All my clients are singers, and a large number are professional/professionally-minded musicians and artists. For various reasons, the kind of client that works with me tends to be at the higher end of the self-development mindset. This means that whatever they do, they tend to take it seriously and work hard at the things they do, to whatever extent they can.
Discipline vs Motivation
Something that often comes up with clients is the topic of discipline and/or motivation. This is true when there is often a lack of a specific musical outlet, or just when people have been doing the same thing for a long time. While I love my job and every day is different, I am at the same coal-face every day. As such, discipline is essential when it comes to working on my voice and continuing my own development.
To some extent, when external factors aren’t motivating us emotionally, this often highlights the difference between those who are highly disciplined irrespective of external circumstance, and those who are highly motivated primarily because of external circumstance.
Within vs without
There is a subtle but huge distinction between discipline and motivation, as the former comes from within, and the latter comes from without. The more disciplined we are, the more we take action simply because that’s what we’ve programmed our habits to be – we don’t need to summon up the will, because it just gets done.
In contrast, motivation is more about how something external stimulates us to do something. In such cases, we are typically relying on our ability to summon up the will to do something based on whether a challenge/external objective is present (or not). This can be positive (e.g. rising to meet a challenge), or negative, (e.g. feeling less inclined to do something because that outlet isn’t present).
WARNING: Don’t beat yourself up
As valid and as valuable as the above point is, it can very quickly become a point of self-flagellation for many. We tend to think in terms of a binary “you’re disciplined, or you’re not“. This means that when we recognise we’ve lost momentum, we suddenly start beating ourselves up that we’re not good enough. We tell ourselves we’ve just got to try harder, summon up more will-power, etc. This approach is not only negative, but it rarely works.
Discipline is context-dependent
Anders Ericsson – the famous learning expert who conducted the study from which Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hour rule’ was drawn from (in his book ‘Outliers) – discusses in his book ‘Peak’ that discipline is highly contextual.
Take Tiger Woods: tremendous practice and golfing discipline, horrendous self-discipline in life and his private/public affairs.
Or consider exceptionally gifted creatives (e.g. musicians, actors, authors, artists, etc) who practice their art with great focus, but cannot organise themselves to save their life. One aspect of their lives exhibits great discipline, the other does not.
What gives? Are these individuals disciplined, or undisciplined?
The reality is, this isn’t a binary situation, but is highly contextual.
The error in our thinking is that discipline is somehow a “top-trumps” skill that we can measure in an absolute sense. We mistakenly think it’s an innate characteristic that we have for all things, that can be wheeled out to confront any subject. Sadly, this isn’t quite true… or perhaps, this isn’t sad, but is in some ways fortuitous. Consider the following:
Negative Responses
When we adopt the mindset that our discipline is constant and should hold up in all areas, this tends to result in two chief negative responses:
1) We feel like failures – We see how good we are at X, yet we failed to do the same with Y. We then demand an unanswerable question of ourselves:
“Why didn’t you measure up here? Why can’t you pull yourself together? What is WRONG with you?”
With no possible answer to be found, it’s just a negative cycle of self-loathing. While critical feedback is helpful, this particular carousel of negativity doesn’t elicit any positive or helpful change, and generally leads to quite a poor and unproductive internal narrative about ourselves.
2) We excuse our failures – We see how good we are at X, and we use our excellence with X to justify or excuse why we didn’t the same with objective Y:
“Well, I’m actually a pretty good person/talented/organised/responsible/skilled/intelligent/any positive trait you can think of here, so that’s not really representative of who I am, so this is clearly an exception“.
This too is an unhelpful response. In doing this, we start to retrospectively reframe things to avoid it puncturing our precious ego. We spare ourselves the valid criticism that should elicit helpful change and growth.
This kind of self-deception inevitably leads to a lack of self-awareness, and a more fragile sense of self. Moreover, we end up trying to narrate our way out of what reality is trying (and will KEEP trying) to tell us.
When we accept that discipline is highly contextual, we can begin to recognise that every area of our life is in a different stage of development.
In turn, this helps us to realise in some things we are beginners, and in other things we are more developed. We can also see that our level of discipline in any given area is generally correlated to the sustainable habits we have built in these areas.
In any journey of self-development, two things must be accepted and also held in a kind of tension. We need to:
1) Accept failure as an essential part of self-development – not something to beat ourselves up over; and
2) Acknowledge our failure to see it as an opportunity to improve – not something to ignore or try to gloss over to protect our internalised version of ourselves.
Discipline = Building and maintaining sustainable habits
To get better and more disciplined at anything, we need to build and maintain sustainable habits.
When people first join the gym, many often go 6 times a week for a few weeks, then crash and burn, and ultimately quit. Some repeat this cycle many times. It’s usually a combination of physical overtraining, creating impossible expectations of themselves, wearing through the novelty of it pretty quickly, and realising how long the journey is likely to be.
Some routines that are perfectly sustainable for some, are impossible for others; and that’s OK. It’s not important that one person can work on something for hours every single day, but another can only fit in short sessions a little bit each week. It’s not about trying to have a perfectly structured routine every single time, it’s about showing up, if only because you said you would. What matters is consistency and sustainability for each individual.
It’s far better to set what seems like too small a goal, yet you can tick it off every time, than set your sights a little bit higher than is manageable, and then find yourself constantly falling short.
Discipline is heavily correlated with how personally sustainable our habits are.
Work on building habits that are legitimately sustainable for you, rather than what you THINK you should be doing.