The detail always left out when talking about self-discipline
There are a lot of really difficult things that we deal with on the road to becoming the person we really want to be. And, in my opinion, one of the MOST difficult is when you desperately want to do something differently in your life, and care so impossibly much… yet commit to it perfectly one day and abandon it entirely the next.
The assumption most people make is that this is a self-discipline problem. That if you really wanted it badly enough, your behavior would stay consistent. But the detail that often gets left out of conversations about self-discipline is that wanting something doesn't automatically mean you feel secure pursuing it.
Even though you do want it dearly, you respond by chastising yourself for not wanting it enough. You assume that if your behavior were just more consistent, if you were just more disciplined, if you were just better, then you wouldn’t have this problem.
The reality is that goals can represent a lot more than the outcome itself. They can represent past failures. They can represent overwhelm. They can represent uncertainty, pressure, responsibility, or expectations that feel too heavy to carry.
The truth is, your goal and your intentions aren’t changing. But for whatever reason, your behavior is… erratic.
You can want something deeply and still struggle to act on it because wanting something and feeling safe pursuing it are not the same thing.
But I’m not here to leave you with that fact and tell you to just get over it. There’s more going on. You aren’t struggling for no reason—and it’s because something underneath this pattern is trying to protect you, and you are responding by abandoning.
I can tell you why.
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It would be one thing if you just abandoned the goal and gave up entirely, moving onto something else. But that’s not it, is it?
You abandon it, yes, but because you care so much, you feel absolutely awful about it afterward and then… repeat the cycle over again. Going after it with everything you have–and then giving up because you just… can’t.
Can’t focus. Can’t make yourself get up. Can’t do it.
Desire, followed by abandonment, followed by shame. And it gets harder to recover from every single time.
It’s more than just shame, though. It’s confusion. You have no idea why you can’t just make yourself follow through, or why the most common willpower advice doesn’t work for you. You watch video after video… surf Reddit post after Reddit post… looking up the same things over and over again to try to find the one solution to finally end this cycle that’s costing you everything.
And the final nail in the coffin is self-doubt. With every failure, you are proving to yourself that you can’t trust your own word. You can’t trust yourself to follow through. And no matter how badly you want a goal, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll never actually act on it. So why even try?
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Most people assume that consistency stems from motivation and desire. That if you just want the goal badly enough, it will give you whatever you need to act on it. But that’s not true.
There is so much that has to be aligned for action to be easily accessible, and desire alone is only one small piece of the puzzle. It’s also rarely as simple as wanting it badly. There are so many things in our lives that matter deeply to us, like starting a business, going to school, becoming healthier, you name it. But that alone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll take the necessary actions to go after it–because there is a difference between wanting something and feeling safe enough to pursue it.
The mistake you’re making is assuming that wanting it is enough.
But a goal is never just a goal.
Sometimes it represents possibility. Or pressure. Or every time you’ve failed before. Or the person your parents say you’ll never be able to become. Uncertainty. Exposure. Judgment. Overwhelm.
So while you can want the outcome, you also experience the pursuit of it as threatening.
Most self-discipline advice focuses on how you want comfort more than you want the goal, and how you tend to give into pleasure instead of delaying gratification long enough to reap a reward. But that does nothing if the reason you’re procrastinating is because you’re really avoiding fear, doubt, exhaustion, and everything else that makes our evolutionary brain panic.
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Your intentions for the task are stable. You want it deeply, and that doesn’t change from one day to the next. But what is not stable is your internal state. And your internal state has the most influence on if you feel safe enough to engage, or feel the need to freeze or to fight.
Whether you are well-rested, energized, hopeful, confident… action becomes much more readily available.
But when you’re stressed, discouraged, uncertain, or threatened by the task itself… then you’re going to go into self-protection mode. And self-protection mode, in this case, means avoidance.
So it’s not the goal that’s changed or your intentions for it. It’s the baseline from which you are pursuing it.
Consistency does not look the same across every single emotion and every single circumstance. Trying to go to the gym consistently is far different on a day that’s going really well, with great weather, where you feel like you could take on the world… and a day where you barely slept and got some bad news about something you were looking forward to.
It doesn’t mean realizing this pattern is the end of the story, because you don’t have to and shouldn’t let a very normal human response dictate your ability to succeed–but it does mean that ignoring it will create unnecessary shame and further perpetuate your avoidance.
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To see how this has been showing up in your life, picture two recent moments for me.
A day where you followed through effortlessly and something normally unenjoyable like washing the dishes was no problem at all
A day you procrastinated even though you knew something needed to get done
Don’t focus on how motivated you may have been at the time. That’s neither here nor there. Instead, ask yourself what your internal state was. Or in simpler terms, what was going on with you that day? How were you feeling? What was going on in your immediate circle?
And is there a correlation between when you struggled and when you didn’t and how you were feeling at the time?
Recognizing this pattern allows you to let go of the shame that you’re just not committed. And opens the door to see how you can better manipulate your response to that internal state.
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And, by the way, if you're interested in learning more about the psychological reasons behind this type of thing, like how motivation works in the brain, you can join the newsletter HERE so you can see how it applies to your real life. I share new insights every single week.
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Inconsistency is not proof that you don’t care enough. It’s just that there are variables at play that you’ve never paid attention to before, and they have quite an influence over your ability to be consistent.
Wanting something and acting on it are not the same thing, and they don’t seamlessly flow into one another. It doesn’t mean that you can’t act on the things you want to, it just means that there’s a little more care in understanding how.
But this still doesn't explain why some goals seem to carry so much more resistance than others.
Why can you consistently follow through on things you don't care much about, yet struggle with the things that matter most?
Why does the importance of a goal sometimes seem to make action harder instead of easier?
Because there comes a point where a goal stops being just a goal.
It becomes a reflection of who you are.
Who you could become.
What your future might look like.
And whether the story you've been telling yourself about your life is actually true.
When that happens, your nervous system begins responding to something far deeper than productivity.
That's the question we're answering in the pinned video (to be linked here 6/24) about how success carries a weight that has nothing to do with the task itself.
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