CHAPTER 6

DISCIPLINE AND STRUCTURE: MORE DOABLE THAN YOU THINK

A FRIEND OF MINE NAMED DALE lost about fifty pounds and kept it off for a year. After I congratulated him on his accomplishment, I said, “I work with people all the time who can’t accomplish this sort of thing. So what’s your secret sauce?”

“Discipline,” he replied.

I waited for more, then said, “That’s it?”

“Yes. I chose discipline.”

I hear this a lot from high-performing individuals, and it is always a red flag of interest for me. “That’s great,” I said. “How did you choose discipline?”

“Well,” Dale said, “I was sick of the weight. Sick of feeling crummy, of my clothes not fitting, of being worried about my health. And Marie [his wife] was all over me to lose the weight.”

“Sounds like lots of motivation,” I said. “So when you chose discipline, did you just wake up the next day and choose the right foods and start working out?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “I had no idea what a good regimen would be. I went to see a nutritionist about the food, and I got a gym membership with a trainer. They gave me information and helped me with a plan.”

I nodded. “And did you talk to anyone supportive about this, or just do it all on your own?”

“Sure, I talked to people,” Dale said. “I asked my men’s group to call me and check in on my progress, and Marie helped me stay on track.”

“Okay,” I said. “Ever fall off the wagon? Get discouraged, get tired of it, bring home stress from work, and go out and eat a bunch of pizzas?”

“Sure, at first. It was pretty hard in the first few months, a lot of old habits to quit. My friend and my wife would talk me off the ledge, help me find the triggers, let me know they didn’t think I was a loser, and help me get back on the wagon. Eventually the new behaviors became habits, and I didn’t need the support as often anymore.”

“Sounds like you did everything right,” I said. “Congratulations again. But, Dale, you didn’t ‘choose discipline.’ ”

“I did choose discipline,” he said. “I got up early and went to the gym and laid off the snacks. That’s discipline.”

“No, you underwent a process of discipline, and then you became a disciplined person. It wasn’t some simple ‘just do it’ choice. It was a set of experiences you underwent that gave you these new habits.”

He didn’t look as though he got my point, so I used a metaphor: “When your son Stevie was six, how long could he last doing his homework? He’s sitting at the kitchen table doing addition and subtraction. Could he go an hour at a stretch?”

“Are you kidding?” Dale replied. “At that age, Stevie couldn’t go ten minutes, and if we went longer, he would get squirrelly or he’d have a meltdown.”

“Right,” I said. “My kids were the same way. Now that Stevie is in grad school, how long can he study?”

“He did an all-nighter last week. Hours and hours.”

“Impressive,” I said. “So why didn’t you tell him at six years old to ‘choose discipline’? ‘Just choose several hours at the kitchen table, little Stevie.’ Wouldn’t that have saved you and Marie a lot of time?”

“Well,” Dale sighed, “he couldn’t have done it.”

“It wasn’t a choice?”

“No. It wasn’t a choice he could make. There is no way he could have chosen that. He was just six years old.”

“Okay,” I said, “so what happened to get Stevie from ten minutes at age six to hours and hours at age twenty-four?”

“Marie and I did a lot of things,” Dale answered. “We used egg timers, we supervised, we encouraged him, we found out what his range was, the teachers helped us, we increased it by a bit every month, we gave him consequences and rewards.”

And then the lights came on.

“And . . . that is what I did to lose the weight, too,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “You received discipline in a process, and it became part of you. You didn’t ‘choose discipline.’ You chose a path that disciplined you.”

Dale nodded his head. “I get it,” he replied. “Stevie and I got the help and the discipline came.”

Dale did get it. He was doing a lot of right things with himself, just as he’d done a lot of right things with Stevie. But the process didn’t get the credit.

You Need Discipline in Just About Everything Important

If you want to succeed in life, career, relationships, or health, you will need discipline. There really is no option. The habit of discipline will help you create great habits, day after day and year after year. Discipline creates a great company out of a small garage, an intimate, long-term marriage out of a glance at a party, a movie that fascinates millions out of an idea shared over dinner, a church that sends God’s love to other continents out of a neighborhood Bible study. Discipline turns a first-grade exposure to intriguing new subject matter into a graduate degree.

Discipline is goal oriented. It harnesses your energy so that you don’t get distracted, so that you become productive. When you combine discipline with innovation and the right values, you can accomplish what amount to miracles in your life and for the world.

Disciplined people don’t have to be rigid, anal-retentive types, or authoritarian control freaks. (And when they are, it usually means that something else is going wrong.) Some of the most enjoyable people in my life have strong discipline. They really can be nice, relaxed, fun people. They just do the right things on a regular basis, over and over again — whether they feel like it or not. That’s how they come out winners.

Disciplined people are patient. They know that their behaviors are part of a process on the way to an important goal. If your goal is just to do whatever you wanted to do, and to do it right now, you would not need discipline. But losing lots of weight, having great relationships, finding your career niche, and being successful all take time, and they involve delaying gratification repeatedly over the course of that time.

Many people get so frustrated about themselves that they don’t develop the discipline to save money, lose weight, have a regular devotional time, learn a language, train for a new career, or learn new relational skills. They give up too quickly, and then have an even harder time believing that they are capable of accomplishing great things.

Entitlement: The Anti-Discipline

Many of our failures in discipline have their roots in the current entitlement culture that surrounds us. Consider two common entitlement mantras regarding discipline, and two Hard Way mantras that counteract them. (You’ll find frequent references throughout the book to entitlement mantras and Hard Way mantras. Pay special attention to those comparisons — they provide a quick and concise statement of the way the harmful attitudes of entitlement differ from the healthier attitudes of the Hard Way.)

The first entitlement mantra declares: I shouldn’t have to be a disciplined person. I’m above all that; I don’t need it. Individuals who live by this mantra don’t see value in hard work, incremental behavioral changes, and patience. They believe they can be happy without being disciplined. Maybe they’re good with people and think their relational skills are enough to get them through life. Or perhaps they think their intelligence will do the trick. Or they feel so unmotivated to accomplish anything that the effort and self-denial of discipline don’t seem worth it.

The Hard Way mantra takes exactly the opposite tack. It says: Discipline will help me achieve what matters. It is the engine that drives my dreams, my vision, and my goals. This mantra reminds us that some structure — schedules, accountability, measureable goals, rules — is necessary if you’re going to accomplish what you hope to accomplish. Success comes to those who work at it, and whose work is not just determined but disciplined.

The second entitlement mantra is even less healthy than the first: If I have to be disciplined, then I should be able to be disciplined right now. Dale started out that way. He put way too much faith in his ability to choose the right thing. Until we talked about Stevie, he thought all you had to do was decide to be disciplined.

The Hard Way mantra looks different: Discipline requires an external support structure, over time. Dale was smart enough to not try to go it on his own; he relied on his wife and his men’s group to cheer him on and keep him honest. Those who care enough about their goals to be determined to succeed in their discipline will likewise build a support structure of their own.

Although these two entitlement attitudes have become popular in our culture, following them leads to failure, regret, and heartbreak. In this chapter, I’ll present the underlying nature of discipline (it’s not what you think!) and explain how you can make it part of your life forever.

The OS That Drives the Discipline App

As we saw in Dale’s story, the skill of discipline is based on a process of information and support that works over time. This process creates and develops a critical character ability that psychologists call internal structure. Internal structure is the capacity to focus your energy over time. It is the steady framework of your mind. Internal structure is a combination of your capacities to focus, persevere, and delay gratification toward a goal. Just as your skeleton is the structure of your body, protecting and strengthening your organs, so internal structure protects and strengthens your goals and makes possible your very survival.

When you get distracted or find yourself under stress, bored, or discouraged, internal structure keeps you on track and on target. Individuals who enjoy solid internal structure can discipline themselves at an effective level. They set and keep goals, have great long-term habits, and get life done. Those without good internal structure have difficulty holding steady for what they desire over time.

Discipline is the app, and internal structure is the operating system that drives the app. Discipline rests on, and is driven by, internal structure. Internal structure also supports other important apps, such as patience, delay of gratification, frustration tolerance, and goal-oriented behavior. If the structure doesn’t exist, the app will never work. All the “I’ve got to be strong” statements, all the New Year’s resolutions, and all the “I am choosing discipline” mantras will break down and fail you — if you lack a strong internal structure.

I love time management information. I read the books and attend the seminars. There’s always something helpful for me and my clients, such as David Allen’s two-minute rule: “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.”⁶ That simple principle changed my life in getting my day organized.

But all the time-management systems in the world won’t make you a disciplined, effective person if you lack internal structure. That’s one reason people get discouraged with such systems. They get discouraged either with themselves, because they conclude that they aren’t really serious about success, or with the management system, because they feel that the system somehow failed them. Most likely, neither is true. These individuals simply didn’t have a strong enough “skeleton” to consistently follow through on the principles and tips.

This also explains why a lot of weight-loss and self-help programs don’t work for many people. The programs fail because they are often based on the “discipline is a choice” idea. Those who have lots of internal structure may well succeed in those programs, despite their flaws. But many people completely lack it, so for them, the rah-rah approach fails over time.

How Internal Structure Grows

So how do you develop internal structure?

You do so through a process psychologists call “internalization.” We internalize something when we “take in” an experience and it becomes part of who we are. Internalization is more than learning a list or memorizing a procedure; it involves both thinking and experiencing over time.

When you spend a lot of time with a music teacher, for example, you learn notes and chords. You repeatedly go over scales and songs. And over time, you internalize the lessons. They become second nature; you can make use of them without conscious thought.

Internalization drives all business training. When I am doing management training, I often do a content piece on how to motivate teams, using several principles and illustrations. Then I do a skill-building segment where the attendees try out the new skills on each other. As they internalize these experiences, the new skills become part of their leadership skill sets forever.

Dale internalized the experiences of spending time with his nutritionist, his trainer, and his training schedule. These new behaviors became habits that now work for him. In a similar way, Dale and Marie provided external structure (I’ll explain this important term more fully a few paragraphs below) for Stevie. Their external structure was their attention, the schedule they set up, and the rewards and consequences program they created to help him. He had little ability to study when he was six, either neurologically, cognitively, or emotionally. But their help, over time, gave him the discipline that eventually he made part of himself. Stevie no longer needs his parents to set egg timers or give him an extra dessert. The ability to study is now part of his own internal wiring.

Several aspects of successful internalization, which creates solid internal structure, form the essential ingredients that allow it to work:

1. A worthwhile goal. Internal structure works best when you’re pursuing something that matters to you, whether it be health, finances, spiritual growth, dating, or marriage. If it is important to you — if it’s worth it — you become more willing to enter the process of internalization.

There’s a term I use to help define structure: cross-context. What this means is that, if you achieve some success in one area, the habits that enabled you to achieve that success will transfer to other areas as well. Learning to work out, for example, can lead to learning to have great and meaningful devotionals. The contexts cross over.

2. An external structure. An external structure is a framework of reminders and short-term goals that breaks time down into bite-sized elements. For example:

• Couples set up a budget system to help buy a new home.

• An athlete develops a training program featuring race-time increments.

• A CEO has a strategic path to go IPO in five years.

• A man who wants to lose weight has an app that measures his food intake, based on his goals.

External structure must also have a calendarized process. That is, things work best when they get put in a calendar, where you regularly see them. For example: setting weekly times to have networking meetings; having a date night with your spouse; working out. Don’t give up on the calendarized aspect. Allow yourself time to get it to work.

You tend to accomplish what you calendar. We are busy people. If it’s a good idea and you’ll get to it “one day,” you probably won’t. When I am working on a particular area of growth, I will give myself sixty days of calendaring it, when I literally input the activity on my physical calendar. Sometimes this happens when I am deep within a book project; at other times it relates to getting enough sleep; and sometimes it involves some spiritual activity.

Just as a cast encases a broken arm and functions to keep the arm straight, as an unbroken bone would do, so external structure gives us protection and strength when we lack what it takes to discipline ourselves in some area. Then, when the bone gets strong, we remove the cast.

3. Relational support. The external frame is not enough. We also need supportive and accepting people to help us develop internal structure. Relationships serve as the anesthetic that helps us get through the surgery of developing internal structure. It can be painful to learn a new habit or to become a disciplined person! Discipline can get repetitive, boring, and hard — and the distractions never end. Not only that, but the judge in our mind beats us up and prompts us to think of ourselves as losers. I’ll never get it right, we think.

You need a life team of people whom you recruit for the specific goal of helping you create internal structure. To qualify for this role, they must have three characteristics:

• They accept you as you are, with no judgment. They can’t have an ounce of condemnation or harsh judgmentalism. You have to be able to fail and confess, over and over again, and experience love and acceptance from them. Otherwise, you will end up avoiding being vulnerable with them, or sabotaging the process for yourself.

• They encourage and push you when you need it. A good life team member loves you as you are, but loves you enough to help you not stay the way you are. These team members aren’t mean, but they do nudge you when you get distracted, lazy, or out of focus.

• They are engaged in growth. You have a real edge when your life team is made up of people who refuse merely to sit in the stands, observing, but who continue to work on themselves as well. They identify with your efforts and struggles, and they can speak from experience.

Personal growth comes from internalizing not only the external structure, but also your life team’s relational warmth. When this happens, the emotional memories of good people live inside you, encouraging you for the rest of your life, keeping you loved and grounded: “being rooted and established in love” (Ephesians 3:17). An added component is how a life team makes growth and success about us, not just me. You are part of a community that you serve, as it serves you. You may even find yourself on the life team of one of your supporters.

4. Information and expertise. You always need the kind of information that can accelerate your internalization process. Dale had a nutritionist and a trainer. You may want to google information on careers, jobs, financial help, or relationships. Become an information junkie. I am one, and it has always paid off for me in my growth.

When you combine these four ingredients, good things happen. The system works if you work the system!

Don’t forget that while developing internal structure is hard work, it is still relational work. As you work on structure, you should remember that you are not alone. You are not alone from your supportive relationships, and you are not alone from God himself. In fact, one way to translate the word “discipline” in the New Testament is “nurture,” as in Hebrews 12:5: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s [nurture].” When we experience and internalize God’s nurture in his process of growth, our internal structure grows and flourishes. As a result, discipline, and then goal achievement, occur. That is at the heart of Hard Way living.

Structure Boot Camp

Finding yourself discouraged about your frustrations and failures in several areas of life can feel overwhelming. You may think of yourself as a loser on all levels, with not one healthy area of life where you can feel good about yourself.

When I have a client in this situation, sometimes I create a Structure Boot Camp (SBC) for the person. SBC is an intensive training process that covers multiple areas, designed to shock the system (just like military boot camp) so that the person quickly experiences hope in a general way about all major aspects of life. You can easily set up your own version of SBC for yourself using my description below.

To design an SBC, I have the client list all areas of frustration: marriage, spiritual health, emotional health, parenting, finances, career, and physical health, for example. We then develop goals for all of them. We set up the system using the four aspects of internalization: goals, external structure, support, and information.

The key is that the client has to prune everything that isn’t absolutely necessary— for ninety days. Postpone family vacation. Don’t start a new business. Don’t sign up to be an elder in the church. Don’t move to a new home. Don’t get pregnant. You can do all of that later. The idea is to put all available energy into the boot camp, which has to consume your life for three months. It doesn’t matter if your friends get tired of you talking about it; they just have to support you for the length of the camp. You have to invest yourself completely, to the point of obsession, for those ninety days. It has to be that way to change your neural pathways and your habits.

Your life team should have a copy of all targeted areas and all goals. They schedule calls and texts so that every twenty-four hours, you get a brief, encouraging contact from one person. Your life team holds a small celebration for you at thirty and sixty days and a large one at ninety.

This is when cross-context really takes over. One executive I took through the process told me that, a year later, he feels more “automatic” about his good habits. In other words, these habits don’t require a lot of psyching himself up, overcoming dread, or even effort. They have become part of who he is inside; they’ve become as normal as turning on the TV or walking to the refrigerator. The new internal structure has created the discipline he needs.

Obstacles Ahead

You will encounter problems as you work on your internal structure. Don’t let this discourage you; it only makes sense. Whatever kept you from having internal structure in the first place hasn’t gone away. So take stock of the major obstacles and consider what you can do about them.

• Isolation. If you’ve read this book so far, I’m sure you’ve picked up on this as a major theme: Don’t try to do it all on your own, without support. Some people go the loner route because of serious trust issues, some have developed people-pleasing habits that drain them, and some nurture a grandiose sense of their own self-sufficiency. Don’t get caught in the isolation trap. Be humble enough to ask for support; people will probably feel happy to help. Don’t be like the successful executive I worked with who, in his early sixties, told me, “I have accomplished a lot. But I could have accomplished so much more if I had been vulnerable and let people support me.”

• Life problems. Don’t wait for life to get easy. For 99.999 percent of us, it won’t ever be perfectly easy. If you wait for that moment, you may end up solving crises forever and never get to your goals. Go ahead and start the program to develop internal structure now— unless the house is on fire, you are going bankrupt, or you have a child suffering from a serious medical condition. Move ahead with your program, and you’ll find that your perspective will become healthier and the problems that have kept you away from your own life will finally leave room for you.

• Extremism: This is the tendency to be highly enthusiastic and intense about your growth, to the point of going completely gonzo — then at some point (usually quickly) becoming discouraged and burning out. In this process, an “all or nothing” mentality never works. This is one of the primary reasons that people go on dozens of diets that don’t work, change jobs often, have serial relational problems, and endure great struggles in finances. If you have an extremist mentality, the little voice in your head is demanding that you get everything fixed and okay right now. Say good-bye to that attitude. The truth is, you will struggle and fail more than once on the journey to accomplishing your goals. At the same time, recognize that you will have to continue to drive to work, go see movies, and take it easy during the process. Don’t be a sprinter; be in it for the long run. No more yo-yo self-improvement!

• Self-judgment. When you experience lapses in discipline and you act out with potato chips, oversleeping, TV, Facebook, or alcohol, your inner judge will attack you and try to convince you how bad you are. A harsh inner judge can totally derail the structuring process. If you are vulnerable to this judge, you need to have your life team speak to your failures, not your successes. This is where grace makes a difference. Instead of them telling you, “You didn’t really screw up; it wasn’t a big deal,” ask them to be honest — as when they say, “You did screw up. It was a big deal. But I like you and I’m not mad at you. I’ll help you.” Grace for our failures neutralizes self-judgment so that we can fight another day.

• Triggers. Disruptive events can throw us off and set us back a week or two in learning structure. Figure out the ones you’re vulnerable to and prepare for them. A few examples:

Boredom

Not seeing results fast enough

Someone who feels upset with you

A temporary relapse

Friends who want you to drop your structure and go play with them

Someone who asks for your time and energy, even when you don’t have it to give

We have to expect and address disrupters like these. But don’t let them get you off track! Be loving and caring, but also read Boundaries by Henry Cloud and me.⁷ It will help you say no when you need to.

Those Who Go Cold Turkey

A friend with whom I discussed the contents of this chapter told me, “I have a son who was heavy into drugs. His life was going down the tubes. Four years ago, he saw what the drugs were doing to him, and he stopped cold turkey. He’s been drug free since then. He has had no counseling, no AA meetings, support structures, growth groups, rehab, or church involvement. And although I would like him to grow spiritually, he has a pretty normal, balanced life. How do you figure him?”

A few people can just “choose discipline,” because they already have the necessary internal structure in place — even if it seems obscured for a time by conflict. In this case, the young man had good family upbringing, consistent love and limits, and developed a good work ethic. So when he got involved in drugs, his structure just got stored in a parking lot in the back of his mind. When he realized he didn’t like the turn his life was taking, he simply reactivated his structure.

Unfortunately, people like him are in the great minority. Most of us don’t have this capacity. We would like to believe we are like him, and we may try to convince ourselves that we are. But for the vast majority of us, down that way lies failure. Better far to get into this growth process and find out for sure!

Stay the Course

If anything I’ve said in this chapter sounds discouraging, let me encourage you instead. While it’s hard to create discipline at first, it gets easier later. It doesn’t stay as boring, or discouraging, or frustrating as it might seem at first. You, or the entitled person you’re helping, begin over time to feel more hope and self-respect. I have seen the material in this chapter alone help so many people help others who are living in entitlement, by helping them learn discipline. Living the Hard Way is just what its name suggests — hard. But it helps you create the internal structure you need to stay the course and achieve your goals.

Skills

1. Meditate on Proverbs 21:5: “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” Ask God to help you have a profitable life, in all senses of the word, by diligently following through on your plans.

2. Keep your goals physically present. Individuals, couples, businesses, and churches need to see their goals before their eyes, several times a week. Put them on your smartphone Notes app, on the walls of your factory plant, and on your refrigerator. We all need reminders. God taught his people to keep his laws physically before them (see Deuteronomy 6:6 – 9), connected to them, to help them stay encouraged and focused.

3. Begin with small steps and quick gratification. Baby steps work when you’re starting the process. If keeping up with your blog is your goal, then write your blog for thirty minutes before doing Facebook for ten (never make the gratification longer or more expensive than the desired behavior). Have the hard conversation you’ve been avoiding, then have lunch with a person who loves you and is fun. Gradually extend yourself as the habits become more internalized.

4. If you are still failing and discouraged. This happens often, so relax — you are normal. It generally means you need some combination of three things: amping up the relational support (double the contacts); creating more structure (daily goals instead of weekly); or getting counseling (to resolve an internal issue that is sabotaging the process).