focused discipline
I have not maintained any type of focused discipline lately.
I have been feeling the overwhelm of my life mounting and mounting, growing, creeping up on me as I fear it may burst the seams.
In that overwhelm, I have let important things drop and temporarily fade away, as I felt myself clinging onto survival in the daily necessities, responsibilities, and work.
I have wondered whether what I need is to make things easier, softer, lighter — to give myself waaaaayyy more gentleness and space and to back off everything I can that’s taking too much.
Or if what I need is to rise up and grow in my own grit, determination, and capacity. If perhaps the problem is not my season or obstacles, but my own response to them. If maybe I don’t need to make things easier and less — I need to help myself be more disciplined and capable.
Right now, I don’t think there is much I can do about the season of life I’m in and how much it requires of me. It’s exhausting. It’s a lot. It’s so, so good, and I love it, but sometimes it feels like too much.
This has only been overwhelming me and shutting me down, minimizing my own empowerment. It is not empowering to wake up everyday and feel behind and overstretched as you look at all things you feel you cannot do.
Instead, I need to rise up, shift my perspective, and take ownership.
If the options I was considering were to make things easier or to get grittier and stronger, less distracted and more determined… but I cannot feasibly make things easier right now… then all that leaves is the route of grit.
Lots of distraction creates splintered vision and willpower. My efforts are all strewn about and mixed up, rather than specific and leveraged, and this adds to the overwhelm.
Perhaps instead of focusing on all I cannot do and how hard everything is — a trap I’ve fallen into before, and one that also didn’t work last time I encountered it — maybe I can compassionately remind myself life is challenging for everyone and then zoom in on what I CAN change and control.
We are the authors of our own stories. I can choose to focus on and amplify whichever parts of my story I want to. If it’s always going to be hard, I might as well choose my positioning for the challenges; in other words, which are the “worth-it” hard things that I am willing to work for and sacrifice for and show up for? Who am I being?
Our thoughts matter. Our minds steer everything. What am I imagining?
With focused discipline, I can rise to meet my potential and capacity and realize yes, things are hard, but there are also hard things I can do that make the rest of life easier. For example, if I zero in on prioritizing the gym and my nutrition, to feel better and meet my goals and fuel everything else I do every day, then the rest of what fills my schedule will go better because I will be more ready to meet it.
It is my choice and mine alone whether I will accept the challenges and be who I want to be in the face of them. I could just rail against them, resist them, complain, and shut down. Does that sound like the brave, true, successful, honest path of the warrior? Will that in any way create the life I want to live? No. Of course, we know the answer.
It is my choice and mine alone whether or not I will look my life in the eyes and be brave and full of love. I can notice the challenge and then remind myself I’m built for it, I’m strong, and I can grow because of this. I can notice the challenge and then just decide: decide what I will build under pressure.
I know focused discipline will come at the expense of my distractions, and I think I’m ready for that. My distractions aren’t serving me; they’re just running me down. If we can adopt temporary discomfort and sacrifice, it will pay off in spades in the long run. Distractions might be more comfortable in the moment, but they create further hardship. Instead, focused discipline will help us carve a path through the challenges and overwhelm.
This is tough, but so are you.
And with that strength, courage, vulnerability, softness, grit, awareness, acceptance, and focus, we will carry on.
Through embracing what is hard that we can rise up and do, we’ll remove the chaotic, splintered overwhelm, and we will refine. This refining ushers in calm in the middle of the storm.
We might not be able to change our circumstances, but we can always change ourselves and our actions amidst them.
Focused discipline will open the pathways for success and peace and joyful satisfaction.
P.S. Comfort or change? Up to you.
