#33 - MEW THEORY - Discipline Vs. Inspiration

Episode #33 - Discipline vs. Inspiration: Finding Your True Drive

In this episode, I explore the balance between discipline and inspiration, diving into what really fuels us to make lasting change. Drawing from personal experiences and reflections, we’ll look at how each plays a role in personal growth, and why relying solely on inspiration can sometimes fall short. I discuss the mental shifts needed to cultivate discipline and the rewards that come from sticking to a path even when motivation fades. If you're navigating your own journey and seeking a sustainable drive, this episode is for you.

🔗 Related Links: The full blog post with resources, references, and transcript can be found on my website.

Transcript

0:02

Vanished. Me podcast. Okay, so off to my 14 day water fast. I realised how my Edna sort of voices kind of crept back in. The word of it is the fear of not being good enough. And so I had this really strong in the Torin voice. It's my perfectionist voice, but in psychology it's often referred to as unrelenting standards. So basically, I find it really hard to accept or love myself unless I reach these expectations that I put in myself that are damn near impossible. So yeah, and this voice takes over like a lot like it's very strong in me in a way. That voice is trying to help me. It thinks that I will get more love or opportunities in life if I aim for these very high standards, and chasing them has become a priority in my life for a lot of it. It's been my direction, and so I constantly have to check in with myself and recognise that that voice and like, recalibrated and, you know, challenge it in a way. So my psychologist told me to name it. So I named her Gertrude, and I didn't realise that Gertrude had snapped back in and hijacked my reasons for doing the water fast. And so I started to explore like, what else has this voice invaded me? And like, where else is it leading me through life? And the truth is a lot of places. An example is this podcast. So I previously wrote a blog called love Article, and I basically realised one day that, like pretty much all of my decisions in my life come down to a choice between love for fear and I realised just how much fear had been leading me through life, and how many of my decisions were made from a place of fear. And so once I became aware of this, I went down this whole journey like I showed my head. I like to announce my career as a geologist, like I, you know, life, relationships, like, you know, all manner of relationships because I realised that like, C was my main motivation behind a lot of these choices. And yeah, I think there's so many layers to it. I think that like C kind of always infiltrates us is such a human emotion that I just think that there's always more and more things that you can become conscious of, and I think that this is another brand of that. But the reason why this podcast is a good example is because, like my desire to do the podcast purely comes from the heart. Like, this is my art and when I'm doing art, that's me channelling source energy. Like I believe that art is translation of the soul and like different arts, different languages. Rick Rubin says that art is a devotional act. Art is like my prayers, my meditation. It's like an act of love. And so I call this inspiration. And then something happens where my mind gets in and my feet get in, and my feet start to tell me that I'm never going to have the freedom to be an artist unless I start making money off my art, and then I start trying to sell it. And I think more about how my art is received than the actual process. I become more self-conscious and my direction on my path becomes skewed. I start making my decisions from this place of fear rather than from love or inspiration. And I do this with me clothing, looking back like I, you know, became so obsessed with how I can make it a successful business that I started to like slave labour, my creativity, and it just stop being fun and full of joy. And then once I quit my clothing, I couldn't look at a sewing machine for like a year after that because I just ruined it for myself. So I listen to a podcast by Modern Wisdom who interviewed the psychologist Doctor Benjamin Hardy. He co-authored a book called The Gap, and again, a high achievers guide to Happiness, Confidence and Success, which I listened to. And the book explains how highly ambitious people are often unhappy because instead of focusing on their achievements or gains, they focus on the gap between them and their next goals. If you focus on the gap, then the goalposts are always shifting. So even if you do achieve your goal, you just focus on the next one. And so it feels like you're trying to chase the horizon. And this really resonated me because I've often said that no matter how hard I try, I'm always just at the bottom of the mountain. And the solution is to start listing all the things that you've achieved every day. Because when you look backwards, you start to notice, like how much you have gained every day and how much progress you actually have made. So like an example is like, say, if you were writing a book and your goal was to write a thousand words every day, and let's say one day you only write 200. If you focus on the gap, then you're going to focus on how you failed that day and you were 800 words short and that you did a shit job. But if you focus on the game, well, technically you have gained because you've gained 200 words that day and that's progress. And so shifting that mindset, I think is something that will be really helpful for me and something that I'm focusing on at the time. I also came across a concept called obsessive versus harmonious passions. So this is two ends of a passion spectrum developed by researcher Doctor Robert Valiant. And I had it summarised on the Joy lab podcast. So I'll put links to these like in the notes. But they say that when we have harmonious passions, is associated with motivation and enhanced well-being, but when it crosses over into obsessive passion, you can also be associated with negative emotions such as compulsive behaviour and exhaustion. So when a passion is obsessive, it controls up and our self-worth is tied up on it. But with the podcast, this collection of five podcasts that I feel like are all meant to be together and release at the same time, there's a very strong voice in me, a fearful voice that's telling me like, you fucking idiot. Like you need to be processing one episode every week. You have to be passing consistently or your podcast will never grow and you'll never be able to monetise off it, and you'll never be able to keep doing this. But my heart is telling me like, no, like, this is a really cool to like, release them all in one batch so people will listen to all of them at once. They can. And so I chose to listen to my heart. And I think the heart of this whole theory is that the motivation behind your direction in life can either come from a place of feel for a place of love, but I'm calling it now. It can come from a place of inspiration, or it can come from a place of discipline. Now, the thing with that is, I think discipline is really important, especially as an artist. Like, it's one thing to sit up in the middle of the night with a broad idea for novel, but it's another thing to actually sit down the next day and start writing that novel with that discipline that dreams don't get accomplished. I think it's really good to push yourself and put yourself through uncomfortable situations and mental challenges, because they make you grow. I think that discipline, doing hard things, even for I think they all have their place because, you know, the offers, the resistance upon which we strengthen ourselves again. And there will always be an easier, I think, always being you go. I also have the belief that discipline equals freeing. I feel like more of life just opens up to you if you are disciplined. For example, I used to think that I could really swim in the ocean, maybe like 2 or 3 months of the year in summer when it was hot enough. And then one winter, I challenged myself to swim in the ocean every single day of winter. And now it's like I know that I can swim in the ocean 365 days of the year. Like that part of the world is not closed off to me anymore. Another example is like climbing a mountain. Like if you don't have the discipline to climb the mountain, you won't be able to see the view from the top of the mountain. So I feel like the more disciplined you are in equals freedom, because the more of life opens up to you. If I listen to a really good podcast with Doctor Haberman and David Goggins, who spoke about this a little bit, and I'm just going to read a quote to paraphrase, the anterior mid cingulate cortex is a brain structure that gets bigger when people do something that they don't want to do. It's smaller in our base people and large in athletes. Scientists think of it as the seat of willpower and the will to live. And I think that this is really fucking cool because like when I was getting out of depression, like I often said, like every time I showed up to therapy, every time I sat down to meditate, every time I did an ice bath, that was me fighting for my life. And sorry to hear it actually called like that. You developing that muscle of like doing shit that you don't want to do is actually the seed of the will to live. I think that's so true. I think discipline kind of is that because like when you know you're doing hot shit, the question that you're fighting against is, what's the point? Why bother? I think that that's the same question that you kind of start asking yourself when you're at the depths of depression. And so I thought that was really fucking cool. I think Goggins is also like a really great example of, like, what you can achieve if you are disciplined. And so in my mind, I see as I'm supposed to have a balance between discipline and inspiration or hidden heart. I'm supposed to walk this fine line between inspiration and discipline, but where am I going? Where is this line taking me? The word inspire comes from the Latin to mean divine guidance. I think that the inspiration is meant to lead us, that we're supposed to follow the inspiration, and that discipline is meant to support that. Is a saying in the East the mind makes an excellent servant, but a terrible master. And I think the same is true for discipline. The word discipline also comes from the Latin, and it means instruction. So I think it's meant to take instruction. And so I know this theory is true to me. Maybe it resonates with you, maybe doesn't. But for me, I know that my inspiration is meant to guide me through life. I know that I'm meant to listen to my inspiration or my heart and just go wherever that calling is telling me to go. And so in the next episode, I'm going to talk about, well, okay, how do we actually listen to this inspiration, you know, how do we actually find this thread? How do we know our purpose here, our calling? Wonder what direction to go in in our lives. And at this time of the journey, I stumbled across a woman named Doctor Martha Burke. And so she wrote a book called Following Your North Star. And so I'm going to go into that into the next episode.