We're Rebranding Discipline (so it actually feels easy & GOOD)

You're going to experience the rest of your life in your body and your mind. Why wouldn't you want to make those the best possible places to live?

For years, I thought consistency came from more discipline, more pressure, and forcing myself to try harder. Eventually I realized I had the entire thing backwards...

If you've ever felt like you know what to do but can't seem to get yourself to do it consistently, this episode is for you.

Most women think the answer is more discipline, more motivation, more willpower, more pressure.

I used to think that too.

But over time I realized consistency wasn't something I could force. The more I tried to shame, pressure, and criticize myself into changing, the more disconnected I became from myself.

In this episode, I'm sharing the mindset shifts that completely changed my relationship with consistency, self-trust, and showing up for myself.

We talk about why devotion is more powerful than discipline, why so many women struggle to trust themselves, and how to build a relationship with yourself where healthy habits stop feeling like a constant fight.

Plus, I'm sharing 3 practical tools you can start using immediately to build confidence, self-trust, and consistency in your health journey and beyond.

In this episode:

• Why discipline often feels like punishment
 • The difference between discipline and devotion
 • How to rebuild self-trust after years of starting over
 • Why consistency is an identity shift, not a motivation problem
 • A simple exercise to build confidence and self-belief
 • How to stop relying on willpower and create systems that work
 • Why learning to do hard things changes more than just your fitness journey

If this episode resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you and find my people. Send me a message on Instagram and let me know which mindset shift or tool stood out most.

Chapters: 
00:00 Building a Relationship with Yourself
09:56 Mindset Shifts for Consistency
19:49 Practical Tools for Self-Trust
30:10 Embracing Hardship for Growth

Instagram: @lainijojo

YouTube: @lainijojo / Laini Gibson 

Keywords: 
self-trust, consistency, mindset shifts, self-love, discipline, women empowerment, health, motivation, routines, growth

Key Topics: 
Mindset shifts for consistency
Replacing discipline with devotion
Building self-trust and confidence
Practical tools for self-trust and consistency
Overcoming mental barriers and self-sabotage

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Has it ever dawned on you that you are going to experience the entire rest of your life in your body and your mind? Why would you not want to make those the best possible places to live that you could? Like, why would you not want to give yourself your best? For a really long time, I thought that the answer was more motivation, more discipline, pressure, just forcing myself. Eventually I realized that I had the entire thing backwards. This episode is not actually about how to become more disciplined. It's about how to build a relationship with yourself where consistency becomes just a natural expression of self-respect and self-trust and devotion and identity. Because most women are trying to force themselves and shame themselves and pressure themselves, burn themselves out. But when your identity shifts, your relationship with yourself shifts. And honestly, I think that this is underneath so many of the things that women struggle with: the self-sabotage, the emotional eating, the all-or-nothing thinking, the perfectionism, the constantly starting over and under-eating and cravings and just the inconsistency. And underneath all of that, like not trusting ourselves and feeling like you maybe you know what to do, but you can't actually get yourself to do it consistently. So I want to walk you through three mindset shifts that completely change the way that I approach consistency and showing up for myself. And then at the end, I want to give you three practical tools that you can actually start using today and like this week to build this, because I can say with absolute complete certainty, I would have never been able to reach the goals that I have or set the new goals that I have or the relationship with myself that I have, and actually, dare I say, enjoy living life in this body that I worked so hard to care for. If I hadn't made these shifts, I would have kept doing the wrong things. I would have kept honestly abusing my body and not understanding how to work with it to be able to get it where I wanted to get and actually love and enjoy the process, even the hard part of it too. I think so many women know how to take care of themselves through, like we're taught to take care of ourselves through pressure and criticism and shame or even self-hatred. Like, I know that sounds kind of intense, but I wonder if you guys can relate to this too, from just my own experience and friends and family members and clients that I've worked with, just the words that I hear that people say of how they talk to themselves and think about themselves. Like, I need to fix myself, I need to be better, I need to lose weight, I need to get it together. But but what if instead we started from, I deserve to give myself my best? Like, what if that's the place that it came from? Because yes, when you take care of yourself, other people also benefit too. I'm not like we we can look at that part as well, especially as women. We're we're the ones that have to typically take care of other people and care about them. And sometimes we overextend and we people please and like we do that, but we just want to love others and help them and give them what we can, right? And we all know that when you show up for yourself and you are your best version of you, you give everybody else that best version of you. And they also deserve to get that best version of you too. But but what if that wasn't the only thing that we focused on? Because yeah, when you take care of you, your relationships benefit, your family benefits, your work benefits, your energy benefits, but also you benefit. You are the one living inside your body every day. You are the one waking up with your thoughts and your energy and your stress levels and your confidence, your relationship with food, your relationship with yourself. You are your ride or die. You are spending the entire rest of your life with yourself. And I would say whether you like it or not, but why would you not like that? Like that's what I'm saying. We want to focus on first. Why would you not want to show up for yourself? Why would you not want to give yourself your best effort and not from punishment, but from love, from respect, and from devotion? And I also think that a lot of people just have this really negative relationship with the word discipline, because discipline feels like punishment. And that's what it kind of was used for when you were little. Maybe your parents had to discipline you, or you heard people talk about that, or if you're on a sports team, you were disciplined and you had to do sprints or push-ups or something like that. So a lot of times discipline doesn't have a very positive connotation. So if we think that we need to be more, more disciplined, it feels kind of like punishment. I have to force myself, I have to suffer, I have to be strict, I have to push harder, I just mean need more discipline, right? But what if we we switch the wording here? Because I know it's just a word, but the connotation, like the meaning behind the word that we're using, has an insane impact on how our brain registers it and like what we're gonna do, how we're perceiving that. So, what if we replace discipline with devotion? Because devotion feels completely different. Dare I say opposite. Devotion feels intentional and loving and grounded, like I care about myself enough to keep showing up. I am devoted to taking care of myself, to taking care of my body, to helping myself actually enjoy my day-to-day life and actually get to the things that I say that I want because I deserve to give myself those. That shift changes everything because when you're constantly trying to push your way towards your goals, eventually you burn out. But when your identity shifts and we're thinking of it this way as we're devoted to it versus discipline and push and grind and just not actually thinking of how we actually feel, your identity shifts and your relationship with yourself shifts and it starts pulling you towards those behaviors inside. It naturally just pulls you towards them. And you don't wait for no motivation. You don't have to push and force and white knuckle yourself and drag yourself towards that. You don't have to wait till you get hit with that motivation and rely on it. You become someone who shows up because that's who you are. You become devoted to taking care of your body, to fueling yourself, to moving your body, to honoring your goals and building a life that actually feels good to live in, because you are devoted to giving yourself that, because you love yourself so much that you couldn't stand to just let yourself do things that truly don't feel good or honor you, and doing it in a way because you hate yourself or you need to change yourself. So I'd invite you, if that's the way that you're going about thinking things, and that's how that's how I thought about it too, because that's kind of how people talked about it. Like that's what was modeled. I thought that's what you're supposed to do. But if that's if that's how you've been doing it and it doesn't feel good for you, just simply that perspective shifts of how we think of like what our why is, of why we're doing those things. I know it sounds small, but genuinely just those small things, and it's it's good that it's small because then it seems like it's easier to implement and it makes the biggest difference. And on top of that, I also think a massive part of consistency is trust. Because if deep down you don't believe that you will follow through, you don't trust yourself that you will follow through, it's really hard to stay committed to anything. So I also think that so many women just don't actually trust themselves anymore because they've spent years starting over and quitting and self-sabotaging and waiting for motivation to be the thing that gets them to do it, not because they trust that they can get themselves to do it and just truly abandoning themselves. But the truth is the only thing standing between you and a lot of the things that you want is that you simply just don't believe in yourself enough to think that you can do the hard thing consistently. And I know that that sounds harsh, but I actually think that it's empowering because that means that you can build self-trust. Just like think about it. Anything that's easy for you now used to be hard, like when you first started driving. I don't know about you. I was terrified. It was so hard to get in that driver's seat and just, oh my God, it was it was nerve-wracking at first. Now it's easy, right? You could like I was gonna say drive in your sleep. Don't do that. Drive very alert, but it's easy now. Or like your job, you start a new job and it's so overwhelming and it's so hard to figure out what do I do here and how do I do this thing and talk to this person for this and what? And now you're like, I just I don't even think about it. Days where I'm tired and like I'm mentally checked out, I can still do my job perfectly fine because it's easy for you now. And just working out. Maybe when you first started working out, it was so hard. You had no idea there was so much gym intimidation, you didn't know what to do, you couldn't do a push-up. Hello me. Uh, I was like that. And it was so hard at first, but now it's like breathing for me or riding a bike at first, super hard. You take spills, you need the training wheels, and eventually now you can get on a bike and like you're fine, or even like public speaking. Maybe if you need to present in front of teams or speak in front of people or anything like that. It felt so hard at first, and now it's just you just do it every day. Like there's so many things like that. It was uncomfortable at first. It was hard at first, but eventually you built the evidence that I can do this. And I don't even know if you've ever heard the quote of it's not hard, it's just new. When it's new, it is hard. And you keep doing it and it becomes easier and you learn and you trust yourself that you can actually do the thing. You can build the skill, you can have the knowledge, you can have the determination, you can show up when you don't really feel like it or you don't feel motivated or it's challenging, and you can trust yourself to still follow through with it. And I think women, especially women, we are capable of so much more than we realize. We literally grow human beings and push babies out of our bodies. Like we hold families together, we build careers, we navigate stress, we carry emotional loads constantly for ourselves and for everybody else. Like we are capable of incredible things. But somewhere along the way, so many women stop believing that about themselves, that they can do it. So again, I ask like, if it what if you don't believe in yourself enough to follow through with the goals that you have, I would invite you not to change the goals that you have, but to build that trust and that confidence in yourself so you can actually set bigger goals. Like if you think that you can't reach the goal that you have right now, I guarantee you can reach a goal that's even bigger than the one that you're dreaming of right now. But the only reason you're not even dreaming of that one is because you just don't believe that you can do it. But you achieving this first goal that you have is gonna open up your mind to so many possibilities of, okay, if I could do this, what else could I do? So I think a lot of times people will listen to something like this, they'll listen to an episode like this or podcast, and they're they'll think, okay, yeah, I totally do that too. And then you hear something that resonates and you think, wow, that's a really good point. And then never actually apply it. Like, I'm so guilty of doing that as well. So I want to give you three practical things that you can actually start doing like today, like this week, to build self-trust and consistency and yeah, some motivation, right? But like in that healthier way, so it helps to pull you towards it. So the first tool, I call this the self-trust list. And that I want you to create this. Go into the notes app of your phone. So you always have it on you, is what I would encourage. Or if you're pen to paper girl, you could write it down too. But I just like being able to pull it up when I need this. This is an actual tool that I use. I want you to go title it your self-trust list. And I want you to write down every single hard thing that you've already done in your life, everything that you've accomplished, everything that you have to be proud of yourself of. Big things, small things, everything, right? Like the jobs that you've gotten, the hard seasons that you've survived, the degrees that you've earned, the relationships that you've navigated, the times that you showed up scared, the workouts that you completed, the goals that you'd achieved, like every single thing. Maybe you won the spelling bee in like second grade, like everything you got a part in the musical that you wanted when you were little, like every little thing, okay? Because we are so quick to look at other people and think, wow, she is incredible. Like, oh my gosh, all the things that she, how does she do it? But we rarely give ourselves that same credit, especially if you are someone who does have big ambitions, who is like that kind of high-achieving kind of individual. You set, you set your sight on the this next thing or these goals, and you think, well, I'm not measuring up to that, that person or that thing, or I'm not there yet. So we just don't give ourselves credit for it. And when you actually look at your life objectively and who you are and what you have done, and what you've gone through and grown through and accomplished and survived sometimes, you start to realize, wait, okay, I have done so many hard things before. I have done so many impressive things before. Things, things that when you look at that list and you compound all of that together, it just hits you. And that builds confidence and self-trust and it builds evidence. So then you can go and pull that list up whenever you're doubting yourself and think, okay, all of these things, these were new when I first did them too, and I did it and I accomplished it, and this was hard and I got through it. And look at who I am today because of that. And what you can even do and take it a step further is if you have a hard time reading that and just giving yourself the credit that you need, pretend like it's someone else, like someone that you that you admire, or I don't know, maybe envy, but envy and jealousy is really just a way for you to show yourself like, I want that, and you can like work towards that. But maybe you have those feelings or someone that you look up to, someone on social media, right? And imagine you're reading this list that you wrote about yourself, but about them. And picture someone else doing all these things, all these accomplishments. And I guarantee when you do that and you take a step out of yours outside of yourself and you look at it objectively, it it really emotionally hits you. Every time I do this, I'm like, okay, wow. And it builds so much more confidence and trust in myself to step forward into this new thing that is a little scarier, a little hard. And I'm like, I actually have all of this evidence. That's what our brain needs. It just needs some evidence to be like, okay, okay, I think we can do this. Let's go do this. Let's go. So go make that list and then add to it every time you do something that is worthy of the other. You do so many things worthy of that list. Add to that, okay? And keep adding to it and keep coming back to it and using that as a tool when you need it. All right. The second tool is removing obstacles instead of relying on willpower. Because, girl, we need to stop relying on willpower so much. Your brain, just quite frankly, it was not designed to make hard decisions all day long, forever, without getting mentally just fatigued and depleted. There's actually research showing that the average adult makes something like 30,000 plus decisions per day. Tiny ones and big ones. So what to wear, what to eat, which email to answer, which lane to drive in, which text to respond to, how to respond to that text, what task to prioritize. Your brain is constantly making decisions. And so the decision fatigue is real, which means that the more overwhelmed and stressed and busy or mentally exhausted that you are, the harder it becomes to rely on that motivation and that willpower because it's just not there. We've used it all, right? So instead of constantly asking, how do I become more disciplined? How do I become more get more willpower? Instead, we ask, how do I remove obstacles? Because consistency, just frankly, it gets easier when healthy choices or aligned choices stop requiring so many dang decisions. This is why routines and systems and habits matter so much. Like the people that have learned this and understood this, like they are scientists, they are researchers, like they are studying the brain and human behavior and psychology. Like, there's a reason that they recommend habits and systems and routines because they understand how our brains work and we're working with our brains when we do this, not against our brains. We don't want to make it harder for ourselves. And we don't need to be robotic about this. It doesn't need to be like we time block every second of our day. If you want to do that, go for it. I'm type A, but I'm not that type A. You can do that if you want to, but we don't have to go that far with it. So if you're someone that doesn't love that, you like some flexibility, like you can give yourself that and still give yourself that supportive structure and routines and habits of ways that you do things to remove some of that decision fatigue, remove those obstacles out of your way. So decisions don't have to be constantly being made. And this reduces friction, it reduces so much friction. So some examples of this is having some sources of protein or carbs or veggies just like easily prepped in your fridge. You don't have to do a full meal prep, put everything in their containers, like pre-portion the meals. You can do that if you want to. So a lot of people love that. Or like if you follow me on Instagram, you see I bulk prep options. So I'll like ingredient prep. I have a Tupperware of just some chicken cooked for the next little bit. I have some potatoes cooked for the next little bit. We've got rice cooked for the next little bit, some vegetables for my taco bowls. Like I have those prepped really easily. So I don't have to decide what do I make and how do I make it? And do I have time and this and that? Like I took the decision out of it, right? I removed the obstacles and the friction. I made it easier for myself. Having the healthy options, just the groceries available, right? Having default meals that you rotate rotate through, save my life with that. Laying your gym clothes out or scheduling your workouts ahead of time. I put them into my schedule of this is the time of day I go to my gym. This is, you know, the workout I do, these are the days that I go. So I don't have to decide, should I go now? I don't really feel motivated. Maybe I go later. Like I don't even have to negotiate with myself or make that decision and overcome my low motivation that day. Cause you bet your, you, I was gonna say, you bet your, I don't know, whatever you say with that brain fart. I I have a lot of days I don't feel motivated to do a lot of the things that I do. But I know that I feel better and if I'm showing up for myself and taking care of myself, if I do those things. So I make it easy for myself too. Because we're frankly, we're reducing the amount of resistance between you and the behavior. And what I always like to say or think about this as is I don't want to put all of my eggs in my future self's basket. I don't want her to have to make the decisions and have to figure everything out from scratch and just she's gonna have the motivation to do it then. She might not. Like she's already busy and tired and stressed. Maybe she's overwhelmed. So current me is gonna help her out. I don't, I don't want to put all the eggs in her basket. She, her basket's already heavy. I don't want her to have to carry all of that. I want to do some of those now so she can do those things easily and carry everything else. That again, us women, we have to carry every day. So that is that is self-love, is what we're doing with that. Having a little bit of structure, routines, and habits to be able to help take some of the eggs out of that future self's basket so it's easier for you to be able to show up for and take care of you. Okay, the third tool is honestly one of the biggest mindset shifts that changed my life. And I don't, I don't say that lightly. Like I genuinely mean this. Uh, I'm so big on this. Teaching myself that I can do hard things. And weirdly enough, the gym, like lifting weights, especially sprinting and other things too, but lifting weights especially helped me build this mindset more than almost anything else. Because your brain here, let's take it, let's talk about the brain for a second. Again, we get if we understand how it works, we can work with it instead of against it. Your brain is literally wired to keep you safe and comfortable. I've talked about that in a lot of episodes before. Your brain isn't, it does not naturally want discomfort or effort or struggle or uncertainty. Like it literally is wired to avoid all of those things. So it can just predict and keep you safe. Even if it doesn't, if you don't like where you're currently at, it at least can predict that, oh, we're not in danger, we're not gonna die. So we're fine. That's all it cares about, right? Thing like evolution, just keep you alive. So our brain doesn't want us to do uncomfortable or challenging things. So our brain is automatically going to innately try to stop us from doing something challenging that we maybe need to have a little bit more motivation. Or discipline to be able to do. So what do we do about it? Well, if we if we don't do anything about it, what's going to happen is when something starts to get hard, your brain is often going to tell you to stop long before you are actually done and like you reach like your ceiling of what you're capable of. And we see this in research too. Like this is like a very clear, like, this is proven. This is this is how everybody is, right? There are studies where, let's now talk about just weightlifting here, where people were told they have to pick a weight where they could get 10 reps. And then the researchers had them pick the weight and then say, hey, we're actually just going to go to failure. We're going to go until you literally are unable to do any more. And when they were supposed to pick the weight for the 10 reps, it was they could only get 10 reps. Like they couldn't get more than that. So then they had them go to the exercise. And what they found is everybody, but especially women, even more so than the men to a higher degree than the men, they got way more reps than they expected. Like 20 plus reps. They were supposed to fail at 10. They could keep going past 20. So what that means is we are often capable of far more than our brains initially believe that we are. And this is why I love things like with the leg extension or like the leg press for this exercise mentally. What it can teach you, it teaches you, okay, wow, I can actually, I can keep going. I can actually do more than when my brain is telling me to stop. So your muscles start to burn and the reps start to slow down because your muscles are struggling to complete that rep. And when we get to that point, your brain starts yelling at you to stop. That's enough. It's starting to get hard. Let's stay comfy. Let's just stay where it's easy, like let's be done now, right? But then when you keep going and it's completely safe to do that, right? It's just into that discomfort a little bit. Your brain's just stopping at the discomfort. We can push into that. That's how we build muscle. You guys know that. Um, if you've listened, especially to my muscle building episode. So we keep going into that safely, and our brain realizes, okay, wait, I actually had more in me. I could actually do more. And I was okay. Right. And every time that you do that, you build evidence, you build confidence, you build resilience, and you build self-trust and you build muscle and strength because growth literally happens outside your comfort zone, right? Like to build muscle outside of that comfort zone. It is not comfortable to push for those last reps, but those are the reps that cause growth. In anything in life, if we stay in our comfort zone, we don't grow. We stay where we're at. So physically and mentally and emotionally, that's how we grow. We get outside of that comfort zone. We do something that is uncomfortable and we step into it because it is uncomfortable, because we trust ourselves to be able to show up and grow from it. And that's why something like the leg extension is a great one to start with. Because both of those, the leg extension and leg press, they're stable, they're machines. Like with it's it's different than like a barbell squat going to failure, is a little more challenging, right? A little less uh inherently safe if someone's not an experienced lifter. But the leg extension, anybody can do that, right? So, what I would encourage you to do is this week, go and put yourself on that leg extension when you got your leg day. And or you can pick a different exercise if you want. It's just a good one to do because it burns, right? And you push through that. And make sure we've got good form, we're controlling the weight, we're not flopping around, you get the good squeeze at the top, controlling the way down. And your last set, literally go until it starts to burn, keep going. Until it starts to be really hard and slow to fight your way to get your leg all the way straight up at the top. Keep going. Go until you quite literally cannot get your leg all the way straight at the top, where it turns into a partial rep, where you can only get it part way up, and that's as far as your leg is physically able to get it anymore. That is you getting to failure. And it burns and it's hard and it's uncomfortable. But you can do it, and we're teaching our brain not only is it safe to do this, but it's actually capable of doing this. And when you're a little bit more experienced and comfortable with lifting, I'd invite you to try it on the leg press. You can do glutathione focus, whatever we're trying to grow, and do the same thing, right? Make that last set, make sure our form is good, we're controlling the weight, the depth is good, like we got to make sure we're doing it well. And take yourself to failure until you literally can't get another rep. And either have someone there to spot you to help you get up if you need it. Some of the machines have like stops at the bottom, so it like catches it, or you can literally even put your hands on your knees and you don't even have to push that hard. And you just give yourself a little love tap and it helped you assist yourself to get it back up. And doing that proves to yourself, oh my, I was, I could go way more than I have ever been going on the leg press before. I guarantee you, like actually getting to failure. It is physically hard, but it's mentally hard. And that's why I love lifting, is because that's those things help grow muscle, but it grows your character. I know that sounds corny, but like it literally does. Like it taught me that I can do way, way more and withstand way more and just be way more resilient than I ever thought that I could. Because I just truly think, especially as a swimming, like we just severely underestimate how capable we really are. And that is such a disservice. Because again, you as a woman are built to handle so many things. Like you can do more than you think that you can because your brain's just trying to keep you safe. Or so that is a way to be able to push past that and give your brain proof that it is actually safe to do this. It's okay to do this and step outside that comfort zone in order to grow and become that woman that you want to be. So that's our tools. We're gonna do the self, the evidence list, right? The self-trust list. We're going to remove some of those obstacles that we keep not being able to follow through on. And we're gonna make like a habit or a system or a routine. I know I listed a couple with nutrition. Maybe it's like water that you struggle with, maybe it's getting your workouts in, maybe it's keeping your house clean, whatever it is, whatever you struggle with, we're gonna create a routine or a habit or a system, a simple one. Just pick one thing and implement that. Totally write it in your calendar or your planner so you visibly see it, so you can visually remember it. Otherwise, we got a lot of stuff going on. You might forget it. And then we're going to teach ourselves that we can do hard things by literally going to failure, going past where our brain tells us to stop. It's getting uncomfy and keep going. And we're gonna do that on an exercise this week. So I want you guys to do all three of those either today, if you got a leg day today, today or sometime this week. And I want you to honestly like take a second and reflect on like how that made you feel. And if you surprised yourself with how you were able to still follow through with it, then it's okay to have some thoughts of, oh, I don't know, or it's kind of hard, or I don't really feel motivated, and still do it anyway. Like that's the point of it, right? To overcome those thoughts telling us that we can't, prove to our brains that we can. So if you take nothing else from this episode, I just really want you to remember this. Consistency is not built through constantly shaming and forcing and abandoning yourself. Consistency is built through self-respect and self-trust and devotion and reducing friction and proving to yourself over and over again, I am someone who follows through and shows up for myself because you deserve that. You deserve to give yourself that. So if you think you don't, you do. You deserve to feel good in your body, you deserve to have energy and confidence and peace with your relationship with food, and you deserve to trust yourself. And the beautiful thing is, all of that is buildable. So I hope that you got some mindset shifts from nuggets from this. Thank you so much for being here, for letting me love on you, letting me shift your mindset with this. And I'd love to hear if there's anything that you implement, if it made that impact, as as I know it's made on me and so many of the women that I've I've worked with and recommended these tools to for. And it's just absolutely changed their life, like not just their fitness journey and their life. So I'd love to hear if this did for you too. But thank you so much for hanging out with me. I love you. I'll see you in the next episode. Now go do something that your future self will thank you for.