The discipline to say no
Hello. Good morning. It's day three of the Christmas challenge. Hope it's going well for you. So we had a book club last night talking about discipline is destiny, about self control basically.
Speaker 1:A lot of interesting things. Please listen to it. There's a lot of golden air from members talking about discipline and, you know, stuff they find helpful, the struggles. But I'm do a recap right now so you get in the right frame of mind for today. So first first few things we spoke about was today in society, if you're bored, you can travel.
Speaker 1:It says in the in the book, if you get a job you can change it, if you crave it you can have it, if you think it you can say it, if you want something you can buy it, if you dream it you can chase it. Basically anything you want you can make a move towards. Right? But humanity is not flourishing right now in terms of psychologically. We're we're more we're more depressed, we're sadder, we're more unhappy than we've ever been probably, or we're at least still in the same position even with all these advances and, the quality of life.
Speaker 1:So what is going on? Just because you have access to do everything, a lot of people think they have to do everything and chase everything, and they have to keep climbing this ladder up. There's no discipline in reining that in, which is an important part of this. There's no discipline in reigning in your your desires. That is just continually chasing chasing chasing chasing.
Speaker 1:Better job, more money, bigger house, nicer car, better relationships, better than other people in your circle, blah blah blah. It keeps going forever. So we need some self restraint in our desires or in our passions as the stoics would say. And this is not this is not new. This is ancient wisdom.
Speaker 1:They've all spoke about the similar thing about how can we have self restraint and why is that such an important topic through all of recorded human history. Going back as far as you can go, there's any wisdom is about self restraint and even back in the day when there wasn't many things you could go towards. I mean, go back two and a half thousand years ago and you were just the average person, know, there's no TV, there's no social media, there's no abundance of food, there's no sports all the time to watch whatever. Right? So we need self restraint more now than ever because we live in a world of abundance.
Speaker 1:We have to navigate abundance. That is the task of our generation or this even all of us alive now in this type of world, we must learn how to cope with abundance. Lottery winners, eighty percent of them go bankrupt, lose it all. They can't cope with the abundance they get given because they haven't got the training. I love the stoics they speak about, you need to endure a tough winter's training.
Speaker 1:Okay, you need to go through the trials, need to go through the tests, you need to go through the journey, and then at the end this reward you get, and Ella spoke in the book club about you know, growing her own veggies and all this stuff and the process of that and being able to go through it and having your own food at the end is so much satisfactory than just being able to click a button and it comes. So we live in that instant gratification life. Okay? It doesn't serve us at all. We have to narrow things down.
Speaker 1:You can't have everything you want without being destroyed. Right? We must look at what really focus our disciplines. What are the disciplines that are gonna bring us back the biggest results that we want in our lives? The discipline to say no.
Speaker 1:The discipline to say no is probably the one of the most powerful disciplines because we can't say no. I wanna say no to that dessert. I wanna say no to an extra fries. No. You're right, mate.
Speaker 1:Do you want to go large on the on the meals? No, I'm okay. Do you want to go do want another drink? Do you want another thing? We have to be able to say no.
Speaker 1:Because if we don't say no to those moments, they end up going into bigger binges and they they know, the the keeps going kind of reinforces itself. So to learn to say no today, learn to say start saying no, social occasions, to say no, in your mind saying, you got to work out six days a week, you guys say no. With that belief, I want to be I want to be patient with the belief, I want to be soft with that belief, I get the belief has come from my memory formed in the past, my past conditioning has formed this memory, that memory spits off a random thought of this belief about the need to train seven days a week to lose weight. If you can see that popped up from the root, you can just look around and go, it's okay, I see where that's coming from, no problem. But most of us fighting all the time.
Speaker 1:We're always fighting our thoughts. That leads nowhere. That leads to burnout really in the mind. It leads to catastrophizing. It leads to getting disturbed.
Speaker 1:Being emotionally stirred up. It leads to anxiety, adrenaline, heart rate going up, all our stuff, all from our own thoughts. So the discipline to say no, the discipline to really just look at our thoughts without reaction, reacting as well is is a strong discipline to have. Can you sit in a room, You know, we should do tests about this. So this should be when you're in school or even in a job, you should get people in a room and have people tell the so go wrong people.
Speaker 1:And then I'm just thinking out of spot here, so this could come out terribly wrong. But it'd be good, I think, is if someone you So you're you're in a workforce. Right? You're not perfect. No one's perfect.
Speaker 1:You have to tell that person that they are not doing something great or they've done something that's upset you before, you tell them. Right? And that other person has to sit there and not react to it. And the same for everyone, go around. You see, say something that's not quite up to standard or something that's they've done in the past or something they said to you has upset you, go around everyone because everyone's gonna said something, done something.
Speaker 1:And you just sit there and you accept it and you just, you just observe and you just you're you're disciplined to not react because most people can't do that. Most people you we say you say someone says something to us, we haven't got discipline to just sit there for a second, not react to what's been said, and just, you know, let it let it go by. We're always instantly meeting it with boom, and then it goes. We're always reacting. Always reacting.
Speaker 1:And I think the the the real the real thing that we the Spoke One Book Club as well, it's easier to do all this stuff when life's going good, but when life is going tough, it's a lot harder. And there's a truth to that, a 100%. But we make our life a lot harder from things that don't need to be, you know, thought about in that way. We catastrophize all the time. All the time we catastrophize, then we make our days harder because we are now emotionally stirred up.
Speaker 1:Right? We do it all the time. So we need to we need to really look at discipline in how we react. We need to not react anymore. We need to respond.
Speaker 1:And that does take discipline because it means discipline to be still. Discipline to say no and a discipline to stay still. And if you can do those two things, you're gonna you're gonna cope better with, you know, confrontations. You're gonna cope better with stress and emotional eating because you're not jumping on it straight away. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Need to eat some in and go and eat some in. Right? You've you've got the discipline to sit still with that emotional feeling for a good minute or whatever before you react in any way, shape, form. Abraham Lincoln, for example, has loads of letters they found in his drawers that he wrote out in reply to, you know, news from a general do them over or whatever.
Speaker 1:All of them had a bit of venom in them, but he never sent them. Okay. So he's like, okay. I'm gonna write that out, and I'm not gonna send that because it's got venom in it. It's got reaction.
Speaker 1:It's got reactionary emotion in it. That's gonna make things worse. So I'll write it out, but I'll store it away, and then I'll write something out, respond in a clear manner with a cool head. And that's how we can look at things that happen to us. Something happens to us at work, someone's really pissed you off and you've got this terrible news in work, you've done a project, they've cancelled it, they're blaming you, you can't believe someone's backstabbed you.
Speaker 1:You go in and you write out maybe, you go and write it out or mentally think about it, you write out I can't believe this, I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. You write it all out. You don't you don't send it. You don't react. You you think about it in your head, but you don't say it.
Speaker 1:You need to sit on it, and then the discipline to sit on it, you can then go and do a response that's gonna be far better for you and the other person involved in the company in general than if you just reacted. Same for food. You know, you can sit on it in the sense that you've got really stressed out about what's happening and you really just wanna go and binge eat because it's gonna make you feel better. Okay. Write out or think about why that's gonna be a good idea.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna binge eat now to make me feel better. Yeah. I'd love to have some Five Guys and chips and a massive milkshake and it's I'm gonna love it. She'll feel great and I'm so annoyed and stressed. Okay.
Speaker 1:Don't act yet. Don't act on buying the Five Guys. You know, give it a few minutes and respond really. Okay. Will eaten 2,000 calories of food I'm gonna regret help me?
Speaker 1:No. Is it gonna make me feel worse down the line? Yes. Is it gonna is it gonna waste my money? Yes.
Speaker 1:Is this the is this the appropriate action I wanna do for the person I wanna be? No. And, you know, you kind of do that. And we can discipline ourselves to slow down this way, think. It's very important.
Speaker 1:One of the most important skills to do, for sure. And to understand that discipline is the the no part as well as as well as like the discipline to do something. It's a discipline to not do something, probably more important. You know, Bruce Lee spoke about it's not the it's not the, addition, it's the subtraction in life. Right?
Speaker 1:So what can you subtract? What can you say no to and take away that from your life as opposed to always adding on things to do? Can I subtract spending fifteen minutes on my phone when I wake up and not go on my phone in the mornings for the first hour? If I subtract that, what's that gonna then be replaced by? What is gonna flower through when that happens?
Speaker 1:And you'll be amazed. You'll be like, well, I didn't wake up and go on my phone, so I didn't react to anything on. I didn't feel terrible and doom scroll for ten or fifteen minutes. I got up, went, did a walk, did a workout, brushed my teeth, go ahead of the day, got plenty of time, felt a lot better, started on some work I wanted to do outside of my actual work, and you go, I can't believe it now that I'm actually working out in the mornings. And it wasn't the fact that you had to discipline yourself to wake up that was the cause of that.
Speaker 1:It was actually the discipline to subtract the phone time that give you the flourishing time frame of flowering to come through to be able to do the something good for you in that time instead. So let's think of what we can discipline to subtract today. You know, going on your phone all lunch break is another one. Reacting news, not going for a walk, know, whatever it is happening, gossiping and being pulled into drama. Right?
Speaker 1:What are things every day you do that do suck away energy from you? And can we take them away? And then we see what happens with this this the time that's replaced by him. You know, if you disciplined yourself to put your phone away at nine or went to bed, and you couldn't fall asleep until ten, but you couldn't go on your phone and there's no TV in the room and there's a few books there, chances are you probably would start reading a few books. You know, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:The morning the morning starts in the evening before. Right? We know this. The evening routine is key to the morning routine. So we need discipline to remove stuff.
Speaker 1:But hopefully, this makes sense or helps in any way shape or form. These podcasts if you are new to them, they are going to cover different topics. We're to talk about research studies on nutrition and training soon, supplementation, do you need to bother with them, do you not, is it going to spend more mental energy than than really get a benefit from it. We're going to cover lot of research studies, some member podcasts will come up here, some old expert chats that are very relevant for new people to listen to. So there's a lot of that coming.
Speaker 1:But I think the first week, the first two days is to really realize these core things. And one of the things I wanna leave you with as well is you're all gonna go over your macros and calories. Right? No doubt about it. Every single person's gonna go over.
Speaker 1:What is your mindset? What are you doing in the brain when you do go over? Now for me, I've gone over. I've eaten, two Snickers bars, and I've gone over by 400 calories, full stop. I've gone over by 400 calories because I ate two Snickers bars, full stop.
Speaker 1:Done. I'm done with it. There's nothing else I need to add to it. So I might have had two Snickers bar, gone off my calories. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:I'm never gonna lose weight. This is a nightmare. What's the point of me even doing this? Why do I even buy this challenge? Why am I even bothering?
Speaker 1:I'm such a useless waste of you know, a lot of people go down arrowed, keep going forever. You then then you turn the stress response on, and that doesn't that'll take a while to the reactions to even chill out in the body, there's huge danger in doing that. So we don't want to be turning the stress response on for simply overeating. I'm not even saying overeating, you've gone over your calorie target, which doesn't mean you're not on track throughout the entire week. You can go over and under your calories, you can have more today, less tomorrow, more the other day, more, more, less, less.
Speaker 1:It's the average of the matters. Where you land on the average, so my average calorie intake and my macros at the end of the week, how close am I to the target? It's not gonna be perfect. It never will be perfect. And if it's not near the realm it needs to be, the app is gonna tell me for one.
Speaker 1:But the second of all, I will know after seven days. I go, yeah, my protein is like 40 grams off on average. I really need to something about that. What are my options? Ask the community wherever.
Speaker 1:Add the options in, okay, I have a higher protein breakfast, increase the portion size of the protein foods I already have. So if I have half a chicken breast, I'll have a full one. If I have one shake, I'll have two shakes. If I have certain portion size of, you know, what ever has to go protein in cheese, you have more cheese, simple stuff like that. And you go, I'll give it another experiment.
Speaker 1:I'll give it another shot. That's it. There's no need to go nuts and catastrophize guys. I'm telling you, this is one of the main things you need to do for you to really see this track and it's not so doom and gloom, oh my god, I got a track. It's just a tool.
Speaker 1:And you let you you draw the line in the sand. It's not the end of the world if you go over. Right? Full stop. If you haven't hit your macros yet all week, doesn't, it's fine.
Speaker 1:It's it's cool. Don't worry about it. What are you gonna do today? Are there any tweaks you can do today to come closer? That's all you gotta think about.
Speaker 1:And if you do try and do closer but something emotionally comes and you're overeat because stress eating, we also write that down in your daily diary in app or you notice these things. And you're like okay, the stress eating, I'm fine, but then I get stressed and I overeat. So it's a stress causing me to wait, can I look at the stress differently? Can I look at a different perception? Is how I look at the stress different?
Speaker 1:Is how I look at this thing happening in my life different to reduce my stress so there's a reduction in my desire to escape it with food? What can I do there? You you start working on the root of it. But that's it for today. Get your one big thing done.
Speaker 1:And the one big thing is important because you might wanna do your macros, you might wanna train, you might wanna hit your steps, all of that. Right? And then you think that's a successful day. But sometimes you haven't done any of those for a while, or you have never done any of those altogether. So you just say, why what if I just get my steps today, I focus on that.
Speaker 1:I go in for a walk now, a walk at lunchtime, and after work, I wanna just hit my steps and see what that day looks like to me. If I can see what a step day looks like, 8,000, 10,000 steps a day, at least I have some kind of I see at least at least I kind of know now what the 10,000 steps looks like, and that'll be a success for me. And I'll track as well and you know you do and if that happens, happy days. But I wanna do the steps. So it might be you wanna do a training session.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm just gonna focus on gonna train today. I'm worried about anything else. I'm gonna do a good training session. I'm gonna put all my effort into it and I'll see what happens. You know?
Speaker 1:It's that's the mindset. The rest of the stuff is additional benefits, but the the one focus can take away the multitask pressure and put that one task for the day in in the front of you. And you should do that one task as clear as day in front of you. Oh my god. I see it.
Speaker 1:I'll do it. So get you my big thing written down in the diary of the app and execute it. Take action. It's the only thing you can do today. So take action now and I will see you on the radio and on nutrition roundtable tomorrow with Doctor.
Speaker 1:P.
