"One of the most underrated skills you can learn is the ability to ignore your mood and stick to the plan."
I came across this phrase. Usually this kind of thing annoys me, but here I agree.
I should say right away that there is an important boundary here. If you are sick, weak, have no energy, and your body is clearly asking you to stop, that is normal physiology, and it is better not to ignore it.
But more often there is another state. Just a bad mood, disbelief in yourself, doubts about your choice, a desire to drop what matters and go do something more understandable and pleasant.
With work, this happens to me regularly. There are days when I really do not want to start some task. I have not even sat down to work yet, and I am already "tired".
Then you start anyway. You do a small piece. And by the end, you are almost always glad that you did not listen to the first version of yourself.
Very banal, of course. But I still run into this regularly.
By the way, ACT therapy helped me a lot with this state. There is a simple but strong idea there: thoughts and actions are different things.
Thoughts are just words in your head. Sometimes useful. Sometimes it is just internal slop.
For this to help, you first need to notice the thought, for example: "I am having the thought that everything is pointless". This turns it from an internal "instruction" into a "set of words" that just passed through your head.
Then you need to ask yourself: does this "set of words" in my head help me or not? If not, put the thought aside and go do what matters to you. Because thoughts cannot control actions. Unless you let them, of course.
That is the very simplified version. It does not always work, but it still works more often than not.
So this is one of the most useful skills for now: not arguing with every thought in your head, but checking whether it helps you act in the direction of what matters.
The truth is, I cannot do this with sports yet. Which is the perfect, ironic ending for this post about discipline.
By the way, I almost forgot: Leaflo has many different guides with good questions for different emotional swings. Do not swing — Leaflo
