Intention Inspires Discipline
Sometimes when we’re feeling a lack of motivation or focus, we tend to immediately think that it’s due to a lack of discipline - that we’re not doing a good enough job of buckling down and just staying focused.
But we feel undisciplined over a long period of time, it often means that something is out of alignment in terms of our day to day connection with our work. It usually means we aren’t currently in touch with the source of excitement or motivation or joy that comes from, or could come from, the work we do.
In this episode, I want to invite you to consider whether there’s an even more powerful way for us to get back on track: reconnecting with our intention.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
Sometimes when we’re feeling a lack of motivation or focus, we tend to immediately think that it’s due to a lack of discipline - that we’re not doing a good enough job of buckling down and just staying focused.
And in doing that we often will beat up on ourselves for not having the innate discipline that we think we should have. Like cmon, just stay focused, pull it together, stay disciplined, let’s go, get your act together.
But if you think about it, when we feel undisciplined like this over a long period of time, it usually means that something is out of alignment in terms of our moment to moment and day to day connection with our work. It usually means we aren’t currently in touch with the source of excitement or motivation or joy that comes from, or could come from, the work we do.
So in those moments where we think we need to be more disciplined, I want to invite you to consider whether there’s an even more powerful way for us to get back on track: reconnecting with our intention.
In this episode we’ll discuss the importance of connecting with your intention, how we often mistake a lack of connection with our intention for a lack of discipline and I’ll give you a couple of ideas about how you can weave intention back into your workday.
Here we go.
Main:
Let’s take a look at the idea of discipline. We’ve heard a lot over the course of our lifetime about the importance of staying disciplined, and how it’s an integral part of day to day success.
And we also have done a lot of beating up on ourselves when we think that we’re not doing a good enough job of staying disciplined, particularly when it comes to our work.
So today I want to look at that and also suggest to you that there might be something even more fundamental that could play a key role in where we draw our discipline from: and that’s having a strong intention.
But let me start with a quick story that I think will help us get to the heart of this concept.
I’ve been working with a client of mine who recently has been struggling to make it through her work day. She’s been feeling very distracted, very unorganized, unmotivated, and all of that’s been leading her to have a hard time making it through her day, to the point where she’s been falling behind on projects and kind of resenting her work.
Now I’ve known this client for a while and I know that she truly loves her work - she’s an accountant and she designed her business specifically so she could help small business owners.
So this is a person who has been very clear all along about what she wants from her work and her career and I know that it brings her a lot of joy.
So in one of our recent sessions when she brought up how she’s been struggling I asked her what she thought was going on. And she said that she thought she needed to be more disciplined throughout the day. Her initial instinct was that she felt like she was losing control over her day, and so she thought that by creating more boundaries that would lead to her getting back on track.
So this is where this episode’s concept comes in. In moments where we’re having a lack of motivation, or we feel uninspired, or our workday feels unwieldy and out of control, or we feel like we’re not getting done in a day, it’s natural to think that the root cause of that is a lack of discipline.
In other words, when we feel out of touch with what’s happening during a day, we think it’s due in part to having strayed too far from a sense of discipline, for a set of rules that we should be following.
And we immediately start to beat up on ourselves for not having the innate discipline that we think we should have.
And this idea of discipline is a pretty strong story in our culture. At the heart of a lot of success stories that we hear - about entrepreneurs or innovators or athletes - is the level of discipline they had, and how good they were at staying focused and eliminating distractions.
And so because the idea of discipline is so ingrained in what we believe is the formula for success, when we don’t feel that sense of day to day motivation or we feel off track we can get caught up in labeling ourselves unmotivated and sometimes even unworthy of success - because we think we’re lacking discipline.
But what I want to suggest to you today is what I suggested to my client when she told me she thought she needed to be more disciplined.
Instead of focusing on being more disciplined, I suggested to her that maybe she should think about reconnecting with and reaffirming the intentions she had behind her work.
And by intentions I meant this: What was her purpose, her goal, her plans, her motivations, her reasons for choosing to do the type of work she did in the first place?
I asked her to spend some time thinking about why she decided to go to school to be an accountant, I asked her to envision how excited she was to start her own business, I asked her to envision all the satisfied clients she had helped over the years who really benefited from her work.
I asked her to envision how providing those clients with excellent service was allowing her to meet her personal financial goals - buying a house, going on a long vacation she wanted to go on, really picturing herself as the wealthy and well-taken care of version of herself that I know she is and had set an intention to become.
And so the reason I asked her to consider focusing first on her intention is because when we’re connected with our intention, and our reason for doing our work in the first place, then we don’t usually struggle as much with staying disciplined.
When we feel undisciplined over a long period of time, it usually means that something is out of alignment in terms of our moment to moment and day to day connection with our work. It usually means we aren’t currently in touch with the source of excitement or motivation or joy that comes from the work we do.
But when we’re focused on our root motivations, and when we can get connected with that part of us that was drawn to our work in the first place, and when we’re aligned with that sense of personal power that comes from setting a strong intention, then discipline and focus come much more easily.
Your root motivation can be anything - it can be your desire to help a certain kind of client, your belief in working for a cause, it can be intellectual stimulation, it can be financial motivation - it can be anything, but the important part is that you know what that intention is and you’re able to be present with it and call it forward and rely on it as a source of day to day motivation.
When you’re in touch with your intention, then the challenges that we face in terms of being motivated or feeling like things are out of control, or falling behind, or missing deadlines, a lot of those things fall back into place because our day to day actions and mindset are driven by intention. We’re beating up on ourselves less, and celebrating why we do our work more.
Now I’m not suggesting that discipline is bad or that you should reject the idea of discipline. I think a sense of discipline and setting up boundaries and guidelines and guideposts is absolutely fundamental to achievement. We need structure and we need guide rails and we need systems and routines to help us optimize and maximize.
But what I am suggesting is that sometimes we mistake the need for reaffirming our intention as the need for more discipline.
We often mistake a lack of connection with our intention for a lack of discipline.
Intention is what inspires discipline. Intention is what fuels discipline.
Your intention is the driving force, and discipline is the structure you build to put your intention to use and to maximize and amplify it.
The professional athletes and entrepreneurs and successful innovators that I mentioned before, yes they of course a big part of their story is the discipline they have, but I’d say an even more important aspect of their success stories is the intention they set for themselves - the reason and cause and the motivation behind what they do.
Discipline will only get you so far - if you’re not connected with your intention, that’s when we run out of steam. That’s when work feels hard. That’s when we start to feel unmotivated. That’s when we start to feel resentful.
So, if you find yourself feeling unmotivated or feeling undisciplined during the day, or feeling out of touch with your work, here’s what I suggest you do. And this is the same exercise I asked my client to do.
First, I want you to take out a big blank sheet of paper and I want you to spend a few minutes answering these questions:
What is my intention behind the work I do? What gets me excited about this work?
Is it helping a certain type of client, forwarding a cause, intellectual stimulation, freedom or autonomy, financial gain?
And I want you to think about the things that really get you excited about the work you do. What’s at the core of that excitement or motivation? And I want you to just freewrite, don’t try to put it under any labels just write it out.
Second, ask: How have I lost touch with that intention?
In other words, how has that intention been masked or overlooked or lost because of the way you approach your day to day work? Are you so wrapped up in the minutiae of the tasks and the projects and the emails and the clients and the stress that you’ve edged out the progress that you’re making or the bigger picture?
Maybe you’ve trained yourself to move so fast from one thing to the next during your day, or that you’ve trained yourself to be so efficient, that you overlook the wins and daily achievements that actually are right in front of you.
For many of us we’re so wrapped up in moving on to the next thing that we miss chances to stay connected with our intention - our intention is expressing itself through our work each day (like helping a client or doing great work or earning money) but we’re not looking for it and so we lose touch with it.
So second is to write down some ideas about how you might have lost touch with your intention in your day to day work.
And then third is the corollary to two: Ask: what can I do to reconnect with that intention each and every day?
What can you do to stay connected with your purpose and your reason each day, so that it’s top of mind for you as you move through your day? This is something I work on with my clients all the time. And there are many ways to do it.
It could be a daily practice of starting your day by reviewing your intention. It could be making sure you make room in your day to work on things that might not be your highest level priority work, but are things that are fulfilling and remind you why you decided to do this work in the first place.
I used to be the type of person who would beat up on myself for inserting anything into my workday that wasn’t the most efficient use of my time, or that wasn’t the next most important project I had to take on. I thought that in order to have a great workday, I had to learn how to stack my highest priority after highest priority after highest priority - and if any windows opened up in my day, then I had to try to shove more work into that space.
And for some people that works, but for me I eventually realized that if I wanted to show up, day after day, as the best version of myself, and if I wanted to grow professionally and be happy each day, and if I wanted to enjoy the reason I started my business in the first place, then I had to leave room for work that might not be my highest priority, but that made me feel alive and excited.
There are two podcasts I’ve put out that I think might help you with this: Episode 13 on Workday Mantras, and Episode 4 on Making Room for Work You Enjoy. If you’re interested in some starting points for how to weave your intention back into your workday, I think they’d be a great resource for you.
So remember that while discipline is important, what’s even more important is the time you spend staying connected with and reaffirming your intentions. If you stay in touch with your intentions, they’ll inspire you to put in place all of the guide rails and guideposts and boundaries and discipline that you need to carry you through.
Go have a great workday.