I’m a believer that words mean things. To communicate with others we have to be precise with our language. To do otherwise leaves room for misinterpretation, argument, and misunderstanding. While some people might accuse me of being pedantic, I prefer to have clarity in what I say.

 A while ago a lot of people got really upset when I pointed out that the term “stress inoculation”as used in the training community is incorrect. Many of the offended people went after me, including friends who I had never done anything negative to, but they wrote some pretty crappy things.. Nobody could argue my exact point; they just preferred to attack me and my audacity in trying to provide clarity. 

Well I’m going to do it again. Today’s term is discipline. and I’m going to quote the Great Inigo Montoya when he said “I don’t think that term means what you think it means”.

 In the self-preservation training community we love to waive the flag that we have discipline. We point out all the training we may do and say “see I’m disciplined”. The problem is that every example tends to be us doing what we like to do. and that is not discipline at all.

 If you are a shooting instructor or even just an enthusiast, bragging about how you dry fire 5 days a week and spend two hours a week at the range firing 500 rounds has zero to do with discipline. If you are heavily into fitness, and you like to talk about how you are lifting heavy 5 days a week or are getting in multiple hard cardio workouts per week, you are not telling me you are disciplined. If you love jujitsu and perhaps even own an academy (Incoming fire!)telling others that you are disciplined because you are on the mat five to six days a week has exactly zero to do with discipline. 

Here is the dictionary definition (or at least one of them) of discipline: To train or develop By instruction and exercise self-control. Doing what we enjoy has no elements of requiring self-control. That will only come into play when we’re doing something we don’t enjoy. It takes no self control to eat a giant bowl of Braum’s Butter Pecan Ice Cream. It takes enormous self-control to NOT do so. 

 For example, I despise pure cardio work. I simply hate it. It’s boring, repetitive or it’s incredibly draining on my energy. So for me to hit my three to four cardio workouts a week requires a great deal of self-control and effort and willpower to do it. it’s far easier to make an excuse to miss the workout or to say I’ll get cardio just from being on the mat. Those are excuses and rationalizations which means I’m not enjoying what I’m doing.

 If you are an incredibly enthusiastic shooter, but are morbidly obese you don’t need discipline to shoot. You need discipline to eat like an adult. Is that fun? No. it is much more fun to eat Twinkies and fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies and butter pecan ice cream from Braum, but that’s not healthy, it’s not good for you and so we have to refrain from going overboard. Not to say we can’t enjoy it at times but we have to exercise discipline to make sure we’re not taking in more calories than we’re burning. We are literally 10,000 times more likely to die from metabolic dysfunction issues (heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer), and a good deal of that can be prevented simply by eating with a bit of discipline. 

 So please don’t try to virtue signal that you are disciplined by showing how hard and how often you do your favorite hobby. Show discipline by putting blood, sweat, tears, time and money into doing something you don’t like but you know is necessary, important and needed to actually practice self-preservation.