Accountability, Intentionality & Discipline

I think people underestimate the importance of intentions behind words, probably due to a historically bad habit of making reason artificially bankrupt of emotions. I say artificially because most of our lives departs from this sensible substrate, even our reason. When my friend says “I love you”, I can feel whether they’re saying it earnestly or to keep up appearances. How we say what we say to ourselves in turn, can indicate whether holding ourselves accountable as a concerned friend or a judgemental enemy. The sentence “bro get off your ass and go to the gym” takes on new life when it is said with endearing concern or crippling self-hatred. Which life it takes on influences whether you’ll be motivated to pursue your goal or remain paralyzed by inaction. It also plays a role in how often you hold yoursef accountable to your shortcomings. If I fail myself or others and holding myself accountable means an honest conversation with myself that’s constructive and solution based, I’ll be much more willing to do it frequently. If on the other hand I have to fear the process of holding myself accountable through bashful self-abuse, I probably won’t be doing it too frequently.

Everyone responds to feelings of inadequacy differently. When we feel like we’re not enough, it can be very easy to embark on a year long quest for a sense of worth that never lost us, one we’ve merely misplaced. When this worth is amiss, looking for it outside can lead us to a life of cyclical self-seeking. Growth should be motivated for its own sake, not to make us sufficient for our sense of self-acceptance. Nevertheless, change only occurs when we no longer find our current state sufficiently acceptable.

I had an hour long conversation with my homie Moe on the ideal way to motivate, develop and discipline ourselves to achieve our potential. He’d just read a book about a man who beat obesity and became a high ranking military personel. His approach was a brutal, self-demeaning and unsustainable method of holding himself accountable to his goals. He stared at himself in the mirror named ‘the mirror of accountability’, stared and berated himself about his shortcomings. While that reportedly worked for him, Moe and I eventually concluded that two things made his approach necessary to people who seek to actualize their potential, and found one fundamental flaw.

First, any dreamer hat aims to be practical about their dreams has to hold themselves accountable to their shortcomings. Practical dreamers must remain lucid about how far or close their goal is, what is missing but necessary in achieving this dream, how our own behavior can keep us from attaining our goals. We need to be accountable to our whole self, not just Me right now, but the 8 year old me that dreamed of greatness, and the future me I’m working to ensure is equipped with the tools that their obstacles demand. Moe stressed that motivation is scarce, discipline is needed to achieve our goals, in other words, our goals must mean more to us than momentary comfort, and in a roundabout way, more than our feelings, our happiness or sorrow when faced with the task.

“Put your feelings aside and deal with the task at hand” has a condition, that ‘putting our feelings aside’ is less of a repression or avoidance of our feelings, and more of an arduous process of leaving space for our emotions in an otherwise mechanical and unfeeling task. Learning how to deal with emotions when they come up, developing emotional maturity so that our work/craft is neither derailed by mood swings, nor consumes our awareness to the point of disillusionment from the feelings we escape. Discipline means showing up, even if if we feel like shit, doing it sustainable requires we eventually learn how to tackle these feelings and move through them, with them, otherwise the well of emotion we escape through work will catch up to us when we hit the next wall.

The last two points have to do with the necessity of pain for progress and the corrosive nature of unnecessary suffering. How do these two differ? Necessary suffering comes up from chosen circumstances, from the obstacles that present themselves on the way to our goal. The ones we toil to overcome. Unnecessary suffering is when you make your self an obstacle as well. The world’s already a pain, but if we fail to be a friend to ourselves, or to acknowledge the importance of intentionality when speaking to a body that remembers it, we’ll never get to where we’re going. Myth: Self-hatred holds you accountable to your ambitions in a way that creates sustainable progress. Truth: it’s neither sustainable nor necessary to treat ourselves as a mule motivated by a carrot, when we are both the tyrant with the carrot and the mule we instrumentalize and misuse. When we fail to disentangle self-empowerment from the self-doubt it rose from, we’ll find ourselves returning regularly to the caustic self-doubt we believe is necessary to foil our self-empowerment. Self-hatred makes an opponent of our selves, it siphons away mental, bodily and emotional energy, energy that could be put to better use supporting the activities that bring us closer to our goal.