MOTIVATION vs. SELF-DISCIPLINE | designing your life

MOTIVATION vs. SELF-DISCIPLINE | designing your life

Hello wonderful humans, welcome back to
The Bliss Bean! So I get a lot of
questions that sound something like “How
do you stay motivated to be so
productive all the time? How do you not
run out of motivation?” and initially when
I wanted to make this video titled
“motivation vs. self-discipline”
I was just basically going to say that you
need to develop your self discipline
because motivation won’t always be there
for you, and that is like the most cliche
message ever, so thank goodness I didn’t
end up making the video that way, because
what happened was, the more I thought
about it the more I realized that I
don’t actually use that much
self-discipline in my day-to-day life.
Sure, there are things that I do that
require self-discipline, like not
checking notifications in the morning,
eating healthily, or waking up early
every morning. But for every single one
of those acts of willpower I can also
tell you how I’ve designed my life to
make that better choice easier to make.
Before I go to bed I set my phone to Do
Not Disturb so that I don’t see any
notifications on my lock screen in the
morning. I have a bunch of favorite
healthy recipes that I love to make and
eat, and I have a morning routine that
actually kind of makes me want to get
out of bed because I know that I can
enjoy some quiet time in the morning
before I get into doing any kind of work.
So I realized that it’s not just
discipline and motivation, it’s not one
or the other, there’s a whole third layer
to this question and that’s what this
video is about, so in this video we’re
going to break down – what is motivation?
what is self-discipline? how do they work?
and how do we design a life that
maximizes our motivation, and minimizes
our need to rely on self-discipline? So
let’s start with motivation. Feeling
motivated is pretty amazing, I’m sure I
don’t have to tell you that. That burst
of energy that you get when you get a
new idea for a new project, or that
feeling after you get a good night’s
sleep and you just feel ready to take on
the world.
Motivation combined with focused action
can create some serious magic, so it’s
definitely worth taking some time to
learn and understand the patterns of
your own motivation. For example, I study
languages in the morning because that’s
when I consistently feel the most motivated
to do it, and I work out in the afternoon
or evening because I do not feel
motivated to do that in the morning at
all. So yeah, a lot of people on the
internet wake up at the crack of dawn to
do morning workouts, but I know that this
works for me, so I choose to do something
different. As you go through life, I
encourage you to have almost the
attitude of a scientist. If you notice
that you never feel motivated to clean
the house Sunday evening, this week maybe
try doing it Saturday morning. Maybe you’ll
just realize you were too tired on
Sunday evenings and now you’ll no longer
have to force yourself to clean. If you
notice you dread going on runs,
maybe it’s the activity you’re not
motivated about, and you can find a
different path to the same end goal,
which is fitness, and maybe try a group
exercise class or something. Motivation,
however, is also a very fleeting thing.
Oftentimes we have no idea why it comes
and goes at certain times and sometimes
even our favorite activities suddenly
become the last thing that we want to do,
so relying solely on motivation to power
you through life is not the best idea.
Once that initial spark of energy fades,
you’ll give up on your good progress and
just end up feeling bad again because
you gave up. So may I introduce you to
our good friend self-discipline.
Self-discipline comes in when you are
lacking motivation. Self-discipline is
not a very fun word because it generally
implies doing not fun things because you
logically know that they are good for
you. I think a better, more empowering way
to think of self-discipline is as a tool
that will help you get to your goals and
get you to your dream life, so try to
really pay attention to how you feel
after practicing self-discipline. For
example, after a workout that maybe you
really didn’t feel like doing, how
amazing does it feel to be riding that
endorphin high afterwards, feeling really
proud of yourself? Maybe even write that
down so that then in the future you can
call on that feeling and think about how
that simple act of self-discipline will
make you feel really good in the near or
far future. Another tip for exercising
self-discipline is to give yourself as
little time to negotiate with yourself
as possible. A great summary of this is
the five-second rule by Mel Robbins. In
her book, The Five-Second Rule, she
explains – “The moment you have an instinct
to act on a goal you must
five-four-three-two-one and physically
move or your brain will stop you.” That’s
what it takes to get what you want.
Not big scary beeps once a year, it takes
small but irritating moves every single
day. But as much as self-discipline can
make you accomplish some pretty amazing
things, we also can’t rely a hundred
percent on self-discipline. I think this
is very similar to decision fatigue – the
deteriorating quality of decisions made
by an individual after a long session of
decision-making. So similarly, with
practicing self-discipline, if you’re
going through your day making good
choices over and over, but really having
to like force yourself to do every
single one of those things, you’re
probably gonna end the day feeling a
little bit drained.
So if motivation doesn’t do the trick
and neither does self-discipline, what do
we do, Beatrice? I’m glad you asked. I
think a good term for it is “life design”.
The key to living a life where you’re
motivated as often as possible and have
to rely on your self-discipline as
rarely as possible, is designing your
surroundings, your environment, your
schedule, etc, so that making the good
decisions is as easy as possible. I think
the best way to demonstrate this is with
a few examples of common goals that
people have, so first off, healthy eating.
So I don’t mind eating healthy because I
absolutely love the food that I eat, and
I don’t talk about that often because I
don’t want people to be like okay we get
it, Beatrice, you like eating
vegetables, wow you’re sooooo healthy *rolls eyes*
But I just think the mindset that
healthy food has to be less delicious is
so harmful. Rather than just accepting
that changing our eating habits means
exercising our self-discipline and
crying over a dry bowl of salad every
day for the rest of our lives, how can we
instead design a life where healthy
eating is not just easy, but, dare I say
it, enjoyable? For one, you can find
recipes that are delicious to you, they
definitely exist. There are healthy
dishes that I don’t enjoy eating,
anything with celery, for example, so I
just don’t eat that and there are a gajillion
other foods that are healthy
that I love. We can also work on changing
our eating preferences
through what I like to call an “initial
investment of self-discipline”. I did the
Whole30 eating challenge back in
February, and yes, it did take some
self-discipline to complete, but I feel
like now I’m reaping the rewards of it,
because I used to be someone who loved
any breakfast that was sweet and
grain-based, but now I actually wake up
every morning craving eggs with
vegetables and avocado on toast.
I couldn’t have toast on the Whole30, but whatever, but the point is
that because I used some self-discipline
initially to get myself to like the food,
I now just feel motivated to eat that
kind of food. Another thing we can do is
remove temptations by not buying
unhealthy treats at the store. When I was
doing the Whole30 the only time
that I ever craved non-compliant food
was if it was literally right in front
of me, so if we didn’t have cookies at
home, I didn’t crave cookies, and so I
didn’t have to exercise the
self-discipline to resist the pull of
cookies, because they just weren’t there.
Another goal people often set is to
exercise more. Instead of dreading every
single time that we put sneakers on, how
can we instead design our life so that
we enjoy exercise more? So first of all,
find workouts that you like. If you don’t
like yoga or weightlifting, try biking, or
hiking, or rock wall climbing, or Zumba, or
kickboxing, or learning kpop dances.
And again, just like with eating, we can
train ourselves to change our workout
preferences. So I used to hate running. I
would dread every single time that we had
to run the mile in gym class, and so I
decided to do the logical thing for
someone who hates running, which is to
train to run a 5k. I did the Couch to 5k
program, on many days it sucked, but I
finished it. It really built up my running
stamina and
eventually I found that once I actually got
to a point where I could do some running
without feeling like I was dying, I kind
of started to see why people enjoyed
running, and so now I’m not like, a “runner”
I wouldn’t say, but I’ve included it as
part of my exercise repertoire, it’s
something that I genuinely enjoy
sometimes… sometimes. Maybe you’re someone
who would benefit from a group exercise
format, so I love kickboxing classes
first of all because there’s so many
people, the music’s loud and there’s a
lot of energy, but also because I’m
motivated to hang in there simply
because I don’t want anyone to see me
leaving, so then that gives me energy to
finish the rest of the workout. And one
last example of applying life design to
a goal is if your goal is to learn
something. First of all, pick something
that you’re genuinely interested in
learning, that’s why I’m currently
studying Korean ,why I read books about
self-improvement and not organic
chemistry. And then create a schedule for
yourself. The thing about school is that
it happens on a fixed schedule and class
starts whether or not you’re feeling
motivated for it,
so once you’re out of school, or maybe
you’re still in school but there’s
something else that you’re passionate
about and you want to learn about, you
have to create that structure for
yourself. So for me that meant two hours
a day, first thing in the morning to
study Korean, three hours a week for
reading, and lately I’ve been wanting to
get better and more thoughtful about my
social media posting, so I also blocked
out two hours, two chunks of time, for
taking a Skillshare course about social
media. Skillshare is an online learning
community with thousands of classes on
everything from illustration and graphic
design to entrepreneurship to marketing,
so when you’re applying life design to
learning, you don’t just want to sit
around waiting for the motivation to
strike, but you also don’t want to force
yourself at the end of a long day when
you’re tired and have no energy to go
learn, because that’ll just make you
dislike learning. So what you can do is
you can design your life by creating a
schedule for learning. That way you make
time for it when you know you’re likely
to be motivated, you make a habit out of
it, and you just don’t have to think
about it as much,
it almost happens automatically because
it’s on your schedule. The nice thing
with Skillshare classes is that it’s
really structured and you can see
exactly how long these lessons are. Each
class is a combination of video lessons
and in-class projects, so then you can
literally go to your calendar and be
like, okay, this class that I took is
called Social Media for the Creative Entrepreneur by Peggy Dean, this is 44
minutes long with ten lessons, so I’ll do
five lessons Tuesday, five lessons
Thursday, and use the remaining hour of
each day to work on the projects and
apply what I learned to my own blogging.
So for example on Tuesday I learned
about using hashtags, and previously on
Instagram I would just copy over pretty
much the same hashtags every time, not
really thinking much about it, but after
this lesson, I really paused to take the
time to find some hashtags that were not
only really relevant to my content but
also very specific with high engagement.
Learning through Skillshare is a really
good way to keep learning and
discovering in a structured way because
obviously we don’t always have the
motivation to learn, but having this
dedicated place to go to where the
entire lesson plan is already laid out
for you means you don’t need as much
motivation to get going.
Skillshare Premium is less than ten
dollars a month with an annual
subscription, and the first 1,000 of my
subscribers to click the link in the
description will get a two month free
trial of premium membership so that you
can explore your creativity. So now that
you’ve seen a few examples of life
design in action, I hope you’re starting
to get some ideas for how you can design
your environment and design your
surroundings to achieve the life and the
goals that you want to achieve. Now I’m
not saying that you can design a perfect
life where everything just happens
automatically, you’ll still need
self-discipline and you’ll still need
motivation, but you’ll be so much better
equipped to handle the natural ebbs and
flows. I hope you enjoyed this video, if
you’re interested in delving deeper into
this and learning more about how to
design a life that makes being
productive easy, I’m currently working on
a course that will be coming out at the end of
the month, so if you’re interested in
just being notified about that once
there’s more information, I have a link
in the description where you can put in
your email. Other than that, thank you for
watching, be sure to like this video and
subscribe to my channel, and I will see
you next week. Bye!