We’re entering the third week of January as I write this, and I can’t help noticing the heavy atmosphere and the general state of panic at everything there is to accomplish during this merciless first month of the year. The race toward productivity and resolutions is in full swing, and the teams face off with ferocity: the die-hard fans of year-end reviews and 18-step routines; the determined ones who refuse to miss the starting gun this time but don’t really know how to go about it; the dabblers who set up four methods at once, keeping the best of each; the holdouts who won’t stoop to “that” (read: the New Year’s rat race); the latecomers with a sage vibe who start the year with spring in March; and the nostalgic souls allied with overwhelmed parents who’ll wait for September to hit the gas and rethink their habits.

I’d love to tell you I’m above all that, but that would be a shameless lack of honesty. I wouldn’t be writing this article if my straight-A-student neurosis didn’t see its internal barometer go haywire when year’s end tolls the bell. I’m a lover of fresh starts, of planners of every kind, of endless lists, and my stationery obsession only feeds the problem — or is it the other way around? January is paradise on earth for aficionados of weekly planners, notebooks, notepads, and other delights. So, after years of making various kinds of resolutions with results more or less fruitful, I wanted to write about the underlying subject: discipline.

Discipline and self-care

We’re sold discipline and habits as miracle cures for procrastination — the ultimate expression of dreaded inertia when we’re sailing full speed toward a deadline (emphasis on the dead). Except, even if we all understand what’s at stake with discipline, I’m not sure we grasp the full extent of the dangers and drifts that surround it.

The injunctions to be disciplined

Discipline is placed on a pedestal as the savior that will solve all our problems. The injunctions rain down and the discomfort grows. We’re made to believe — on social media and in most self-help books — that the key lies in flawless hygiene of life: waking and sleeping at regular hours, getting up before 6:00 a.m., drinking more than two liters of water a day, walking more than 10,000 steps, standing up from your chair, eating healthy (choose your constraints here: cut coffee, gluten, dairy, eggs, …), ice baths, jogs, CrossFit, yoga, meditation, journaling…

Open Instagram and you’ll take a wave of injunctions right in the face and swallow half the ocean. I understand those who despise discipline before even giving it a chance. It’s painted in the most unappealing light. Turned into a communications object, its real strengths have been stolen. Which is why the injunctions to practice it drastically reduce the field of possibilities for what discipline can look like and how to cultivate it.

I don’t claim to have discovered the grand secret of discipline. I’m sharing, humbly, this observation: when it comes to creating a framework of discipline for yourself (with no external person setting the rules, imposing a rhythm, and guaranteeing those rules are respected — I’ll come back to this later), it’s essential to test your own needs; understanding how you function then becomes a crucial asset.

Know yourself to win yourself

After years of therapy, thousands of pages read, and hours of podcasts on personal development, I think I can calmly say that self-knowledge is a powerful, indispensable tool.

I’ll spare you the exhaustive list of reasons why I believe we should all do the work of exploring our identity and our deeper patterns. I’ll focus here on how vital this knowledge is for conquering your independence and freedom.

I learned the hard way that leaving the family nest wasn’t enough to be independent and free. I had to untangle the knots of my story, understand who I was, work on fighting my most detestable faults and cultivating my most sparkling qualities. None of it was innate; I earned my badges with sweat on my brow. Studying the gears of my thinking, observing my mechanisms, repairing the broken pieces and replacing the most defective ones, I wrote the user manual of me (a work forever unfinished and constantly being rewritten).

The work is never done, and depending on life’s seasons, the recipes evolve. But today I know a little better how to decipher who I am and how to take myself where I want to go.

• I know that to establish a new habit I have to want it from the depths of my being, with the intimate conviction that my life depends on it (quitting smoking after a flu when I truly thought I might lose my skin is one of the clearest examples).
• I also know I need to make small, gradual changes to set the new framework — especially not upend everything at once: I reprogrammed my alarm clock by shaving off a few minutes each day for two weeks.
• I know that if I have fun while changing things, it’s more likely to work: I set rewards at milestones, I make a game of my goals (a water bottle that cheers me on to drink, a dawn-simulating alarm clock, and other cute gadgets — sometimes a bit overpriced) and it works!
• I’ve noticed that having someone to whom I’m accountable is a real asset. Sending a photo after my morning workout to a friend who’s also getting back into sport; having a coach help me with my meals or other aspects of my life — it all makes the whole thing so much simpler and often multiplies results. Don’t underestimate what a people-pleaser can do to please — I’m working on it, but in this case, it finally serves a good cause!
• I’m forced to admit I cannot change many things at once in a lasting way. I have to focus on small changes over an extended period to be sure it works. Endurance is my best ally.
• I must especially avoid straying too far from my routine when I’m establishing a new habit; otherwise, when I return to a normal rhythm, the habit disappears.

That’s my list. Obviously what works for me might not work for you. I invite you to take inventory of what you’ve successfully put in place and how: what mechanisms work for you when we talk about discipline?

Building your character: yes — but to what cost?

I wanted to address discipline, often presented as a muscle it’s important to exercise. True. However, I wanted to share a personal example when it comes to exercise, because after reading many books on the power of habits and the importance of discipline in our daily lives, I can’t help feeling a trace of bitterness. Habits and discipline are often presented as a Grail, with no regard for the consequences the shared advice might have. In my view, encouraging people to build an extremely rigid framework to guarantee their success is no guarantee that everything will go smoothly. On the contrary…

I swam a lot, for a long time. I counted my strokes, took my pulse, swam length after length, learned to read my time while breathing before my turn… I trained in the water and out of it. A grueling rhythm was imposed on me; I was asked to push past my limits, to ignore pain, to get back in the water after vomiting because my body was so shaken by the effort. I imposed an iron discipline on myself, I built up my resistance (that’s even the name of some drills — “resistance”). I learned that even if you hurt, you keep going; that for a few tenths of a second you could exhaust yourself for months, for years.

I also learned that the stronger your mind, the more rigid the framework — and the more violent the fall.

What do you think happens to high-level athletes when everything stops? One morning I could no longer lift my left arm — I had abused my tendons’ goodwill. I couldn’t swim one more length. I couldn’t even grab my bowl to pour my Smacks…

I had seen others around me stop, but I hadn’t really looked. When discipline is the result of an external framework with military rigidity (sport, elite prep classes, overly demanding parents…) is it real? Maybe. One thing is certain: it isn’t durable. The individual is fooled by the illusion of a framework that holds them up; but if they don’t have a solid spine (a good reason to impose said discipline), then they will collapse. That’s a constant.

I saw teammates sink into depressive states after an injury forced them to stop. I saw others indulge in every excess. While I was still swimming, we would comment on the impressive weight gain of young women who stopped training to pursue their studies after earning their Bac.

When the framework disappears — when it’s been the center of gravity of your life for as long as it was for me (more than half my life at the time) — then the world collapses. Wake-up time no longer makes any sense because it’s no longer dictated by training; meals are no longer governed by tapering phases; free time stretches to infinity. It makes me question deeply the nature of the discipline I imposed on myself back then; I said again this very morning, “I had no choice,” but that’s false. I did have the choice to stop; I was simply convinced it was the only possibility. When the field of possibilities opened for me, the vertigo paralyzed me before the void swallowed me up. Which brings me to the end of this reflection on the intrinsic value of discipline.

Reshaping our relationship to discipline

I believe it’s essential to rewrite our script when it comes to disciplining ourselves. We see it as yet another objective to reach, as an ultimate social proof of achievement that would make us a “better version of ourselves.”

Let’s go back to the etymology of the word: from Latin disciplina, derived from discipulus (“disciple”), itself from discere (“to learn”).

The disciple is the one who follows the master and learns from them. Thus, discipline is a learning — a path where we feed our knowledge to elevate ourselves. It is the rigor necessary to integrate into ourselves a new knowledge coming from the outside. Seen this way, it’s no longer about performing but about educating — and in my opinion, that changes everything. We are much more patient when we face learning something new; we know we’ll have to be “bad” at first, then progress. Discipline is the ability to grant ourselves enough patience and gentleness to get past the unpleasant stage when our mastery of a subject or practice is very low — and the discomfort can be immense.

Believe me, the first time I tried to balance on my head, it wasn’t comfortable. Nor glorious or graceful, for that matter. Today, I can breathe calmly in that posture and enjoy all its benefits; it’s my discipline that made that possible. The repetition of small actions, with a large dose of patience, can work wonders.

If you only remember one piece of advice from this article, let it be this: big changes spring from the smallest actions, repeated with patience and consistency. Which brings me to my last point — the role courage plays in this obstacle course.

Having the courage of your discipline

A few weeks ago, I read a post by Inès Leonarduzzi about courage. I even shared it, scribbling a few thoughts on the fly in my Stories. And then the word stuck to me like chewing gum under my shoe, so I decided it deserved its proper place here — I even hesitated to devote a full article to the notion. I may come back to it — who knows!

Swimming against the current

When we decide to set up a certain hygiene of life or a particular rhythm for various reasons — artistic projects, launching a product, preparing for a sporting event… — we’re going to face the incomprehension of many people in response to our choices, and the constant temptation to stray from our habits — which are nonetheless the guarantors of our future success.

We’ll need the courage to swim against the current: not go out on Friday night, not drink alcohol, go to bed early, and miss a few memes on Instagram. In reality, it’s about not choosing immediate gratification. As the “Marshmallow Experiment,” conducted at Stanford in the 1970s by Walter Mischel, taught us, people capable of delaying gratification statistically have better chances of success in life (with varied indicators: academic results, health status, etc.). This study has recently been complemented by integrating the influence of participants’ socio-economic environments — since it was conducted with elementary-school children. It’s been shown that part of their ability to self-regulate is directly linked to their social and economic context.

My aim here is to bring you back to the importance of courage in the equation: in order to keep control of your impulses when you’re in a situation where immediate gratification is possible (a tall glass of icy Coca-Cola with ice cubes, lemon, straw — my guilty pleasure) and it runs counter to your long-term goal (my desire to reduce sugar for better health). It’s very easy to give in to a single glass of Coke since, in itself, a simple glass seems absolutely innocent and yet… Our discipline is built by compiling each small victory, each small moment of courage where we delay gratification to make sure we reach the true objective. A wink here to compound interest and to Darren Hardy, whose book I’ll be presenting in more detail very soon.

Dealing with detours

So then, how do we avoid becoming completely rigid by trying to over-structure our lives? What about spontaneity and adaptability to change?

It’s the eternal dilemma: finding nuance and the right intensity. There’s no point living like an ascetic. My advice is to fumble your way through. Yes, I know — it’s not the tip of the century, but again, if you understand how important self-knowledge is when formulating strategies for your development, then feeling your way forward seems entirely appropriate!

I’m deeply convinced that no matter the frameworks and their rigidities, they will never protect you from the unexpected and the bumps in the road. Life is meant to be unpredictable and intense, so ideally you’d choose goals that truly animate you — not those an algorithm recommends in a feed pretentiously named “for you.” Once the goal you’re aiming for makes sense in your eyes — once it lights a small fire in the pit of your stomach — the strategies you’ll have to put in place will feel far more acceptable.

Rigidity won’t necessarily serve your interests, and discipline expresses itself in as many ways as there are human beings. Trust yourself: learn the kind of rigor that supports, not the kind that walls you in. Remember the pool lengths — and the tumble that followed — and don’t swim without a purpose!

So discipline is built around the desire to conquer yourself, in a way — while accepting, like mountaineers, that the mountain always wins.