5 Easy Ways To Build Self Discipline

0:00When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store at on Lululemon.com now. If you're the kind of girly say with fitness, that is always like, if I can't do it perfectly then what's the point? The point is that doesn't allow you to remain consistent for long enough to get the result. Don't try and overhaul your whole life and change everything that you're currently doing. Focusing on the promises that you've made for yourself and not just the outcome. Understanding life is f***ed up. Things will happen to us, but how can we keep the bare minimums? Things that we know make us feel good and keep the ball rolling? discipline is not perfection.

1:04Welcome back to the Oilets Talk podcast, I'm Kate. And I'm Gemma, a space for no BS conversation for the women who want more. And we are up to our final episode in the discipline series and we thought that we would wrap this episode up because sometimes you listen to podcasts and you're like, they're just whaffling. What am I taking away from this? And you guys know that we love to give you like tangible things, strategies, actionable tasks that you can actually start actioning because that is the vibe that we are on. So we're going to give you guys our top five discipline strategies that you can take away today and start implementing into your life. If you are the person who right now knows that they have low levels of discipline or really wants to be more of a discipline girl, he wants to enter your discipline era. And if you are clocking in today and you're like, oh, what's this discipline series about? We want you to catch up because the first three parts of this really build a bit of a foundation with helping your mindset, with working through reshaping how you might view

2:06discipline, relying on motivation less, looking at how you can master that delayed gratification in the boring middle and how you can set your environment up for success. So make sure you go back and listen to those. So you can kind of integrate bits and pieces from each of these episodes to kind of help you like become the discipline person that we know you want to become. Amen. I'm going to start with the first thing. And the first strategy slash thing that you can implement and something I really, really want you guys to listen to is don't try and overhaul your whole life and change everything that you're currently doing. You need to pick one non-negotiable or one goal that you want to focus on and start honing on honing in on that and building discipline on that. I find when people go on their discipline journey or go in a journey to achieve any goal, they try and do everything all of all of it once, right? So let's just say they've never been to a gym before. Instead of just focusing on getting to the gym two to three days a week, they try to

3:09go to the gym, change their nutrition, change their sleep, hit their steps, change their stress level all at once. And what ends up happening is they can't stay consistent for a long enough period of time or they don't actually build any discipline. So my first strategy is actually looking and picking one non-negotiable task that you want to become more disciplined in instead of trying to uphold and change your whole life. The second strategy I wanted to go into is creating a bit of a minimum standard or like the floor, aka the least things that you can imagine committing to so you don't just stop altogether. So what I mean by that is if you're the kind of girly say with fitness that is always like, if I can't do it perfectly, then what's the point? The point is that doesn't allow you to remain consistent for long enough to get the result. So having this bare minimum that you can stick to is essentially just like having these things that you can lean into that allow you to keep chipping away when you can't have a perfect effort.

4:10So that could look like normally you do four sessions a week and they might take 50 minutes but your floor or your minimum standard is three 30 minute sessions. So you know that on those hard, busy weeks, you're not just giving up because you can't do that perfect version. You can always rely back on the easier but still helping you get towards your goal version of like the three shorter sessions. And when you kind of have in your head what you can do on those weeks that it's hard or when it's busy or when you're not feeling it, it actually helps you stay locked in and stay consistent, which is what's really important. So I think when we look at nutrition, fitness and steps, it can be the three 30 minute shorter sessions that you're training the lower intensity but you're still getting something done. It could be rather than prepping and tracking all of your food. It's like you can still eat three high protein meals a day if you're traveling or whatever. Like that's something that you know you can still get done and it doesn't need to be this whole like on or off mindset. And arguably that's the thing that's going to be easier to stick to long term.

5:14And with steps it can just be okay, maybe I can't get 10 steps today, 10,000 steps today, but I know that I can get a 10 minute walk. I think as well having that mindset of something is always better than nothing and something is always going to help me continue moving forward even if some weeks feel slower than others. I think is really good but I love the minimum standards things because if we travel or if we do anything we know that there's always something that we can do that's going to move us forward and is going to make us feel really good and that's kind of what I want to lean into. And then when you're having a really good week and you've got all of this time you can then ramp it up again. I call them bare minimums in my life and I apply it with everything like what you were saying when it comes to my halt and my fitness but I also think that this is important when life is life. Right? We're all going to go through shit. We're all going to have seasons in our life where you know things feel really hard and maybe there's things moving behind the scenes that are requiring a lot of your energy mentally, physically, emotionally and I think it's really important during these seasons

6:14instead of just letting everything fall to the wayside that you're working towards whether it's your fitness, whether it's your business, whether it's a consistency goal in every at any avenue that you can actually just lock into your bare minimums and allow them to be the thing that carries you through. Now I think back to when a man had his suspected heart attack what? Am I on my partner by the way? A year and a half ago now? I don't even remember time passes. I remember going, whoa, okay, this is going to be a lot. This is really stressful. This is frying my nervous system. I'm feeling really anxious around this. What do I need to do that is a bare minimum to make me feel good and keep things moving so I'm not then coming back when life is settled again feeling like I'm at sub zero. So I got up the notes in my phone and I wrote down a list of bare minimums. What are the bare minimums I'm doing to keep my business moving and to keep showing up in the way that I want to show up through this really hard season as I'm navigating life behind the scenes? Then what am I doing when it comes to my health?

7:16What are the bare minimums? What can I actually commit to at the moment and what is important to me for not only my physical health but my mental health during this time and those two lists that I wrote honestly were my saving grace in a period of really high stress uncertainty and overwhelm and it really allowed me to continue having discipline that just looked a little bit different where it wasn't like, oh, whoa, okay, this is going on. I can't do anything for myself at all because I know if I do that, I'm not going to be the best partner to support him through a time where he really needs me. But I also know that I can't show up 100% because he needs me at this time too. So it's about finding that middle ground, understanding life is fucked up, things will happen to us, but how can we keep the bare minimums, the things that we know make us feel good and keep the bowl rolling so we don't then come back feeling like we're starting from sub zero again and then we feel like we have to build discipline all over again and it feels 80 times harder. When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset and new pieces from Lululemon's

8:19fall job are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day and as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on Lululemon.com now. Yeah, and I think discipline is not about being perfect. Like discipline is not perfection. discipline is about being adaptable and making it work and continuing to make effort and that effort can look different week to week, but it's about the fact that you're not giving up. I think that something that can make that feel easier is our third strategy, which is removing some of that decision fatigue, which we both love thinking about like, how can we make the best decision feel easier? How can we remove the resistance? And a lot of that can be the things that we love doing like having set training times and leaning into your systems and leaning into your routine and letting that carry you

9:24along the way rather than every day being a million things you need to think about because that wears you down. And it also allows you to stop negotiating with yourself when you're really organized and you have a plan that you can follow that is very similar every day with the same time frames, it's going to allow you to remove that negotiation. It's less likely for you to not show up to not follow through with your word and in turn, you're going to build more discipline. So getting the same routine or building any kind of routine, scheduling in things that you want to achieve, whether it's posting more content, going to the gym, reading a book, 10 minutes in the morning to yourself into your calendar, like an appointment you need to show up for that organization is going to allow you to build more discipline way quicker than you think because you can get up, you can do the same thing on repeat and then before you know it, you've achieved the goal because you've ticked away every single day at the thing that you wanted to achieve. 100% and the next one we wanted to get into was focusing on the promises that you've

10:25made for yourself and not just the outcome. So that can be the following through with what you say you're going to do. It can be like the actual day to day tasks that you know are going to move you closer towards your goal and not just being focused on like I need to like let's just say sign the clients or I need to lose the weight because again, it just becomes a lot more of an uphill battle with achieving that goal versus if you promise, if you stick with did I follow through what I say was going to do, did I stick to the promises, did I get the work done, like focusing on the actual physical tasks that you do day to day add up to you achieving what it is that you want to achieve and the strategy being having a list of what actions you actually need to take that are going to get you there and it's the day to day things that add up and not just focusing on like huge sweeping changes that you're expecting to happen straight away because it's really hard to see that straight away happen like we said delayed gratification that will be a much better mindset and actual action actionable

11:28things you can do is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, and it's celebrating the small things. It's like we always set these big goals losing 10 kilos, growing your business, signing 50 clients, but it's like if we're only going to celebrate ourselves once we hit the 10 kilos, you'll never hit it. It's like we need to collect evidence along the way. We need to start. We need to smell the roses. We need to celebrate the small wins. If the goal is to lose 10 kilos, it's like celebrate yourself for getting up at your first alarm in the morning. Celebrate yourself for going to the gym two times a week. Celebrate yourself for hitting 10,000 steps three days in a row, even if it's not seven days in a row. You need to still celebrate the small stuff because at the end of the day, if you're waiting to only feel good, if you're waiting to only celebrate yourself when you've achieved the milestone and the goal you've set out, it's going to be really, really hard for you to stay the course. I like for myself, I use like a reward system like a dog. I said a goal, let's just say I want to sign 10 clients.

12:32I don't just only go, well, Kate, you did a really good job when I hit 10. It's like, no, every single client that starts working with me, I'm like, oh my God, fuck yeah, I get to work with this girl. She wants to achieve X, Y and Z and I'm going to be the vessel that helps her get there. I'm going to be the support and guidance and I actually take a second, which I know sounds fucking crazy. But take a second to go, well, that's incredible. Write it down. And then once I hit the bigger goal, then I'll reward myself with something, but it's not just ignoring that in the interim, still celebrating those small things and then rewarding yourself with something when you do hit it. Now, that doesn't need to be a materialistic thing. It can just be like going for a walk, listening to your favourite podcast for me, it's buying my favourite chocolate. Loco, love. Oh yeah, you love. Loco, love. Oh, dude, it's so expensive, but like, it's so good. So, the only reason I love it is because it has really fun flavours like hazelnut, pre-lein, caramel blend. It's just like, 10 out of 10. I love that. Now, when it comes to discipline, I also think there's an element of understanding that things

13:35are not always going to go to plan, but what you do next is really what dictates whether or not you succeed. So something that you can integrate is like a never miss twice kind of rule. This can be with staying on track on nutrition. It could be posting on social media, like you said, but essentially even with fitness, like let's just say you have your plan to wake up, train, doesn't go to plan. Your phone dies in the middle of the night and you sleep in. Don't let that become a trend. Don't let that one off day become an off week and it's really easy for people to kind of catastrophise when things don't go to plan, but just make it a rule with yourself where it's like, if it doesn't go to plan, I'm just going to get back on track and try again tomorrow. And it really just comes back to that consistent effort of not giving up too quickly. And it really just leans into you becoming the version of yourself who's like, I'm staying locked in. And if you make that a habit, it will help the opposite, it will help you avoid the opposite happening where every time something doesn't go to plan, your bad day turns into a bad week, which turns into a bad month, which turns do you stop in and starting again, which we want to

14:38help you avoid? Yeah, I love the never missed twice rule. I fucking live by this. It's like, I can give myself grace if I sleep in because maybe it's day one of my period I've been up all night with cramps. Okay, fine, don't worry, I'm not getting up, I'm not going to the gym, I'm not doing my morning walk, but you best fucking believe that I will not make that a trend and I'll be doing that the next day because as soon as you give yourself, like I was saying before in the last weeks episode, if you give yourself the leeway to constantly push things back, you're pretty much telling yourself that like your goals don't really matter, meaning we're doing the opposite of building discipline and we're just procrastinating, avoiding and falling victim to the excuses that we're trying to get rid of and break, right? So I think it's really important having the never missed twice rule is really going to allow yourself to give yourself a little bit of grace because we're humans and things happen and life is busy and sometimes it doesn't work out to plan and we do need to be adaptable, but that is not snow bowling because that is where people get tripped up,

15:40exactly like what Gemma said, it's like cool, we have one off day, then we have three, then we have five, then it's 12 months later, then it's five years, then it's 10 years later and we're like, oh, fuck, how do we put on this 10 kilos? So it's really about catching yourself in those moments, allowing it to happen for one meal or one training session or one alarm snooze or one miss of reading 10 pages of your book, but not allowing that to back it up and also when you do back it up, it feels like you lose control. So like I'll use a step example, it's like if I don't hit my 10,000 steps today and that's a goal that I want to work on getting better at for example, if I don't hit 10,000 today by 2000, tomorrow I say I'm going to hit it and then I don't, now I'm making up 4,000 steps, then 8,000, then 12,000 and then all of a sudden it's out of control and it's hard for you to catch up and what does that do? Reaffirms, we can't do it, reaffirms were not good enough, reaffirms is actually is too hard to commit to, meaning the next time in six months time when you go, no, I'm locking back into my steps, you already have evidence that you

16:44can't do it, meaning that it's actually harder for you to follow through. 100% is snooze and I see it, we both see it all the time and that's why it's so important to just break the pattern before it becomes the thing that you're always used to doing every time you have a little slip up and if you're someone who's always like it's because you know I can't do it perfectly or I didn't go to plan and I'm going to have to play catch up, it's just not a great feeling, it's like just reset tomorrow. Now on that note we wanted to leave this episode with a little bit of a challenge for our listeners for the next seven days so what we would love you to do is just set some standard or non-negotiable that you want to work on improving in your life. Maybe it's the fact that let's just say the steps, you're, you really would love to hit 10,000 steps but you just keep making excuses or not prioritising it. For seven days your goal is to lock in and not make excuses and just get it done and the whole focus is just showing yourself that you can continue to put in sustained effort for seven days, it could be anything, it could be posting on social media,

17:46do you have any other example? Yeah, it could be you know you've had the goal of wanting to get up early to read your book in the morning to have me time. Okay for the next seven days you're going to use the tools that we've given you in this episode, our five steps which were one picking an on-negotiable which we're talking about now to creating a minimum standard of things that you will always result back to if you're able not able to give it a hundred percent. Then three, removing the decision making, the decision fatigue by actually getting organised and planning ahead. For tracking the actual actions and processes that are going to get you to the goal and not just the outcome and focusing on the long thing that's a while away. And then lastly actually implementing the rule of never missing twice. So pick your non-negotiable, follow through those five steps, lock in for the next seven days and we want to hear about it all in the comments whether you're on our YouTube or your over-and-ass Spotify. And we will see you next month for a brand new episode. If you have any

18:46recommendations or there's anything you're like dying to hear about for a monthly themed season, let us know in the comments and we love you. Bye! When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day and as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on Lululemon.com now.