There is a lot of confusion going around about when doing something qualifies as being disciplined and when doing something qualifies as bulldozing yourself. This confusion is a problem when one is an important element of success and the other is a road to failure. For this reason, I’m going to explain the difference between discipline and bulldozing.
To understand bulldozing, I want you to imagine a bulldozer. When a bulldozer encounters resistance or opposition, it drives straight through and over it. It will not stop and consider and it will not work with whatever is resisting it, so that there is any alignment. It plays a zero-sum game with whatever is opposing it. “I win and you lose.” “I get my way and you don’t.” And this, is a recipe for a terrible relationship with yourself and others, as well as failure.
When someone is disciplined, or has a high degree of self-discipline, it means that they have an internal drive to act based on their goals. This implies the ability to use their own conscious, objective free will to govern their emotional system, mind and body. And as such, they are not controlled by their own thoughts, emotions or body. Even when they encounter resistance. When we say that a person is disciplined, what we are talking about in layman’s terms is that they can take action regardless of how they feel. Or that they do what needs to be done to achieve goals, even if it is difficult or painful. Or that they pursue what they think is right despite temptations to abandon it. Or that they make themselves work hard (or behave in a certain way) without anyone else having to tell them to do it. All of these examples, imply that self-discipline has something to do with self-governing as well as the ability to persevere towards one’s aim even though there is resistance. Keep in mind that resistance is any oppositional force. This resistance can come from the outside or the inside, or both.
There is a BIG space between the two extremes of bulldozing right through any resistance you encounter and allowing any resistance you encounter to dictate what you do and don’t do. In other words, ignoring and disregarding resistance and letting the resistance be in control you. Discipline and success lies in-between these extremes. But it isn’t about balance. It is about working directly with your resistance.
Working with resistance means seeing, feeling and hearing into it deeply so as to be aware of the cause and the WHY of the resistance. From there, it is about resolving that resistance, so as to make a decision with your conscious free will that is actually in your best interests. Doing so, will make it so that all of you can say yes to something because it will feel right for you to do, potentially even if it comes with discomfort.
Living without discipline, means that you are at the mercy of everything around you. It means your life is limited. When faced with the inevitable downsides of doing something, you will give up on it, achieve nothing, build up nothing, never end up where you want to be, be unreliable, unable to plan, be a floater in life, align with your own resistance (regardless of whether your resistance is in your best interest or against it) and fail to delay instant gratification in the face of short-term temptation. You will have ruined every relationship around you. And you will be at the mercy of everything around you, including your own mind, emotions and body.
Living your life by bulldozing means you are unresponsive to yourself and to the world around you. It means you are willing to play zero sum games with parts of yourself and with things external to you. And by doing so, you are choosing to put yourself and others in danger. There is valuable information within resistance. Ignoring that information can be catastrophic to yourself, to your relationships and to your success. With true discipline, you are working with yourself not against yourself, like you are with bulldozing.
An important thing to know is that “it doesn’t feel good” is not the information you are looking for when it comes to what you should and shouldn’t do. The fact that something doesn’t feel good is simply your alert that there is a red flag. It is the same as hearing the ‘you’ve got a message’ ring on your cell phone. But it is as strange to decide that this automatically means you shouldn’t do something, as it is to decide that when your “you’ve got a message” ringer goes off, it means you need to not do something. All it means is: You’ve got a message! You have to actually see, hear and feel what the message underneath the alert is, in order to make the right decision relative to the information.
It is very important to know that you (and/or a part of you) are able to choose what does not feel good for an important purpose. You are able to say yes to negatives. And there is a big difference between part of you really saying no to something for some reason and part of you saying yes to something, even though it doesn’t feel good. If this were not the case, you would never exercise. All you would eat is junk food. We would never learn anything new. Say goodbye to all sports. No one would ever go through pregnancy. You would never work late hours to accomplish something important. No one would ever leave an abusive relationship. There would be no societal revolutions. There would be no innovations regarding the negatives that come with anything. The process of healing in general would be out the window. You get the point.
When you hear teachings like “follow your joy” or “listen to your emotional guidance system”, that doesn’t mean “never do anything that feels uncomfortable or painful”. That doesn’t mean “your emotional guidance system is always going to lead you to something that feels good, so let it govern your life”. That also doesn’t mean that “your feelings are always a reflection of an accurate perception”. Discipline goes hand in hand with following your joy and listening to your internal guidance system. But for them to operate hand in hand, you’ve got to understand that your emotions and mind and body are simply providing you with information about you and the world around you all day long. But this information, though important, is not necessarily always accurate, nor is it necessarily a good thing to allow to govern you. Your conscious awareness and free will must heed this information and use it to decide what is right to do given that information.
If you are making a choice from conscious, objective free will, often times it becomes obvious that the right choice to make is in the direction of something painful because you align with the reason for doing so.
To understand the difference between discipline and bulldozing and allowing your resistance to rule you, here is an example:
Bryce is currently obese and has his sights set on losing weight. He decides to go on an extreme diet and commit to going to the gym with an aggressive personal trainer every day. Because he thinks this will get him the fastest results. This goes good for two days. Then he starts to feel deprived and like he is being forced to do something he doesn’t really want to do. He has big time resistance to what he is doing. None of it feels good. Bryce decides this is normal and forces himself to keep dieting and bulldozes himself to exercise anyway. In fact, he pushes himself harder. And as if things weren’t unenjoyable enough, his ankle starts hurting, making what he is doing in the gym, even harder to do. He bulldozes through this too and ends up injured. As a result, he has to take a break to “recover”. But this sends him into a “nothing ever works for me” spiral. And eventually, he breaks down and copes emotionally by binging junk food.
Charlie is also obese and has his sights set on losing weight. He decides to exercise and go on a diet on Monday. Because of this, he is very excited and starts off the morning on Monday by eating cottage cheese and cantaloupe. And he takes a 45-minute walk. At lunch time, two of his friends invite him to a restaurant. He goes along and looks at the menu and all the delicious options he could order and realizes that the only thing on his new diet is an overpriced salad. He starts feeling bad. He feels resistance to staying on his new diet. When he closes his eyes to see why he is feeling so bad, he sees that he is feeling deprived and cut off from enjoyment. He immediately decides this isn’t good. And so, he lets himself order what he really wants off of the menu, especially because his friends, who want him to feel good, are encouraging him to get what he really wants to eat. The next morning, Charlie feels tired getting up to go on a walk. He doesn’t really want to go walking, even though he wants to lose weight. So, he decides he doesn’t want to bulldoze himself and calls it his rest day.
Lyle is also obese and has his sights set on losing weight. He decides to hire a personal trainer and cut out all sugar and junk foods from his diet. Even though his personal trainer was really good and supportive, his first day of exercising with the personal trainer made him feel bad. He initially interpreted that resistance as a “No, we shouldn’t do this.” When this resistance comes up, he does not bulldoze it. Nor does he just give into it. He decides to sit on a park bench and really become aware of the way he feels. Doing so, makes him aware that he feels bad because working out makes him feel bad about himself because of how little he can do. That he does not really want to go back and feel the physical pain or shame that he feels when he exercises. Lyle thinks through the option of quitting based on this reasoning and decides it is a bad reason to quit because it would simply be avoiding shame. So, instead, he decides to do The Completion Process on the feeling of shame. He also decides to do belief work. He works on the belief that “I shouldn’t be fat.” When he does this process, he sees that given everything he went through, it makes perfect sense that he is fat and has struggled to lose weight for so long. He also sees that his personal trainer actually has no judgement towards him being fat and wants to be a support to his health. That unlike his step father, who made him bad and wrong for everything, his personal trainer wants him to feel good and to feel good about himself. As a result, Lyle feels in alignment with exercising, even if it isn’t comfortable. And decides to involve his personal trainer in how he is feeling emotionally, so they can work through that together and adjust things accordingly if the feeling arises, while still remaining committed to working out.
When Lyle starts to feel like he doesn’t want to be on a diet anymore, especially when he went to thanksgiving dinner and saw how many of his favorite foods he would have to say no to, he started to question himself about what it was about the foods that he felt so desperate for. He realized that it was emotional. The part of him that wanted to say “screw you” to the diet wanted the emotional element of those foods. He associates those foods with togetherness and comfort. Something he really struggles to feel with the people in his family. He wants to feel those feelings and also, he wants to stop eating foods that are bad for him. So, with that information, he decides to suggest to the family to play a specific game, because Lyle feels like when they play that game, everyone is together and there is harmony and he feels comforted. He also decides that on special occasions, like holidays, he is going to let himself have a taste of his favorite foods, but to not have a portion of them. And that when he has a taste of them, he is going to really savor them and experience them in his whole body. So that he won’t feel completely deprived and cut off from joint experiences. As a result of working with his resistance to make up his mind about what to do about it, Lyle stays disciplined to lose weight. And he does lose weight. Not only that, he heals a great deal of the emotional and mental patterns feeding his obesity, because those patterns came up during the process in the form of his resistance to losing weight.
The moral of the story is, when resistance arises, you must see it as important. You must be responsive to it. You must look directly at it. You must explore it. You must question it. You must work with it. The WHY behind resistance is everything. And based off of all the information the resistance contains, you must make a decision about what is best to do. Knowing that to act in alignment with your internal drive to act based on your goals, often means saying yes to a specific unwanted thing or to doing something, even though it doesn’t feel good.
