Be Disciplined Enough To Recover

I think people are wildly misunderstanding what it means to be disciplined. The idea of being disciplined comes with the idea of not making excuses, mind over matter, and making yourself do things even when you don’t feel like it. And while I agree that all of that is important, it needs to be applied in the right setting.

I define discipline as “following through on doing the thing that most serves you, consistently, despite the circumstances around it.” This very much includes elements of the conventional definition of discipline while making a really important distinction: All of that action taking power needs to be harnessed in the direction of doing what most serves you, what’s best for you in the long-term.

There are times when you make a commitment and circumstances change. The action no longer has the same intention or delivers the same benefit. It’s in those moments that you need to reconnect with the commitment to decide if it’s something that still serves you or you’re just doing it blindly because you said you would.

I believe that one of the most disciplined things we can do on a daily basis is get to sleep on time. The irony… That doing nothing is among our greatest expressions of self-control. But that’s because it’s what most serves you. Your days start the night before.

That’s why today, I want to offer a reminder to be disciplined enough to allow yourself to recover and to ward off your compulsion to do more. The desire for more comes from our ego and our need to prove our own significance. But, it’s a short term urge, driven out of insecurity and fear, that compromises our long-term capacity.

Facing off with my ego, and my compulsion to do more, was a battle I fought last weekend. A few days before I injured my shoulder in a soccer game. Because of that, I knew what most served me was to take a bit of a break and give my body time to heal. The plan for that was to go on a light, short run, just to get my blood flowing.

I took the first few steps of my run and realized that swinging my arm wasn’t as painful as I expected it to be. It was great news! My mind immediately went to convincing me to push my workout. That I didn’t need to rest, that I could actually keep up my fitness as my shoulder recovered!

But I quickly realized that would have been undisciplined. That the better thing for me, and the harder thing to do, was actually stick to my slow recovery run, so I did.

Be disciplined enough to allow yourself to recover. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

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