Discipline as Learning

"The word discipline means to learn, not to conform, not to suppress, not to imitate, but to learn" - Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Self Discipline Trap

Discipline is often seen as a struggle—a battle against our own desires. Social media amplifies this, showcasing extreme routines, strict diets, waking up earlier, and fitness as a form of hardship, suggesting that success requires rigid conformity and austerity against oneself.

But if you frequently fall behind on a training schedule, the answer isn’t about ‘beating yourself into shape.’ It’s about learning how to take consistent action to get what you really want.

Long-term change doesn’t come from suppressing your behavioural faults with discipline. Instead, it comes from understanding what causes them and creating systems to address them. This process—of observation, learning, and intentional design—becomes the discipline itself.

Creating Your Own Discipline Through Systems

Building your own discipline begins with creating systems. A system is a set of repeatable actions or processes designed to achieve an outcome. Unlike goals, which focus on results, systems focus on the daily actions that make those results possible. They reduce friction and decision fatigue, making consistent action easier without relying on willpower.

You already have systems running in your life—some work, and some don’t. In the case of inconsistent training, the problem isn’t a lack of systems, but that the systems you have built around training are not working to your advantage.

The most common areas that affect training frequency are:

• Tiredness from lack of sleep

• Inadequate nutrition

• Running out of time to train

• High mental stress
  

Designing Your Discipline

• Sleep

  • Create an alarm 40-60 minutes before bed to signal the start of a ‘twilight zone’ phase.

  • Put your phone on airplane mode, dim the lights, and turn off the TV.

  • Use this time to transition out of the day: lay out your gym clothes, brush your teeth, and do light foam rolling or slow tempo breathing.

• Nutrition

  • Set reminders for grocery shopping at consistent times each week.

  • When cooking dinner, make double portions and store the extra for tomorrow’s lunch.

  • Keep healthy snacks (e.g., mixed nuts, fruit, Greek yogurt) nearby and stash protein bars in your cupboard or bag for travel.

• Running Out of Time to Train

  • Schedule workouts like appointments, with reminders set for when you need to leave the house.

  • Choose the easiest time of day or week for you to train consistently.

  • Start with a low-frequency training split and scale up as your routine becomes more established. 

    
    

• Mental Stress

  • Tackle the biggest source of stress head-on, with the smallest action you can take right now.

  • Reduce background stress by listing small tasks (e.g., fixing the doorhandle, sending that email) and knocking them out one by one.

  • Schedule notifications to appear or disappear at key times, disable unnecessary ones altogether, and use social media blocking apps to keep certain times of day distraction-free. https://freedom.to/dashboard
    

Not to Conform, But to Learn

The goal here is not give you a prescriptive list of tasks to follow, but to open the idea that becoming more disciplined should be focused on building better systems to make it hard to fail.There is an undeniable relationship between training, nutrition, stress and sleep. The game, which goes on forever, is to find ways of connecting these areas, as they become one discipline, yours to create, flex and adapt as life goes on. 

Open Questions

1. If you had to pick one area that was impacting everything else, what would it be?

   
   

2. Right now, what small change can you make by creating a better system for this area you want to change?