Unmasking Greatness

Discipline Over Motivation

• Chris Kakouras • Season 3 • Episode 20

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We explore why motivation fades and how discipline, built through simple systems, carries you to your goals. We share four steps to build discipline, real client examples, and practical tactics for workouts, planning, and meal prep on a busy schedule.

• discipline as self-respect and freedom, not punishment
• motivation versus systems and why emotion cannot lead
• commit once and act daily to remove debate
• reduce friction with evening routines and planning
• stack small wins to build momentum and identity
• reward the process with non-food incentives
• act despite feelings to keep promises to yourself
• short workouts and outsourced prep as smart defaults
• meal prep options, costs, and compliance strategies
• systems as the backbone of lasting results

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, Chris Kakoris, a lifestyle fitness coach and mentor. This podcast is about unmasking your greatest potential, finding your purpose, and crafting a life worth living. Health and fitness has been the gateway drug to all of my success. My continuous drive to keep learning and surround myself with other high achievers forces me to level up, which has developed my mind to something I never thought was possible. This podcast is here to share what I've learned and continue to learn with all of you. This is your time to take back control of your health, mindset, and personal environment. Strap in as we are recharged, and always, if you find value in the show, please subscribe and share as we can all get better together. Let's go. What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, Chris Kagoris, and I hope everybody is having a blessed Monday. You're probably right into work, or maybe you're listening to this when you're working out, which is what I'm hoping. But today I want to talk a little bit about discipline. Everybody throws around the term discipline. People come up to me and be like, I wish I was so disciplined. You're so disciplined, Chris. You're so motivated. And you know, I want to just address that specifically. If you listen to the last podcast we did, we we talked about finding your why, right? This is kind of like setting the tone of your clear goals and figuring out why you want to accomplish those. Well, that's great. That's that's enough to get the ball rolling. But what I want to do is focus a little bit more on discipline because you know, motivation will start to fade. Inevitably, it will start to slowly fade out of your emotional state. But discipline is what's going to come in and actually finish that job. I can tell you through so many different series and uh seasons of my life where just the motivation was non-existent. But because I have built systems and created better discipline in myself, I've been able to power through. Because again, motivation is very emotional. When things are going good and great, well, we're on a high. Everything's working. You know, when it's great, it's great. But when things don't work out the way that we want them to, what happens? That motivation starts to slow down because it's like you start to question is this working? Why am I doing it? Is it worth it? And discipline becomes more intentional than emotional. Because there will be days you don't feel like doing it, and that's where the transformation really happens. So the goal is to make doing the hard things normal, and it's a non-negotiable. I was actually listening to a podcast the other day, and this entrepreneur was talking about his definition of discipline, and he says the discipline or or that the discipline is not from doing the things over and over again, it's doing the things you don't want to do over and over, right? It's easy to do something that you enjoy doing, right? So when people look at me and they're like, oh, Chris, I wish I was so bliss disciplined, you go to the gym every single day. I wish I could be like that. And you know, I started thinking for a while, I was like, yeah, I am disciplined, but if I enjoy going and doing something over and over again, is it really discipline? Discipline becomes more of doing the things we don't want to do for an extended period of time and not seeing the results immediately. And so, is there days that I do need discipline to get to the gym? Of course. Of course there is. There's days I don't want to come, and that's when I have to lean on discipline. But the days that I'm like looking forward to it and I'm excited to work out and you know, do the things that I'm supposed to be doing, then discipline's not really there. So I say that to encourage you guys on both ends of the spectrum. If you are somebody that works out on a regular and someone that is considered disciplined, I want you to give some grace and think about this because when you are talking to other individuals that are, you know, looking up to you, asking you questions, you can't just say, well, you just gotta you gotta be more disciplined. What does that even mean? And then you need to ask yourself, are you really disciplined? Because you're doing something you enjoy doing. And vice versa. You know, if you're on the other end of the spectrum, I would say you may not be disciplined right now because this is something that is new to you. But once you start to do something, once you start to see the results, you want to do it more. And then you don't need to rely on discipline as much because this becomes more of a lifestyle, right? This becomes a little more intentional because you know what's going to be on the outside of the other end when you continue to do it over the weeks, the months, the years. So discipline is not a term that I just tell people that they need, it's something that is developed and you grow through it. So, you know, a couple things I want to talk through today with you guys is, you know, talking about motivation. And I'm also going to talk about how you can build your discipline. You know, through my life and career, when I was bodybuilding, I can tell you when I was trying to go pro, you want to talk about the days and weeks that I just did not want to do something. I did not want to do two hours of cardio a day. I did not want to train and go to the gym two times a day, on top of the fact that I was working and going to college. A lot of people don't know that. They think that, you know, I was just training and, you know, I was working and all that. But I chose a very busy season of my life to try to go pro, but I was so adamant. I mean, it was just a big dream of mine and a big goal that I just I knew I could do it and I was willing to do whatever it takes. And so I was very clear on the goal, and I just I knew I had it in me and I wanted to prove it to myself. So whether I was having to let go of some sleep or push through, you know, the tired days and you know, continue to go to my job and study and everything that I needed to do to reach my other goals, which was to graduate and then of course make money to be able to compete, I had to stay very, very disciplined through that season of my life because it was hard. And so I had to keep reminding myself what's the goal? What's the goal? Why am I doing this? And you know, while I'm debating with myself, I'm taking action, right? It's okay to question what you're doing, it's okay to feel like not doing something, but I don't let my emotions get in my way. I don't let my emotions dictate what I'm gonna say or what I'm gonna do, right? So even with my business, I can tell you now, and I think a lot of that has correlated and transitioned over. Do I want to wake up at 5 a.m. every single day? Do I want to be working 12, 14 hours every single day? Uh probably not. Do I enjoy what I do for sure? But there's definitely times where I just want to chill, I want to disconnect, I want to relax, give my mind a break, and uh, you know, just live normal, which is, you know, debatable for everybody. But again, my discipline is I have a goal, there's something that needs to get done, and I need to rely on what is the objective at hand and the task that I need to do for the day. You know, motivation is really like caffeine. You know, if you take take in, again, and I'm not knocking nobody for caffeine because I I need it in my life, but when you drink caffeine, what happens? It gives you that burst, that burst of energy. You're like, oh, okay, we're good, we're focused, we're alive. But what happens after a while? That caffeine starts to fade and then it starts fading fast. And sometimes you can crash. So do you just stop? You know, what happens? And that's kind of what motivation is. You'll never feel like working out or doing your meal prep or going to your job, but we have to stay focused on what that goal is. It's like making little deposits. You know, I talk to people all the time, they go to work. I'm like, I can almost guess and predict you don't like going to work every single day. But somehow you find a way to get in there. You find a way to get into your work. And why is that? Well, because you got bills. You got bills, you got a family, you got things that you need, you need money to buy things. I mean, it is a necessity. And so you don't go to your work one day and buy a house, right? You have to go for an extended period of time. If you work for yourself, you need two years of income to even purchase a property. And so the same things with your body, you know, you're making daily deposits into your health and your fitness. You may not see the results immediately, but over the next year, two years, five years, you're gonna see significant changes if you are consistent, right? So, again, it's just taking your mindset and shifting it and looking at it from a different lens because all of you have the ability to reach your goals. It's just can you put it into context? Can you extend the timeline to the results that you want and stay disciplined in the sense of creating structure and systems to do something over and over again? You will get the results you want. So, discipline is doing the things that needs to be done, especially when you don't feel like it. All right. So let's talk about how you build discipline, okay? Because you know, I'm tossing this word around, you're like, Chris, all right, like how do I how do I gain this this thing you call discipline? Well, there's four steps, okay? Because discipline is a skill, it's not a personality trait, and it grows with repetition. So the first step in building discipline is don't keep deciding every day whether to show up. You gotta commit once and act daily. Okay, it's already decided I train on these days. It's already decided this is what I'm eating for breakfast. It's already decided that I'm going to work at 9 a.m. You know, like whatever it is, you gotta decide and you gotta commit. Okay, there's no debating, there's non-negotiable. You go all in. So once you make that decision, you gotta hold that decision to you. Now, because sometimes it's a little difficult, you gotta reduce the friction. So that's number two. Reduce friction, make it easier to do the right things. We do this with all of our clients. We try to not add more to their to-do list, we try to reduce, delegate, eliminate, make your life easier. And some of that means planning and preparing. You got to have an evening routine. Maybe that's you got to lay your clothes out the night before. Don't be shuffling around trying to figure out what you needed first thing in the morning. Or same thing. What are you gonna eat breakfast? Okay, you should know that before you even go to sleep. Have your food prepped. You know, you should already have your calendar blocked off, time block, prioritize, you know, delegate different things that need to be done, eliminate things that are just not really important in your day. So again, how can we just make our life easier and more automatic? And once you start to start doing these things, it becomes more of just something that you do. It's just part of your life, you know. I've got to the point where, you know, my food is is in the refrigerator, all I gotta do is take it out and put it in my box, in my little lunch box. You know, because once I leave the house, I ain't going back. You know, my clothes are always laid out. You know, my shirt, my shoes, my socks, it's just it's sitting there. So when I get up, you know, I go and I just throw on my clothes. And then what am I eating breakfast? I already know. I go straight in the kitchen, I get that, I eat it and I go. So everything I do is very just systematic. And when things are systematic, you reduce the friction and things become a lot easier. The third one would be stack small wins. All right. This is hard for people that are just starting their journey because especially when we're talking specifically about weight loss and building muscle, people want the physique. People want the weight to come off immediately. And it's hard to acknowledge the success when it's it's small, right? It's it's a gradual progress. You don't go from you know, A to Z. You got to go through each letter all the way through it. But when you do things like that, you start stacking the small wins. So I like having these little flagpoles and landmarks that our clients start to hit. And we also have to bring them back and reflect on it. So there's a there's one of our clients that we're working with currently, and you know, she's she's hectic. She's been in the gym before, but she kind of lost momentum and she wanted to come back. And so we started putting her on a plan and we started realizing that she was not getting the water that she needed to take in, right? She's not, you know, prepared in the morning. She's kind of chaotic, not eating breakfast. She's not uh having her workouts prepared. So those kind of things. And over every single week, I'm like, okay, let's let's you know pull it back. Let's focus on one thing. I just need to focus on let's get some more water in. So I was like, what's the problem? She's like, well, when I have water with me, I can drink it. I was like, okay, so do you have water with you? And she's like, not always. Sometimes I forget to grab my water bottle in the morning. And I was like, okay, so here's the deal. I was like, the night before, you're gonna take your water, your container, whichever you're using your bottle, you're gonna fill it up the night before, and you're gonna have it right next to your keys. Wherever your keys are, I want you, or your jacket, you know, depending on the season. Uh, you want it with to stack it with something that you're already going to take with you, right? That you're not forgetting already. And so we can start to compound these habits together. And ever since we started doing that, where she already filled her water bottle up, it was right next to her car keys. You can't, you'd you'd have to consciously decide, I don't want to take that water bottle, right? Because it's right there. You know, you can put your keys on top of it, right? And and it makes it almost like impossible not to grab unless you intentionally said, no, I'm not taking it, which is not the case. So we did that. And so we got together the next following week. We sat down, said, How'd the week go? And she did it. And I was like, this is awesome. This is a win. Check the box off. All right, we got that nailed down. Let's move on to the next one. And then we created a game plan for that. One thing, just focus on one habit, and we just compound these over and over. And you'd be surprised how quickly this starts to add up. So it becomes, again, not how far you have to go, but how far have we come? And the coolest part about this client in particular is that she's lost about 14 pounds already within I believe it's been almost three months. And she hasn't been a hundred percent dialed in. And I told I tell her, I'm like, can you imagine how much faster your results would be if we could actually just like get everything in place and really build some momentum? Her progress is gonna skyrocket. So again, but we have to start with a strong foundation, which is what we've done. And so the fourth one I will say is reward the process. Celebrate showing up, not just the results. You don't earn discipline, you reinforce it. Sometimes give yourself a little bit of a pat on the back. You know, give yourself some sort of reward for doing something good. Now, I don't think rewarding yourself with food is necessarily a good idea, because then I start, I believe that you start to create a potentially an unhealthy relationship with food. It's like only you eat every time that you're happy. You eat every time you succeed, you eat like you you just kind of compounding eating with good. And then what do you do after that? The other side of it was like you don't eat if you don't do well. You don't eat if you don't follow the plan. So I don't think eating is necessarily a good one, but I do think maybe you taking um, you know, going to bowling. If you like bowling or you like going golfing or you want to go on a bike ride, so you gotta go rent a bike, you know, something, something in that sense. Uh maybe it's buying a purse, you know, whatever, whatever you got going on that you really want, you got to work for it. And this is a good way to reward yourself. And it also brings meaning to what you have if you buy something. So don't look at discipline as punishment, it's it's self-respect in action. Okay. So I encourage you guys to think about that. You know, maybe even write down one area this week where you know you've been relying too much on motivation. And maybe one small step to that you can take to make it a little more automatic, right? Compound it with something that you're already doing. And I think if you follow these four steps, your discipline is going to start to get reinforced, and you're going to start realizing that you can get a lot more done than you realize. So remember, you know, when you don't feel like it, learn how to act in spite of your feelings. You are not your emotions. We can have emotions. We do have emotions. Does not mean you are your emotions, right? I can feel like I am so mad and I want to punch somebody in the face. You don't see me punching people in the face. That is, you know, it doesn't mean I didn't feel like it, but again, you got to have some self-control. And I think when you start to realize you can control your emotions, you can control a lot of the outcomes that you want. Okay. So again, but a lot of this comes down to, you know, when I don't feel like it, plan. You gotta plan, you gotta prepare. The clients that we work with are very busy, they have crazy schedules, families, businesses run, work for corporations. So things need to be more systematic versus just kind of floating and drifting through it, right? We gotta put a specific game plan that works for their schedule. So even if you don't feel like working out, well, maybe, or even I've had this happen. For whatever reason, something pops up, and instead of having 45 minutes, you got 20 minutes. All right. Well, you may not feel like going because you're like, well, I don't have the full 40 minutes, but we can still get a good workout in 20 minutes, right? So why wouldn't we do that? You know, would you if somebody was like, hey man, I want to give you a hundred bucks, but I can't, but I can give you 20. Like, nah, dude, I don't want the 20, I want the hundred. No, you'd probably take 20. You know what I mean? So don't don't sell yourself short. Everything makes a difference, you know. You may even want to skip a meal or skip meal prep, right? You don't feel like it. All right, well, I get it. I don't feel like doing things either. Maybe you want to order your food, you want to get it from a meal prep company. It's another help, healthy option instead of you actually going to the grocery store, buying it, cooking it, measuring it out, you know, doing that whole thing. Maybe this week you want to chill and you'd rather pay a little bit more to make your life a lot more easy. So, again, you wanna you want to figure ways to make make things a little bit more smooth for you. And you know, there's there's a lot of entrepreneurs that if you know, if you can figure out what your income is hourly, so whatever you make, you know, do the calculations to figure out what how much it you would be making hourly if you work hourly. If it costs less to get the meal prep option, then you should do that because your time is more valuable. And again, I can't, I can't you you have to do the math to figure out if that makes sense for you, but again, that may be an option. And unfortunately, too, and I don't want actually not unfortunately, uh, meal prep, depending on how you go about it, is will actually save you money. Many people think that eating healthy is so expensive, and it's it's not, you know, it just depends how you want to go about it. And so, you know, we've we've partnered up with Clean Eats in Greenville, and we've we've also partnered with Tropical Grill. Now, I'll give you a little breakdown of both of them, they're both great, amazing, food quality, portion control, etc. But it's it's all what you want, okay? And so let me explain. If you are an individual that wants something different all the time, different meals, different flavors, different options, then excuse me, clean eats is probably your your better bet because there's so much variety over there, and their goal is to provide good, delicious food that's uh portioned correctly, or portioned in general, just a good portion size, because it can't necessarily tell you how much you need, right? That's great, and that's what they're good for. You're gonna pay a little more, okay? You're gonna pay a little more for the variety and for all the different options, whether it's pastas or steak bowls or sandwiches or wraps, I mean, you're you're that's what you're gonna pay for, right? Now, if you go to Tropical Grill, they're a little more I don't want to necessarily say basic, but it's consistent with like you're getting chicken, steak, rice, shrimp, salmon, but they have different bowls and they have different options. But if you do things in the way that we teach our clients, we can actually get meals, individual meals, to cost around you know,$450 to$5 a piece. Now, where in the world are you gonna go anywhere and get a meal for four to five dollars a piece? Nowhere, okay. But it's gonna be a more consistent, right? You're not gonna have as much variety. The only variety that you could do with something like that would be you can season it and spice it a different way, but this is my preferred preference. And honestly, this is a preferred preference for for many of our clients too, from a financial standpoint, okay. So, again, find ways to make your life easier, and you know, neither one is right or wrong. It just comes down to what are you willing to pay and what are you willing to do, right? So, again, this is a this this whole topic I really wanted to get into was just like a mindset shift, okay. And when it comes to discipline, I don't want you to ever think of discipline as being restricting, it is freedom. This will cause your life to be so much easier and smoother. The lack of discipline leads to chaos and stress. I can promise you that. Like I need to have this in place, or my life is running in circles or on a hamster wheel. You know, this discipline is going to give you peace, it's gonna give you structure, and most importantly, it's gonna get the results that you want because that's that's what we're doing, that's why we're doing this. So we need to do the things that are necessary to get the results that we want. And the most successful people don't rely on motivation, they rely on systems. This is why our program is built on systems. It is not built on we got to get you motivated, we got to get you moving, we got to get you eating healthier. Yeah, like all that is a byproduct. But if we can't put a system together that you can follow and execute and track, these are all hopes and dreams. These are things that are gonna, you're gonna go and be successful for maybe a couple weeks, a month until that motivation dies and you're like, dude, I just can't do this anymore. I can't do this. This is this is too much. This is boring. I'm not seeing the results. I mean, whatever you want to like negotiate in your head to make it to where you're like, I shouldn't be doing this, throw that out. Throw that out. When you have systems put in place, this creates a discipline which gets you the results that you want. All right. So the freedom is found in the routine. So I hope you guys get a lot of value out of this. Just remember your discipline is going to bridge between you and who you want to be. All right. Love you guys. Hope you have a good Monday. See you on the next one. Peace.