Transcription
You don't have a discipline problem. You have an identity problem. And that is why discipline feels hard when it should feel natural.
You see, psychocybernetics explains that your actions tend to match the image you hold of yourself. If you see yourself as somebody who lacks discipline, then it's always going to be hard to stick to your goals, to stick to your habits and routines. You're always going to feel like you're fighting against your own behavior, against your own mind.
But when you change the underlying self-image, when you change that identity, discipline stops feeling like a battle and it actually starts to feel like second nature. That is when you want to do the things that are good for you. That is when you want to go for a run, when you want to read, journal, meditate, do the deep work, and that is the end goal.
In this video, I'll break down the practical ideas from this book over here, psychocybernetics. And I'm going to show you how to use these principles in your own life to build discipline and rewire your identity in order to eliminate procrastination, to focus better, to fix your inputs, be more consistent so you can get to your goals a lot faster.
Part number one, discipline's main enemy. Discipline's main enemy is self-image. You see, your self-image is either working for you or working against you. There is no in between. Chances are, your self-image has been obstructing your discipline and making it harder for you to achieve your goals.
You see, if I ask you to wake up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, a disciplined person and an undisiplined person both hear the alarm at 5:00 a.m. Now, the difference isn't the alarm. They both hear it. The difference is the identity. The disciplined person wakes up because they want to wake up. because they know that that's good for them because they have all the tasks that they want to do and achieve in their mind and they're ready to attack the day.
For the undisiplined person, it just feels uncomfortable. It feels like a very comfortable snooze. They know they have to get up. They know they have work to do, but their identity is just holding them back and creating this mental resistance towards them and the action they need to take.
Now, there is two versions of you at this moment. There is the disciplined version of yourself, the highest version of yourself. And there is the undisiplined version of yourself, the lower version of yourself. The higher self is the one who sticks to their promises, keeps their promises. They journal, they read, they do all the good habits, they don't waste time, they don't procrastinate, they don't doom scroll, they focus on themselves, and they are the best version of themselves.
Now, that version of you, you might have been for maybe a week, for maybe a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months. But it seems that that identity just can't stay. And there is a reason for that that I'll explain later in this video.
Now, the undisiplined version of yourself, the lower self, always seems to write things down and never actually does them. This version of yourself procrastinates and doom scrolls and just wastes their time. They can't stick to their goals. They don't stick to their inputs and they always complain about why they don't have the life that they want. And this all happens on a subconscious identity level.
Now, there are two versions of you. Let's tap into exactly the framework you can use in your own life to transition from being the undisiplined version to the disciplined version so you can get to your goals.
Now, your level of success never exceeds your level of discipline. If you're stuck with, you know, your income, your business feels like it's stagnating. It feels like you're unable to make progress in the gym. It feels like your relationships are just on hold. And it feels like you're just not operating at the level you want to be at. That is all identity. And I'll explain exactly how to shift your identity so that the good work, the results that you want feels like it's like deserved, like it's natural.
Now, that's where the goal seeking mind comes in. We need to first understand how the mind works. You see, your brain naturally moves towards whatever outcomes you tend to focus on. So, if you have an identity and an outcome that you repeatedly focus on, this is going to stick and it is going to be absorbed by your subconscious mind and it's going to become your self-image. And that self-image reflects itself through your daily actions. And obviously, the actions you take create the life that you have. You can't expect to scale your business if you're not putting in the work to scale your business.
You see, it all starts with belief. And number one is the way you see yourself. First of all, you see yourself a certain way and then your brain starts to look for evidence to match that self-image. So, if I see myself as a disciplined person and that's my underlying self-image, then yes, I'm going to slip up. Yes, I'm going to have times where I just like go back to bad habits where I procrastinate a little bit or I doom scroll. But the trick here is the discipline identity is going to kick in and your mind is going to start looking for ways to reconfirm that identity. It's going to look for evidence. It's going to create patterns in your behavior, in your actions so that it can be like, "Yes, we are right." The brain loves to be right. The subconscious always wants to be correct. So whatever your self- image is right now, your brain is going to look for ways to match that. You are going to find yourself taking actions just to confirm that belief that you have of yourself.
If you see yourself as a person who procrastinates, even if you try a thousand things, you will come back to the same place. And that is why identity before habits is so important. You see, Atomic Habits is a great book that talks about habits. And it also has a part about identity where habits and identity meet is that if you want to make the biggest change with your habits, you shouldn't try to focus on the habits themselves. You see the habits themselves are a consequence. They are a byproduct of your identity.
Now a lot of people they try to stop bad habits, cut out the bad habits when they still have the identity of somebody who does those bad habits and they also try to implement good habits like they try to read, they try to journal, they try to meditate but they don't yet see themselves as a person who does those things and as a result they'll be able to be consistent for maybe one week or two weeks and then they will forget these habits. Most people try to build disciplined habits before becoming a disciplined person. Psychocybernetics flips that around. Change the identity first and the habits become much much easier. instead of trying to change the habits which eventually always leads to you forgetting them and slipping up and then you ask yourself what's wrong with me and then you think that something is wrong and you ask yourself why am I not disciplined why don't I have willpower first you change the self-image you see willpower tries to force behavior you try to force these habits into your life when they don't even belong yet but self-image determines behavior automatically you will always take action in alignment with the way you see yourself with your identity.
Now, before we get into part number two where I'm going to show you exactly how to rebuild your self-image to match your desire desired outcome so that the habits, the routines, the actions you have to take don't feel forced but they feel natural. Let us talk about the identity thermostat. So you can temporarily outperform your self-image but it's just not going to last. It's always going to return to what feels like normal. So you need to ask yourself what current level of success, what current level of being disciplined, of being productive is your normal. What is your baseline? That is your identity thermostat.
For example, in a room, if the thermostat is set to 25° C, it doesn't matter if the room gets colder and it drops down to 20, the thermostat is going to kick in and bring it back up. Bring the room back up to 25. Say for some reason the room gets warmer than 25 C, the thermostat is going to kick back in and bring the room cool the room back down to hit 25, which is the baseline. So, it doesn't really matter how hot or cold the environment gets, the thermostat will always bring it back to baseline.
This is the same with your success, with your income, with your physical goals, with your health, with your relationships. For each of these things, you have an identity thermostat. A level of success, a level of income, a level of habits and discipline, a level of anything that is normal to you. And that normal is what you will always return to. If your identity thermostat is that of a person who can only make 10K a month, then it doesn't matter if you have a good month, your identity thermostat is set to 10K. If you have a good month and you hit 20K, you will self-sabotage. you will take the wrong actions, make negative decisions to bring yourself back down to 10K. Likewise, if you have a bad month, you hit 5K, you will instantly up the gas, you will instantly up the actions to get to that 10K again. And most people, they have their identity from what's set at a certain level, and it's like a ceiling, right? They try to outwork the identity, but they keep hitting the invisible ceiling. So, in order to achieve what you want to achieve, you first need to remove the ceiling so you can level up. Before that point where you raise the set point, where you raise the ceiling, everything is going to feel hard. The habits are going to feel hard. Scaling your business is going to feel hard. Being more productive and not wasting time is going to feel very hard.
Now, one quick question. Let me know in the comments below. What is one habit that you've just never been able to stay consistent with? For me, that has always been meditation. I think I've said this in another video, but before October of last year, I had the thought of I wanted to meditate. I would always write it down, but I would just never stick to it for years before that. So, let me know below because I guarantee that it has way more to do with identity than with motivation.
Part number two, rebuilding your self-image. Most people think they're not where they want to be because of circumstance, because of luck or strategy or whatever. But it's just because of identity and discipline. Number one, you don't have the discipline systems in place to be able to take the action consistently enough to scale. Your inputs are not dialed and as a result, your outputs are also not dialed and you don't get the results you want. And with identity, you just have a ceiling above your head that blocks you from getting to the next step.
So, let us talk about imagination versus reality. You see, the nervous system actually responds very strongly to imagined experiences, almost as if they're real. And I'll talk about this in a minute. You see, like think about the time where you had a bad dream and you wake up and you're sweating. You have a dream and all of a sudden your heart is racing or you think and you project to the interview you have next week or you have this public speaking event tomorrow or you have this important thing and like you're in your mind, you're just sitting, you're in your room and you're just thinking about something and then your mind and your heart starts racing. Your heartbeat goes up. You start sweating a little bit. You get more nervous and tense. You have all these physical reactions to an imagined experience.
Now the subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between an experience that is very vividly imagined, very strongly imagined and one that actually happens in real life. In this book there are many examples of people who you know exercised and people who imagined themselves exercising they both gained the same result. People who learned piano mentally literally they didn't touch a piano. They just visualized. They closed their eyes and visualized themselves practicing the notes and stuff and those who actually sat down to practice and they got nearly the same results. So that goes to show you can shape your mind in such an amazing way to shift your identity through the art of visualization. So use this to your advantage.
And this is where mental rehearsal comes in. This is how you can shift your self-image. Athletes and performers, the best of the best, they actually improve by practicing success in their mind before the actual event. They visualize that shot, that one play, that one, you know, that one event, that one thing. Like a basketball player before the game is going to visualize that winning shot, is going to visualize just hitting every single three-pointer. So whatever you do, you need to visualize it. You can literally visualize anything, right? You can visualize being productive tomorrow. You can visualize playing really good at your football game, scoring as many goals as you like. You can visualize walking as the version of you who has everything you want. Literally, there are no limits to your imagination. All you have to do is close your eyes and visualize yourself either at the basketball game, you know, performing well where you want to perform well. And there are so many things and like this is so amazing because you can literally shift your self-image from anywhere. you know your identity. You can change it by literally mentally rehearsing at your office. You could do this. You could do this at home. You could do this outside. You could do this before sleeping, while sleeping.
And this takes me to the theater of the mind. Right? In the book Psychocybernetics, Maxwell Maltz recommends deliberately picturing yourself as the version you want to become. That most successful, best version of yourself who has all the goals, who's achieved everything. Think like that person and ask yourself, what would they do right now? A nice exercise to tap into an identity shift to tap into that future version of yourself is to think about what they feel. List out those top three emotions. For me, that's joy, gratitude, and empowerment. Those are the three emotions. And I write them down. And I practice feeling them on a day-to-day basis. This is in essence identity shifting. The more you do this, the more you practice this, the more you are going to tap into and teach your nervous system, teach your subconscious mind and allow your brain to build out all of these neural pathways around being a different person. You are literally training your mind to think, feel, and act in a different way. And because you do those things, because you are shifting the identity behind everything, you will literally see different results. You will literally step into a different reality. You will have opportunities come from places that you never even knew existed. Things will change so drastically, so fast. And that is the trick, that is the key to identity shifting.
Now, let's talk about rewriting past failures because actually a lot of the time the only reason your identity is actually being held back is because of the past. Your brain always remembers past experiences and it always for some reason connects those to the future experiences. So a lot of the times you can be stuck in a cycle just because your brain predicts the future using the past. So if your past has been unsuccessful, you haven't made the money you want to be making. If in the past you were undisiplined, you were not productive, not focused and you got distracted, then in a way the past identity, the old version of yourself is going to hold you back because it feels familiar. And a lot of the times your brain is going to go back to familiar because that's like a survival mechanism or whatever. And evidence creates identity. So if your brain is always seeking past evidence for confirmation of who you are, then you will always be stuck with old patterns, old behaviors, old ways of thinking, and old routines.
So rewriting past failures, ignoring the past and allowing yourself to only focus on the present and the future. And for example, if you were always an unconfident, shy person in the past, if you never had good social skills in the past, if you're always unlucky in the past, you need to start shifting those beliefs by replacing them with the exact opposite belief. So say you were unconfident your whole life. Now you're going to want to tell yourself and visualize yourself as an ultraconident person. Say you always viewed yourself as a person who gets unlucky. You are going to need to practice mental rehearsing and visualizing yourself in lucky opportunities, lucky environments, everything goes your way. Writing down how lucky you are, how many opportunities you've had, and literally being grateful for everything. And then in the process, you're gathering new evidence. Every small win becomes proof of the person you want to become. It solidifies the fact that your identity, your new identity is real. So create for yourself a new identity, that figure, the archetype that the person you want to be. Delete all of the old patterns, the old behaviors, the old the past experiences, and create new evidence for yourself by gathering new wins that vote for the person you want to become.
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Part three, automated discipline. So, you need to act as if. That's a phrase Maxwell Maltz uses. Start behaving like the person you're trying to become before you become that person. If you want to become a millionaire, just ask yourself, how do I act like that version right now? Be the millionaire version of yourself in this moment. Start acting like that and reality will follow. If you want to be a disciplined and productive person, there is nothing stopping you from acting like that person now. From being that person now. You need to place more emphasis on being rather than having. It's a common thing to wait for external events to confirm your internal state. But instead, why wait? Instead, you can just create your internal state. And as a result, external events will follow.
Now, I'm going to take you through three things that are going to change your identity. Number one is relaxation and performance. You see, tension interferes with performance. If you want to perform at a high level, if you want to be productive, focus, deep work, scale your business, be a good athlete, whatever it is, tension interferes with that. But confidence and calm actually improve it. When you are calm, your brain is at the highest potential it can operate at. And what I realize is that most of us are tense every single day without even realizing it. Like your mind is racing. It's going pretty fast. Your thoughts are very fast. You're in a way you're overthinking. Even your body is tense. It's like we all, you know, fidget at one time or the other. You know, when you're at your desk, you're tapping your pen or you're shaking your leg and you're just fidgeting. That is a sign of, you know, your nervous system is going fast. You are not calm, you were tense. So, it's time to reverse that if you want to shift your identity because being calm is going to allow you to access your subconscious mind way more than being tense. This is called the relaxed and rich mindset. This is where abundance comes into your life. This is where you're able to shift beliefs entirely and even change your behavior. So, it is about just breathing and focusing on what's in front of you. It's like the basketball player before the basketball game. Nerves can kick in. They start overthinking. They start, you know, thinking about what people are going to think of them and they get into this loop where they stop performing. But as soon as they just enter the flow state, they focus. They breathe and they just focus on one thing at a time and they're just in the zone. That is when they win. That is when they perform. By staying relaxed, you signal to yourself that your body is safe. And this allows you to perform at your highest level.
Number two is trusting the mechanism. You see, once the goal is clear, stop obsessing over every step. Stop obsessing over the, you know, the micro results. Let the system get to work. Detach from the outcome and attach yourself to the process and create systems for everything. I'm not going to get into systems. I have tons of video on that on the channel.
Number three is small daily targets. The brain always responds better to clear targets rather than vague ambitions. You want to have clear objectives, clear targets, not just for your life, but for every single day. I say this in every video. Plan tomorrow, today. Give yourself proper objectives. Every single day you need to know what are the exact things I have to do today to make it a successful day. Otherwise, your focus is going to be scattered. You're not going to have a clear direct outcome and as a result your identity will always stay stuck as the person who just can't focus.
Now, the goal isn't to become better at forcing yourself to do the good things. Forcing yourself to go to the gym like every single time you have to go to the gym, do the work, you dread it, and then you're like, "Oh, why do I have to do this?" But then you have to like drag yourself along. That is not sustainable. That is discipline that runs out within weeks. That is not the goal. The goal is not willpower. The goal is not trying to force action. The goal is to become the kind of person who naturally does the things that you want to do.
Right now in my current stage of life, I want to go to the gym. I literally enjoy doing the deep work. There is no discipline in my life because I enjoy reading every single morning and night. I enjoy meditating. It makes me feel good. I enjoy eating healthy and exercising and getting sun and going outside and going for a walk. I enjoy putting my phone in another room and forgetting about it. And as soon as I do scroll and you know miss a workout, I just feel bad. As soon as I get distracted while working and don't finish my tasks, I don't feel good. And that is the identity that has shifted. That is discipline. Discipline is not willpower. Discipline is literally becoming the person who loves to be disciplined, who loves to do the things that are going to make a difference.
Now, identity shifting is just one of the three strands that you need to level up your life. So, if you want to learn more about the other two strands like dopamine rewiring and focus mastery, then click the link in the description below. Watch that video over there that explains everything.
Now, your level of success never exceeds your level of discipline.