The Mindset Mentor - The 5 STEPS To Be More Self-Disciplined TODAY!

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Today I am going to teach you how to be more disciplined to start and finish the most important things in your life. Watch my podcast videos here: https://www.youtube.com/robdialjr Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. And if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love YouTube and you want to follow along with these podcasts on video and start seeing the mini documentaries we're going to start putting out, go ahead and look me up on YouTube. Type in Rob Dial, R-O-B-D-I-A-L, and you will find me there. Today, we're going to talk about the five steps to be more disciplined today. Now, I get it. Discipline doesn't sound sexy. There's nothing sexy about the word discipline or making yourself be more disciplined, but it's not the discipline that's sexy. It's the results of the

discipline that is sexy. It's the results of the discipline which creates the life that you truly want. And we're going to talk about how to build your discipline. And this is important because discipline isn't something that you're born with. There's no person that just comes out of the womb and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm just a disciplined person. No, discipline is actually a muscle. Discipline is a habit. It's something that you build and it's something that you create in yourself. The same way that you go to the gym over and over and over again and start lifting heavier and heavier weights, your muscles will start to grow. Same thing, exact same thing happens with discipline. You might start off and not be a very disciplined person. I used to be extremely undisciplined. I used to just be lazy, not do anything that I

needed to, not get anything done, super late to everything that I did, never accomplished any of my tasks. And then slowly but surely, I had little tiny wins. And it wasn't like my whole life just shifted. And I had this, I went from completely not disciplined to the most disciplined person in the world. There was never that shift. It was years and years and years of just working on myself and realizing after five years, after 10 years, oh my God, I'm a different person because I've developed this discipline muscle. I've developed this discipline habit. So for anybody who's watching this or listening to this, realize if you don't feel like you're disciplined right now, you're not starting behind the eight ball.

Nobody is disciplined. Nobody's born with it. It's something that you have to develop in yourself. And the funny thing about discipline is that we don't need discipline for all of the easy things in life. We don't need discipline to eat a pizza. We don't need discipline to take a nap. We don't need discipline to eat a pizza. We don't need discipline to take a nap. We don't need discipline to sleep in. We don't need discipline to do any of those things. What we need discipline for is the hard things,

not the easy things, the hard things, the things that you know you should be doing. Let that sink in for a second. You don't need discipline for pizza. You need discipline for, you know, a salad when a pizza is in front of you. You need discipline to say no to that pizza and say yes to salad. You need discipline to wake up early and do your morning routine. You need discipline to force yourself to go to the gym when it'd be a lot easier to just go to the bar and get a beer, wouldn't it? But going to the bar and getting a beer isn't going to build the life that you want. The discipline is going to build the life that you want. The discipline is going to build the life that you want. So once again, it's not sexy,

but it's necessary in the results of discipline is sexy. It's the life that you want, the money that you want, the freedom that you want, the business that you want, the relationships that you want. But before we dive into my five tips on how to actually be more disciplined, discipline is not about being perfect or being this badass productivity machine. And you're just like, I get stuff done. You know, it's not about that. It's about winning more than you lose in this battle every single day. Right? You're going to mess up. It's okay. We're going to talk about that later. You're going to screw stuff up. No big deal. But it's about winning more battles than you lose on the discipline side. It's about creating more than you don't. And what happens is if you slowly start winning more than losing, it kind of gets addicting. You're like, I'm going in the right path. This is fun. This is something I want to continue doing. And then you get a little bit better and a little bit better. So I'm going to give you my five tips to help you be more disciplined and to build this discipline. The first tip is this, is I want you to challenge yourself to finish everything.

You may have heard the phrase, or you may have heard me say it. I say it all the time because I'm a firm believer in it. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And so I want you to challenge yourself, not just to finish the big things, not to get the reports done that your boss needs by the time that you need it. I want you to actually focus on challenging yourself to finish the small things in life. When you eat something, instead of taking the plate and putting it inside of the sink, can you take that plate, wash it off by hand or wash it, put it inside of the dishwasher? Because you went from the act of eating. How do you close out the act of eating? Making sure the plate is clean. That's a win. Okay. That's just a little thing. It's not

sexy, but the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So if you're not doing the little things and you're not finishing the little tasks and creating just the little tiny things that need to be done, you're definitely not doing and finishing the big things. So if you can have discipline to do the things that are almost minuscule, almost don't even mean anything, it makes it so much easier to start doing the heavy objects, to lift the heavy objects later on down the road, right? So do the dishes. You've heard me say this one before. After you get done sleeping, just make your bed. Listen, I'm being honest with you. I hate making the bed. I think it's, I've always thought that making the bed is stupid if I'm being honest with you, because I'm

like, I don't ever spend any time in my room. The only thing that I do in my room is brush my teeth. Brush my teeth after I get up, I sleep, I go and shower in the bathroom, and then I leave and I never come back. So I brush my teeth, I shower, and I wake up for my sleeping. Those are the things that I do when I'm awake inside of my bedroom.

Other than that, it's just eight hours of sleep in every single night. So to make my bed doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'm in it for the act of discipline. When I wake up in the morning, I go, okay, I have almost finished the act of sleeping. If I want to finish the act of sleeping, I need to now make my bed. It's about doing the little things because when you do the little things and you have discipline on the little things, like doing the dish, washing the cup, making the bed, then when you start to develop that little muscle of discipline, it makes it easier to go, you know what? I need to go to the gym. I'm going to force myself to go to the gym. You know what? I need to wake up at 5 a.m.

I'm going to start waking up. It's about building. You can't go in and just automatically start curling 75 pounds in the gym. You know, the 75 pound dumbbells, you have to start with the smaller ones. So why not start and have the discipline and to start to challenge yourself to finish everything, finish the small things, finish what you start. Don't allow yourself to stop anything early. Because one of the things that I see with most, I've coached tens of thousands of people, is that so many people are excited to start, but they're terrible at finishing whatever it is that they want. They're excited about their New Year's resolutions. They do really well for the first week and they start to fall off in the

second week and the third week. Basically, they're completely off and they're back in their old routines. So I want you to get the discipline of finishing what you start. Do not allow yourself to stop early or to give an excuse as to why you're going to stop. Okay, so that's tip number one. Tip number two, plan ahead and ask yourself this question, how can I make what I need to have discipline in easier on myself? So let me give you an example. Let's say that you want to start eating healthier. Okay, you can eat healthier. That is great. That's a beautiful thing. But then you ask yourself, how can I make this easier on myself? Well, one thing I could do is I could take Sunday and take two hours on Sunday and plan and create every single meal. And if I do meal plans, it makes it easier to stay on track to eat the stuff that I need

to. And therefore, I don't go five hours without eating. And then I find myself with really low blood sugar. And then I just want to freaking eat a bag of chips and a bag of Skittles, right? Plan ahead for everything that requires the most discipline for you. How can I make this easier on myself? How can I make eating healthier easier myself? Why don't I take two hours of meal plan on Sunday? Perfect. Cool. How can I make working out easier on myself? I've done this before. I've done this many times. I forced myself to go to the gym and I get to the gym and I'm

like, well, what the hell should I do? And I'm kind of like just wandering all of the gym and picking up a couple of things and doing a couple of things. And then I'm like, I don't feel like I did anything in the past 45 minutes. So maybe if you plan on working out four times a week, five times a week, maybe you actually have your workouts planned. So all you have to do is show up. So there's less resistance because what we're trying to do is we're trying to remove resistance in our brain. When we know there's more stuff that we need to do, like creating a meal, we're less likely to create that meal because we've, we're freaking busy. Let's be honest. Right. But if I've already got the meal done, it makes it easier. Cause I'm like,

all I got to do is just take this food and put it in my mouth. That's it, right? If I know that I've got to go to the gym and I now, as I'm at the gym, have to figure out the workout, there's resistance to that because it's going to require more of me. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And I'm going to do chest and back this day. I'm going to do biceps and triceps this day. I'm going to do legs this day. And I'm going to do full body the next day. And I have my exact workout plans done. Makes it so much easier.

All I got to do is just show up, right? So plan ahead. How can you make this easier on yourself? I gave you a couple of examples with meal plans, with eating healthier, with working out. But with anything that you're trying to get better at, anything that you need to work at, how can you figure out a way to make it easier on yourself and to plan ahead? Today's episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace empowers millions of dreamers and doers just like you by providing them with the tools that they need to bring their

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to launch, you can use the code dial D-I-A-L to save 10% on your first order when you're ready to launch, you can use the code DIAL to save 10% on your first order when you purchase a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash D-I-A-L. The next thing, number three, is to design your environment to help you. Let me give a couple of examples of how to do this. Remove temptation, right? So like for me, I'll be honest with you. I am like a crackhead when it comes to sugar. I know that when I have sugar, when I actually have a bag of a couple of Skittles, if I have a couple of Skittles,

I want to crush the entire bag of Skittles and I want to crush as many Skittles that I could possibly get my hands on. I'm like a crackhead when it comes to sugar. So what I do is there's no sugar inside of my house that can tempt me. There's no candy. There's no popsicles. There's none of that stuff. I remove the temptation. I design my environment to help me be more disciplined, right? If I want to start eating healthier, I don't have any crappy food that's in the kitchen. I don't have any crappy food that's in the pantry. I remove all of that stuff. If you want to stop drinking alcohol for 30 days, let's say you even have alcohol in your house, you have a bar set up. Can you take that alcohol and put it out of sight? Lock it inside of a closet somewhere, right? Out of sight, out of mind. Can you design your environment to support this discipline that you're trying to build?

Ah, think about that. What about the people that you hang out with? Hmm. Okay, if I want to, you know, let me just think back to the Super Bowl that just happened, right? I had friends over for the Super Bowl and I had friends over and they were all drinking and I wasn't drinking at the time. And so, you know, I had them over and it made it really hard not to drink because I wanted to drink just to have a drink with my friends.

But if I wanted to make that even easier on myself, what I could have done is gone, you know what? I'm not even going to be around people who could possibly talk me into drinking. Now, luckily, my friends know that I rarely drink anyway, so they don't could possibly talk me into drinking. Now, luckily, my friends know that I rarely drink anyway, so they don't try to talk me into it. But when I stopped drinking, when I first started getting out of it, when I went from hardcore partying Rob to actually serious business owner and creating the life I want to Rob, I got so much crap from my friends, so much peer pressure. And that was hard. And I did well sometimes, and I failed sometimes. But what would make it easier

is to not be around people who can't help me actually make this whole thing, who can't support me, who want to make it harder for me, who wanted me to, if I want to stop drinking, who want me to drink, right? So design your environment. If you're trying to be more positive and you're being disciplined to think of every single thought, to make sure that every thought that comes through your head that happens to be positive, sure that every thought that comes through your head that happens to be positive, you celebrate every thought that comes through your head that's negative, you fix with a couple of positive thoughts.

Then it'd be really dumb for me to be around somebody who's constantly negative, right? So how can you design your environment? You're in control of this. Don't act like it's someone else's fault that they're negative. No, you got around that negative person. Take responsibility for it. Design your environment to get it done.

If you're like, you know what? I need to crank out two hours of hardcore work. Maybe what you do is you clear all of the crap off your bed or not off your bed, off your desk. You put it all away. And the only thing that's on your desk is your computer. Your phone is in another room. Whatever it is you have to do to design the environment to make sure that you can be ultra productive at that moment, right? Turn off all your notifications. Turn off

the notifications when you get a text message on your computer. If you have an app, you know, a MacBook, turn off all of your email notifications. Turn off everything that could distract you from the one thing that you need to do, which is get stuff done. You have two hours to work. Get it done. Don't allow yourself to slip into, oh, I've got my phone right here. Oh, I got a text. Oh, look, I got to, oh, somebody sent me a Facebook message. No. Design your environment to support you in building up this discipline. So that's number three is to design your environment. Number four, this is super important for everybody. Realize it's not about being perfect. It's about progress, not perfection. Okay. You're going to mess up. You're not going to be perfect. I promise you this. You're going to mess up quite a lot in your life. And so what you have to realize is this, when you mess up,

don't judge yourself. Don't guilt yourself. Don't get emotional about how you messed up because you will mess up. But when you mess up, make adjustments, right? If I'm sitting down to be ultra productive, like the example I just gave, and I happen to find myself going down the rabbit hole of Instagram, when I'm supposed to be working, I go, oh, crap. That's right. I'm supposed to be working right now. What can I do? What adjustments can I make? Well, next time I could take my phone, I could put it in the other room. That's what I'm going to do, right? If I notice that I'm in the middle of my ultra productive time or what's

supposed to be my ultra productive time, and I happen to notice, oh man, I'm in the middle of doing all of these emails and that's not what I wanted to do. How can I make adjustments to make sure I don't have this happen again? I can turn off the notifications on this, right? When you mess up, make adjustments. Don't judge yourself. Don't be hard on yourself. Don't talk trash to yourself. Don't make it harder on yourself than you need to.

You screwed up. Okay, it is what it is. It happened. Don't resist it. It is the way it is. But how can I make adjustments? You know, if you were planning on not drinking and you wake up with a big hangover, well, you probably need to make some adjustments as to, you know, maybe you have alcohol out or maybe you were stressed out or maybe your friends called

you and there's certain people that you, when you're not drinking, maybe you shouldn't spend much time around or spend time around them during the day and not at night when they're going to get you wasted, whatever it is. It's going to happen. You're going to mess up. You're going to fall on your face. That is life. That's the way that it goes. But when it happens, when you mess up, make adjustments. It's about progress, not perfection. Am I still going in the direction that I want to? If I happen to screw up and take a step back, am I at least taking two steps forward for every step back that I take? Progress, not perfection. Take a deep breath and realize you're not perfect. You never will be perfect and you're going to mess up a lot of stuff. That's okay though. It's about progress, not perfection. And then tip number five

is to reward yourself. Reward yourself. Give yourself some sort of reward. If you want to be super healthy for the entire day, have one day where you have a cheat meal. Like when I was, when I used to literally, when I was hardcore into being like really hardcore meal planning, working out, eating the stuff that I need to, like I'm not anywhere near as hardcore as I used to be, but I would be so hardcore for the entire week. Saturday night, it was on like Donkey Kong. You knew that I was about to destroy some food. I get an entire freaking cheese and pepperoni pizza. I'd eat the entire thing by myself. Then I would go to this place called Amy's ice cream here in Austin. And I would order a big old freaking ice cream. And I would basically go into a food coma and pass out because I ate so much. But that I ate so much and I was so rewarded that it really like the next week was actually easy for me to be disciplined because I was like,

holy crap, I kind of went off the hinges there. And also I ate so much. I don't feel like I need to eat that again, at least not until next Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening. Well, I'm going to crush it again. Right. Another thing I used to do when I was a salesperson is I would sit down and go, okay, I've got to make a hundred phone calls. And so I would figure out a way to reward myself. And so what I would do is I would set up what they call dopamine reward systems. I didn't know I was doing this. Now I know the actual neurology behind what I was doing. But what I would do is I would go, okay, every 10 phone calls, I can eat three Skittles, right? So I'd have a bag of Skittles and I would have them in front of me so I could see it. And I was like, oh my God, I want the freaking Skittles,

right? Because I told you I'm like a crackhead with Skittles and sugar. So I go, okay, I can have three Skittles after I get done my first 10 phone calls. I can have three Skittles after my next 10 phone calls. And when I get done with my 100 phone calls, which was my goal, I can have three Skittles after my next 10 phone calls. And when I get done with my 100 phone calls, which was my goal, I can eat the rest of the Skittles. And so what I would do is I would reward myself and set up small rewards to get me excited to do what I needed to do versus just eating the entire bag of Skittles,

having a massive sugar rush and then falling asleep after, right? So can you set up your life where you reward yourself for the discipline that you need? One thing that I'm going to tell you, this is something that really helps me out. When I was younger, I remember reading a book that changed my life that talked about this, but what I used to do is I used to think to myself, if I'm not where I want to be in my life yet, I don't deserve a day off. I don't deserve free time. I used to live my life that way.

And I used to think that, but then I came to realize, I read a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. And I read the book and I realized that I needed to actually start to set up my life where I had free time planned. Because when I go and have my free time, it allows me, that reward of free time allows me to go back into the work time, the hardcore time and get the stuff done that I need to and to be focused on it. But I'm the type of person, and you're probably like this as well. My goals are like the horizon. I'll never catch them.

Every time I get closer to them, I push them just a little bit further away and a little bit further away because I want, I keep thinking bigger and bigger and bigger. So if I set up my entire life not to be rewarded until I hit a specific massive goal in my life, I'll probably never hit that goal because I constantly keep pushing it further and further away. And so you have to set up reward systems to reward yourself. Reward yourself with a cheat meal. Reward yourself with a day off and not having to work out. Reward yourself with a bag of Skittles after you make 100 phone calls. Set up reward systems to start to help you Skittles after you make 100 phone calls. Set up reward

systems to start to help you out and to start to make you more disciplined. So those are the five tips that I have. Number one, challenge yourself to finish everything, especially the small things. Number two, plan ahead, help yourself, make it easier on yourself. Number three, design your environment to support your discipline and your growth. Number four, it's about progress and imperfection. Number five, reward yourself. You freaking deserve a reward if you get done what you need to get done. So that's all I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Please continue to take a screenshot of this or a video of this and put it on your

Instagram stories. Tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. The only way that we grow and the only way that we become one of the top 100 podcasts in the entire world is because you guys continue to share it. So I greatly appreciate you for it. If you've ever gotten any value from anything that I've ever said, please share it. Please allow more people to find it so that they can get value from it as well. So I greatly appreciate you and I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission, make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.