 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. Today, we're gonna dive into the five steps that you need to take in order to be more self-discipline. Now, when we look at self-discipline, the phrase discipline makes us automatically think that discipline is a bad thing, right? If your dog poops on the floor, you discipline your dog. If your child does something they're not supposed to do, you discipline your child. And so there tends to be a bad connotation around discipline. But when you really think about self-discipline, if you've been listening to me long enough, I always say that self-discipline is the highest form of self-love because you never have to have discipline to do things that aren't good for you. You only have to have discipline to do the things that are good for you, right? Like you don't need discipline to eat an entire thing of ice cream. No, you just do it because that's easier. You need discipline to go to the gym though, don't you? That's self-love. You don't need discipline to sleep in. You need discipline to wake up so that you can have your morning routine. That's self-love. And so when we talk about self-discipline, first thing I wanna cover is that becoming more self-discipline is one of the highest forms of loving yourself more. And so I'm gonna talk about how to be more disciplined. The way I think of discipline is I think of it like a muscle. Like with me, I think that I'm quite a disciplined person. I'm not the most disciplined person in the world. But when I was younger, there was no discipline in this body of mine. I was just a lazy tub of ice cream and food and alcohol. That's what I used to be, right? Discipline is a muscle. The more that you work out a muscle, your biceps, and the more weight that you give that workout, the bigger those muscles will get. Same thing works with your discipline. If you're not a disciplined person today, you're not born with discipline. It is something that you become better at. So discipline is a muscle, discipline is a habit. How can you become more disciplined? Because nobody is born disciplined. For me, like I said, I used to be extremely undisciplined and I developed it over years. So you don't need to be disciplined at the easy things in life. You need to be disciplined on the hard things, the things that should be done. And discipline is not about being perfect. When you think about discipline, it's not about being the most perfect version of yourself. It's like James Clear always says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you want to become. So if you start thinking that way, you realize that in order to win an election, you don't need 100% of the votes, you just need the majority of them. So as long as the majority of your actions are heading in the right direction, you're gonna be much better than if they're heading in the wrong direction. And a really good question to ask yourself before I give you these five tips, whenever you're doing something, you've got to ask yourself this question, is what I'm doing right now, getting myself closer or further away from my goals? Is what I'm doing right now, getting myself the actions that I'm taking in this very moment, is it getting me closer to or further away from my goals? Is getting you closer to your goals continue on that action? If it's getting you further away from your goals, stop and start moving towards the things that will help you get closer to your goals. So it's about winning more than it's about losing, not about being perfect. Because one thing that I know is when somebody that wants to be perfect messes up in some sort of way, a lot of times they end up just crashing the plane because then they start guilty and they start creating shame around it and you should have done this. No, no, no, you're gonna fuck up, it's okay. But when you do use that as a lesson to improve. So let's dive into it. The first tip, the five tips to be more self-discipline is try to challenge yourself to finish everything that you can. Like everything, every little tiny thing that you can, when you start something, finish it. Because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And that goes for the big things in your life, but also goes for the small things in your life. Because what you realize as you get older, as I've been in this self-development game for 17 years, is I've come to realize that it's not really the big things in life that changed my life, it's the little tiny things done consistently, every single day. And so if I can tell myself, the way I do one thing is the way I do everything and to try to get those little things done, usually I'm gonna end up being better. So like an example would be, let's say that you cook some dinner. Well, screw it, let's say you cook down, say you go for something real easy. Say you wake up in the morning and you make yourself some oatmeal. You put the oatmeal inside of a bowl, you put some water in it, you throw it inside the microwave, it's on for, I don't know, 90 seconds. You eat that and you could immediately go and you could take that bowl of oatmeal and you go, man, that bowl, these oats, they're sticking on the inside of that bowl. Now you know what I'll do, I'll put it inside of the sink and I'll put the water in because I've gotta soak it. I've gotta soak it to get that shit off the side, right? You could do that. Or if you want to try to finish every single thing that you do and ingrain that into being the type of person that follows through, what's the best thing to do? Take an extra 15 seconds. Get the scrubber, scrub off the oats and put that thing, dry it off and put it back where you found it. That's the way to finish everything. It might take an extra 15 seconds but you're starting to develop the discipline of finishing everything that you start. You know, let's say that you're sleeping. You wake up and maybe your spouse is already out of bed or maybe you sleep alone. You could wake up and you could just immediately go on about your day but you want to finish the act of sleeping. So what do you do? You make your bed. Just like you finish the act of eating, you wash the dish, you dry the dish off, you put it away. When you finish the act of sleeping, you make the bed. It's these little teeny tiny things. When you can start to train yourself to do the little teeny tiny things every single time it makes it easier to start to finish all of the big things that you do. So develop this mindset of whatever I start, I'm going to finish. Don't allow yourself to stop early because stopping early is also a habit too. You want to develop the habit of following through on everything that you do. So that's the first thing. First thing is to challenge yourself to finish everything. The second thing is something that I find a lot of people are really, really bad at. Planning ahead. Some form of time management. Thinking ahead of what's going on. So let's say that you're on this fitness journey, right? You want to lose some weight or you want to gain some muscle or you want to get healthier, whatever it is. You could walk into the gym and go, well, what's my workout going to be today? Well, I'm going to go from this thing to this thing and I'm going to go from this. And you just kind of flow with it. You can flow with it if you want or you can know when you walk into the gym exactly what your workout's going to be for the day. Oh, it's buys and tries today. Oh, it's back in chess today. And you could say to yourself, these are the exact movements that I'm going to be doing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'm taking Thursday off, Friday, Saturday. These are my movements that I'm doing. This is exactly what I'm going to do. I'm just taking Sunday off as well. It makes it easier to go in and execute when you've planned ahead. Now let's say you're trying to build muscle. You're trying to get some muscle on that scrawny little body of yours, right? Okay, I'm going to need extra calories. I'm going to need extra protein. You could walk into the kitchen and just try to figure out what you're going to be eating or you could plan ahead and say, I need this amount of protein. I need this amount of calories over this many meals. This is what I'm going to eat in the morning. This is what I'm going to eat at lunch and this is what I'm going to eat in the evening. And you can, if you want to, just wing it. But if you really want to get disciplined and help yourself in execution, plan ahead. And so that's the next tip, is to make sure that you plan ahead in as many things as you can. Tip number three is to design your environment. One of the best ways to get really good at executing and to be more self-disciplined is to design your environment to make execution of whatever it is you need to do easier. So let's say, for instance, that you are trying to build muscle like we're talking about. Why don't you design your environment to remove any temptation that you might have around something? Or if you're trying to lose weight, why don't you take out everything that has too much sugar? Or if you're trying to get off of alcohol and to not drink for 30 days, why don't you hide every alcohol bottle so that you don't see it? You don't have to throw it all away. I don't care if you throw it all away, but if you hide it out of sight, out of mind, you're usually not going to think about it as well. And so you start to think, if I'm gonna be more disciplined as a person, how can I make it easier on myself? Like I could make it harder on myself, or I could just make it easier. Okay, I'm not gonna drink alcohol for 30 days because I've never done that before and that's something I wanna do. Remove all the alcohol from sight. And you're just not gonna think about as much. If you have friends that like to go out and party, tell them the next 30 days you can't go out and party. Whatever you can do to start to be more intentional in design your external environment to do so. Let's say you wanna get more disciplined and you don't wanna read, or you wanna read more and not watch as much TV. Really simple way to design your environment. Take your TV off the wall for 30 days, put it inside of a different room or put it inside of a closet and on your coffee table, put out books. That alone is designing an environment that used to be made to watch TV inside of your living room to now you have an environment that is designed to reading. And so it just makes it easier to get into the habit to take the right actions when you design your environment correctly. So when you look at how you wanna be more self-discipline ask yourself this question. How can I design my environment to make taking that action easier on myself? Simple, that's number three. Number four, this is a tip that one of my bosses a few years ago, eight, nine years ago gave me and she used to have it on her wall and it said progress, not perfection and done is better than perfect. When you mess up, make adjustments, don't shame yourself, don't make yourself feel guilty. When you mess up and something didn't go exactly the way that you wanted it to, maybe you tried not to drink alcohol and somehow alcohol slipped into your face, right? Like that's just happened. Oops, I just opened my mouth and alcohol fell in, okay? You could, you know, beat yourself up and hate yourself and shame yourself. You could do all of those things or maybe you wanted to not eat sugar and you had a moment of weakness and you ate sugar. Instead of when you mess up, just beating yourself up, make small adjustments. Okay, let me take a step back. I had a moment of weakness, I fucked up. What can I do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Because what most people do is they just, we shame ourselves, we guilt ourselves, I should have done better, what did I do wrong? I screwed that up, I always screw this up. Man, I'm never gonna be able to create the life that I wanted, the body I wanted, the mindset I wanted, the business that I want and we start to beat ourselves up. Instead of beating ourselves up, what we do, take a step back and make adjustments. Just take a step back, dude, chill out. Stop being such an asshole to yourself. And we go, okay, I messed up. I have been doing really good. It's about progress, not perfection. Let's say that your goal is to work out every day for the next 30 days. And on day 13, you didn't plan accordingly. You got 12 days in, you get all 12 days. Day 13, you screw up. What happens only? People get pissed off themselves, they shame themselves, damn it, I always do this. And they focus on the one time they screwed up versus the 12 days in a row where they actually had progress. It's about progress, not perfection. Remind yourself of how well you've been doing. You see your moment of weakness. You see where you screwed up. Make adjustments so that you can make sure that you try to get around that again. So you take a step back. You see what happened. You stop judging yourself and you make a plan to get it done. So that's number four. Focus on progress, not perfection. And number five, reward yourself, right? If your goal is to try to do incredible with your health over the next 30 days, give yourself a cheat meal every once in a while. It's a lot easier to go. If you're like, I'm gonna eat really healthy for 30 days. If at one day you have, if you know at day 15, okay, I'm gonna go on this 30 day journey. On day 15, I'm gonna get one cheat meal. And that one cheat meal is gonna be, I don't know, it's gonna be a big ass pizza and it's gonna be two margaritas, whatever it is, right? Then what happens is day one through 14, I'm like, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined because I'm gonna have a reward at day 15. Day 15, we go balls to the wall, margaritas and pizzas and all of that fun stuff so that it's so much that I'm like, you know what? I need another two weeks off. And then over those 30 days, I had one crazy meal where I had a whole bunch of fun and I got everything that I wanted, but I got my fill. Now I can go for another 14 days. And so how can you develop a system of actually rewarding yourself? You know, when I used to do another example completely different, when I used to do 100 sales phone calls, right? We would do 100 sales phone calls. One of my managers taught me how to do this and he would say, he was like, hey, what's your favorite candy? I was like, Skittles. He's like, okay, I want you to buy a bag of Skittles, I want you to bring him to the office tomorrow. I'm like, okay, cool. He goes, okay, what I want you to do is I want you to put three Skittles out in front of you, another three Skittles out in front of you, another, another, another, another, another. And every single time that you get 10 phone calls done, give yourself three Skittles. And you get another 10 phone calls done, give yourself three Skittles. And I started doing this over and over and over again and it drove me to take the action that I needed to take because I wanted the Skittles. And I got the 10 phone calls done and I ate three Skittles. Oh my God, that was so good. Okay, I can't skip ahead. Let me go ahead and get another 10 done. And it was like breadcrumbs that kind of made me keep going on my way to success. And so can you develop a system of actually starting to reward yourself for taking the action that you need to in order to create the life that you want to? Whatever it might be, whether it's the Skittles, every 10 phone calls, or whether it's the cheat meal once a week, or whatever it is that kind of is the rewarding so that you can go, dammit, you know what I'm doing really good? Okay, let me keep on this path. And you use this. It's actually called the dopamine reward system. Your brain actually works better when you have a dopamine reward system. They've actually found that people will actually be more motivated to work out tomorrow. If at the end of the workout today, they have a tiny piece of chocolate, not an entire bar of chocolate, but a tiny piece of chocolate. It seems counterproductive to be able to have chocolate right after a workout, but that little bit of chocolate is a dopamine reward system for your brain, which makes your brain more likely to want to work out tomorrow. So how can you develop a reward system around everything that you do? So those are the five things that I got for you to be more self-disciplined. Number one, challenge yourself to finish everything. Number two, plan ahead. Number three, design your environment. Number four, focus on progress, not perfection. Number five, make sure to reward yourself. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories and tag me at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you love this podcast, you'll also love my YouTube. Go to YouTube and type in Rob Dial, R-O-B-D-I-A-L to check out some of the videos that we've been putting up there to help you improve yourself. And I'm gonna leave it the same way, I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.