The Coach Who Doesn’t Believe in Discipline (Part 1)
Want to listen to the article instead? Tune into Spotify.
If I had it my way, I'd call what I do life design rather than life coaching.
Life coaching implies that I somehow get my clients to find the discipline, heretofore missing in their lives, to finally reach their goals.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
My clients, as a group, are already unapologetically ambitious, with more goals than they know what to do with. They're also fiercely disciplined when they need to be. To call the mother of five, with kids in three different schools and a full life, undisciplined is both ridiculous and untrue. The same goes for the CEO building her next professional and personal chapter, and the philanthropist working to scale her project. These are not women who need more discipline.
What they need is a redesign.
I love this teaching from James Clear: "If you want a plant to grow, you can fuss over it every day, watering, weeding, and moving it toward the sun. Or you can place it in the right soil and let nature do the work. A seed planted in the right spot often thrives on its own. Life is much the same. Progress is not only about how hard you work, but also about where you decide to work."
Let's do a little exercise together. Choose a goal in your own life that you're confident you could achieve, if only you could muster the discipline.
Got one? Good.
Without knowing your goal, I can promise you this: it's not a discipline problem. It's a design problem.
A well-designed life treats willpower as secondary to environmental design. Instead of hunting for more willpower, we arrange our environment and our day so that following through becomes the path of least resistance.
So what does that actually look like? It looks like the work of a designer, and it moves through a few clear phases.
It starts with listening to the client, and the client is you. A good designer doesn't sketch a thing until she understands what you value, how you want to feel, and why this project matters to you in the first place. In everyday life, this is the work of naming your top values and deciding what truly matters, which also means deciding what does not.
Then comes research. So many of us set goals with no context at all, pulling a random time, weight, or dollar figure out of the air and then trying to strong-arm our way there. A designer studies how others have reached the same destination and weighs that against their own particular strengths before deciding what the goal will actually require.
Then comes the part most people like least: setting a real budget and timeline. Even if the budget shifts and the timeline stretches, committing time and money is what focuses your energy. It's also the most important step.
Why?
Because if you're not willing to commit time and money to a goal, you don't really mean business, and you're better off letting that goal go.
Now the designer is ready to sketch.
In your daily life, that means committing to designing your day, your week, and your month. It sounds like a lot. Let me show you why it isn't.
Daily
In the morning, before you dive into the hustle and bustle of your day, take 10 minutes to write down how you want to feel when your head hits the pillow tonight. Then list what you absolutely must do to feel that way. You'll usually find it's two or three things that genuinely matter, the very things that go undone when you mechanically work down a never-ending to-do list.
And I can hear you asking, "So what about the to-do list?"
Accept that the list will always be full, no matter how much you cross off. So stop letting it run your days. Let it grow, do what you can when you can, and check things off as you go. What matters is that at night, you've done the few things that give you a sense of purpose. That might be fifteen minutes of solitude with your morning latte, or hosting a lunch for friends, or visiting someone who's sick. It might even be three boring tasks you've been avoiding that have now turned urgent.
Remember the question: How do I want to feel before I drift off to sleep tonight? The answer could be peaceful, productive, loved, generous, satisfied, or any number of other emotions. You then work backward from that emotional goal.
Weekly
Take 30 minutes on Sunday night or Monday morning to write down every commitment for the week, and ask what you need to do in advance to show up fully for each one. And if something on the calendar no longer means anything to you, cancel it now, not the night before.
If your Present Self doesn’t want to do that thing, don’t fool yourself into thinking your Future Self will. It’s untrue and not nice to your Future Self.
Monthly
Take 30 minutes at the turn of the month to decide how you want to feel thirty days from now. Ask your Future Self where she wants to be, how she wants to feel, and what she wants to have done by then. People tend to overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a month if they don't let the time slip away. Make a game of it; name the month after your goal. It sounds corny, but Magnificent March and Audacious April have never once let me down.
Here's where most teaching on this stops. You've listened, researched, budgeted, and sketched. You've designed the life.
But a design isn't a building yet.
An architect eventually has to stop sketching and put the plans in stone. And then comes the part of her job nobody romanticizes, the part that determines whether anyone can actually live in what she designed: the systems. The plumbing. The wiring. The machinery behind the walls that makes the beautiful design genuinely work.
That's where almost all of us fall short in our own lives. And it's where we're headed next.
If something in you is craving a little more clarity—about where your life is working and where it's quietly asking for attention—I'd love for you to take the Life Audit.
It's free, it takes about ten minutes, and people are often surprised by what they discover.
Once you complete the audit, I'll share with you three handpicked reads from my journal (or you can listen to their audio versions)—chosen specifically for the area that needs your attention the most at this time.
