By Grace Sweeney.
Work harder! Keep going! Work harder!
When we think of self-discipline, the first thing that might come to mind is the ability to force ourselves to work harder. Self-discipline is often viewed as the ability to press on when burnt out and exhausted.
That… is not what self-discipline should be.
Let me tell you a little story.
Not too long ago, I was bombarded on every side by things I needed to do. I was in the middle of a challenge to write a novel in a month, was trying to start a business by the end of six weeks, struggling to work on other commitments, keep up with friends, and my mom was sick, which put the majority of the housework on me.
Like the overachiever I am, I decided I could keep up with all. Of. That. It worked out really well, I’m sure you can imagine.
By the end of six weeks I was burnt out, exhausted, and working for sometimes 14-16 hours a day. But I kept on pushing myself because, “I need to have better self-discipline!”
I am here to tell you now, that mindset is flawed.
I’d begun to hate the very idea of discipline and productivity because I was so exhausted. That’s not the effect self-discipline should have.
Instead of being a chore, self-discipline should be a joy. It shouldn’t be something we need to force ourselves to do.
What I should have done during those months was given myself grace. Grace to mess up, grace to slow down, grace to knock some things off my to-do list. Instead, I pushed myself way harder than I should have, all in the name of self-discipline.
In the end, instead of learning how to be more productive and discipline myself well, I learned more about mental energy and how to recover from burnout. Ha!
While I definitely needed to learn those things, I didn’t learn anything about true self-discipline. I only learned how to run myself into the ground.
During the last couple months, I’ve been focusing on learning true self-discipline… which is the mindset of being able to improve yourself, being able to be more productive, being able to master your input and output each day.
Self discipline is not a requirement.
Rather, it’s a gift. Yes, we don’t always want to do school. Sometimes we don’t even want to think about it. (I’m sure we all understand the longing to throw our textbook in the trash and burn it.) But at the same time… we do need to do school. We need to know some of that academic material in order to do well in whatever lies ahead in life.
So, rather than simply forcing yourself to muscle through it and get it over with (and then likely forgetting everything you learned), true self-discipline would remind you why you’re doing school. And you would do it despite your dislike, because of the greater reason.
We need to learn to embrace self-discipline, to not act as though it’s the enemy. Imagine if we never disciplined ourselves and never did what we need to. Nothing would ever happen. People wouldn’t be getting paid for work, parents wouldn’t be taking care of their children, children wouldn’t be doing school or learning how to navigate life.
The world would be a mess.
Instead of that, God gave us self-discipline to master ourselves and our to-do lists with. He gave us the ability to pace ourselves, to work ourselves to the bone, to do nothing… He gave us free will. Free will in self-discipline and everything else.
It’s up to us how we decide to use it.
When I burnt myself out, I was using self-discipline in the wrong way. I was using it in the extreme, and it resulted in exhaustion. Some people use it in the other extreme—they don’t discipline themselves at all. That also has drastic consequences.
We need to find a balance of enjoying self-discipline while still doing the things we don’t enjoy.
It’s a gift from God, and something we should treasure—even if we don’t love it all the time.
That’s something we need to remember every day of our lives, because going to either extreme will hurt us. Not practicing it at all will hurt us. Disciplining ourselves too much will hurt us. There is a balance, and we need to be disciplined enough to find it. (See what I did there?)
Keep your mind on the prize ahead. The reason why you’re doing something. Why you need to finish that schoolwork. Why you need to write that book. Why you need to master self-discipline, even. And trust me, that’ll make it so much easier.
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