Would you like your life to be in complete order?
Do you want everything to be structured and would you enjoy never having to deal with uncertainty?
Would you like to know how anything is happening before it happens?
If your life would always be in complete order,
Then very little unexpected could ever happen
and that might not be the best idea after all.
So let's look at how you can use discipline to create a healthy mix of chaos and order.
So today we are trying to raise your awareness of discipline and how you can use it
to create the right amount of expected and unexpected moments.
Our goal is to understand that discipline is a mindset that can make things easier
without your life becoming boring and rigid.
We will not try to make you a hyper-disciplined person.
We will merely explore what amount of order is right for you.
John Wooden said,
Discipline yourself and others won't need to.
Let's explore discipline.
Let me start by mentioning that having discipline is not achieved by a few weeks of making good choices.
Having discipline means that you have an ongoing mindset around accepting
complete responsibility for yourself and your actions.
This fundamental mindset will lead you to make decisions serving your immediate actions
and also your long-term growth.
So let us look further at why and how having a good amount of discipline can serve you.
Firstly,
Having discipline makes you an active human being.
You will not allow yourself to procrastinate for too long
and even more importantly,
You will not allow things that need your attention to pile up.
This is extremely beneficial because this means you will hardly ever feel overwhelmed.
You will have good overall energy,
Which is necessary for balance and growth.
Discipline allows you to always keep moving on your path.
My next point is that discipline will make you choose the right decisions over the easy ones.
You will not make many mistakes because you will usually think before you act.
Discipline will allow you to reap bigger and better rewards later by missing out on the instant gratifications.
With discipline you will have a long-term mindset and a deeper enriched reward system.
This will automatically make you less distracted by unimportant and unhealthy stuff.
You will not spend time with people or places that don't serve you
and you will not eat the third piece of cake.
You will not wake up one morning and realize you wasted your life.
With discipline you will experience strength.
Another great side effect of having discipline is that you will have a good self-esteem and you will trust yourself.
You will feel strong enough to withstand temptations and other negative outside influences.
You will be able to walk freely in this world.
Your strength and self-trust will also make other people trust you.
They will see you as a person that they can rely on and they will want to be connected with you permanently.
Lastly,
Having discipline does not mean creating complete order in your life.
Having discipline means creating the right mix of chaos and order.
Of course the meaning of chaos and order is very subjective and that is completely fine.
But please challenge yourself to raise your awareness as to how both chaos and order can serve your life.
This awareness will definitely improve your decision making and allow for a less rigid approach in your life.
Now let's keep investigating chaos and order.
When I speak about chaos today I am talking about an environment,
Feeling,
A project or relationship
that is at least partially unpredictable and has no clear structure yet.
The first advantage of chaos is that it confronts you with your current opinions and value chains and it pushes for growth.
Chaos is unpredictable,
Which means you have to be awake and alert.
You are forced to look at your life and you have to consider your actions.
These circumstances automatically challenge your abilities and belief structure.
In chaos you will automatically grow by the experience of managing to go through it.
Furthermore,
Experiencing chaotic situations will most likely make you more creative and adaptable.
In chaos the ideal solutions are often unclear at first,
Which means your creative thinking will get stimulated and make you look at unique and new ways of dealing with situations.
You will have to think on the spot and doing so on a regular basis means you learn how to deal with all kinds of situations life throws at you.
Now another immediate effect when dealing with chaos is that it brings you into being completely present.
You are not worrying about the past and you are not scared of the future.
You are in the now,
Because chaos demands you to be present.
In chaos you are awake,
You are alive,
Hormones are released into your body and you are ready for action.
You can clearly see things for what they are,
Because you have to pay attention.
My last point about chaos is that I think it humbles you.
A chaotic environment is often so big or untameable that you can never fully control it.
This means that you have to accept chaos and surrender to it.
It humbles you because it automatically makes you understand that you are part of something instead of leading or controlling something.
Surrender to chaos and you can observe your emotional reactivity disappear.
Now let us talk about order.
When I speak about order today,
I am talking about an environment,
Project or relationship that is predictable and has clear structure.
Environments that have order allow you to be more productive overall,
Because you are not dealing with anything apart from the things you set out to do.
This is important when you have a heavy workload to fulfill.
Order will also make you avoid stupid choices.
If you bring order into something,
You will automatically create a plan and most likely you will have spent a good amount of time creating that plan.
And you will thus do things in a way in which you can easily avoid mistakes.
The next point I want to make is that order will give you a feeling of control.
You are steering your own ship or your ideal path.
Yes,
You are part of the river of life,
Which is chaotic,
But you are in control of your path and you can choose where to go when.
Lastly and most importantly,
I want to mention that order will allow you to have peace of mind and will allow you to switch off.
Order allows you to move in one direction and also allows you to pause anytime you want to.
Moving in one direction means you are less confused,
Worried or busy and you can feel at ease and peace.
Now I want to mention one more thing that personally serves me well in my life.
It is often the dance between chaos and order that makes me the happiest.
A give and take,
Yin and yang.
The secret for me is to marry the two elements to get the best of both worlds.
Take this course for example.
When I started writing this course,
I just vomited out any thoughts I had about anything concerning life.
It was chaotic,
It was fast,
It was creative,
There were no rules,
It was wonderful.
Eventually though,
The huge amount of chaos made me want to structure the course.
I needed to give it order,
Also because I wanted others to be able to understand my thoughts.
So for me,
Chaos and order go hand in hand and embracing both can benefit your life greatly.
