Improving your self-discipline

Intensely difficult jobs can be intensely rewarding. (Provincial Archives of Alberta)

One of the most important lessons I learned from Karen Pryor’s amazing Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training is that operant conditioning can be humane — so humane that you can use it successfully on yourself. In doing so, you can improve your results and more reliably engage your powers of self-discipline and follow-through.

Pryor tells the story of a night class that she dreaded going to, even though she didn’t mind it she was there. It was just the hassle of leaving the house that she didn’t like. So she got her favorite chocolate and gave herself a little square as a reward for each part of the journey: Walking out the front door, getting on the bus, and so on. It made the trip a little sweeter, something that she could eagerly anticipate instead of wanting to avoid.

I have made use of this tactic countless times (sometimes with chocolate). Sweet drinks, a favorite song, a TV show, a walk outside, time with friends — there are so many ways to associate hard work with pleasant things. And once this association is made, it strengthens itself even without the reward.

Intentionality is major ingredient here. To have a plan of positive reinforcement requires you to think about what you want to accomplish in a strategic way. This, alone, can change the entire dynamic of the task at hand.

For example, let’s look at email. Instead of simply checking my email, I want to process it. Each one represents a decision to be made, along with a variety of tasks associated with it. This can quickly get exhausting and overwhelming.

One approach is to grimly open my email program and try to tackle as much as I can. Along the way, I will probably berate myself for getting so behind. I’ll read through a few things until I find one that I can deal with. I’ll lose steam after about ten minutes and force myself to keep going; all the while, my progress will slow until it stops. Then I’ll abandon email for awhile until the cycle repeats.

There is nothing positive here — just a terrible, soul-crushing slog. So how can we use positive reinforcement to help us?

This time, when I open my email program, I’ll set a timer for ten minutes. I will then tackle as many emails as I can, giving myself a tally mark for each one. When the timer goes off, I’ll count the tally marks and text a supportive friend to let her know how many I did. I’ll put on a favorite song and have an impromptu dance party, go outside for a minute if the weather is nice, or have a sip of a favorite beverage.

Then I’ll go back and set a timer again. I’ll repeat the process a few times, each time being sure to celebrate what I accomplished. And when I start to show signs of fatigue, I’ll be done for the day.

The next day, I can try to process more emails than I did the day before. I can do more ten-minute sprints or attempt to tackle more emails in a given sprint. I can keep a chart of how many emails I process per day or how many sprints I do. I can keep track of my “streaks” — the number of days in a row in which I do six or more email sprints.

I can hear you protesting, “But this is something I’m supposed to do. Why should I congratulate myself for something that I’ve been putting off?” Because it works. It’s exactly as Mary Poppins sang: “In every task that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job’s a game.” You may not be able to snap and magically tidy your home like the kids in Mary Poppins, but finding a way to make an otherwise dull task festive and enjoyable will help you to complete it. If you manage to complete it, it doesn’t matter that candy was involved; if you don’t complete it, it doesn’t matter how virtuous or serious you are.

In fact, the rigid insistence that something should be done without any games, rewards, praise, or or fun — and without any compromise — can backfire. Instead of watching ten minutes of a favorite TV show as a reward for a half hour of work, we try to muscle through the work for its own sake — the work we should do, or should have already done. If this brings up bad feelings, we may struggle to even get started — and then find ourselves six episodes deep into a Netflix binge to take that pain away.

Ironically, the more we have struggled with our work, the gentler we need to be with ourselves when we return to it, even if we don’t think we deserve it. The voices telling us, “Well, it’s about time!” and “Where have you been? You are so far behind!” may seem to be justified in their point of view, but they don’t help us. They encourage to stop the work, because when we do, they disappear. We need generous, kind voices that say, “Welcome back! You got this!” and promise something yummy ten minutes from now.

When we have these positive associations with our work, the need for extrinsic rewards will fade. When we sit down to do a challenging task, we hear only the encouraging voices and remember the satisfaction of past accomplishments. That becomes enough to carry us through — although a celebratory dance party is never a bad idea.