Or you can just call it discipleship.

Every day is a battle. Without moral support — without self-discipline — we will falter and fall back into our old habits.

We need inspirational, motivational stories each day, just as our brains need routine.

On this journey, I can personally say I still battle with inconsistency. Last week, I wrote an article that included a Productivity planner, and I discovered a lot about myself and the things I spend/waste time on while tracking my productivity across 8 different domains.

Success Without Sacrifice is Impossible.

After tracking my productivity after a month, I realized the areas I sorely neglect: health, content creation, creativity, and self-study. Having a visual has helped me to change gears slightly on my focus, but now I have come to terms toward the next step.

Maximizing the Productivity Process → Add Discipline

Being productive goes hand-in-hand with discipline. In order to be a producer of quality work, you must become a disciple of the discipline.

If you’re someone who has battled guilt between spending time in solitude and spending time in the noise of the world, there’s some good news.

Solitude is the answer to becoming more disciplined.

Solitude is also the answer to reconnect and engage in the world on a 100% charge.

“Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9: 25)

To illustrate this quote better, we are all in a competition between ourselves. We call the shots on what success looks like — the crown — and the training we undergo is the process we put ourselves through. What are your current habits? What are the habits you are creating? This is the process.

In solitude, we will have the time to curate AND create the mindset, environment, resources, and everything needed to become disciplined.

We lack discipline because of distractions. ALL we need to do is eliminate these distractions to follow our own rules of disciplineship.

Bottom line: You make the rules on the discipline that you put yourself through.

Discipline Only Has Value If You Give It Value

The value of disciplining yourself has no real value unless it is done for one reason and one reason alone: out of self-worth — love.

Disciplining is an act of our individual parts — our physical body, hearts, mind, and Spirit — working together, prepared, chiseled, and refined each day to do good works…

To achieve greatness.

The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy. — Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines

Starting today, choose what you struggle on, what you love, and let it guide your discipline. That’s the rule. ;)

Free Disciplineship Planner here or → subscribe first.

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With love. ❤

The Rules of Discipline-ship was originally published in The Ascent on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.