When Discipline Wears a Mask

In this episode, Don offers a solo reflection on the complicated role discipline can play in a leader’s life. Discipline can help us show up, follow through, and build something meaningful, but it can also become a way of staying above reproach while keeping parts of ourselves out of reach from others. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to Meditations on Leadership. I'm Don Carpenter. Let me ask you: what happens when the very thing people admire in us, our focus, our consistency, our ability to keep showing up, also becomes the thing we use to hide? That question brings us into this week's meditation on the topic of discipline and the hidden cost of always holding it together. Because discipline can earn trust. It can make us reliable, respected, and also almost impossible to criticize, because it can also become a way of staying above reproach while keeping parts of ourselves safely out of reach. Exploring leadership tensions like these is at the heart of this podcast. Each week begins with a meditation, followed by a personal reflection, and usually then a conversation with a guest whose lived experience helps bring the theme to life, all in the service of talking about the inner formation leadership asks of us. However, today, through some unforeseen circumstances, my guests couldn't make it at the last second. But as they say in Hollywood, the show must go on. And so today I'm going to read the meditation, offer a personal reflection, and then answer a few questions as a way to kind of dissect deeper into this topic of discipline. So let's move forward. Today's meditation is number 20 from my forthcoming book. It's titled When Discipline Wears a Mask. The quote I wrote down was from Jim Collins. And it goes like this greatness is not a function of circumstance. As it turns out, it's largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline. Discipline, the choice to keep showing up, to do what matters, to stay committed when life pulls us in other directions. It is one of those qualities we admire in leaders. We trust disciplined people. We celebrate their consistency, focus, work ethic, and follow-through. For much of my life, discipline came naturally to me. Structure came naturally. So did focus. So did the ability to keep doing the work. But over time I began to understand I had something that I had missed. Discipline is not always as healthy as it looks from the outside. Sometimes discipline comes from purpose. Sometimes it comes from fear. Sometimes it is rooted in clarity, calling, and commitment. And sometimes it is rooted in the need to prove ourselves, protect ourselves, or hide how uncertain we really feel. I know this because I lived there. In my early years, I often used discipline as a disguise. If I stayed busy, productive, and focused enough, no one had to look too closely. Not even me. I could avoid harder questions by staying useful. I could hide my uncertainty behind my work ethic. I could look strong while remaining unexamined inside. And that is one of the quiet dangers of leadership. The things people praise us for are not always the things making us whole. A leader can be admired for discipline and still lose touch with meaning and connection to others. That is why every disciplined leader eventually has to ask a deeper question. What is driving me? Am I doing this because it matters or because I'm afraid of what I might feel if I stopped? Am I staying disciplined because I am aligned? Or because I do not know who I would be if I were no longer needed? Am I leading from purpose or from pressure of other people's expectations? Am I being faithful to my personal calling? Or am I trying to prove that I am enough? Those questions changed me, challenged me. When discipline is rooted in fear, it becomes armor. It keeps us moving, but not always growing. It can make leadership look strong while keeping us hidden. But when discipline is rooted in alignment, it becomes devotion, devotion to the work, devotion to the people we serve, devotion to the promises we have made, devotion to the person we are still becoming. That kind of discipline does not empty us. It gives shape to what matters most. So maybe the question is not whether we are disciplined. Maybe the better question is: what is our discipline serving? Is it helping us become more honest, grounded, and whole, or is it helping us keep the mask in place? Discipline can grow us or can hide us. The difference is whether we are using it to live more truthfully or to avoid the truth altogether. So I'm going to offer a real-time reflection. And as I think about this meditation, I find myself thinking about what happened to me when I was given a lot of responsibility at an early age. The public expectation turned into an internal expectation. The sense that because people were trusting me, I somehow had to carry it with unusual strength, unusual clarity and discipline. In those early years, I do not think I knew what my identity was without being dedicated to something meaningful, some type of meaningful work. And the truth is that discipline became my superpower. Not because I wanted to be reckless, but because I did not know how to be what I would call carefree. And I still don't think carefree is a word most people would use to describe me. Intense, maybe, focused, driven, serious about the work. As a young leader, I did not know how to hold all that. And meaning mattered so deeply to me. One of the reasons is that when I was 16, my childhood best friend died. Somewhere in the pain of that loss, I made a commitment that I would spend my life caring for and loving young people in ways that helped them know what it meant to thrive in life. Before it was taken from them way, way too soon. That was when I became serious about my calling at 16. That pain gave me purpose, it gave me fire, but it also made it hard to rest, hard to play, hard to simply be. Looking back, I can see that my discipline helped me build a life of meaning. But it also became a place I hid my grief. And what helped me begin to heal, especially in my late 20s and 30s, was stepping outside the life I had built. I would say that travel helped. Being out in nature and wilderness settings helped. Community, being in community helped. Each one in its own way, opened something in me that discipline alone could not reach. Slowly I began to find parts of myself that had been buried beneath the work. And I began to understand that healing was not a distraction from my calling. It was part of becoming whole enough to carry it all. And that is why I believe the journey of leadership begins within. So I'm gonna just focus on a couple of the questions that I had for my guest and just offer some of my own thoughts on them. I won't go through them all, but stay with me since this is new and uh I may fumble around a little bit. But when I think back to the beginning, I really wonder about the fuel behind the work for me. And that fuel, as I said, really started when my best friend Orlando had died. And it became so clear to me that I really wanted to do something to make an impact by caring and loving young people for the rest of my life in a way that could have them think differently about their futures, how they could thrive. And everything that I wanted for them is what I wanted for me, which was to live a life that was whole. So much of that beginning work, I don't think I could enjoy it. I don't think that I was able to bring my full self there because I felt so much pressure on the inside to live up to so many of the models I grew up respecting. And when I look back now, I just want to give that young little boy a hug, tell him he was doing great, and that he could that two things could be true, that you could live a really disciplined life and and change the world while also being loose, carefree, and enjoying every minute of it. I think what caught my attention by Jim Collins' quote was that he identified discipline as being the thing that moves the needle. And I had never really thought about it before. Like, I don't think I ever said to myself that I would choose discipline as my superpower. But as I look at my life, I'm super disciplined, it can drive my wife crazy, but at the same time, I need structure. I have most days down to the minute of when I need to start a bike ride or start my workout or start that Zoom call. And sometimes that rigid approach to life can be exhausting. And at the same time, it does give me something, it gives me a way to interact with the world where I can bring my full self to it. So I think that what I want to say in closing is that I've had to pay attention, real close attention, to when I feel this internal desire to meet other people's expectations through a life of discipline. And that has been hard. I believe that for many years I chose to live from a perception perspective to live up to those expectations. But once I began to see that those were not mine, I could back off a little bit and enjoy myself a bit more and kind of have the best of both worlds. And that's why many people will say to me now, it seems like you're living your best life. And I feel that. And I am so grateful that I came, did the deeper work to understand myself in a way that my identity is not what I do. And that's where I guess I want to close. My identity has been so much a part of what I've done in life. Who I am, I can honestly and embarrassingly say who I was was what I was doing. I don't think I had a strong center when I first started this work. But what I've come to understand is who I am outside of the work. That I don't have to identify myself with that deeper meaning. It helps. It helps when I'm doing some really important work in the world, at least from my perspective. Because I feel like there are aspects of being born to do it, because I feel so alive when I am doing it. But at the same time, I've had to get grounded in who I am outside of it. And that understanding that I am not my title, I am not what I do, has been one of the most freeing things that's ever happened to me. I'll leave you with two questions, as I always do, for you to think about and ponder on. And the first one is what is my discipline revealing about what is happening within me? What is my discipline? What are you so disciplined about in your life? Can you name it? And what does it reveal about what's happening within you? Because I really think that I was so disciplined because I was fearful of who I might be if I didn't have that discipline. And the second one is where do I need more inner honesty? So my discipline becomes an expression of purpose, not a disguise of fear. So much of this topic really goes into this idea of the imposter. I think I felt like an imposter for a decade at the beginning of this work, and I just knew that if I could create a life of discipline, no one could question me. But that was out of fear, not purpose, not love. And so, where do you need more inner honesty so that your discipline becomes an expression of purpose, not a disguise of fear? As I close, I want to thank Omar for producing this. If there's something you enjoyed in this episode, and forgive me for the unforeseeable circumstances around my guests not being able to join me today, but I hope you would share it with one other person because it does grow this listening audience, which I am so grateful for. If you have a reflection or thought you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Don at Carpenter Company Consulting dot com. Thanks for listening, and always remember that the journey of leadership begins within the club.