Athena Sayaka: Hello. Welcome to my session. I’m Athena Sayaka. I’m going to be talking about demystifying discipline. We’re going to talk about what it feels like to really develop a supportive relationship with discipline. I’m well aware that this is a really charged word and a charged concept. One of the things that I’m hoping to do today is help folks to be a little bit more regulated when we discuss the concept of discipline and when we try to infuse it into our lives. All right.
Here’s a bit of an overview of what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to learn how to neutralize our response to discipline. Part of how we’re going to do that is by familiarizing our self with the faces of discipline. Then we’re going to dissect a framework that I use personally to befriend discipline. I’m going to share how I have applied it to a few different business operations as well as a few client examples. Before we get into all of that, I want to express to you my personal evolution with structure and discipline.
Hello, again, I’m Athena. I’m first-generation Jamaican-American. I’m thrice neuroexpansive, which is a term that was coined and trademarked by Ngozi Alston. It is specifically for black disabled people. I am a neurodiversity advocate and speaker. I study decision processes at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. Part of my passion is co-creating frameworks that really honor how people naturally show up rather than fighting against what is innately there. Also, potentially most importantly, I’m a sour gummies enthusiast. If ever I open a PO box, that is what I would like people to be sending me. Just a note.
Okay. A bit about my story. As I said, I’m Jamaican-American. Additionally, my parents joined the US military. Through both being child of immigrants and being a military brat, I understood and learned from a very young age that the most important, the most noble thing I could do, the best way to thank my parents would be to adhere to the program. They made and continue to make all of these sacrifices. The best thing I can do is be a disciplined person, be someone who is willing to follow the directions that are given.
Discipline in my household had four ingredients. These were not necessarily explicit, but this is ultimately what I picked up on. Firstly, discipline is having the will to do whatever is necessary to produce a better future for the next generation. Secondly, it’s adhering to the demands exactly as they’re given without questioning the methodology or the value of the task to begin with. “Is this a useful thing for you to do? It doesn’t matter. I told you to do it.”
Thirdly, discipline is conforming under the threat of corporal punishment. Now, when I was a child, that literally meant spankings. As an adult, the way that I had adopted that was forcing myself to work past the point of exhaustion or potentially withholding certain things like stretching or eating until I completed whatever task I needed to complete. Finally, discipline is suffering, persevering as an act of care for yourself or for the people that you’re being disciplined for, and deprioritizing emotion in most scenarios. Let me know, does any of that resonate with you? Did anyone else here grow up with a similar concept of discipline? You can let me know in the chat.
I want to share a bit more context about my personal relationship to discipline. When I was about 11 years old, I remember reading a short story in English class about a young man who had what was at the time called manic depression. I remember reading the story and truly crying my eyes out because I felt so seen. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is how I perceive the world. This is how it feels to be in my body.” It was through this story that I learned that I have bipolar disorder. One thing that comes with being bipolar is that I really am not working with the same tools season to season. It’s not always the same level of energy or the same capacity that I have access to on a consistent basis.
Sometimes I have all the energy in the world that I can do everything I need to do without sleeping, without resting, without eating sometimes. Then other times, it is incredibly difficult to get out of bed. That whiplash was quite hard to deal with in my adolescence. Structure became a way to evade that experience. It was how I stabilized myself. That’s why structure and discipline are so important to me, hence this presentation. I can’t really express how much I feel that discipline really saved my life, even still to this day.
Specifically, the way that I interacted with discipline the most when I was first interacting with bipolar disorder is that I really threw myself into athletics. I was a multi-sport athlete with the most rigorous of those being competitive gymnastics. That made my life look like waking up at 5 or 6 a.m. to do schoolwork and then going to school. Most days, I didn’t make it home before 9 p.m. because I had to train right after school up through 9 p.m., come home, eat, sleep.
What this did was it actually really exhausted me in a way that felt good and useful. It made it so that I didn’t feel necessarily the depression on the depressive cycles. It made it so that my mania had somewhere to go and some utility during those times. I did all of this while also managing to be valedictorian, and winning writing awards, and winning scholarships for different skills, different things.
I tried to find a picture of my bullet journal because I was really into bullet journaling for several years. What I was able to find was this whiteboard picture. A part of having such a structured day was I also would plan my day to the hour, sometimes to the half hour. Again, this really helped me. This felt really good at the time. It was the tool that I had to assist myself. I was not able to explore the intricacies of bipolar disorder because it was not something that my parents were open to. I didn’t feel like I had anywhere else to go other than into a highly structured life.
Now, the issue with that is that I just kept getting rewarded for this behavior. I needed anything to latch onto. The thing that I latched onto also just happened to be the thing that helps me get into a prestigious school or the thing that got me coveted internships while I was at university. The issue was that I was being so robotic. There are entries, actually, in previous journals where I’m lamenting about my physical body, I’m like, “Oh my God, I need to eat three times a day? Are you serious? I have things to do. I don’t want to give time to tending to my physical body beyond the point of utility.”
Flash forward to my third year in university, and I was still operating at this level. Basically, from 11 to– I don’t know how old you are at that time, maybe 21, 22. I was operating at this level of planning things out almost to the hour. There came a point in which all of my previous factors that ground me, in this case, gymnastics, the sports weren’t happening. I had gotten injured. I couldn’t do them anymore. Everything just started to fall apart. I was having difficulty adjusting to my university setting, my housing got weird.
A confluence of events during this third year just happened, and it led to a complete mental and psychological breakdown. It felt like the weight of 10 years of operating at this robotic level just erupted and slammed into me full force. Part of what I experienced during this time is I would have ocular migraines, which for me resulted in the inability to see for hours at a time. It was like my brain was so overstimulated or so exhausted that it would stop processing visual information.
Another physical ailment that I had or a somatic side effect to how much I had worked myself was that I had this chronic neck and back injury that made it hard for me to move. I was lucky enough to have friends who would bring me food during these times, but it was such a depressing time. I was severely sad. Every day, I was bending off the desire to not be alive anymore.
When I got to this point, I understood that I had been operating at a level that was completely unsustainable, and I couldn’t continue to do this. This was not a battle that I was going to win. I really had to reassemble everything I knew about what it meant and looked like and felt like to show up for myself and for my goals. I don’t have a great photo to represent this time, but I like this little sort of cave photo with the light going up the stairs. With a more relaxed and humanistic approach, I’ve been able to still achieve the things that matter to me, but at a cadence that is joyful, efficient, sustainable, and really honors the fact that I’m a person, a fleshy being with feelings and physiological needs.
Now, I want to help you experience what it can feel like to partner with discipline. Quick recap, we’re moving away from the inherited definition into the redefined definition. The inherited one was restrictive, self-sacrificing. It ignored emotions that were not useful for productivity. It can be for some people abusive and certainly unrelenting. No time to stop, no opportunity to rest. Everything is urgent.
We’re moving now towards something that is more flexible, something that can breathe with you. It’s self-honoring. It asks the question, “What do I need today? What do I have the capacity for in this moment?” It also incorporates your personhood. That’s more than just thinking about emotions. It’s also adding 15-minute buffers between meetings because it helps you to re-regulate, re-center. It’s supportive, and it accounts for rest. I want us to move forward with a shared definition of discipline, at least for the purposes of this presentation.
For me, discipline is any structure or accommodation that supports me at my current capacity. I just want to sit with that for a moment. Who else is ready to make this transition? Who wants to create or adopt a new definition of discipline? Let me know in the chat.
The faces of discipline. This is really fun. This is something that I developed after working with a number of people. The people that I work with tend to have a relationship to discipline that falls into one of these four categories. First and most common is the taskmaster. This, I know this still is from the movie Whiplash, but this man is J. Jonah Jameson to me forever and always. Anyways. The first is the taskmaster. All that matters to this version of discipline is that the work is completed in an unyielding cadence. You are always performing at peak performance. Your best is never enough. Often, shame or humiliation is the main form of motivation with discipline that takes on this phase.
The second most common is the scrub. This is TLC. Know that song? “I don’t want no scrubs.” You reject any and all thoughts of being with discipline. If you see even a hint of structure, “No, I want to be free. I am going to do things only when I want to and only when it’s intuitively right to do so.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I have noticed that sometimes people are rebelling so hard, pushing back so hard against any concept of discipline or any concept of structure that you don’t even accept when you are telling yourself to do something that you want to do, by the way.
The third is unrequited love. This is SZA. Famously, a yearner, if you will. This relationship with discipline is where you want so badly to be connected to it, but for whatever reason, you just can’t really get a firm grasp on it. It feels like where you might develop a certain cadence with discipline, none of that stuff really lasts as long as you want it to.
Then finally, where I’m hoping we can all move towards is discipline as a mentor or a partner. This is Uncle Iroh from Avatar the Last Airbender. As a partner, discipline can challenge you. It will hold you to a high standard, but it also can do that with a compassionate perspective. It can do that while holding space for your humanity. It cares as much about the– tending to you emotionally as it does about achieving the goal.
One of the biggest things that helped me to reshape my relationship to discipline is to really personify it. I want to know again in the chat, what relationship do you currently relate to the most? As I decided that I was going to move myself towards partnership with discipline, I had to ask myself the question, what are the conditions that make for a good partner? We’re going to go through each of these one by one, but I just want to share, at the core of everything, is making discipline supportive? Without the supportive energy, none of the rest of these work, but I created the ARCS framework, which is what I need from discipline personally, which is that it’s activating, rewarding, cyclical, high leverage, and of course, supportive.
Let’s dive into each of these one by one. Activating. What I mean by activating is that it’s a framework that excites me and that facilitates growth. I love being provoked. I think that it being provoked can be a positive thing. It’s like being catalyzed. One of the things that I love is that it moves me towards goals that actually matter to me. It can also gamify discipline on whatever task I’m doing so that it’s more exciting to interact with.
Then we have rewarding, which is linking it to an immediate positive result. A lot of us are very familiar with the opposite of this where we link the lack of outcomes to punishment. I really want us to reframe how we think about this because, as humans, we discount how much we’re animals. Dopamine is going to win eight out of 10 times, guarantee it. I love to give myself these little treats on the way to achieving the longer term vision.
Then we have cyclical, which is really about being able to adapt with my seasonality. It’s something that can adjust to my highest and lowest capacity. If I’m developing a structure, and it can’t support me in the lowest level of effort or ability, then it’s not a sustainable practice, in my opinion. Then we have high leverage. This is really about making a decision that creates a domino effect that makes every other decision easier. Again, we’re going to get into examples of these, so don’t worry about that.
Then finally, supportive, right? I want to feel like if I’m entering into a relationship with discipline, I want to feel like discipline is on my side. I want to feel like there is kindness and compassion in every single choice that is being made, in every request that is being made. Really, it’s about honoring how I can show up in the moment. I have some questions. I always have questions. Which of these do you feel like you already are interacting with? Then which one or two of these, activating, rewarding, cyclical, high leverage, supportive, which one or two of these feels the most accessible if you’re not already implementing it in your relationship with discipline?
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I love a framework. Everybody loves a framework, but, “Athena, how can I actually implement this in my business? What does it really look like? What does it really feel like in action?” Don’t worry, I’ve got you. I’m going to walk through each of these elements in some of my actual business operations. I’m going to share how I use it for crafting, publishing a newsletter, how I ran a weekly podcast on my own for over a year. Then I’m going to share some client examples. For any questions you have during this, add them to the chat, and I’ll do my best to type an answer.
For crafting a newsletter, looking at the element of high leverage, I know when the best time to write is. I know when I get my best work done, and also when I’m the most efficient. For me, that is as soon as I wake up, probably within first four hours of being awake. It’s way easier for me to put the discipline towards keeping that morning, protecting that morning, rather than trying to convince myself to write after I’ve already been externally stimulated or after I’ve already been up for a long time and gotten distracted by various things.
High leverage is really about not necessarily how much discipline you’re putting into anything, but instead, where is that discipline most effectively applied? Again, for me, that means I keep my phone and my computer out of my room so that when I wake up, I can just start writing. Sometimes that means writing in the journal. Other times it means writing on, for example, a computer that doesn’t have wifi on it.
In terms of the cyclical element, thinking about editing an admin for publishing the newsletter, the thing that is actually hardest for me about running a newsletter is implementing the thoughts into the actual platform. For me, that’s MailerLite. Formatting things and designing things, I don’t really care about that. It’s not very fun or interesting to me. As a person who menstruates, I work a lot with my menstrual cycle, though, obviously, you can implement this idea whether or not you menstruate. I do the hardest part of crafting a newsletter during my luteal phase. Again, for me, that is the designing of it, making the text a certain size, and figuring out the shape of things, and then scheduling it out.
In addition to that, I also allow myself to do different formats. Some of my newsletters are audio-based, or I’ll recycle a previous YouTube video, or even a podcast episode, if I don’t really have the capacity or the spoons to express new thoughts or to synthesize new ideas. That’s also part of the cyclical that is unrelated to menstruation, for example.
Then we have activating. This is how I help myself to get inspiration if I don’t have any ideas for a new newsletter or if I just don’t want to do it at all, which happens quite a lot. I will create a low-stakes challenge for myself. It’s like a little game. “How could I write this essay in 15 minutes? How could I get 400 words out of my brain before–” for example, like my niece and nephew come over to play, how could I play with structure to get my point across? My most recent newsletter was actually just a series of poems, which is something I’ve never done before, but that was how I coaxed myself into writing when I didn’t feel like writing.
Moving towards more general operations. The aspect of supportive is really, as I’ve said, it’s baking compassion into every choice. It’s understanding that consistency is not sameness. Consistency is just showing up. In order to show up, you have to acknowledge how you can show up in a given moment. If I don’t have the energy to do something, I am very understanding with myself. I realized that these are all temporary phases. It’s not permanent.
Again, with bipolar disorder, there are times in which I have all this energy, and it can be disappointing to, a few weeks later, not be able to do the amount of stuff that I did a few weeks ago. I just hold space for the fact that I’m in a constant cycle. I’m moving through phases. That’s really helpful to me. Regarding the podcast, for example, one of the ways that I would support myself is that if I was really low capacity, I would either do a solo episode to keep my weekly cadence, or I would do an episode with a friend because it didn’t require the same level of preparation and having the questions look and feel professional. I could just have a conversation and know that it was going to slap.
Again, about the podcast reward-centered, I hate editing. I hate editing podcasts. It is not a fun thing for me at all. Prior to having the funds to outsource editing, the way that I helped myself to do that more was that I always scheduled a time with a loved one after a session of editing. It didn’t matter if I finished the episode or not, I just knew that I’m going to put in X amount of time to edit. As a reward, I get to go hang out with someone that I love dearly. Again, rather than withholding and punishing myself for maybe not finishing, I congratulated myself for doing part of the process that I found really difficult.
Now, a few client examples, using the leverage lever here, I had a client who has social anxiety, but he loves live streaming, and he found it to be also the most lucrative way to run his business. He conserves his social battery by having a moderator. The moderator, he puts– actually, my client friend, puts a lot of energy into giving the moderator like all of the information possible so that that person can be the one responding in the chat instead of him, because it’s just easier for him to broadcast out and know that someone else is taking care of the back and forth that is expected in a live stream.
Another example is I had a client who just had such a difficult time waking up early, but she always had to go to class. One of the things that helped her was if she made all of her decisions the night before, so part of like the thing that would create anxiety for her or really made it difficult to wake up is that she felt like she always had to– she had to get up and immediately, she was like being pulled in different directions, and needing to make certain decisions. That was contributing to her discomfort with waking early and even getting to class at all.
When she makes the decisions the night before, such as what to wear, what to eat, even if she changes her mind in the morning, it was nice for her. It created peace for her when she went to sleep and when she woke up knowing that she could basically be a zombie throughout the morning if she wanted to, just like go, “All right, pick this up. I know this is what I’m needing.” It was very helpful for her to be able to move through the morning without having to think or make any decisions.
I hope that this has helped you to get some ideas of how these can look in your actual business. I want us to end with these key shifts that I hope you have made throughout this presentation. Firstly, discipline is simply a structure or accommodation that supports you at your current capacity. In order to achieve the thing you’re trying to achieve, discipline is just there to be almost like the skeletal structure that helps you get from point A to point B.
Secondly, discipline can be a supportive partner. If discipline is something that you’re in relation with, you can have any type of relationship you want, right? You could choose for that relationship to be one of support, one of compassion, one where you are equal partners rather than discipline being this scary entity that may or may not try to abuse you.
Lastly, if you are in partnership with discipline, you get to decide what your ideal conditions are for that partnership. If you download the document below, I put out a little worksheet to help you craft your own framework with discipline. ARCS works really well for me because I made it about the things that matter to me, but through this worksheet, I’m going to help you develop your own version of the ARCS framework.
With that, thank you very much. I hope that this presentation has created some calm, some level of restoration for you and your relationship to structure, to discipline, to rigor. You can connect with me via all of these platforms. I have ordered them in terms of maximal usage to minimal usage. Thank you so much. Any questions, you can feel free to message me via any of the platforms listed here.
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