Discipline. It�s a trait that might make us more successful at anything we do. Whether you are aprofessional athlete needing to put 100% into every training session, or a working mum needing to keep your cool with your kids (and husband) after a taxing day at work, or a staff member who has to get a monthly report in on time, discipline will undoubtedly help you in everything you do.

In fact, there are some famous experiments by Walter Mischel called the �Marshmallow Experiments� that highlight the necessity of this trait. Simply, the research involved children sitting in a room with a marshmallows in front of them. The researcher told them that he had to leave for a while and that they could have one marshmallow only, but if they waited for him to return before eating any marshmallows, then they could have two. The particular results of the experiment weren�t terribly astonishing � some children were able to hold out, while others weren�t (there�s a good article in the New Yorker).

But the surprising results came years later when the subjects were followed up during their schooling. The data showed, without a doubt, that those who were able to hold out for the second marshmallow were the exact same people who showed the greatest academic success. This discipline wasn�t just useful for resisting lollies � it was useful for academic performance as well.

This has been shown time and time again, most notably by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book, Outliers.

So, are we born with discipline and self-control or can it be trained? Let�s look at one of the most brutal forms of discipline to find out.

Meditation is hard. It involves shutting out all distractions and thinking about nothing. In some ways, thinking about nothing seems easy, but paradoxically, keeping our neurons and cells completely at rest requires a tremendous amount of energy. Doing and thinking nothing is one of the hardest things to do. It�s easier to day dream (in terms of energy expenditure) than it is to do nothing.

But we know that we can train meditation ability. The ability to hold our full attention on being completely still mentally and physically. Even small amounts of practice greatly increase people�s ability to pay attention and physically increase the size of the brain region devoted to controlling emotions and attention. So it�s possible.

But beyond meditation, what are the things that help build self-control and discipline?

Well, like it or not you do this every day � or you don�t. Every day, most likely hourly, we train ourselves for either self-control or to give in to our whims. Here are some examples:

• You procrastinate instead of doing something productive
• You commit to something like getting up to go to the gym, or to hand in a project by a certain date and then you skip it
• You only do 90% of something that you could complete right now
• You use the last 15 minutes of your day to do mundane things to kill the time rather than start a really important piece of work

When you do each of these things, you condition yourself to do the easier thing. It becomes self-reinforcing because the immediate good feeling you get (staying in bed, letting yourself �off the hook�, doing easy things) produces a dopamine response (signaling reward), which reinforces the behaviour.

So, can we train discipline? Absolutely. We do it every day even when we don�t realize it. The more often we practice the better we get � don�t wait only for the big moments to practice self-control, do it every hour of every day.

Should You Control Your Emotions Or Not?

How do you keep a lid on your emotions?� You actually shouldn�t. �Now, I am not saying that you should go ballistic at every chance you get.� That wouldn�t be helpful at all.� Last time I yelled at just about anyone I cared about things went badly.� But suppressing emotions is�probably the worst thing that you can do if you want to maintain healthy relationships and perform at your best in the office.

Hard Work

Eveyone will agree that when we try to keep our emotions deep inside and don�t let people see them, it takes a lot of mental effort. Sometimes an extreme amount.� And that mental effort could be used elsewhere like controlling our behaviour, cognitive performance like problem solving and decision making, and also remembering things � holding things in short term memory.� You see all of these things (including suppressing emotions) takes place in the same area of the brain and if you are burning fuel doing one thing, then chances are you won�t have any fuel left to do some of the others.

We also know that the stress on people around us is dramatic.� There is evidence to suggest that people who have to watch someone suppressing their emotions show elevated levels of stress hormones and�stress reactions.

So what can you do?

What can you do without getting into serious trouble? �If bottling them up doesn’t work and expressing them relentlessly doesn’t work either, what then?

Well it seems that one of the best ways to deal with negative emotions (or even extreme positive emotion that might be clouding your ability to perform) is to name it.� This method is called labeling and it seems to switch on our�brain�s handbrake � the part that stops circuits from repeating themselves.� If you can say what the emotion is � succinctly � then it seems the emotion starts to suppress itself.� A recent study also found the same result when people wrote about their emotions and anxiety before having to perform.� Those emotions were lessened.

Don’t go too far….

The only caveat that seems to be in place is that you have to make sure that you do this succinctly.� Wallow too much in your own negative feelings and you are bound to make them worse.� And anyway, no one wants to listen to you whine�..not even yourself.

How the things we say belie our efforts

I am doing some research for a new book on creating the environment for people to thrive. Along the way, we have been looking at the reasons that people succeed on an individual level and the overwhelming amount of research (as I am sure most of you will know) points to self-regulation as the common denominator.

Self-regulation: the key to success?

What is self-regulation? I�m glad you asked (well, I asked), because the definitions are pretty vague and general. But we can safely say that, broadly, self-regulation involves being able to regulate your behaviours � to stop doing the things you shouldn�t do and also have the discipline to do the things that are best for you, even if it involves some short term discomfort.

And central to this argument is that we choose our own behaviours, because if we aren�t responsible and accountable for them, then we have no chance of self-regulating. The research in particular by Martin Seligman, which is dated but still incredibly relevant, and the famous �marshmallow experiments� by Mischel** shows this in an entertaining and enlightening way.

**(If you haven�t seen the �marshmallow experiments� they gave children the choice of taking one marshmallow, in front of them, right now, or wait and get more marshmallows. Those who waited (self-regulated) tested higher in almost every measurement of success in their early adult life).

What does this have to do with language?

What we say can sabotage our ability to succeed

Think about the language that many people use. It actually runs counter to these foundations of success. You hear people use the following phrases mainly when they are feeling out of control. Here are just a few that come to mind:

�If only I had/did/could�..�
This is really saying �I�d like to be able to do this, but because something isn�t in place for me, it ain�t gonna happen. So I might as well just wait until this thing falls into place because then I will be able to perform/succeed.�

A mentor of mine once told me that losers say �if only this happened�I would perform� winners say �only if I do this�.will I perform.�

�He makes me angry�
When people say this, they are telling themselves that they are not in control of their emotions. Think about it�.he MAKES me angry. Did he really make you angry? Of course not. He did x, and you got angry. Big difference. This is disturbing because I hear myself say it to my children sometimes.

�You make me so angry sometimes!� I should say, �When you push your brother down the stairs, I get angry.� Poor example but you get the picture.

�I have to go to work/the gym/my mother-in-law�s�
You don�t have to do anything. I used to say this to athletes all the time. �you don�t have to turn up to training; you don�t have to run this drill��..but if you don�t you have to live with the consequences.�

If we indeed choose all of our behaviours, then you choose to do all of these things. �I am going to��� or �I choose to��� would be a better option.

�I can�t do it�
This gives you no choice. If you can�t do it, you can�t do it. No point in trying anymore. The correct answer would sound like �I don�t know how to do it yet� or even �I don�t know how to do it�. Even this hints at the fact that you have options � you can learn.

Are these just excuses?
The funny thing is that all of these phrases excuse us from doing our best, in any zones of performance. The reason we say them is because it makes us feel better about not doing the thing we know we should be doing. It gives us a reason not to do it.

We all have the ability to self-regulate and therefore the ability to perform at our best in any situation. Maybe it just starts with the things that we say.

A Jennifer Aniston Neuron?

If you’ve read John Medina’s great book, The Brain Rules, then you will have come across something that he calls the ‘Jennifer Aniston’ neuron.

In short, if you show people a picture of Jennifer Aniston, there is a neural area of their brain that starts going berserk.� Is this because Jen is so amazingly attractive to our brains? Well, she might be, but that’s not really the point.

The contingency is that if you’ve never seen Jen (and I don’t know where they found these particular subjects) then the brain activity doesn’t� take place.� What this shows is that if you’ve seen Jennifer before, then you’ve created a specific neural network that registers when you see her again.� If you haven’t seen Jen before, then this network doesn’t exist.

This got me thinking. What happens when you run into someone that you have, apparently, met before, but who you don’t remember? Clearly one of two things must have happened.

Either you never built the connection – maybe that person wasn’t important enough, or you were paying attention to something completely different and the networks just didn’t connect.

Or,� you once had the connection but now you’ve lost it.� Our brains are continually creating and replacing neural ‘maps’ so maybe you have replaced it with something else, or it is buried beneath so much other stuff that you can’t get it to fire up again.

Can the same thing happen to individual or team goals?

What were the team goals, again?

Everyone has sat in on the ‘Team Planning’ session – it is usually at the beginning of the new financial year and the manager spells out the things that the team needs to achieve (the KPI’s, the budgets, the strategy, the vision) but after a few months the majority of the team can’t seem to remember most of those things.� Sure, they might know their personal budget targets, but the rest of the objectives go out the window. The same thing has happened: Either the goals weren’t important enough to make the new neural connection, or they got buried under the ensuing ‘business-as-usual’ approach to office management.� Whatever the case, the upshoot is that team members can’t really see the goals – they don’t have a ‘goals’ neuron.� From a performance perspective, this will stop them from working towards these goals as efficiently as possible.

Oh, that’s right.� I WAS going to do that, wasn’t I?

On an individual level this is also true.� Why do I keep forgetting to drink water throughout the day, even though I told myself that it was important?� The same thing has happened yet again: either the neural connections were never made or they are not important enough to stay at the top of the pile – I don’t have a strong ‘drink water’ neuron.� The upshoot is that that particular goal doesn’t get achieved.� You can substitute drinking water for ‘time with the kids’, ‘chores around the house’, ‘spending quality time with your spouse’.� Anything, really, that you set out to do but never really go traction on.

What happens when the connection is particularly strong?

If you have ever met someone and instantly fallen in love with them, you will notice that a very strange phenomenon takes place.� You start to think you see that person everywhere.� In the bus on the way home, at the markets on the weekend, at the airport…….it seems that just about every second person resembles this new-found attraction.

What is happening is that you haven’t just created the ‘new love’ neuron; this network is so strong that it is looking for an excuse to fire up and get active.

Imagine if that were the case for those goals that we talked about earlier.� Imagine if your staff could see opportunities to create amazing customer service experiences where others couldn’t see them; imagine if your sales team could see opportunities buried under other opportunities to find another deal; imagine if, habitually, you just programmed time into your schedule at the start of every week to spend quality time with your kids.� And your wife.

The bottom line is that if you set out to do something but can’t get it done, it’s not just because you keep forgetting, it’s because it was never quite important enough to you in the first place to get the neural connections firing and the brain chemicals working.� And the same is true for the people that you manage.� Once you understand this, you can take steps to making better priorities both for your own goals and those of your team.

Or, maybe you could just marry Jennifer Aniston?

A recent study has shown the effects of how we perceive our self-control.

A group of smokers were asked to take a �self-control� questionnaire. Regardless of the results of the assessment, the people were then randomly told that they tested as having either �high� self-control or �low� self-control (in many cases those who actually tested as having �low� self-control were told they had �high� self-control).

A following experiment tested their ability to abstain from cigarette smoking in a number of different levels of temptation, which they chose themselves (eg watch an entire movie with an unlit cigarette in your mouth; or with the cigarette in another room).

The people who were told that they have �high� self-control chose the most tempting options and were able to abstain. Those who were told that they had �low� self-control chose the safer options and gave in more regularly.

Regardless of their actual predisposition for self-control, what really mattered was what they thought their level of self-control was.

There is some recent neuroscience research that suggests the brain is wired to choose the �default� option whenever a choice is too difficult. There seems to be a decision difficulty ‘threshold’ above which, we are wired to choose the status quo; that might be the thing that everyone else is doing, or the thing that we have been doing up until this point. Or we might even choose to do nothing if that’s an option.

Think about behaviours for a second. When a decision to change behaviours is a difficult one – if we aren�t completely convinced that the benefits of change outweigh the costs � chances are we will revert to our old behaviour or, at the very least, just go with what everyone else is doing.

This has big implications for team culture, organisational behaviours, and even changing behaviours on a personal level. When the choice is easy, we will choose the behaviour we think is right, even if we believe that the majority of people chose the alternative.

What makes the choice easy? If we show people that the new behaviour is clearly more beneficial, if we convince them that it makes sense, if they can see that if makes a difference and if they can see that we are consistent in our response towards it, then their choice becomes clear.

People always do the thing that they feel has most benefit to them. If you are trying to change behaviours in your team or organization and are getting little traction, then chances are that the benefit of the behaviours is not clear to the people who are unwilling to change.

Mediocrity is the easy choice. Behaviours that underlie success are usually difficult and force us to evaluate the benefits relative to our own comfort levels. When the benefits and purpose are truly clear, this is the point at which the choice to change becomes simple.