Pleasure Is the Missing Link to Discipline and Consistency

What if the secret to staying consistent in your business wasn't more willpower... but more pleasure?

Regan returns to the Pleasurepreneur Podcast after an intentional break (with zero guilt about it!) to have an honest conversation about one of the most misunderstood dynamics in business: discipline and consistency.

She's noticed a lot of noise online pushing the idea that to be disciplined, you have to sacrifice enjoyment. That it has to feel hard. That pleasure is somehow the lazy option.

And she's here to lovingly call that out.

In this episode, Regan explores why pleasure isn't the opposite of discipline... it's actually what makes discipline sustainable. She walks through James Clear's four laws of behaviour change from Atomic Habits and shows exactly how pleasure is woven through every single one, and how you can use them to build habits in your business that your brain actually wants to repeat.

This one is equal parts relief and activation. Whether you've been white-knuckling your way through your to-do list or wondering why your consistency keeps slipping, this episode is for you.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome to the show
00:49 The Lost Recording
01:39 Why Regan Took an Intentional Break
02:28 The Problem With Discipline vs. Pleasure Conversations
04:05 Why Pleasure Makes Discipline Sustainable
06:00 James Clear's Atomic Habits Framework
08:28 Law Two: Make It Attractive
09:37 Law Three: Make It Easy
11:17 Law Four: Make It Satisfying
12:41 Building Consistency Without Force
15:45 Work With Regan
16:52 Wrap Up + Subscribe

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• Why the "either/or" framing of discipline vs. pleasure is costing you results
• How pleasure functions as intelligence, not indulgence
• How James Clear's four laws of behaviour change map directly onto your brain's reward system
• Practical ways to make showing up in your business more attractive, easy, and satisfying
• Why consistency isn't built through force... and what to do instead

Resources Mentioned

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Play More, Make More Guide 
• Work with Regan 1:1 — two spots open before end of financial year at current rate (9K for six months)
• Join the Pleasurepreneur Mastermind waitlist

Follow Regan

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/regan_figg

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Regan: Hello and welcome to The Pleasurepreneur Podcast. This podcast will help you create what you desire in your business with pleasure. Whether that be calling in your ideal clients, making more money, or creating a balanced business life blend, I'm your host. Regan Fig pleasure and business coach, published author of a Mother's Pleasure wife and mama to three little Wildlings.

However, you're choosing to listen to this podcast. Ask yourself, how can I make this more pleasurable and do just that? I acknowledge the custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded and produced, the Wadi Wadi people of Doland. Now let's proceed with pleasure.

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I feel a little bit clunky today. It has been a while since I have recorded a podcast episode. Actually, it was just last night, and it was a really great [00:01:00] podcast episode, and then I realized I'd somehow managed to not hit the record button. Serves my right for trying to do work at 9:30 at night.

I was feeling really lit up after working with a client, at 8:00 p.m. at night. We finished at 9:00, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna record this podcast episode." It was great, but yeah, I didn't hit record. So take two. Um, but apart from last night, it's been a while. and what's so funny, and so ironic, is that this podcast episode is about discipline and consistency.

So the irony is not lost on me that I haven't published a podcast episode since the end, end of February. However, it was an actual... It was actually a very intentional decision. I spoke with my coach Beck about it. I was having so much fun in the last Mastermind launch. I did a completely new strategy. it meant that I got to connect with and build deeper relationships with, the people in my community, which [00:02:00] was so great.

But it also meant that, look, I didn't really have the time and energy that I wanted to give the podcast. so I knew that this would return at a time that felt good for me, and so here we are. so let this be your permission slip that you get to let yourself off the hook sometimes.

You know? It doesn't mean that you're never gonna do the thing again. it just means you're not doing it right now perhaps. All right. So let's dive in with today's conversation. look, I've been hearing a lot of conversations, especially on social media, around being disciplined and staying consistent.

Yeah? . It all just being really serious. You know? How you have to raise your standards. You need to stop procrastinating. You need to lock in, have accountability. Of course, it's not gonna be enjoyable. You have to force yourself.

Stop, stop being such a lazy loser. Okay, okay. I might be exaggerating. And look, I'm not here to poo-poo discipline and consistency [00:03:00] in favor of pleasure and enjoyment, and I think that is the problem. In fact, it is the problem, and that's what I wanna have a conversation about. Because this is a problem, especially in the business and coaching industry, pitting one against the other.

You know, it is shared as an either/or conversation of, you know, consistency and discipline or pleasure and enjoying yourself, you know? And when it is this either/or conversation, this either/or paradigm, this dichotomy, then we miss out on the gold of both. You know? Like, you see we've got boss babes locking in, sacrificing their enjoyment for their wins, or we've got the soft girls surrendering and manifesting and just being with presence and pleasure.

But what happens when we buy into that dichotomy of either/or, when you're either disciplined or you're enjoying yourself, is that we miss noticing and utilizing the [00:04:00] best performance strategy for success that there is, in my opinion, which is pleasure. Pleasure as intelligence, not as indulgence

So pleasure as a resource that activates motivation and focus, that allows for better consistency and, and discipline, that allows us to create and maintain habits that lead us to what it is that we are wanting to achieve, create, have, be, experience So, in this episode, I hope that it brings you sweet, sweet relief, and perhaps even, like, tingling, zingy excitement to not have to compartmentalize yourself into one camp or the other.

Um, because I have no doubt that within you is one badass boss babe and a soft, feminine goddess. We need both. Yeah? Just like masculine and feminine energies, we need both. We need to unify both. Yeah? The [00:05:00] hard and the soft, the masculine and the feminine, the discipline and the softness, the riverbanks and the river.

Yet if you swing too far one way, you'll end up dried up, burnt out, and bitter like a metaphorical dam, or waterlogged, stagnant, or, like, washed out like a metaphorical swamp, per se. Pleasure isn't the opposite of discipline. It bridges both. It unifies both. Pleasure activates the masculine, and it enhances the feminine, right?

Now, this... We don't need to dive into any more about, like, you know, feminine and masculine energies. That's not what this, uh, podcast is about. But I'm just sharing that discipline and pleasure are not opposing forces, that there is two sides of the coin, and the pleasure helps the coin be more of the coin.

You know? Um, it has a power that enables us to become more disciplined and remain [00:06:00] consistent. And so, you know, when I think about becoming more disciplined and being consistent, I think of creating and maintaining habits. And

when I think of creating and maintaining habits, I think of James Clear and his book Atomic Habits. I wonder if you've read it. I'm sure you have. So anyway, James Clear's four-step habit loop inside the book, it is a psychological model that closely mirrors how the brain's reward system works. Yeah? Um, so it closely maps the reward system in our brain, which is, like, the mesolimbic pathway that I have spoken about many times on the podcast before, that requires pleasure or the anticipation of pleasure to create change.

Yeah, so whilst he doesn't specifically talk about the reward system or the mesolimbic pathway, ha- what he's describing is that pathway. Now, it's not perfectly mapped because [00:07:00] the brain isn't that simple. We don't c- we can't simplify it that much. but ultimately, if you wanna be more consistent and disciplined in your business, it's not about forcing yourself harder.

It is about working with how your brain actually creates habits. Yeah. Your brain runs on reward. So instead of trying to push yourself through things that feel like obligation or are draining or feel like, "Ugh, do I have to?" That's a kind of like obligation, isn't it? Like, you know, the heavy stuff, stuff that feels like it's dragging us down.

We use the four laws of behavior change that are linked to pleasure to make your business feel better to show up to. Yeah? So the four laws that James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, the four laws of behavior change, so that behavior change for us to be more consistent and more disciplined are this.

Number one, we make it obvious. [00:08:00] Number two, we make it attractive. Number three, we make it easy. And number four, we make it satisfying. Yeah? So out of those four laws, immediately, immediately when I read this, I'm like 75% of that is pleasure. Like, we make it obvious. That's kind of like the trigger, right?

That's the, the thing that we notice that has us kick off with our new habit, right? Or dive into our habit that we wanna make more consistent. We make it attractive. Like, oh. The thing... What makes something attractive is that it brings us pleasure. So for example, if you're like, "I want to be more consistently emailing my mailing list," then number one, we need make it, make it obvious, as in that might be a reminder in your phone on a day that you've set aside time to do that.

Like, your phone's gonna tell you, set an alarm, blah, blah, blah. Your alarm's gonna go off, and it's gonna say, like, "Now is the time to do it." That's gonna make it a bit [00:09:00] obvious. And the number two piece is we make it attractive.

So if you are someone like me who's a bit of an extrovert and you get energy from being around other people, you might like to make writing this email more attractive by taking yourself to a bougie hotel lobby bar or to your favorite cafe, maybe slipping on a pair of heels and putting on some lippy.

Maybe you're not an extrovert and you're like, "Actually, I wanna snuggle into a rug and have a glass of wine or a cup of tea and be on my couch or in my bed, like writing that email." Like, let's make that attractive. Step num- number three, we make it easy. Now, I can attest to this. This is something that I actually have done in my business.

A while ago, I wanna say like a few years ago, I was like, "Oh my God, emails are so long." Mind you, I'd already written like a 60,000-word book. But to write an email, it just didn't have the... It, it felt like there was [00:10:00] resistance. It didn't feel easy. It felt like a slog. And then I realized, like, the amount of text that I put on my Instagram Stories could be an email

So I made it easy to write my emails. I... When I felt inspired or when I had a topic that I wanted talk, to talk about, , and I made a bit of a system, so I had a topic each week to talk about, I would just start sharing that topic or that conversation to my stories. What I would then do is crop, like screen grab those images of my Instagram stories, and then press whatever that button is down the bottom right-hand corner to copy all the text, copy-paste it into a document, edit it slightly, and there's my email.

You know? Um, the other thing you might like to do is if you're someone who likes to speak rather than write, for an example per se, you might want to record a voice memo. You might wanna do a voice memo or some kind of audio message that you can then [00:11:00] transcribe from there. You know? Like there's so many tools that we have now where we can actually do all of these things and make it easy.

So the step number three is making it easy. To me, that screams pleasure. Like make it pleasurable. If you remove the resistance, it becomes more pleasurable, right? And then last of all, we make it satisfying. Hello pleasure. Like is satisfaction not just like a different word for pleasure?

So how might we make it satisfying to more consistently say, let's stick with the same example, write emails to our mailing list? You might wanna activate the reward system by giving yourself some micro rewards. So that could look like, treating yourself once you have completed that email. Maybe it is a...

You write it on a, what's it called? I'm thinking Romy and Michele High School Reunion. A Post-it Note. You write whatever your email topic is for the week on a Post-it Note. You put it somewhere obvious that [00:12:00] makes it obvious. you know you've made it attractive because you're gonna be taking yourself to somewhere bougie or your lounge snuggled up with a cup of tea to write it, and you make it easy because you're transferring it from, say, like an audio message or your stories or something into an email.

And then the satisfying part is, and then you get to scrunch up that Post-it Note, chuck it in the bin, and there's your micro r- reward

Because when something feels good or it even just promises to feel good, your brain will get on board. Your brain is more likely to be like, "Okay, I'm ready. Let's go." There's your discipline. "Okay, I'm ready. Let's keep doing it." There's your consistency. You know, pleasure isn't the opposite of discipline. It is the thing that makes discipline sustainable.

Yeah, it's so easy to be disciplined to begin with, but to maintain discipline, to make that sustainable, we need to thread in pleasure. We need to thread in those four [00:13:00] laws. We need to make it attractive and easy and satisfying, right? So when you layer pleasure into your business using these four laws of behavior change, or spending time working with me, either one-on-one or in the mastermind with a million different practices, techniques, and, , ideas that I can share with you of how we can weave pleasure into your business, then you make your work more attractive.

You make the things on your to-do list more attractive. Yeah? You reduce the resistance by making it easier. You create little hints of satisfaction along the way, and then before you know it, consistency doesn't actually feel like something that you have to force. You know, it becomes something that your brain actually wants to repeat.

It becomes something like a lifestyle, something that you just do all the time. Yeah? Consistency isn't built through force. It is built by making your business feel rewarding enough to come [00:14:00] back to

So I'm gonna keep it short and sweet for today. That feels like my little rant that I want to come back into the podcast with to get back into making my podcast more consistent. I might need to take myself through these four laws of behavior change. But ultimately, I want you to know that you do not have to give up enjoyment and pleasure in order to be disciplined and in order to be consistent.

I want you to see that, in fact Building in or baking in pleasure or even the anticipation of it, making sure that, you know, you're doing things in your business that become attractive, that are easy, that are satisfying. That is what helps you to be disciplined and consistent sustainably, not just like, you know, when you start [00:15:00] doing something, um, and you get that dopamine rush because, yay, it's novel and it's a new thing.

Like, this is what will help you continue to make that sustainable. Now, obviously this ties in with making business pleasurable. The more... And this is what I say, like, the more you can make your business pleasurable, the more money you're gonna make, right? Because you can be sustainable, because you wanna show up, because you wanna sell your offers, because you want to be coaching people or doing whatever it is that you do in your business.

You wanna be meeting with your clients and your customers. You want to be facilitating your offers and your programs because it brings you pleasure, because it is rewarding, because it's attractive and easy and satisfying. Yet this is how we make more money with more pleasure. . So if you know that this is exactly what you want, you wanna be making more money, and you wanna be making your business more enjoyable, you wanna make it really sustainable, you do not wanna burn out. In fact, you're too fabulous to be burnt out, bored, or broke from your business, then you [00:16:00] need to reach out to me.

 Here's what you can do. You can work with me one-on-one. I am opening up two spots to work with me one-on-one before the end of financial year.

, Once financial year comes, I'm gonna be raising my rates. So if you know that you wanna work with me, let's have that conversation sooner rather than later, so you can make the most of my current price, which is 9K for six months. And the other thing you might like to play with, which I will pop a link to in the show notes, is my Play More, Make More guide.

So this is where you can weave in five ways to make your business more enjoyable, more playful, and make it more profitable, exactly from what we've talked about today, making it more attractive and easy and satisfying so that you can be disciplined and consistent in your business, and so you can also have a really good time.

Okay, my love, that's all for today. I'm gonna go and pick my kiddies up from school, and I... You'll be hearing back from me on the podcast [00:17:00] soon. Don't forget to follow along the show if you haven't already. Subscribe, follow, whatever it is, whatever app you're listening to, hit that little subscribe or plus button.

And yeah, I'll see you back here soon. Bye for now.