How to Stop Making Excuses and Build Real Discipline (Realistically)

Most people think that discipline is about being tough or having the crazy ability to suffer more than everybody else. But that is not discipline. That is suffering for the sake of suffering, when it's actually not necessary to achieve your goals. I want to break down what discipline actually is, and spoiler alert, it is not about willpower and it's not about grit. Here's the thing. Discipline is not in your DNA. You're not born with it. It is in your design. It's about making success easier than failure by designing your environment to do the heavy lifting for you. Discipline is not a personality trait. It's a system. When I was 19, I was 100 pounds overweight, I was failing out of school, I didn't have the friends that I wanted, I didn't have the body I wanted, and I was just a f***ing mess. And I thought to myself, oh, I'm just not a disciplined person. But then here's the thing. Once I installed systems into my environment to make it easier to lose weight than to stay overweight, to make it easier to have the right friends than to have the wrong friends, and to make it easier to work hard than to be lazy, suddenly I looked really disciplined. For example, I took out all the junk food in my house, and if I wanted junk food, I would have to literally walk to the store because I didn't have a car. And that's when I realized that being disciplined sucks in the moment, but not being disciplined sucks later and for the rest of your life. Most people aren't disciplined simply because they don't put systems into place, and they don't understand how it works. And then they think that they're lazy. You're not lazy. You're just not doing the things that you need to make it easier to be disciplined than not. And so if you're wondering, okay, gosh, I think you're right, but I don't have the systems in place. Where do I begin? The first thing that you want to do is block a time on your calendar where you can actually do research to put the systems in place. Even just the system of writing things down to prompt yourself to take action is actually a really great system to have. The question that you should ask yourself right now is what friction exists in my current environment that is making it harder to be disciplined than to be lazy? That's the first thing I think about. What things around me? Is it the food in my pantry? Is it the friends that I have? What do I need to extract from my environment to make discipline easier? The second thing that I want you to ask yourself, willpower and motivation are like batteries. So they're going to constantly deplete because here's the thing. Structure is where you derive power from and discipline is like the power grid. So if you rely on motivation or feeling motivated, you, my friend have already lost. Most days when I wake up, I don't feel motivated to do what I've got to do that day, but I have systems in place that make it easier to do those things than hard. For example, when I first started dieting, I told myself, I'm just going to white knuckle it. Don't eat anything bad. Don't eat this. Don't eat that. Don't eat out. Don't eat dessert. Don't eat whatever. I would go to dinners with food everywhere and it would be so hard to resist. I felt like all day I was resisting something which doesn't feel good. And I would always cave because I was relying on motivation. I was relying on willpower. Whether it's three o'clock or six o'clock or the end of the day or the end of the night, it would run out and then I would end up eating something I don't want to eat. And that's because if your day relies on feeling motivated, if your goals rely on feeling motivated, then you're already behind because motivation is unreliable. It is a source that depletes. It is finite and it's not something you can control. So if you don't have structure and you don't have systems, then you quickly burn through your motivation and you don't ever get to achieve your goals because you don't have the real structure it requires to achieve one. So what I realized is that what you have to have to figure out in order to use this structure is what to do instead. Instead of relying on motivation, you create structure. So what does that look like? If I want to lose weight and I'm going out to dinner, I'm going to look at the menus for the dinner ahead of time. That's one option I could have, right? I could look at the menus for the place I'm going to and then I could pick ahead of time. When I get there, I don't have to think. I don't have to decide what I'm going to eat. I just get to eat what I already decided upon. The second thing I could do is I could say, I'm going to build a system where I eat before I go to dinner with people. So I'm going to eat dinner at my house with the food that I know is healthy for me. It helps me achieve my goals. Then I'm going to go to dinner and I'm going to get a tea. Or if it's the gym, right? And you're just trying to figure out how to work out, I'm going to follow an online gym workout template. And I'm going to always have an alternate for if I've got to travel and I've got a travel friendly one. And so my point is this, it's not that we want to stop doing the behaviors that are preventing us from reaching our goals. It's that we want to figure out an alternative. We want to say, what can I do instead? Instead of eating the chips, what if I ordered tea? Instead of ordering the fatty hamburger at the burger bar we're going to, what if I have a protein shake before I go? The biggest way that I've been able to hack my way into having a disciplined life is I just find alternatives. A huge alternative I have is that, for example, in my house, I had this cabinet where I always stored candy. And whenever I go to diet, I actually put gum and mints where the candy is. So every time I go to reach for the candy, there's a piece of gum there. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm trying to lose weight. And then I just take a piece of gum, I chew the gum. And then eventually I forget about the fact that I even wanted the candy. It's not that I try not to do something. It's that I'm replacing it with a new behavior. And that is a system. Another system that a lot of people have is when they wake up, maybe they eat a really bad breakfast. Maybe you go to Starbucks, you get a really heavy coffee or something. Okay, well, a system you could have is, you know what I'm going to do when I wake up? The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to walk for 30 minutes. Instead of going to Starbucks and getting this drink that has 450 calories in it, because they all do, not only am I replacing it with a behavior that's going to help me, but replacing it with behavior that's positive, not even just neutral to my goals. And so a question to ask yourself is, what is one decision that I can make today that will eliminate 10 decisions for tomorrow? When I think about this, I think about alternatives. We want to pick our alternatives ahead of time. What am I going to do instead of get my Starbucks tomorrow morning? What am I going to do instead of laying on the couch and being lazy tomorrow night? What am I going to do instead of eating the hamburger when I go out with my friends? What am I going to do instead of drinking 10 beers at that party? It's not about, oh my God, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And just focusing on not doing it. It's about focusing on what you're going to do instead. And if you make those decisions ahead of time, then all you've got to do is follow the system. The biggest lie that people tell themselves is that discipline should feel hard. Here's the thing. If it's too hard to repeat, it's not discipline. It's your ego. It's willpower. Because if discipline doesn't feel easy, then you're thinking about it wrong. For example, when I first started going to the gym, I went to the most advanced classes thinking I was going to get results really fast. So I remember I went to, it was called Body Pump. Body Pump was where you would do like 30 reps of one exercise four times. And so if you picked an even moderate weight, you're going to be fried from that. And I remember I went to Body Pump three days in a row. And then I went home and I went to go upstairs to my room and I collapsed trying to walk up the stairs because my legs were so sore that I couldn't even, they just, they just gave out. And I was like, oh my God. And I remember the moment I crawled up the stairs. And so I hated it. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine at the gym and I told her this and I was like, I'm not going to go back to that class. It's just like too hard for me. And she said, Layla, your muscles need time to adapt. If it's constantly painful and you're constantly in pain, you're never going to stick with it. And so what I realized is that if something feels too hard or too punishing, or it's too advanced too soon, you're going to associate it with negativity and you'll avoid it. You're essentially punishing yourself. And then when we punish ourselves, that means we also avoid the thing that could potentially lead to punishment. So if every time I work out, I hurt really bad after, I'm going to eventually avoid working out because I know what comes after working out is feeling really bad and sore after. And so here's the thing. You're not failing at discipline. You're just approaching it from a standpoint of having too big of an ego, too high of standards, too early on, or you're approaching it from a place of anxiety rather than ease or consistency. And so what do we want to do instead? We want to lower the bar and stack easy wins. We want to make our tasks so achievable that we feel good after we've done them. And then what happens is if we do something, we feel good after we do it. Then we want to do it again, because we like doing things that feel good. This is looking at yourself as a scientist versus being the judge of your life. You want to be a scientist of your own behavior and the way that you act rather than being a judge who's just trying to punish yourself all day. And if you do this, you're going to build positive momentum and then you will create consistency because we tend to do things that we like doing and we tend to try and avoid things that we don't like doing. And so question for you to ask yourself is what habits or routines that you've been putting in place that you haven't been sticking with feel punishing and that pain is making you avoid them? Think about it. Is it something at work? Is it something with your relationship? Is it something with yourself? Is it something with food? Whatever it might be, if you constantly do something and then feel pain because of it, you are likely not going to stick with it in the long run. So what this means is that real discipline is not about stopping a bad habit. It's about creating a realistic and better alternative. So if you want to build real discipline, this is a common misconception that you need to avoid at all costs. So I'll give you an example that's pretty morbid, but it always really resonated with me, which was my mother was an alcoholic when I grew up and she quit drinking by smoking. Sounds crazy, right? But she went from drinking to smoking, to vaping, to chewing gum, to eventually nothing. And so she didn't go from zero to perfect. She continued to replace her bad habits with increasingly better alternatives. I know it sounds nuts, but too often people think that discipline means stopping a behavior immediately, but that almost always fails. So you don't need to be perfect right away. You just need to take a step towards the next best alternative. What you want to do is identify a realistic, better, not perfect alternative to your habit. So instead of drinking vodka, maybe you drink a seltzer. Instead of drinking a seltzer, maybe you have a craft beer. Instead of a craft beer, maybe you're going to have a non-alcoholic beer. Maybe then instead of a non-alcoholic beer, then you're going to have a Diet Coke. And then after Diet Coke, you're going to say, I'm going to have a sparkling water. And then from a sparkling water, you can stick with that or go to a water. You see how it goes. It's like you take tiny little steps. You don't just make big swing all at once. This can be done with food as well. Say you eat dessert every night. You're like, I eat a sundae every night. It's like, or I'm going to go from having a sundae every night to nothing. No, let's go from having a sundae with caramel, with toppings, with hot fudge, to like, let's have a sundae with no hot fudge. Then two days later, let's have a sundae with no brownie bites. Then two days later, let's have a sundae with half the ice cream. And you just continue to gradually swap out alternatives in stages. And so small steps in the right direction turn into big changes over time. It's just that most people are so impatient with themselves. They don't allow themselves to get there and they stay stuck in this cycle of going big change and then back out. Big change again, back out. So here's the deal. If you want true freedom, you have to stop relying on how you feel each day. Freedom comes from following a plan, not your feelings. A good example of this is that every year I map out a 12 month plan for my business. And now I do this because what it means is that I take some time, maybe it's a week, it's two weeks, it's five days. And I put all of my effort into figuring out what's the plan going to look like to get me to my goal 12 months from now. Now, why do I do this? I do this because I'm trying to get all the hard thinking done ahead of time so that every day when I step into my business, I just get to execute. I don't have to keep thinking. I don't have decision fatigue. I'm not constantly in this tear of like, what should I do? What do I need to do to grow my business? I just know. And I've been able to achieve that level of freedom through structure because without structure, I'm going to constantly debate with myself and I'm going to be exhausted because I'm going to be in this cycle of like decision execution, decision execution. And that decision fatigue is going to prevent any kind of meaningful progress because I'm going to be stuck in the cycle of questioning what I'm doing. But if I do all the thinking ahead of time and then I just get to execute, I don't think about it. I just say, you know what? I'm going to play this out. I'm going to see if I make progress. Another example of this is that every Sunday I plan my entire next week. Why do I do that? It is another way of doing this on a micro level, which is I don't want to wake up every day and be like, what am I doing today? I think it's the biggest waste of my time and energy. And there's nothing I hate more than not knowing what I'm going to be doing for the day. Now, it doesn't have to be perfect. It's something that you can do. You can test it out for a week and you'll see how much more freedom you feel when just on a daily basis, you're not arguing with yourself. And so the question that you can ask yourself is how much energy am I losing by fighting with myself on a daily basis? All in all, discipline isn't sexy. It is boring. And boring is what scales. Boring is what works. If your routine is exciting, you're probably doing it wrong. Because by the nature of routine, if it's exciting, it means you don't do it all the time, which means it's not a routine. It's funny because people say all the time, I would love to see a day in your life, Layla. And I'm like, well, that's boring as f**k because my life is a series of systems strung together every day. And so it means like I have a system for working out. I have a system for my marriage. I have a system for my business. I have a system for my friendships. I have a system for my family. Like I have a system for every aspect of my life. But here's the thing. Those systems, those are discipline and they're real. Are they boring? For sure. They look boring from the outside, but they get the results that I'm looking for in my life. And a lot of the times, most people are just chasing novelty. They want a new workout. They want a new mastermind, a new business, a new meetup, but they don't actually get any results. They just feel like they're making progress because they get to go to from zero to one a million times. I'd rather go from one to 10. And so the reality is if your routine is too exciting, you're probably not actually making progress. And so you want to embrace boring routines. Doing simple things consistently is what actually leads to massive success. I have literally never had a time where I have woken up on a single day and thought, I want to do every single thing today. Seriously, I haven't. In a long, long time, probably 15 years. Because most days I wake up, I at least don't want to do one thing. I don't want to do the workout. I don't want to talk to the person. I don't want to have the hard conversation. I don't want to do the interview. I don't want to do eight meetings. I don't want to run a board meeting. I don't want to look at these financials. I don't want to answer these emails. I don't want to talk to anybody. But I also know that feelings are fleeting and I want the long term satisfaction of knowing that I can stick with something. Knowing I have control over myself and knowing that I've mastered something. And what I've seen is that when you start doing it, it adds up and then you start to feel better about yourself and better than you've ever felt. Because you're like, I trust myself. I trust myself to stick with the plan. I trust myself to have my own back. Discipline is not just going to bring you closer to your goals. It's going to bring you closer to the person that you want to be. And at the end of the day, I care more about how I feel about myself when I'm by myself than I do about the fleeting moments I had during the day where maybe I wasn't super into something. Maybe I didn't want to do it for five seconds. But that always goes away. Building discipline is only half the battle. But if this felt valuable, you can go ahead and watch my video on building micro habits that could change your life.