Cultivating Discipline: The Gratitude Connection

Dec 13

As Nick and Stef were growing up, they would often complain as kids do. Especially about homework. I can still hear them, "I have so much homework. I’ll never have time to play with Sarah this weekend."

"Yes, Stef you’ll have plenty of time for play. As soon as you get your homework done we’ll drive you down to her place."

As parents, we eventually realized we needed to shift from dealing with each and every complaint as they arose to equipping the kids with a principle they could use to make better decisions—regarding their homework or for any decision they faced in their life.

So our next conversation sounded something like this.

"It’s not fair. Our friends don’t have to do this. Why are you guys so hard on us ?"

"Here’s the thing Nick. You need to realize that you will always be disciplined—always. Either you discipline yourself or someone else is going to discipline you—whether it’s a parent, a teacher, an employer, a school you want to attend, the law, whatever. This is something for the rest of your life and the good news is that you have the choice—self discipline or external discipline. While neither may sound like a lot of fun, for me, I prefer self discipline."

At that point, we didn’t know about the connection between gratitude and the human tendency to discount the future, which is known as temporal discounting—in fact we overly discount the future. Researchers from Harvard, Northeastern and University of California, using real money, found people are more likely to delay gratification when they are grateful, more so than people who are happy or a neutral control condition—in a nutshell, grateful people have more self discipline.

In their discussion, the researchers remind us that willpower and self-regulation (which was my approach using self discipline vs external discipline) often fails and can lead to worse consequences.

Who would have thought that a gentler and more effective approach to self discipline was out there ?

So for you, if you want those at work or at home to exercise more self discipline, then nurture a culture that embraces gratitude and encourages each person to develop a Habitual Ritual focused on gratitude.