Mindful Self Discipline

Living with Purpose and Achieving Your Goals in a World of Distractions

Giovanni Dienstmann

• Editorial: LiveAndDare Publications
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780645138931
• Categoría: Personal Development
• Categoría: Self Improvement

If you want to live a life of purpose, build good habits and achieve your goals, there is one skill that is more important than anything else: Self-Discipline.

Self-discipline is not about punishment, it's about self-respect. It is not about being inflexible, but about living your best life. It is the superpower of focus in a world of distractions — allowing you to overcome procrastination, excuses, bad habits, low motivation, failures, and self-doubt. With it, you can stay on track with your values and goals even through the times when you are least inspired.

Self-discipline allows you to choose who you want to be and live by design rather than by default.

As a meditation teacher and self-discipline coach, Giovanni Dienstmann has helped hedge fund managers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, ambitious professionals, artists and pro athletes to live a more focused and disciplined life. Since 2014 he has been successfully coaching people to overcome distractions, procrastination, self-doubt, fear, and other forms of self-sabotage. Whatever self-discipline challenge you face, whatever excuse you are telling yourself — Mindful Self-Discipline is a collection of all these years of experience, converted into a tool for you to use.

This revolutionary book is a comprehensive and practical guide for you to develop self-discipline in a balanced way — without beating yourself up. It emphasizes the use of mindfulness and awareness as key components for building habits, rather than forcefulness and willpower. If you have tried other methodologies and failed, then this is for you.

This manual for living your life purposefully contains:

• Over 50 step-by-step exercises
• Over 100 illustrations and diagrams
• Links to the scientific studies about each topic
• Many, many examples — all to make it as easy as possible for you to actually apply all this knowledge and transform your daily life.

If you have tried other approaches (Miracle Morning, Atomic Habits, Willpower Instinct, Tiny Habits, Discipline is Freedom, Hooked, Can't Hurt Me) and didn't get the results you were after, then this is for you. Mindful Self-Discipline goes much beyond building habits, time management, and forcing yourself. It is gentler, more achievable, and rooted in living a life of purpose.

Think you are not made to be self-disciplined? Think again.

CHAPTER 6

THE WHAT AND THE WHY

Inspiration follows aspiration.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

A person without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Your aspiration is your purpose, your dream, your why. It is the goal, desire, or ambition that moves you to action. It’s what you want to achieve, experience, or become. (Throughout the rest of this chapter, I use the terms aspiration and purpose interchangeably.)

Desire motivates action. Desire creates a void in you, by conceiving a reward that will fill it perfectly. The bigger the void—in other words, the aspiration—the greater the fuel that’s available for you.

That fuel is essential for you to overcome the challenges that will eventually come your way. Challenges such as things not working out as expected, self-doubt, procrastination, confusion, criticism, and rejection. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why can bear almost any how.”

START WITH PURPOSE

Your aspiration is the reason you are starting the journey in the first place. Without it, self-discipline becomes difficult at best—if not outright meaningless. You’re unlikely to go through pain, discomfort, and sacrifice without a good reason for it. Your aspiration is that good reason.

Let me give you a simple example from my personal life. My wife insists encourages me to use a face cream every night before going to bed, to prevent wrinkles. She reminds me that I am constantly appearing on videos, seeing clients, and giving interviews, and argues that appearance matters a lot. She points out that other men in my family got face wrinkles early, so there might be a genetic predisposition for it. Besides, “it only takes two minutes”, she says.

Yet none of that seems to make any impression on my mind. I don’t seem to care that much. As a result, I never end up using the cream for more than a few days in a row, even when the environment is conducive (that is, the cream is clearly visible on my bedside table). Because it’s not connected to any deeper aspiration for me.

If the habit you are trying to build or the change you are trying to make are not connected to a deeper why, then self-discipline will feel forced—a chore. But if they are connected to a heart-felt purpose, then self-discipline can feel exciting, meaningful, and promising.

Let’s say we want to encourage Mark, an executive in our company, to meditate. If Mark is simply told to “sit quietly every day for ten minutes and watch your breath”, because “it’s good for you”, he is unlikely to follow it. Or, even if he does, his meditation practice will lack depth and vitality—it will not be transformational.

Compare that to Mark having clarity that the most important thing for him is to master his mind so he can live without anxiety, sleep without using pills, and begin to explore his deeper potential as a leader and as a man. Then have him magnify that feeling by evoking the understanding that he can never be a true leader in his company if he is not a leader of himself, and that lasting legacy and influence can only be had if he is more calm, centered, and focused in his daily life. Show him the difference between living and leading from the monkey-mind versus the monk-mind. Explain that meditation is a powerful tool that supports this transformation—and then encourage him to meditate.

Can you see the difference?

Every activity that you can connect to a deeper purpose will be energized with meaning and vitality. This changes everything.

Indeed, studies show that people with a stronger sense of purpose:

• live longer

• experience less depression

• have better immune systems

• are more engaged at work

• are less likely to experience cardiovascular diseases and Alzheimer’s

• feel more love and connection in intimate relationships

• experience a greater sense of abundance in their lives

We all need to aspire to something and feel that we are going somewhere. Otherwise, there is a sense of boredom in life. Our daily routine feels stale and unengaging. As a result, we seek relief through bad habits, and seek engagement through mindless entertainment, news, social media, games, etc.

When you have a purpose, you are not waiting for things to happen—you are making them happen. You are not waiting to feel like doing the work; you do so regardless of how you feel. Because it’s key to who you are.

Your aspiration is the source of your motivation and commitment. It’s the spark, the fuel for the journey. If you don’t have it, it will be easy for you to get distracted, give in to temptation, forget what’s important, and run after the next shiny object.

Despite being extremely important for living and thriving, most people don’t have a deep aspiration. The current climate of busyness, materialism, and cynicism doesn’t help either. As a society, we are living in a crisis of meaning. Dr. Viktor Frankl, PhD, calls it the “existential vacuum”, which he deems responsible for the three major societal ills: aggression, addiction, and depression. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is a masterpiece on the topic of purpose.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Having no sense of purpose kills us from the inside, little by little, without us even noticing. If we feel that we are not needed, that we cannot contribute and make a difference, that we have no mission… then our life will feel empty. We may attempt to fill it with pleasure, money and fun, but we will never be fulfilled. Not until we touch that deeper pain or deeper desire that exists within.

You need a noble aspiration. Something that stretches you, that keeps you engaged, and that is deeply meaningful for you. And if you can connect this aspiration to an ideal greater than yourself, that’s even better. With that, you will also have access to strength that is also greater than yourself.

At this point, you may be thinking: “Giovanni, I got this book just because I need to start exercising, save some money, and stop eating donuts. I’m not into all this soul-searching stuff.” If that is you, then you may want to skip Steps 1 and 2 of this Pillar for now and start from Step 3 (Chapter 9).

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GOALS VS ASPIRATIONS

Let’s take a moment to clarify the differences between a goal and an aspiration. In the table below, we start with the goal, which is more specific, because that is usually what people are aware of. Then we cover an example aspiration that could be sitting behind that goal, and some of the strategies (tactics) that can be used to accomplish it.

The goal is the vehicle for your aspiration; the strategy is the vehicle for your goal. Two people with the same goal may have completely different aspirations; or they may have the same goal and aspiration but completely different strategies to achieve that goal.

The aspiration is the deeper why behind your why. Discovering what that is will unleash tremendous energy for your journey, and lead to greater fulfillment. This important step is usually skipped in many other books in this genre, which focus more on the technicalities.

If you think of your life as a boat journey, your strategy is the map, the destination is the end goal, and your aspiration is why you want to get there. If the destination is not clear, you will be continuously tempted to choose another destination midway, when the journey gets rough, and settle for the distractions on the way (islands).

Indeed, in this book, I could have simply given you a proven framework for self-discipline—with all the tools, tips, and exercises—so you can reach whatever goal you are pursuing. But that wouldn’t necessarily serve you, because your goal is only half the story. You need to touch the aspiration behind it.

Your goal needs to be a proper vehicle for your aspiration. Yet for most people there is a disconnect between the two. It could be because:

• Your goal was borrowed from someone else. Perhaps you were told that this is what you have to pursue. Or perhaps this goal embodies the values silently imposed by your parents, society, or the media.

• You are unaware of your aspiration, and so you cannot choose a goal that is well aligned with it. This, again, will make you gravitate toward other people’s goals and worldviews.

• You are aware of your aspiration but lack the courage or support to fully embrace it. Perhaps you believe that it is not right for you to pursue it, or that it’s “not practical”, or that you are not good enough for it.

Whatever the cause, when your goals don’t match your deeper aspiration, achieving your goals will leave you unfulfilled. You will have successfully climbed to the top of a ladder you actually didn’t need to climb. No amount of money, ovation, or perks can compensate for the emptiness you’ll feel.

Self-discipline empowers you to achieve your goals. Mindful self-discipline empowers you to fulfill your aspiration by achieving the right type of goals.

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