Hal Elrod: Hello, my friend. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod, and today we are talking about the ultimate superpower, and that is self-discipline. It’s the ability to get yourself to do what you need to do when you need to do it, whether you feel like it or not. And think about that for a second. The biggest difference between where you are right now in any area of your life and where you want to be is doing what you need to do when you need to do it on a consistent basis, whether you feel like it or not. But most people don’t do that. Most of us give into our laziness or our lack of motivation.

We’re looking for the feeling that we need to achieve what we want. And if we don’t feel like it, we don’t do it. But if you look at high performers, people who seem to get more done and accomplish more and achieve more, it is not because they’re more talented or even more motivated than you. It is because they’ve trained themselves to be self-disciplined. And today I’m going to teach you exactly how to become a highly disciplined person, even if you’ve never been one before, even if you have a history of not following through with things, or you start things strong, maybe a new habit or a new routine, but you lose motivation and eventually stop, right? Can you relate to that? Do you struggle with consistency? Most of us do.

And now if you are already a high performer, you already consider yourself to be a highly disciplined person, stick with me. I’m going to also talk about what I call the degrees of discipline. In other words, there are levels to this. I’m going to share with you what I think is the most effective strategy that top performers use to continually uplevel their discipline and get more done and get better results. If you are a top performer, the best athletes in the world, they’re always trying to get better and better because human potential is unlimited. So, how do you become a disciplined person even if you’ve never been one before, even if you have a history of not following through with things, or lacking motivation, or being inconsistent?

Or maybe you’re like a lot of people where you’re disciplined in some areas of your life. This is probably more likely. You’re disciplined in certain areas, right, but you’re undisciplined in others. Like, maybe you crush it in business, but you struggle with your health and your fitness or vice versa. If you can relate to any of that, you’re not alone. You’re in the majority. Human nature is to do what is easy. It’s to take the path of least resistance. So, today I’m going to break down the difference between motivation and discipline, why discipline is a superpower, and how to actually become a disciplined person one simple decision at a time. Now, first I’m going to share with you how I got here.

Okay. Growing up, I was not self-disciplined. Now, I knew kids who were self-disciplined. They got good grades and they were dedicated athletes, and they followed through on all their homework and their commitments, whether they felt like it or not, without needing to be constantly nagged or reminded by their parents. I was not one of those kids. In fact, I was the opposite. I had major ADHD. I wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-twenties. And I have mixed feelings on if ADHD is even a disorder, if it’s really just the way your brain works. And there are pros and cons but that’s another topic for another time.

But I didn’t get good grades. I was always in trouble. I was talking in class. I always got detention. I never played school sports. My identity was as a lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined, and inconsistent person. Maybe you can relate to some of that. Now, all of that began to change for me when I was 19 years old. As an undisciplined teenager, late teens, I got a job selling Cutco knives. You probably know that if you listen to the podcast. But I was very fortunate that the person who hired me was Jesse Levine. Now, I say that like you would know his name. You probably don’t. But the reason I say his name with that emphasis, he was the number one manager in Cutco’s 50-year history.

So, obviously, he knew a thing or two about leadership, about getting the best out of people. And Jesse taught me how to develop self-discipline, which led to extraordinary sales results and income for this mediocre, lazy kid that I was, and eventually to achieving other goals and dreams beyond what 19-year-old me could have ever imagined. But knowing what I know now, there is a shortcut to developing self-discipline. That’s what I’m going to teach you on today’s podcast. But let me explain my journey, okay?

So, I started selling Cutco. Jesse did something on day one that was incredibly powerful. He systematically held me accountable. And the way he did that as part of my job, and it was not just mine, it was everybody’s job, obviously, that worked there was that I was required to call Jesse every single morning. And it’d be I think it was between 7:00 and 8:00 AM. I’d have to call in and I’d have to check in the morning. He would start by being all — he was hyped up and fired up, “Hal, good morning! We’re going to make it a great day.” I’m still in my bed under my covers on my cell phone, like just barely awake, calling him because I’m supposed to. I had no motivation. I didn’t feel like working. But here’s what would happen.

Jesse would ask me to commit to making 10 phone calls. He’d say, “Hal, can you make 10 calls and then call me back and let me know how they go? Okay. Can you do that in the next 30 minutes?” I’d go, “Oh, okay. Yes.” So, I do it now not because I was motivated or I felt like it but because I didn’t want to let Jesse down. See, Jesse understood the power of accountability to get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. But because I’d make the 10 calls and then I’d call him back and go, “Jesse, hey, I set two appointments.” Now, I’d get motivated. I’d get energy. As I was getting results, I’d start to feel more confident.

So, I’m making calls. I’m booking appointments. Now, I’m making sales day by day calling and checking into Jesse, getting on the phone and making my calls, calling him back. Then he’d usually say, “Hey, why don’t you make 10 more calls and call me back?” And little by little doing the hard things got easier. I was becoming a disciplined person. However, this is important. I wasn’t yet self-disciplined because I didn’t see myself as a disciplined person. I was what I call discipline-dependent, meaning I only got results when I had Jesse holding me accountable to do the things that I didn’t feel like doing.

I wasn’t self-disciplined, right? You take away the accountability and I’d go back to my lazy, unmotivated, undisciplined identity. So, he’d essentially hold my hand, right? It’s make the calls, call me back, and I did it because, think about that for a second. If it wasn’t for Jesse and that accountability, him saying, “Hal, will you make 10 calls and call me back?” I mean, what am I going to say? “No, Jesse.” Like, there’s literally nothing else I can say. I’m working for Jesse. I look up to Jesse. I respect him. So, when he says, “Will you make 10 calls and call me back?” Of course, I do it.

But if it wasn’t for that accountability, I would’ve woken up that morning, I would’ve not made those 10 phone calls and the 10 that followed after I called Jesse back and he asked me to make 10 more, I would’ve done what human beings do. I would’ve procrastinated. I would’ve put those phone calls off and I would’ve potentially not made any calls that day because I’d be like, “I’ll just make them tomorrow.” And we’ve all done that, right? “Well, I’ll make them tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes. You don’t do it the next day because you literally become a perpetual procrastinator by saying, “I don’t want to do it right now because it’s uncomfortable. I’d rather do nothing and experience that sense of relief that comes from procrastinating.”

Because of Jesse’s accountability, I made the 10 calls and I made 10 more day after day after day. So, now this is both powerful, also it’s problematic. And here’s what I’m talking about. Now, this was the beginning of my transition from an undisciplined 19-year-old to a highly disciplined 19-year-old, but it wasn’t overnight. In fact, it took months for me to develop the daily discipline with Jesse’s help but it took years for me to move beyond being dependent on Jesse to being self-disciplined, self-reliant, and that’s because I had to shift my identity. I viewed myself based on the first 19 years of my life as an undisciplined, unmotivated person. That’s who I saw myself as. That’s who I was. So, if I didn’t have Jesse saying, “Make your 10 calls and call me back,” I would get away with not making 10 calls and he wouldn’t know about it.

And that’s how many of us act like children, by the way, where we’re like when nobody’s looking like you look around, there’s a cookie in front of me, but I don’t think mom and dad are here and nobody’s going to know so I’m going to reach in the cookie jar and I’m going to eat it. And we never grow up out of that. Like, we literally wake up and we’re like, “What can I get away with today?” My boss doesn’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have any accountability. But what you realize is when you understand the power of accountability, and this is going to be one of the things we talked about today, but accountability is not the key to self-discipline. It’s the key to two things.

Discipline-dependent, right? Becoming discipline-dependent, where you’re dependent on the accountability to follow through. That’s the problematic version of accountability. But then accountability, which we’re going to talk about is, actually, it’s that strategy that top performers use to become more disciplined and more effective and take their results to new levels. That’s why executives hire executive coaches. That’s why the world’s top athletes credit their coaches for their results, right? Michael Jordan, one of my favorite basketball players of all time, he used to always credit his success to his high school basketball coach and his college coach, and then Phil Jackson, who was his coach in the NBA.

So, let me break this down. I’m going to break down my journey from undisciplined to disciplined in four parts, and then I’m going to share with you the shortcut. I’m going to share with you the shortcut, which is simply a rearranging of these four components. Because knowing what I know now, I realized that I took the long way to develop self-discipline. I was discipline-dependent for far too long, and that showed up in many areas of my life where I was disciplined when Jesse held me accountable and I would do the things, whereas other people would quit.

That’s the difference, by the way. It’s better to be discipline-dependent via accountability than to be completely undisciplined, which a lot of people were so undisciplined that they’re like, “This is too hard. I don’t want to have to call Jesse every day, and I don’t want to have to make my calls and get rejected on the phone, so I’m just going to quit.” And the majority of Cutco salespeople, they quit. Only those that are really committed to becoming the person that they need to be to achieve not just Cutco success, but success in other areas of life, they stick with it. And this is true for any sales position, network, marketing, you name it, any sales position.

Alright. So, my journey from undisciplined to disciplined, there are four components, okay? You don’t need to write. If you’re taking notes, which I always encourage you take notes, otherwise, you’re going to forget most of what you learn. But don’t write these down yet. Wait until I rearrange these for your shortcut. Your journey will be slightly different than mine. But my journey, four components. Number one was intentionality. Number two was accountability. Number three was activity. And number four was identity. And I’ll break each of these down.

So, intentionality, what does that mean? It means I made a commitment to Jesse that I would do whatever he led me to do. He said, “Hey, Hal, you want to be successful? It’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be difficult. You have to do things you’ve never done before. But if you’re willing to commit to do the things that I tell you to do because I know what it takes to be successful, you can be really successful. Will you commit to that?” That was my intentionality. I said yes. I made a commitment to become self-disciplined, to do the things that Jesse asked me to do, that he taught me to do. So, that was number one with intentionality. Yours will start the same way.

Number two, though, was accountability like I talked about. I became discipline-dependent on Jesse to hold me accountable. Again, not a bad thing. It’s better to be discipline-dependent than undisciplined. Okay? But it’s not ideal because when the accountability is gone, then your discipline typically isn’t there. It’s not present, right? You’re just getting away with whatever you can get away with. You want to be self, emphasis on the word, self-disciplined.

Number three, activity. I did the things that Jesse told me to do. I made the phone calls that he asked me to commit to make. And here’s the point of activity. By doing those things, even though I didn’t usually feel like it, it became easier and easier and easier to do them. I don’t know if I said this in the beginning but today’s focus, I’m going to give you a 30-day challenge. I’m going to encourage you. You can start with seven days if you want. Obviously, there are seven days that lead to the 30, but within 30 days you can completely transform your level of self-discipline. Even if you’re totally undisciplined or at least that’s how you see yourself then you’re like, “No, I don’t just see myself that way, Hal. That’s how I am. Like, I’m not a disciplined person.”

Okay, great. If that’s you, within 30 days, you can completely transform your level of self-discipline, and I’ll unpack that more here when we get to the next phase of these teachings. So, activity, right? So, we had intentionality. It’s where it started. I made a commitment. That was my intentionality. Jesse held me accountable. It was the accountability then the activity reinforced the discipline. It made it easier and easier to do what I needed to do even when I didn’t feel like it. Although I was relying on Jesse’s accountability, it still was getting easier and easier and easier.

And then number four, identity. It took me years to upgrade my identity and see myself as a self-disciplined person. Even though I was doing the things and making the sales and scheduling the appointments, I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like it. I was dependent on Jesse to do the things. So, knowing what I know now, I would’ve upgraded my identity first so that my being disciplined wasn’t dependent on accountability from other people, but it came from within. And that’s what I’m going to walk you through right now. So, that was my journey. Again, intentionality, accountability, activity, and identity. Those are the four components to becoming a self-disciplined person.

Now, your journey will be slightly different. Number one is the same, intentionality. And if you’re taking notes, this is where I encourage you to take notes. By the way, if you’re not taking notes, what do you do? You’re going to forget this. Pause this and take notes. If you’re in the car, look at the timestamps where we’re at in the podcast and like make a note of that or send yourself a text. Like, go back to this part and take notes. Okay. All right. So, your journey starts, number one, intentionality. It starts the same as it did for me with a commitment to become self-disciplined. By the way, quick bonus. This morning I wrote an affirmation for you, for this podcast, my daily self-discipline, or wait, my daily self-discipline affirmations.

So, to access those, I’m going to tell you now in case I forget later, and if I don’t forget, I’ll tell you again, but to access those, go to MiracleMorning.com/582. This is Episode 582. You can always access the show notes or any episode, the audio, and the show notes by going to MiracleMorning.com/ in this case, 582, but it’s whatever the episode number is. This is Episode #582. And you can download these daily discipline affirmations. I highly encourage you to do this because I literally took everything that we’re talking about and I synthesized it into a one-page affirmation that you can read that affirms your commitment to being self-disciplined.

It reminds you why it matters, what’s in it for you to follow through, and then number three, it gives you four specific daily actions that you can do every day that are universal for all of us to reinforce self-discipline and make it a part of who you are, a part of your identity. So, before I forget, MiracleMorning.com/582. Okay. So, number one, your journey to self-discipline starts with intentionality, but number two, while number two for me was accountability, yours is going to be identity. The fastest way to become self-disciplined is to focus on your identity first. It’s seeing yourself as self-disciplined. And then to do that, use those daily self-discipline affirmations.

And so, every day you’re reinforcing that you’re committed to being self-disciplined, you are reminding yourself why it’s a must for you, and you’re clarifying four specific repeatable actions that you can do every single day, that’s the activity part, to ensure that you’re actually becoming self-disciplined. You’re not just thinking about it, you’re not just imagining it, you’re not just affirming it, but you are turning your affirmation into action or in this case, number three, activity. So, commit the activities into your schedule. So, number one, intentionality. Number two, identity. You’re reinforcing the identity through daily affirmations. Remember, what you affirm repeatedly becomes your internal reality.

And I want you to just think about not applying these steps, by the way, and just listen to this podcast being like, “Oh yeah, that was a great podcast. I totally want to be self-disciplined.” But you don’t have a daily affirmation that reinforces it every single day. Like, what are the odds that you’re going to remember this? And that you’re going to actually do the things, right? You’ve got to have daily repetition that you’ve probably heard the quote, “Repetition is the mother of skill.” It means that repeatedly doing something consistently, it’s what gives birth to a skill. Well, repetition is also the mother of mindset, right?

When you focus on something every single day, you give birth to a new mindset. And this is why you can change or transform any era of your life in a short amount of time through daily repetition. Thirty days is a very nice round number. Every 30 days, by you focusing on one specific either mindset or habit, behavior, activity, goal, and every day you focus on it, you affirm it, you remind yourself of what you’re committed to, why it’s important to you, why it matters, and which actions you’re going to take to follow through, you can do anything. But think about it, 99.9% of people, maybe it’s 95%, but it’s a majority of people, they don’t do that. They set a goal and they don’t look at it.

They make a decision or they kind of make a decision of something they want to change in their life, but they don’t focus on it every single day and reinforce the mindset that they need every single day, and reinforce their commitment every single day. And if this is sounding overwhelming, you’re like, “Hal, dude, slow down, man. Like, every single day?” Remember, it becomes easier and easier and easier to do this. Anything that you do repeatedly becomes easier and easier and easier to do, and that includes self-discipline.

All right, number four. So, your journey, four components. Mine was intentionality followed by accountability, and I became discipline-dependent on Jesse, then activity and identity. Your four, same components, different order. Intentionality, identity, activity, and then number four. And in some ways it’s optional. In some ways it’s optional. It’s accountability. And here’s what I mean. While you don’t want to become discipline-dependent on accountability from other people, like we talked about earlier, leveraging accountability as a strategy is what even the most self-disciplined people use to uplevel their discipline even further.

Again, this is what I refer to as degrees of discipline. It’s not like you either are or are not self-disciplined. It’s that you develop discipline and then you become more disciplined and then you apply discipline to other areas of your life. Like, for me, I started being disciplined at work with Jesse’s help and his support and accountability, right? I wasn’t disciplined in my diet. I wasn’t disciplined in my exercise. I wasn’t disciplined in any other area of my life. I was very solo like there was one area of my life that I was disciplined in.

So, there are degrees of discipline. Eventually, it spread to every area of my life. And I can say today very confidently, humbly, however you want to say it, I am extremely disciplined in my diet. I’m slightly less in my exercise, but I’d say like in my diet, I’m probably like a 9.5 out of 10. I try to eat with impeccable integrity in terms of what goes in my body. With exercise, I exercise like three to five days a week. Sometimes it’s five, sometimes it’s just four. I’m like, I don’t know, I’m less disciplined in that area of my life. But the point is in every area of my life, I try to implement a high degree of self-discipline but accountability is how I take it to the next level.

And again, I said this earlier, it’s why top executives that are highly self-disciplined, they hire executive coaches to take it to the next level, to take their discipline and their results to the next level. It’s why the best athletes in the world credit their coaches for elevating their mindset and their work ethic and their discipline, and ultimately their performance. I’m going to give you just a quick, measurable example. So, for five years in my Cutco career, I was disciplined, even became self-disciplined, to do what I needed to do to sell $100,000 of Cutco per year. That was from age 19 to age 24, I believe, right in that range. So, I was averaging about $100,000 a year in Cutco sales, one of the top sales reps in the company, like top 10 every year. I’m pretty disciplined.

Then I hit Hall of Fame with the company, and I’m like, “All right. I’m out of here. I’m done.” And at my very last conference, I was like, “I can’t leave. I never fulfilled my potential. I just coasted at $100,000 a year.” In year six, I decided I needed to finally fulfill my potential. In order to do that, I had to increase my degree of discipline. And so, that year I went from 100K the year before that to 200K, $200,000 in sales in that final year. And how did I do that? I increased my degree of discipline. Specifically, I went from averaging 10 calls per day throughout the year to averaging 20 calls per day. I increased my degree of discipline by 100%, right? I simply doubled the amount of phone calls that I made and then I was able to double my income as a result.

So, I promised you one thing that I would talk about the difference between motivation and discipline. I want to do that before we wrap up here because a lot of people are mistakenly thinking they need motivation. Motivation is a temporary emotion that makes you feel excited to start something. Again, we’ve all felt that excitement to start. And I think it was Jim Rohn, one of my favorite quotes around this. He said, “Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going.” Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going. Abraham Lincoln, a great quote from Abraham Lincoln. He said, “Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”

We’ll say that again in case you’re taking notes. Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. Right now, we always want to do the easy, the fun, like the pleasurable thing. Of course, we do. That’s human nature. But if what you want most is beyond this temporary, short-lived pleasure that you’re going to get from procrastinating or eating the junk food or making the decision that’s not healthy for you or doesn’t take you to the next level, what you want most if it’s success and fulfillment, discipline is choosing to do what you need to do now that will move you in the direction of what it is that you want most.

So, motivation is that temporary emotion and it comes and goes based on external factors. It could be mood or sleep or stress or weather or whatever. Discipline, we already said it. It’s the ability to do what needs to be done even when you don’t feel like it. So, it comes from an internal decision, not a fleeting emotion. And that’s crucial to understand because — and it’s one of the reasons, this is important, it’s one of the reasons that a lot of people don’t see themselves as disciplined. I didn’t see myself as disciplined even when I was disciplined, even though it’s like anybody from the outside goes, “Hal, you’re making your calls every day. You’re one of the top 10 sales reps in the company. Of course, you’re disciplined.”

Well, no, but I don’t want to make the calls. For me, I thought that to be disciplined would mean I wanted to do the things that I had to do. I was confusing motivation and discipline. So, what it was is I wasn’t motivated. But again, motivation comes and goes. We are falsely believing that what we need is motivation. No, we don’t need motivation. Like, yeah, if you can sustain motivation by using affirmations and focusing on things that get you excited and exercising and moving your body, and doing Tony Robbins power moves, right, like all of those. There are valid ways to get yourself excited to start or continue something. You can pump yourself up. That’s great.

But discipline is an internal decision, not a fleeting emotion. When you make a decision, it’s like, “Oh, the alarm goes off on my phone at 8:00 AM. It’s time to make my phone calls.” I don’t even ask, do I feel like it? I don’t check in and go like, “Huh, do I feel motivated to make the calls right now? Do I feel motivated to go to the gym? Do I feel like writing, working on my new book this morning?” Like, I don’t even ask myself that because that’s me searching for motivation. No. Discipline is I decided that I’m going to do what I commit to do, whether I feel like it or not.

And a big part of that is time blocking in my schedule. Like, I put what I’m committed to doing in my schedule and then I look at my schedule, I go, “Okay, it’s 8:00 AM. I’m committed to work out right now. Oh, it’s 8:30. What am I doing now? Oh, that’s what.” Literally, I commit in my schedule to the time blocks, a block of time that from this time to this time, here’s what I’m committed to doing, whether I feel like it or not. And as you do this, it gets easier and easier and easier. Alright. If you want to download the daily discipline affirmations, I wrote these literally this morning as I was outlining today’s podcast episode. So, it will help you to reinforce these concepts and to become the self-disciplined person that you are capable of becoming and that you deserve to be.

And again, maybe you’re already pretty self-disciplined, so let’s take advantage of the degrees of discipline and take it to the next level. So, your journey to becoming highly self-disciplined or going from where you are now on your discipline degree to the next level, intentionality, number one; number two, identity; number three, activity; number four, accountability. Make the commitment. See yourself by daily repetition of affirmation as a self-disciplined person, do the things that you’re committed to doing, put them in your schedule, do the activity, and if you want to uplevel beyond that, accountability is what the top performers utilize to take their results to the next level.

Alright. Goal achievers, I love you. Thank you today for listening. I appreciate you so much and I’m excited. I’m excited for you to implement this and to hear results. Send me an email support@miraclemorning.com. Actually, I think you can go to hal@miraclemorning.com or leave me a comment, MiracleMorning.com/582. That’s where you can download the daily discipline affirmations, MiracleMorning.com/582. All right. Love you so much. I’ll talk to you next week.