Discipline is Negotiation with Yourself
Let me paint you a picture: you want to start eating more healthy. Not a fad diet to get your beach body. Diet as in changing the food you eat on a regular basis to be more healthy.
It sucks! Highly-processed food, namely fast food, was engineered to be tasty and even addictive. Sugar is terrible for our liver, but cravings are difficult to ignore.
However, you finally want to get your dietary habits right. You realize that you have to take care of your body to avoid being a burden to your family when you’re old. You don’t want them to take you to the hospital everyday for regular exams and treatments.
Even young, you want to avoid diabetes starting with a healthier diet.
What is Discipline?
The example about changing diet is a form of (self-) discipline. The Webster dictionary defines discipline as
orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior
You have a goal in mind of living a healthy life. The diet is a means of achieving or at least working towards that goal. Discipline is a pre-requisite for you to put the diet in practice.
Negotiate with Yourself
Negotiation is everywhere in our lives. It doesn’t need to be something as extreme as hostage negotiation. It can be a salary revision, getting your child to bed or, you guessed it, a diet.
As Chris Voss describes in his brilliant “Never Split the Difference” book, a negotiation serves two primary purposes:
- To gather information
- To influence behavior
How do they relate to the diet example? Let’s have a quick look.
Gather Information
What exactly are you feeling? Think about why you are eating so much tasty junk food. Maybe you are compensating for problems at work? Stress in the relationship?
This introspection can help gather information about the deeper root cause to the behavior and/or thought pattern you are trying to change.
Influence Behavior
This is your end-goal. This internal negotiation is all about a behavior you want to be more disciplined about, but require buy-in from the subconscious to materialize.
Discipline = Restriction
The whole diet example illustrates how we can increase the chances of success for (self-) discipline by shifting our perspective to an inner conversation, more accurately a negotiation.
Discipline equals restriction of our behaviors and/or thought patterns. It can be a diet where we restrict what we eat. It can be gym attendance where we restrict our behavior to go to show up on a regular schedule. It can be to complain less to restrict our negative self-talk.
Biological Wiring
However, the restriction by itself can be demanding, imposing, to our subconscious mind. Some instances, such as the diet, can even go against our biological evolution. We know what is the best alternative, but we simply can’t change it at the flip of a switch.
In the diet example, we crave tasty food and healthy food can be quiet dull. Do we just stop with the hamburgers and pick up a bag of broccoli because we know it’s the healthier choice? No, there is a lot of resistance to that. Maybe we can do it once, but can’t stick with it in the long run just because we know it’s better.
That’s where negotiation kicks in. Whatever the discipline instance may be, it should start as a negotiation between your conscious and subconscious — a negotiation between the ego and the id in Freudian psychology terminology.
You don’t want to demand. You want a conversation of sorts where your conscious mind can demonstrate to the subconscious mind the value of the change so it acknowledges your goal and agrees to it.
The Subconscious Mind is in the Driver Seat
Your subconscious is the driver of your actions.
For example, you walk somewhere and suddenly realize you have arrived without paying attention to the journey. That was your subconscious moving your legs while your conscious mind was distracted thinking about a conversation from earlier in the day. The subconscious will be programmed in a way to naturally work towards the things you truly want.
Back to the diet example, our biological wiring puts taste above the health factor on the priority list. That’s why it’s difficult to let go of the tasty food and choose the healthier, more dull-tasting alternative. The subconscious is programmed to drive you towards the tastier option.
“That’s right”
The negotiation is precisely to get your subconscious to shift those priorities. In any discipline scenario, you want your subconscious to understand that the new behavior or thought pattern is a better alternative. You want the subconscious to be engaged, not subjugated by force.
In negotiation terminology, you want the subconscious to say “that’s right” instead of “you’re right”.
Let’s take a sales scenario between two people. The seller doesn’t want to hear “you’re right”. That is incredibly dismissive and shows the buyer is not on the same wavelength — the buyer is simply moving the conversation along. But “that’s right”, well that’s powerful. The seller has worked the conversation well enough that the buyer now sees and shares the same understanding of the proposition. The seller is now well-positioned to close the deal.
Delayed Gratification
As an adult human, you know about delayed gratification. You know bigger goals require some sacrifice, some restriction, some discipline in the present to achieve that goal in the future.
That’s part of what you (or the conscious mind) want to demonstrate to the subconscious. The subconscious, or the Freudian id, doesn’t care about the future, it follows the impulse, it wants to feel good now! But the conscious, or the ego, sees the bigger picture and needs to make it the common vision for both ego and id to share.
Set up the Conversation
This is where you can do meditation, or simply sit on the floor looking at the wall with your thoughts and do that inner dialogue between conscious and subconscious mind. This is what you’d generally call an introspection moment really.
The conscious goes in with a discipline goal and presents it in a way that showcases to the subconscious why it is good to have some restriction now to hit a much bigger target a few weeks down the line. You want the subconscious to get to the eureka “that’s right” moment of agreement.
Extreme Anchors
Sometimes, you will have such poor encounters in daily life you will immediately start reviewing what happened. This will likely even get you to see something obvious you’ve been doing wrong but had not seen before. This is a negative extreme but, as an extreme, it does all the legwork and acts as a wake up call to the subconscious. Then your conscious mind can swoop in and close the deal to set your act straight.
It’s like when a person gets into a car accident and comes out okay, so they decide to start looking after themselves because they have “cheated” death.
I am not recommending that you go out and find that extreme situation that will lock you into your goals. What I want to highlight is that you can use extreme negative situations as an angle for your conversation to work in worst-case scenarios you want to avoid — negotiation calls this an extreme anchor.
The Implementation Committee
But much like negotiating with other people, there is an important external aspect to consider: the implementation committee. This is what Chris defines in the book as the other parties that can either make or kill a deal. They can be someone of high status like C-level executives, or low-rank employees who have boots on the ground during implementation.
In this case it’s even simpler — the committee represents the people in your life. The subconscious mind, you, is the person in the room during the negotiation. That’s where the exchange takes place to make sure YOU are fully onboard for this change, down to your (re)wiring.
But what about your social group? Say, you want to drink less alcohol. How are you going to manage a Friday night out with friends? They want what’s best for you but won’t you at least feel awkward when they are all drinking and you are not? That’s the “negotiation space” you can’t forego on the internal negotiation. It’s not only about the subconscious agreement. You are not isolated in society. You must also consider the outside world influence during that inner dialogue.
“Yes” is Nothing Without “How”
And that’s the final dual point I want to make about the self-negotiation: “Yes” is nothing without “how”.
You want the subconscious to hit the “that’s right”. Your deeper wiring agrees to the change and will drive you towards actions and behaviors that map to that goal. Maybe the “how” you are going to hit a healthier diet is by eating vegetables twice a week for a whole month. Then progressively eat them more frequently. Progressively change the diet to how you want it to look like in the end instead of a big sweeping change.
But, how will your new behavior and/or thought pattern be materialized? Consider not just your personal actions, but also the implementation committee — how will the people around you influence your changes? You work full-time in the office so maybe you need to refuse the invite to go out with colleagues for lunch sometimes and eat the healthy meal you prepared the night before.
If you don’t have a clear answer on both internal and external perspectives it will be extremely difficult to maintain the discipline long-term.
Closing Thoughts
And so we’ve reached the end of this perspective on discipline via negotiation.
The big takeaway here is that we can’t just demand ourselves to undergo big behavioral changes just because we want to or know they are a better option. More often than not, we chose the poorer option because it was programmed in our brains by thousands of years of biological wiring. Have an honest discussion with yourself to commit your subconscious mind into the change and ease into it.
Moreover, make sure you understand how you will do it. It’s not just your own buy-in, make sure you understand how social dynamics, different environments will impact your choice and still allow you to follow through with it.
