Cultivate a Flow-Based Lifestyle by Trading Discipline for Congruence
Bring forth results by aligning with them
If you’re interested in personal transformation, sometimes you’re brimming with enthusiasm and motivation. In elevated states, you make promises to yourself. You form intentions, author plans, and talk about your goals. Your desires feel so potent that you can’t imagine anything getting in their way.
Two days later, your forehead veins are tight and inflamed. Those plans go hollow. Last night, you were excited about your work, but now you’re tired. Hungry. Cranky. You’re distracted by heightened anticipation about what will happen in the next hour. Most people are familiar with the experience of becoming alienated from an intention that once felt so substantial.This is where the topic of discipline enters the conversation.
People say that discipline equals freedom. True, perhaps, but not when discipline is the product of force-based will power. This is an unsustainable charade that makes you an enemy of nuance.
There’s an easier way to facilitate the results you’re striving toward. Unlike discipline, this alternative doesn’t involve pushing, forcing, or believing that you occupy a state of unreliability by default. It’s called congruence.
While discipline trains us into managing an innate resistance, congruence asks that we optimize our emotional state so that we automatically tune into the perceptions, frameworks, and bodily conditions we occupied when we first established a goal or intention.
This is central to a flow-based lifestyle, and it’s what we mean when we talk about being in the present moment. Congruence is the zone where genius becomes possible, and it involves no hard-earned skill or force-based programming.
Discipline is a vector of inertia
When you understand this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom. — Jack Kerouac
If you value discipline, you might also habitually distrust yourself, believing you are an animal bent on sensory pleasure at any and every cost.
As a member of the animal kingdom, you’re intent only on scavenging for food or reproducing. All achievements are artifacts of renunciation or hard-won control of the self. From there, you assume that your every emotion warrants suspicion.
This perspective invites a misreading of the role of feelings and bodily sensations in navigating reality. Choosing discipline as a core operating principle isn’t different from turning down the volume on the stomach pains alerting you to stop after eating seven rich and creamy desserts well past the point of satisfaction. The stomach ache is a signal, a compass, a plan of action.
Without pain, the chocolate cake would send you hurling into a state of disequilibrium. Likewise, when you become hyper-focused on discipline, you reject the opportunity to use feelings of resistance as optimization data toward processes more ergonomic to who and where you currently are.
Too often it’s hard-and-fast discipline that prevents you from absorbing insights necessary for your evolution or for a useful pivot in the right direction. Let’s face it — sometimes you thrive after quitting a project and pursuing a different one. Discipline won’t let you accept that. It’s not attuned to the subtle signals, hunches, and pockets of blind faith that encourage movement in more suitable directions.
Struggle signals the need for re-calibration. A value like discipline isn’t sensitive to the nuances and counter-narratives that are so often characteristic of those fruitful and life-defining pivots or perspective shifts.
Why you play whack-a-mole with the source of your problems
Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Sometimes the unbridled drive toward discipline worsens the very dynamic that renders a person in need of discipline. Let’s say I’ve asked you about the trait you like most about yourself. You straighten your shoulders and tell me that you value your ability to stay disciplined.
In this statement, you’re affirming a certain self concept; namely, an image of a person who regularly occupies a state of mind that doesn’t bring forth desired results.
As a self-defined disciplined person, you are admitting to being someone who is skilled at forcing, cajoling, or guilt-tripping yourself into another state. With a self-concept built on a sense of inherent wrongness, discipline on its own won’t be enough. When you operate from the foundation of self rejection, you’re rarely equipped with the resources to create anything of value.
And that’s because all true value is born of harmony: it’s the culmination of a state that benefits you, the people it impacts, and evolution as a whole. If your discipline requires that you suffer, you’re removing a key component out of the equation. While your force-driven program may work temporarily, worry not: burnout will come. In your state of denial, you might betray yourself, over-complicate problems, and deprive yourself of the very source of creative inspiration.
When I think about discipline, I imagine cold showers, waking up at 4 a.m., and vowing to write 4,000 publishable words every morning. This could all be done, benefiting you, me, and others, no doubt, but think about the difference between someone who engages these pursuits in allegiance to discipline versus someone who acts out of congruence. When challenged in these ways, the congruent person is going to focus on the novel subtleties in perception that accompany the blood flow modulations brought about by a cold shower. They’ll enjoy the challenge of transforming a blank page into a series of consecutive ideas.
In contrast, the disciplined person will be tense and resentful until they complete their work. Discipline is useful fuel on some days, sure, but on others it’s thin, temperamental, and wavering. The disciplined person is more interested in the pride linked to her improved circulation or finished e-book, not the cold immersion or the productive doubts that arise in the creation of each sentence. The congruent person sees herself as the generous participant in the way things are and the disciplined person just wants to prove he’s accomplished something.
Progress is on the other side of negotiation
Creating, yet not possessing, Working, yet not taking credit, Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts for ever. — Tao Te Ching
A great lever for congruence? The skill of enjoyment. The truth is that enjoyment isn’t something dependent on sensory pleasure or good news. Instead it can be intentionally cultivated no matter what you’re doing. Start by simply immersing yourself in a task, giving up inner commentary about where it will lead. Notice if it’s possible to conjure feelings of pleasure. Can you feel good for no reason?
The ability to see the fun inherent in giving something full attention, or the skill of enjoyment, is the doorway into the flow state, the juncture where talent meets challenge or the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety. Enjoyment is the perfect antidote to discipline because it facilitates focus and concentration from a place of lightheartedness and the drive for pleasure. We draw on discipline with an implied desire to access these pleasurable states, yet we often get lackluster results. Conversely, when you strive for congruence, joy, ease, and lightheartedness are always preconditions of a successful process.
With congruence, your actions proceed effortlessly from the way you view yourself. Luckily, you can re-calibrate your self-concept using cause-and-effect reflection. Next time you’re attempting to do something but feeling hesitance or frustration around doing it, simply begin journaling about the emotions that first evoked your not-so-great mood. Write down every intuition that arises. You’ll usually find that the exploration of your inner space results in the uncovering of a genuine thread of interest. You unveil the seed of motivation that invited the urge to pursue the thing, and you water it. From there, you access a supply of forward motion that isn’t dependent on self-denial based will power.
Last but at the heart of the previous points: the best way to cultivate congruence is to reprogram your subconscious mind. Your subconscious prefigures the thoughts and intentions that characterize your personality and everyday conscious experience. Most people are programmed by television, songs about why no one should be trusted, or the assumption that money only comes when it’s seduced by shortcuts.
If you don’t make reprogramming your subconscious a priority, you’re going to be overrun with corporate propaganda, limited beliefs, and the unresolved wounds of your parents and grandparents.
One way to reprogram your subconscious is to choose a subject or activity that reliably leads to curiosity, happiness, immersion, and other empowering states. Do these activities in the morning and at night. Do them whenever you want to refresh your mind. Build everyday routines based around personal empowerment and eliminate those that cripple it. This may mean checking your email twice a week instead of four times a day or ceasing to have conversations about your indecisiveness. It could even mean ending a friendship.
Autosuggestion is another central tool for subconscious mind reprogramming. You can practice autosuggestion by writing down first-person statements that affirm uplifting beliefs about yourself and your life. Read them before going to bed, after waking up, and during moments of pause. Use phrases and tenses that allow you to immediately locate the present moment within the statements, such as “more and more each day I realize” or “every day I discover…”
The subconscious responds to emotional cues, so the goal is to saturate these statements with powerful emotions like enthusiasm and desire. While you might not be able to immediately manufacture these states at will, with persistence you’ll automatically take actions that affirm the ideas conveyed in your autosuggestions. You don’t need to believe me. Just try it.
As intensive as this sort of reprogramming may seem, remember its rewards. You can easily reprogram your subconscious so that the behaviors and skill sets you value pour forth from you with minimal effort and zero resistance. In this case, will power and discipline become obsolete because there will be no inner contradictions pulling you apart from the inside and demanding your use of will power.
Discipline, when rooted in force-based will power, is a blunt instrument. It may even amplify the very imbalances that rendered you in need of discipline in the first place.
Congruence, on the other hand, lets you excavate motivations and employ them in the service of your far-reaching and deeply felt values. Not only does congruence facilitate greater self-awareness, it gives you data points that enable you to re-calibrate so your actions move you closer to what you’re ultimately seeking.