. And then with a sense of feeling already full along the way. I think that for some people, there is enjoyment when they complete a task, maybe for most people. For some people, there isn't. And we might talk about that a little bit. But for most people, when they're doing something where they feel like they need to apply discipline, in other words, it doesn't flow from them naturally, there is not a lot of enjoyment

while they are doing the task itself. And I think that you've really found a way to kind of hack this whole thing and cheat the system here a little bit by maximizing how much immediate gratification that you actually found in the tasks that you were doing. In other words, taking the good, which is your big practice. That's one of your 10 pole contributions in terms of how you think about the brain. And if there's one guy I know who can make

answering 100 emails enjoyable, it's you. I distinctly remember being the kid sitting down at the table, and when I was like 15 or something, and you would come to us and be like, guys, I'm so excited. And we'd go, oh, dad, why are you excited about today? And you would say, I answered 150 emails today. Wow. I feel so thrilled about it. And I suspect that. I suspect you could correct me from wrong care. There was at least a part of you that did not actually

feel thrilled about it. There was a part of you that felt tired and bored and like, oh my god, I have to do this task again tomorrow. But you were really leaning into and feeding that more enjoyment centric part of you, not just when the task was done, but actually while you were doing it, you were finding things to like about it along the way. And I just think that that's so present in your story as a whole. And I'm wondering what do you think about that? Well, so funny again,

to be observed by your very wise son. And I think you're right. And so part of it here is to make a distinction between the things that really, really serve something we really care about and something that we do out in necessity. We can reduce our resistance to both of those in lots of good ways. One of the things I think that has been very interesting to me is to become skillful, much as you say, at finding reward wherever I possibly can if it's in the service of what's good

for Rick. Now, which includes often my care and concern for others. So it's just logical if you can, for example, while you're doing pushups or dishes or emails or I was just thinking about I worked a night shift in a bottling plant in LA for a while, lifting heavy crates onto trucks and being unbelievably sore at the end of the day as a skinny guy. If you can help yourself find what's enjoyable in those little tasks, then it's enjoyable while you're doing them. You'll be much more

motivated to do them and you won't be so upset about it. Could you have kind of a concrete example of the status, expect that's where you're going, but that might be helpful for people? Yeah. Yeah. So there he was lifting heavy crates of RC Cola. This was back in the day, LA 1972. And I didn't really like it, but I would make a game out of it. How could I lift the crates? How could I move my body in a way that didn't hurt? How could I kind of sort of keep up with the

burly dudes around me? How could I get through the next 90 minutes, 89 minutes, 88 minutes to the next break? I would do that. It's not all the time, but a lot. I would do that. Or let's say repetitive emails. So I'll just kind of put a little music on and I just do the task and each one I do, I've noticed, okay, I'm getting farther and farther and farther and farther, farther

down the list. That's good. And also, I really have tried to dispense with inner whining. You know, that part of the brain, I'm not trying to pathologize it or look down on it, that's complaining. The inner complaint. Oh, this is such a drag. Oh, I don't like doing this. I'm not talking about being an authentic about something that just really isn't right for you, but I just mean dispensing with, disengaging from, defueling that complaining voice in the back of the head

that is grumbling. Well, you're doing what you need to do. You know, and maybe you know nothing too. Listen to myself who works mainly with words and ideas and technology say, I try to remind myself, Rick, what are you whining about? Think of all the people throughout history. Think of all the people today are doing tasks that are inherently a lot more unpleasant than what you're doing here. So I try to, you know, I keep that in mind as well while I'm doing

what I do from time to time. So it's standing up to me about what you're saying, a couple of things here. First, obviously, it's a lot easier to sustain motivation to sustain discipline when you're doing something that you care about. And that's going to be true of all things in life. So the task then becomes because we're not always going to have a perfect connection with everything that we

need to do. We need to find what about it we care about, even if that is making the money that we need to make to support our family or seeing it as a task along the way to something that is more aspirational. So there's normally something in anything that we're doing that hasn't aspirational

quality to it. And then it becomes on us to identify what that is, right? And can you pull out the aspects of something that are more intrinsically appealing to you as opposed to extrinsically appealing, something we might talk about a little bit is that intrinsic motivation is generally a little bit stronger than extrinsic motivation because extrinsic motivation, that's motivation that comes from outside the self is dependent on many things. Whereas intrinsic motivation is natural. It flows

from the inside out. Then the second thing that I think is really relevant to what you're saying here, dad is that that point you are making about the voice of the inside the mind, the complaining voice. If we think about the enjoyment aspect of it, we often have this part of us or speaking personally, I can find this part of me where while I'm doing a task, let's say that I'm in the gym or something, there's a lot about going to the gym that I like. But particularly when I haven't

been to the gym for a while, there's the voice of inertia that exists inside of me. That's this is uncomfortable. Your body doesn't like this. I don't want to lift up the object again. I'm bored, I'm tired. I want to go home. That voice is very, very present inside of the mind. Alongside all of the other things, alongside the aspects of that that I find aspirational or enjoyable or everything else. And I think that many people are very captured by that voice. I was very captured by that

voice for a really long time. And I'm wondering while you think about this, if there's anything that you think can help people get more on the same side with the voice of enjoyment as opposed to the the voice of inertia or that more negative voice than that we have. It's really kind of intimate what we're talking about because it's very personal. Yeah, because they're both there. They're both there totally. Yeah. A bit of a recap when I think about what we've been talking about.

Three things stand out for me. One, connect the actions to something you care about if it all possible and to see the connections. So for example, there I was lifting that those crates at the bottling plant. I was making union money and it was connected to leaving home. I was probably 19 or so when it happened and being able to support myself financially and feel good about that. And

it was connected to a larger whole. So that made sense to me. So try to connect it second. Look for every possible enjoyment you can in what you're doing, including finding ways to be interested in it. I think about my dad, your grandfather, driving him back up to San Francisco. And we would stop by the side of the road, take a little break. And my dad would just start looking at a road cut. The cliff, the hill had been cut so that the road could go through. It was just about

a ordinary sun-bait dirt. My dad was starting looking at the plants growing out of different levels of the little mini cliff there and start pondering out loud. Wow, Rick, I wonder why this plant grows here, but not higher up or lower down or wonder why that is. And being able to find interest in even prosaic things is really helpful in terms of being disciplined. So that's one example of rewards along the way. And then third thing we're calling out here is reducing resistance.

Reducing resistance, including that voice in the back of the head. Okay. So not to talk about that complaining. Doesn't want to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't like this. I don't want to. I definitely still know what it's like to feel. I don't want to. I know that place. So what to do about it? First, does that have something important to tell you that maybe you don't want to go to work because you know you're never going to get promoted due to a glass ceiling or you don't want to

go to work because it's not suited to you. Yeah, you can do it, but it's not well suited to your nature or for other reasons. You just don't want maybe it's telling you something. I don't want to. It's telling you something. It's important to listen to. Second, if you decide that no,

I do want to go to the gym. I do want to write the book. I do want to send out the 100 emails if only because I got a I want to because I got a if you decide that gosh, at least for me one thing I kind of had I think at a young age that I've also developed over time what we talked about is this very important quality of being on your own side where your friend yourself,

your now light yourself, your guide to yourself, you're out for your own best interest. So if you know, even though you don't want to that you really got to that have that helps you in your relationship with the I don't want to voice to foreground and be really in touch with the part that does want to do it. I think also it's helpful to make deals with yourself

like okay today I'm just going to do five minutes on this. Then tomorrow 10 day after 30 minutes next day and hour you're going to do enough you can understand that you can go forward. Then I think there's also a place for us where people have a kind of come to truth conversation with themselves and I had several of these. One of them happened with the writing of my very first book. I was staring at this pile of papers and I realized that no one was going to rescue me.

No one was going to write this chapter and then embark on the process of getting a publisher to want to publish the book. No one was going to do this thing that was very important to me at the time to start moving into that world. It was on me to do it and I had a very soulful moment. I didn't like doing it. I was scared about it. I wasn't good at it. I didn't know how to write a book yet. I didn't want to give a moment. It was so much easier to swear away. But I just knew. Even though

I don't want to was really big, I made an existential choice. I think that knowing your why can be a really big part of this whole thing. Which again, I think is a big part of your story. Yes, it's easier to be disciplined when you're being disciplined toward things that you really care about. But many people struggle to figure out what they really care about. So it becomes a little bit like a cart-leading a horse. They're trying to be motivated towards things that they care about,

but they don't actually know what they care about. They just go around in circles or they don't go anywhere and all. I think a lot of this topic actually connects back to some of the wants and needs material that we've explored previously on the podcast, figuring out what you really want,

what do you really care about deeply? When you know that, when you really have that clearly inside of yourself, and particularly when those ones are positioned more intrinsically, like I was mentioning earlier, I think it becomes a lot easier to get on the same team as the more enjoyment focused voice inside of the mind. And you also get better at interacting with the more idle one voice because you have better arguments. You come up with better internal reasons for why

you should want to. And so I think that if you're somebody who really struggles with this material, a great starting point, like before anything else, is doing a deliberate process around wants or around desires or aspirations, however you want to position that material. Yeah, a couple of things on that. First, even before clarifying what you want, I think for many of people, and it goes back to the first discipline I name, the discipline of the

heart, you've got to be emotionally engaged with your own life. If you're not sincere about your own life, if you're not aware of its passing nature, if you don't have a sense of basically, to heck with all of them, I'm going to make this as good as I can for myself within the framework of my ethics and so on. If you don't have that kind of somatic, emotional engagement with your own life, then yeah, all wants are the same, which is to say none of them matter.

And I think for many people, there's an initial step to go through that sometimes is very psychological to let your life matter to you. Now to a baby, their life matters intensely to them.

But yeah, life happens and we numb out, we dissociate, we shut down, and we learn in a way to huddle in a corner of the room in our own mind, peering out at the world, you know, trying to not get noticed or punished or caused trouble, understandable, but totally in the way of claiming your own life and then taking the practical steps that will with repetition, discipline, make it as good as possible. So that for me is really important for people to hear, you know,

and that goes to that's what I meant by the discipline of the heart. What do you, what can you give your heart to? Can you be open-hearted in your entry into life? Can you enter into your own life in good faith on your own side sincerely for yourself? These words can just be a fortune cookie or you can feel them like, whoa, what does it feel like to be emotionally engaged with something?

Then on the basis of that, yeah, ask yourself what really matters to you. Sometimes it's not even that hard to identify what matters to you just in terms of maslow's hierarchy or the three needs that you and I talk about a lot like for a lot of people, it would really serve them to be more disciplined with regard to their own safety, including financial security. You know, so goals that you can be disciplined toward or often

pretty straightforward. Then there are more esoteric ones. I realized, midway through my dissertation, for example, that I did not care that much about doing research. I needed to finish it though. So I stuck with that, got a PhD, obviously, but I realized, okay, it isn't what I care about. And then, you know, I became clearer and clearer that I really was going to go down the road of being primarily a clinician and a writer and a teacher. And that was clear for me. So sometimes

are our subtleties of what we care about. But often, with regard to discipline, it's pretty straightforward. If you've listened to the podcast for any period of time, this might surprise you, coming from me because I'm normally a captain agency. But I think that discipline in a weird way becomes a lot easier for people when they reduce the number of choices that they're making. Sure. You are right. Yeah. And that's the power of habit right there, right? That's the power of

routine and habit. And maybe even a bigger piece of those two things, your identity, how you think about yourself and how what we do naturally flows from the way that we perceive ourselves. And from the mental models that we have about who we are. For a long time in there, like when I was most consistent about going to the gym, and I use going to the gym as an example, not a lot because I'm trying to convince people to go to the gym, it just do it's a habit in my life. And so it's a

very useful linear example of this kind of thing. When I was most consistent about going to the gym, I wasn't really choosing to go to the gym every day that I went. I just was a person who went to the gym, so I went. It was almost in a weird way. It was the afternoon that's when I went to the gym. So what did I do? I put on my shoes and I went. There wasn't in a weird way a choice that I

was making about it. The choice was just flown naturally from how I conceived of myself. I was a gymgower in much the same way for a long time still to some degree, but I'm more relaxed about it these days. I was a serious dancer. That was the thing that I did. So I went dancing on Wednesday and Friday, whatever it was. And I think that that piece of it can be very, very effective, particularly for people who struggle to get started. Because if they're able to get past that

hump, they really have to stay in the inertia of it. Otherwise, they're constantly restarting. And one of the ways to kind of cheat that is by changing the conception of the self, so that the habit becomes really more ingrained in it. I'm wondering for starters, what do you think about that in general, dad, and also how that pertains to your experience with becoming more disciplined? I'm so glad you're pointing it out. And you're exactly right. One aspect of this

is a feeling for me of surrender. There's a thing that needs doing. I'm surrendering to the task. I remember my friend Tom coming over one time. I had to fix a fan, so I was stepping back from it and analyzing it and thinking about it. And Tom just reached in, grabbed some boards, started pounding some nails. He just gave himself over to the necessities of the task. And he got it done in about 15 minutes, which, and instead, if I'd been on my own, you would have taken me an

hour or two to think about it. So there's a place where just surrender. Just like you're saying, you're surrendering to the routine, you're surrendering to what you're being called to. The dishes are there. They're in the sink. They're not going anywhere. No one else is going to do those dishes. So you surrender. It feels good, in a way. So then you're not resisting. And so I want to call out the experience of surrender, which again is a word surrender that people have an

extremely negative connotation with. And you're turning it in a positive way, just like how many people have a negative connotation around the word discipline, which you found a way to kind of turn in a positive way. I just pointed that out, interesting. Oh, that is interesting. When they kind of, the way I relate to discipline a little bit is that I'm surrendering to the discipline. Yeah, exactly right. Retains are great. Finding routines that help you do the thing that

you tend to not readily fall into. People don't tend to need to be disciplined about making sure they have a hot fudge. They eat a hot fudge on day every day. Right? You don't need a lot of discipline. You can let dopamine carry you along with that one. Yeah, that's pretty easy, right? Yeah, routines like setting up your room. I like a clear space. I find it easier to think when

I'm in a fairly uncluttered environment. So I have morning routines at this point that I'm just kind of naturally lead me into getting stuff done, but in a way that feels a kind of flow to it. So yeah, routines are really useful. Buddies who help you be disciplined. I wish I had to work out buddy. I would do even more than what I do. And you know, different kind of buddies, meditation buddies. Sometimes people have gratitude buddies. People they connect with, you know, a quick text

with each other every day. Something they're grateful for. So yeah, these are ways to be routine. And then I love that you said about identity. Yeah, I want to ask you about that part, dad, because I wonder if this is the secret reason that you haven't really retired as you've aged. Because because of what would you do if you weren't on the first? You are. Yeah, I want to quit. Yeah, I'm interested. Right. Being interested and being interested in how to become interested

is a really, really good thing. Right. Steven Covey, one of the seven habits of highly effective people, be interested, rather focus on being interested rather than being interesting. Yeah, including with other people. Yeah, so identity. So when you were born, I did not want to be Fred Flintstone. I wanted to be a fully engaged dad. I was also in graduate school. And I was

so provider at the time for our family financially. So I was a really busy guy and doing all these things and definitely pulling my weight, unlike frankly, the majority of dads with child care and house care. Right. But your mom was not very happy with me. And I was puzzled. And at the same time, I came across this funny phrase in a textbook I was reading in grad school called relationship tasks,

relationship tasks. Now, as a guy who loves a to-do list and I surrender to what's on the to-do list. Right. I create little boxes next to each of the major items typically, little square boxes. I love crossing them off. Right. So I'm surrendering to my to-do list. I know how to surrender. I knew that I had a surrender to to do list. So I put relationship tasks mentally on my to-do list in a good way. And then I would surrender to them. And for me, it was part of kind of like

the job description for being a good enough husband. That was my identity. Okay. I want to be a good enough husband in the context of raising a family. And with that is my identity. Of course, I should engage the not burdensome delightful relationship tasks of asking your mom three questions in her own about how her day was and how she's feeling and what's important to her. And if there's anything I can do. Right. So what I mean. So if you identify yourself in that way, just like you're

saying, then certain actions start flowing a lot more readily. I want to go to another thing that relates to this so I could, which is what I'll call being. In other words, underneath discipline is state of being. What are the states of being that are the well springs of the actions that you really want to take in your life? Or what's the state of being that reduces the resistance to getting important things done? If your state of being is that you're fatigued and you're

you have a background sense of not feeling quite well. If your state of being is that you're really wounded by something and dealing with that, of course, it's a lot harder to be consistent and disciplined in your efforts. On the other hand, if you listen to our podcast and you know, do various things to raise your level of being inside. So you have more of a sense of vitality, simple practical things, how you eat and how much sleep you get and how many intoxicants

you avoid. You know, simple things to increase your vitality. And you do things inside your own mind to help yourself find more interest in what you're doing and build up over time that core resilient well-being that we talked about in the book, resilient. Then as you lift that kind of state of being, it becomes a lot easier to just do the right thing. No. Moment after moment after moment after moment. Whether you're off to the pool, hiking or traveling the summer,

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relevant for people who don't have as much natural self-regulation as you do. You have a lot of executive function. You are a very high executive function person. I'm a pretty high executive function person. There are a lot of people listening who, whether it's from something like ADHD or whatever else, where executive function can be difficult to access. Maybe these were tools that they just were not taught when they were younger. Or maybe they were socialized in a way

where that just wasn't a part of their socialization. A lot of men are socialized in ways where they are not taught self-regulation skills around the expression of anger, for example. That's just a core skill that they don't. They never learn. Then they have issues with that later in life often. I do want to appreciate here the role that those tools play in this whole process, particularly when we're talking about distress tolerance as a staining effort when

it's less than 100% pleasant. It really helps to break things down into little parts. Here I am. I'm staring at this spreadsheet. I want to accomplish something by mobilizing 100 of my people I know to send out an email about something. Then if I think, I'm just going to start with Bob. Then it's going to be Mary. Then it's going to be Jose. One after the other. Break it down into small parts. My cheesier. Exercise down my favorite weightlifting.

I just kind of, there are the different elements in each set. Then each set is a unit. I want to give rid of those. Give rid of. Get done with those three. That set. Then I'm onto the next set. Then I'm done. It's time to shower. Break it down into parts. That really helps. You don't need so much executive function. Finding what you really like about it, all that sort of stuff I've said. Letting it become habitual, wherever routine. Again, you don't have to keep making

choices. Again and again. Here's an interesting analogy from research on the brains of beginning and advanced meditators. Beginning meditators tend to have a lot of activation in the interior, frontal, singulate cortex in the brain. Two of them, one on each side of the corpus colosum there, on the inside of the brain. That's the part of the brain that regulates attention. Stay on the

breath. Stay on the breath. Stay on the breath. Shopping less. No. Come back to the breath. Advanced meditators have less metabolic activity in that area because increasingly their presence is automatic. They've trained in it. It takes less effort to remain present in the breath. They're

just naturally there. I think that if people do what we're talking about, if they're in touch with their heart while they're doing the activities of being disciplined, if their heart felt about it, open-hearted, warm-hearted, if they're like emotionally connected to themselves, that makes discipline a lot easier. If they have a sense of enjoyment in each of the little bits, the little steps they're taking as much as possible, or even being interested in why it's not enjoyable,

then you're interested again. That makes it a lot easier. I really do recognize for us what you're saying because part of it is neurological. Some people do not express a lot of receptors for dopamine. They need an ongoing trickle of stimulation to stay focused. I've never had this assessed in my own case, but I suspect I'm in a different group of people who express a lot of

receptors for dopamine. A little bit of reward goes a long way for me. I think it's really important because to acknowledge these things about ourselves, and I'm really glad you're foregrounding it. I really am. I think it's important to be kind to yourself about discipline and to know your natural rhythm. If your natural rhythm is you've got a good 20 minutes and then you need to take a break, do 20 minutes, take a break, set the timer, take a break. Even if you

kind of think, no, no, I want to give a five more minutes, no, take that break. Then maybe next time set the timer for 25 minutes. But take a break. Know that about yourself on the one hand. On the other hand, I just think back, and this is going to be a little cultural to people throughout history who had things they had to do that were inherently quite unpleasant. It didn't matter how they felt. It didn't matter whether they liked it or not. They just did it because they had to do it.

And I think, you know, if all else fails, there's a place for that. What's interesting throughout this conversation is that we really haven't talked much about motivation. I think the word motivation itself has just come up once or twice in passing maybe. And I think a lot of the time when people think that they're thinking about discipline, they're really thinking about motivation if that makes sense. There's a real like confusion conflating of those two words. And I think that it's interesting

that in that that list of how to there was not a lot of rarama motivational stuff. And I'm sure that from day to day that mattered to you like how did you fire yourself up to get excited to sit in the chair that day to do whatever it was that you needed to accomplish. But at the big picture it often fades into the background. And I think a reason for that in part is because discipline is about behavior. It's about what are you repeating day after day after day, whereas

motivation is more about passing emotional states. Motivation is about how we feel or as discipline is more about how we do. And motivation in particular focuses on like the enthusiasm with which we approach a task. I like do we feel up for it or not? Is that positive voice in the mind that we were talking about a lot louder than the voice that just doesn't want to do it? And I think that motivation really helps us light the pilot light. But it's an ephemeral thing. It doesn't like stick

around for too long, right? And that's when the distress tolerance piece of this comes into the puzzle when motivation flags what do we do? And I think that we've talked a lot about that throughout this episode so far. What are the things we can do to build up that discipline so that when

motivation falls away, we have something that we can actually. And I think that the real secret for that in the development of this as I said at the very beginning are those positive experiences that people have because while distress tolerance is a really important skill, it's actually anti-motivational in nature. We're not motivated to stick with discomfort, right? So there's this natural push and pull that's happening between those two things. And if we just rely on distress

tolerance forever and ever and ever, we're eventually going to burn out. Nobody can do that. Even the examples that you've given over the course of this episode about people who had to accomplish heart things, they probably did that, but they did it also by relying on some emotional numbing and some dissociation and some things that as time has gone on, we've just learned about as being not really great for somebody over the long haul. Even pretty low levels of stress can build up over

time for us. And so there's this natural marriage that we need to create between distress tolerance in the one hand, comfort with a degree of discomfort. And then our more positive motivations are positive desires on the other hand, which are characterized by this enjoyment because what's actually motivational for people is feeling good. Most of the time, feeling accomplished, feeling like we're improving. And so how do we get there? Experiences of success,

which we talk about on the podcast all the time and which are so fundamental to your work. Yeah, how do we develop that? Experiences of success. How do we develop better relational scales? Doing something in a relationship and getting positive feedback about it, feeling like, oh, wow, I did it right this time. Now the hook in all of this is that that's all great to say. It's good background information, but so many people in my experience dad do not feel good when

they do good. They accomplish the task, they get to the end of the day, they do the 150 emails, and they feel tired and burnt out and done and exhausted with the idea of having to do it again tomorrow. My sense from you, whether it's as a personality structure, just does something you developed over time, is that that was not the case for you. You feel good when you do good.

And so I'm wondering for somebody who's less than all this and going, yeah, great, positive emotions, yeah, great enjoyment, man, it is so hard for me to feel good at the end of a long day. What would you say to that person? I love this question and it takes me into and maybe we could do this experientially together. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, good. It was really help it because I fear

that this conversation to some extent has been almost too abstract or general or conceptual. So what your question really takes me to is what I think of as meta-motivations, because very often the result, they were trying to be disciplined in the service of, you know, it matters to us, but it's not that important really. But the meta-motivations can really be important to us. So what do you mean by that? What's a meta-motivation? Yeah. So

one meta-motivation would be duty. You gave your word, you promised, you said you would do it. So you're going to surrender. You're going to surrender, you know, my word against. You just surrender to the task like I promised, I'm going to do it. I don't really want to do it. I've got all kinds of better things I'd rather do right now, but I just, I give up to it. So duty would be one. Another meta-motivation is mastery motivation. Is liking getting good at things.

Sorry to cut you off real quick, just drop something in. The point you're making here about a moral purpose as an aspect of discipline, the implicit point you're making, I think it's really interesting. Oh, okay. It could be, it could be super meaningful for some people. Yeah. Yeah. And you could frame that like it was in my family, I did stuff to keep my parents off my back. So mastery motivation, like there you are going to the spread sheet. How can you help yourself,

for example, learn how to do it efficiently. That's a meta-motivation. Getting good at things. Like dishes. I take pleasure in continually getting better at doing dishes. Just the fluid motion, you know, setting them down, being, come on, man. If you can find pleasure in doing dishes, you have truly, you've truly hacked the, hacked the system here. It's mastery motivation. Okay. You want to ask you, and then I'm going to keep going with even more meta-motivations.

Can you want to give an example of where you find that a sense of fulfilling a duty, keeping your word, keeping an agreement, showing up, you know, being someone who shows up, etc. Is helps you be disciplined? Or second meta-motivation I named was about enjoying getting better at things, learning about things. Oh, yeah. I mean, those are both huge for me. I think that particularly the second one is enormous for me. I'm highly motivated. I was always a kid who

cared about what the right way to do something was. And in adulthood, I think that, frankly, some of the problems that I ran into socially with other people have been based around having caring a little bit too much about what the proper way to do something was. So I'm

highly mastery-motivated, for sure. And then in the first stack, I think that really comes up for people relationally, feeling like a sense of good purpose or good effort inside of our relationships with other people, doing the dishes because you know it's your turn to do the dishes, to steal your dishes example, or doing something not necessarily because you want to, but because you know it's meaningful to your partner. So you've like checked that box. It a little bit like you were talking

about earlier in the episode, dad performing those relationship tasks. Yeah. I think they could really come up for people. Yeah. Here's the third one. It's the meta-motivation of not wanting to be defeated by something. Not wanting to let the undun task win. And, for example, of that, I remember being a kid in school, you're presented with a page of like 20 math problems, long division or something, or algebra problems. And a lot in my attitude toward it was,

I wanted to beat every single problem. There's something I think that's okay. It's like a meta-motivation of not wanting to be defeated, obstructed, life frozen, immobilized by some pile of undun things. Here's another one. Number four, the meta-motivation of discovering and supporting and expressing self-actualizing various talents and capabilities inside yourself. I guess what I'm getting at is

it's true that dishes are boring. You know, the hundred emails, they're boring. But if they're in a frame, if we relate to them in a context of our kind of overarching motivations that are not about doing dishes or getting emails out the door, but are about larger purposes that the dishes or the emails fit inside of, then we're kind of carried along by those larger motivations.

And you think that that itself can help somebody feel more enjoyment, more of that sense, that feeling of success that I was talking about after completing those tasks, just tapping into those feelings associated with those different kinds of one-way shots. Yeah. You did the hundred emails and you, because you said you would and you kept your word and good on you and you can feel pride and worth about that. And when you're done, it wasn't fun at all and you're glad it's

done, but you feel good. Or maybe for you, there was an interesting to just kind of get increasingly efficient, so that it took fewer and fewer seconds to get each one of the hundred emails out the door. You know, could also have been that, you know, if you're like me, I admit it, you stare at the list and you're like, fuck you emails. I'm going to annihilate you. You're not going to be

like the thousand, the hundred threads tying golever to the ground. No way, but I'm admitting that's maybe not the best motivation in the world, but it's applicable sometimes. So I want to ask you a follow-up question about this here, Dad, that speaks to, I think part of what I'm thinking about with this theoretical person who's having a hard time feeling enjoyment after doing things that you would think that they could find some enjoyment.

If you're working with somebody clinically, okay, they're in the office with you. And you just feel like they're very on the same side of that more negative, down, dismissive. I don't want to find the enjoyment. I don't want to feel the enjoyment. Voice, do you go through a process that you would go through with them? Yeah. Of turning them around on it or working with them around it. I'm wondering what that looks like because I just think that that's such a huge issue for so many people.

I'm so I'm really glad you did this. You're raising this. And part it has to do with our modern societies too. Back, you know, three, four, five generations ago, most people had a very visceral connection between their work and their survival or the immediate care of their family or their small group, their village. Those very connecting these days. You know, people are pushing paper. You just kind of wonder why you think of the TV show, the office, you know, the kind of what

it's speaking to there. So it's a very real thing. What I do with a person like that is first of all start by joining and to really understand how it is for them and why it is for them. Along the way, I'm kind of wondering about their overall vitality level and also wondering about their temperament. So maybe their vitality level is kind of low. Also, maybe their temperament is that by nature, they need much more stimulation. It's as if they are a jackrabbit trapped in a turtle pan

grinding out 100 emails, you know, an hour to various people, yuck. So that's kind of contextual. Then I get interested in what they love doing. Okay, your job is boring. You start falling asleep every time you walk into the office there. I got it. What do you really like doing? And sometimes for people, it's very hard for them to identify what they like doing. Some people, it's really important to search for it or what did you like doing? What have you like doing? What is it like to

do it? And then I'm going to be, and you see the method to the madness here, very interested. In anything they like doing that requires some discipline. Well, they like fly fishing. Wow. It's not easy to get good at fly fishing. You know, the uti are on flies. The tiny little things you're making there. What? You know, and how did you help yourself? Whereas where there are parts of it that were kind of boring and routine and were frustrating at you had to practice multiple times

to get good at it. Maybe they play a musical instrument. How do you, how are you about practice on getting better? And so now they and I are both learning. Oh, who are they around things that they really enjoy? The counter example. We're looking for counter examples and then we're looking for ways to bridge back. That's happening inside their own mind that they can learn and then maybe start to apply to their office job, let's say. You know, certain societies, you don't really have

a lot of opportunity to think about a different job for myself. This will not fit a lot of people and you know, there's privilege that gets involved in this sometimes. But wow, you know, we spend more time on the job than we do with our partner. So if you have a kind of a work that you really don't like, it's just not fulfilling for you. It's, and I think it's, it's really important to think that through. Now, maybe what you need to do is just realize this. I've known people have done it

that you just need to clock your 40 hours a week in and out. Try to get through it as easily as possible, live for the mornings, evenings and weekends and be real clear when you're going to retire and make as much money as you can. Me more. On the other hand, sometimes what people can do is they can shift their job. They can change certain aspects of it. You know, they can find a different way about it. So I just want to name that this is a really important thing if somebody has that

as an issue. And I think back on my experience in the Zen bakery, this was a long time ago, San Francisco Zen Center, I had a bakery in San Francisco, of course. And I remember going there with my friends to get bagels and rolls and coffee. And it was a very ordinary bakery. People were standing in line. Dishes were being bust. People were hauling crates of dishes. People were bringing out rolls from the back kitchen. And it was very, very ordinary. And yet the people doing it

were bright eyed, completely present. They moved like ballet dancers, complete mindfulness, very zen-like way. But then it wasn't about the bakery. It wasn't about the spreadsheet or the dishes. It was about the frame in which they held it as practice. And that I think is maybe our first resort and our last resort is to relate to what we're doing in the traditional term as karma yoga. It's the yoga, which means union. It's a yoga dealing with our everyday tasks and

responsibilities. And relating to them in even a sacred kind of framework where we're using them as a field of practice, which we're cultivating. This is a meta-motivation. Using ordinary tasks as a field of practice in which we can cultivate qualities that we're trying to develop such as present moment awareness and mindfulness and non-reactivity and releasing craving. And I think that also it's a great encapsulation of a lot of what we've talked about here today,

right? Because they're finding in some way enjoyment in what they're doing. Injurement in the simple tasks. Injurement along the way. In addition to enjoyment at the very end of this whole thing. And as we come to a close, I just want to reinforce the overall theme of the conversation that we've had, which has been, I think, very positive, very focused deliberately on the positive, very kind of uplifting in its tone, and very much about finding what

works for you as an individual. And I think that that's the mistake that so many people make around discipline and motivation as they don't try to find what works for them. We are told a story about

what we must do over and over again. And in that must-ing of whatever it is, there's not a lot of space for making things work for you or finding your way into these topics, whether that way is by adjusting if you have it available to you, what you're doing in the world, or it's by finding different ways to feel more enjoyment along the way, or it's by finding more ways to feel enjoyment

when you're done with the task at the very end of it. Maybe it's by changing how you think about yourself or finding some new habits, some new behavior that really helps you sit in that position of discipline a little bit more, whatever it is. That's a very different tone to return to what you said at the very beginning, that about making a friend of discipline as opposed to the punishment mindset that so many people have about these topics. And so I'm glad we were able to talk about it

this way today. Me too. What a beautiful summary. Thank you. We began today's conversation, which focused on how to become a disciplined person by talking about the underlying model of discipline that most people are carrying around. Most people associate discipline with pain, whether it is the pain of not getting what they want because they weren't able to complete a task, or the pain that happens during the task itself when they make them self keep going, even though they don't really

want to. Think about where else we use the word discipline. You discipline your children to get them to behave the way that you want them to behave. And this becomes our mental model. Discipline is something that feels bad. It hurts, but we have to do it even if we don't want to because there are things that we want to accomplish in life. This clearly is a pretty negative framing, right? And I thought it was really interesting how Rick began the episode by talking about

making a friend out of discipline. And that theme, that theme of turning toward the positive, finding what was enjoyable even amidst the tasks that might seem pretty unenjoyable by and large, was most of what we talked about today. We framed most of the episode around my dad's experience as, in my opinion, probably the most disciplined person I know, and the things that helped him keep going even when he didn't want to. And first, really is that positive framework,

that enjoyment based framework that I was talking about. He is a master at finding what is enjoyable in a given activity, even if it's something like just doing the dishes. Then second, of course, it's a lot easier to be disciplined when you're doing something that you care about. But we're not always going to care about everything that we're doing. So then a hugely important skill becomes

finding what is care about a bull in whatever it is that you're doing. And then toward the end of the conversation, we explored this at some length when Rick was talking about these various meta motivations. A person might have, are you motivated toward fulfilling a certain kind of duty and finding satisfaction in that, or are you motivated toward not feeling defeated by the task? Do you have a mastery motivation? Do you really just care about getting good at things? Can that be

a motivation that pulls you forward? And the huge part of this is figuring out what you really care about. So many people put the cart before the horse here. They try to be disciplined toward vague goals somewhere in the future where they're maintaining their work because they know they're supposed to and they're just grinding it out day after day without any kind of larger organizing

framework because they haven't actually figured out what they want from life. They haven't figured out what they want from the job that they're in from the relationship that they're in from the stage of life they're in as a whole. And Rick also talked about really coming into life on a emotional level. What does it feel like to be really emotionally engaged with and committed to your life? Something Rick has talked about on previous episodes of the podcast is the feeling

that many people have that they're kind of sleepwalking through life. They're checking the boxes, they're getting to the end of the day, but there's not really this deeper sense of engagement associated with what they're doing. And if that's true for you, it's going to be really hard to find that enduring sense of discipline associated with the tasks that you're doing because you don't have

a lot of aspiration that's pulling you along. Rick also talked a bit about being interested as a as a character trait and how we can develop the capacity to be interested in things that might initially seem not very interesting. And I gave this example of my grandpa finding something interesting about sidewalks or plant growth or whatever else was going on in the environment that

he was in and knowing him might I can absolutely see that being the case. And inside of this conversation, one of the big topics that we went back and forth about was what we can do to align more with the voice in the head that is the voice of enjoyment, the voice of finding what's there and what we're doing to like the voice of discipline, the voice, maybe it's the voice of aspiration, the voice that is encouraging and enthusiastic and positive about whatever it is that we're doing

as opposed to the voice of I just don't want to do this. And I think it's important to acknowledge that for just about everybody just about all of the time both of those voices are there. And I think that sometimes in the self-helpy world or the personal-grathy world, there can be this misunderstanding based on the public image, frankly, of a lot of content creator types like me that one day that negative voice just goes away and you don't have to worry about it anymore,

at least in my case that is absolutely not true. So we all have those two voices and the question then becomes not how do we like delete the negative voice because you're probably not going to do that. It's more about what we can do to align with the positive voice and what we can learn from that negative voice for from time to time because one of the things that Rick really emphasized is look sometimes that negative voice has good material and is really telling you

something about your environment or maybe there's something you can learn from it. Is there is there something to do here? Something you haven't seen or is this negative voice instructive in some way about how you think on a deeper level? And then Rick also talked about the feeling being a friend to yourself. We can get on the same page with the positive voices that exist inside of our friends, sometimes much more easily than we can with the positive voice that exists inside

of us. And then finally he talked about a kind of coming to truth that a person might have. What do you need to do today in order to get where you want to go? Regardless of whether or not you want to do it, what do you need to do? And then toward the end of the conversation we talked about what I think is a major issue for many people, which is the difficulty with feeling good after they've done good. Because we know that we develop just about every positive trait in life by experiencing

success, right? If you feel good after doing the thing, you're likely to do more of it. So if you struggle to feel good after doing the good thing, it's going to be really hard to be disciplined because you're just not getting any positive reinforcement. And he really focused in on these meta-motivations, these different things we can identify that can help us feel better about whatever it is that we

are doing. And I named some of them a little bit earlier in this recap. At the very end here, I'd like to mention something that I didn't actually say during the body of the conversation, which gets to how we can have more experiences of success. And I think that the biggest mistake that most people make when it comes to motivation and discipline is they self-sabotage, essentially. They bite off way more than they can chew. They're unable to complete whatever that thing was that

they bit off. And then they throw their hands up and say, you know, see, I can't do it. Or see that felt bad. Or however it is that they want to essentially talk themselves in to never try again. But the reality isn't that they're incapable or that they can't learn or that there's nothing fun to find there. They just didn't select an appropriately sized challenge. And I think a huge part of feeling successful is biting off a small enough chunk that you can feel successful

about it. It's going to be really hard to feel successful about writing a book because you only get to feel successful when you're done writing that book. And as somebody who has written a book or co-authored a book, gotta tell you, it is a long march to that final feeling. So the real question is how we can reframe things inside of our own mind, how we can find what's enjoyable along the way,

how we can break things into smaller pieces. So they are more digestible. And so we get more opportunities to feel that enjoyment at that feeling of success when we accomplish something. Because we have more accomplishments along the way. And then as we're doing this, what can we do

to feel vital and fulfilled and attached to those positive aspirations that we have? Those senses of higher purpose, those things that we really care about, those things that we want and need from life, how can we deepen the connection between the person we are right now and the task we're doing right now and those senses of aspiration that we find extremely naturally motivated.

And I think that if you're able to do all of that, what you'll find is discipline becomes much more closely connected with that feeling of friendship that Rick was talking about at the very beginning of the episode as opposed to the model of punishment that most people carry around about it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear what you thought about it in

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and receive a bunch of bonuses and return. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.