Craig Ballantyne: The Dark Side of Discipline

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Kevin: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Reframeable podcast, the podcast that brings you people's stories and ideas about how we can work to reframe our relationship, not just with alcohol, but with stress, anxiety, relationships, enjoyment, and so much more. Because changing our relationship with alcohol is about so much more than changing the contents of our glass.

This podcast is brought to you by the Reframe app. Reframe is the number one iOS and Android app to help you cut back or quit drinking alcohol. It uses neuroscience to reframe your relationship with alcohol and unlock the healthiest, happiest you. My name is Kevin Bellack. I'm a certified professional recovery coach and the head of coaching at the Reframe app.

Emma: And I'm Emma Simmons. I'm a Reframer, a certified life coach and Thrive coach with Reframe app from New Zealand.

Kevin: Today's guest is known as the world's most disciplined man and is the author of the Dark Side of Discipline, as well as the Perfect day formula. He was also the creator of the Turbulence [00:01:00] Training fitness system and owns early to rise.com.

We'd like to welcome Craig Ballantine to the podcast. Hey Craig, how's it going

Craig: today? This I'm doing great and this can be a lot of fun. Thank you.

Emma: Welcome. So good to, I'm excited to chat with you. I feel Kev. Do you feel mildly intimidated? Like I feel like all of our flaws and lack of discipline are gonna come flooding out.

Kevin: This is really just a session for me. Yeah. Get my bootcamp, get my habits back on track. Why don't we just jump in and Craig, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and give us some background.

Craig: Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up near Toronto, Canada and in small towns in Canada, when you grow up, you uh, play hockey and drink beer, drink beer, and play hockey. It doesn't matter which order that you do it in, that's what you do. And unfortunately, that left me with a few bad habits as I grew older.

And when I went to college, I was obviously like a frat boy drinker. And when I left college, I continued with the binge drinking on the weekend. That didn't serve me in life, but it [00:02:00] was, part of my identity. And it was, part of the habits that the people that I kept my time with and the environments and what I pushed myself into, and there wasn't.

I just didn't know anything different and it wasn't, I met Lewis Howes in 2009 and he was the first person I ever met who said he that they'd never had a drop of alcohol. And I was like so blown away. My binge drinking mind could not believe that someone who played sports in college could not have ever had I.

A sip of alcohol. But it was one, through changing my circle friends and changing my habits and changing my identity, that I was able to go from binge drinker to social drinker to, once a month drinker to finally never drink again in November of 2021. And, I don't have judgment on people that drink, but I just found that, if I go back in time and change one thing that would be at the top of the list.

Kevin: Yeah, that's yeah, and I agree like with the whole really you never had a drink? I would sit there and be , perplexed. One of the things I was [00:03:00] curious about with that progression of cutting it down as the, as I read, the world's most disciplined man, right?

And talking about discipline, how I. Easy, hard, how difficult was it based on, we know a lot when we know a lot, right? It can be, it can still be tough to implement something when it has a hold on us.

Craig: Yeah. That's great point. So one of the main low points in my life that was partly due to the drinking was that I had severe anxiety attacks in 2006.

On January 1st, I woke up with a bloody awful hangover. And I was personal trainer at the time, so I was a hypocritical binge drinker. I was personal trainer, goody two shoes, Monday through Friday through Saturday afternoon, and then from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, drinking.

And I think that misalignment in my life caused a lot of problems for me. And then combined with, the fact that I was getting up early to do personal training and then staying up late over the holidays to go out, [00:04:00] drinking at a lot of parties. It all caught up to me on that January 1st, 2006, and it was really bad.

And anybody who's ever had an anxiety attack, it's just, you just do anything to get out of it. It was very crippling and I did go to the emergency room that night thinking I was having a heart attack over the next few days. It settled down. I did a couple yoga classes and that seemed to get rid of it, and then after about six weeks I thought I was invincible again and started going back to the binge drinking.

Yeah. Again, because I didn't. I didn't really know anything else. There was no other life that I had, and I didn't really ha, I didn't have any, I wasn't married, I didn't have any kids. And so I didn't have any disp dependents, any responsibilities other than to show up for work. And I had built the systems in my, binge drinking alcohol life that all I'm fine by Monday morning, and I can go in and be my normal self until Saturday and then all goes downhill again.

So there wasn't the consequences that needed to be there. And then I had a second anxiety attack in about March of that year. And that one lasted six weeks. [00:05:00] So for six weeks straight, as long as I was awake, which was about, 19 hours a day, 'cause I could barely sleep. I had elevated heart rate, I had tight chest, couldn't breathe.

I had tingling from the top of my head down to the end of my fingertips. And I just couldn't break it even though I didn't drink again during that time. So I drank the night before the anxiety attack started, but then I didn't drink during that six weeks and I just couldn't shake it. And when I finally did it was because I went to the emergency room again.

I. And this time they gave me a bunch of tests and they, when they told me that there was nothing physically wrong with me, that was the flip in the switch that had to flip in my head that allowed me to, basically walk away from anxiety in addition to adding good breathing habits through Tai Chi yoga, meditation and all the classic belly to breathing type of exercises.

And then I finally got serious about the alcohol. And for me, it took a long time. For what took me a long time, doesn't necessarily mean that some people have to take a long time with it. And [00:06:00] for some people they're able to change bad habits overnight. For example, I have a friend who, has read my book read my content and all this stuff, and he had had a bad habit of pornography and.

He found out, I don't like it. I don't use it. I don't, I'm I use this phrase in some article somewhere that he saw that, you're an honorable man. You're a family man. You're just not the type of man who uses porn. And he didn't need six months or a six week challenge or anything.

He just went immediately and shifted his identity. So there's a bunch of ways, many ways that we can change our habits in life. And I call the one way that I really use the effortless discipline systems, I. Elimination, preparation, and connection, and we can go through those if you want, because you can apply them to any habit.

If you're addicted to your phone if you wanna start exercising. They all work. They work for all of these things. I went through that path and it was a little bit longer and I had to build my confidence and change my identity. But he just decided overnight to change his identity from the type of man who's oh, I just use it once in a while.

It's not a [00:07:00] harmful thing to, I'm the type of man that doesn't use it because I'm an honorable man, family man, and that just doesn't fit with my values. And so there's, in the extremes of habit change, this continuum of habit change. There's everything from yes, you can quit some things cold Turkey.

Just like we've all heard of somebody who quit smoking cold Turkey, which sounds insane considering you, we, what we know about the physical addiction side of things and there are some people who, ah, it took me 10 years and I finally quit. And there's everything in between and there's all types of tools and systems that we can use to get rid of it.

And so that's what I want to expose people to. And an overriding lesson as I describe these things as tools is back to the challenges that you, we see. Whether it's an ice bucket challenge, whether it's, I do cold plunges every day, whether it's I work out twice a day, whether I read a book. We need to look at these routines and action and habits as tools, and is this tool serving us and is, are we using this tool in a way [00:08:00] that's serving us?

Like we can use a shovel, but if we're using a shovel to paint a. We're not using the tool properly and it's not actually serving us, and we can use a tool to smack ourselves in the head, but now the tool is actually detrimental to us. Whereas in many cases, when we're digging, the tool is helpful.

So that's how we need to look at these routines and rituals and challenges, not as something to conquer. But simply as a tool to get us closer to the outcome that we want in life, rather than something that just takes our time or that we're doing because everybody else is doing or we're doing it, worst of all.

To get a bunch of people who we've never met and never will meet to like our video on Instagram.

Emma: I love the analogy of having a tool, but knowing when to use it. And I use that quite a lot with my coaching as well, like it's all very well and good if you need, you've got a hammer, but if you're using a hammer to try and screw in an.

A screw into the wall, like it might get the job done. You might get the screw in the wall eventually, but it's probably [00:09:00] not the most effective way of doing it. So yeah, it's about knowing what tools you have, what you have available in your toolkit, building out your toolkit so you know that you've got different tools and different scenarios.

But yeah, knowing when to use them. So I love the using a shovel to paint the wall. I love that one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna borrow that one for sure.

Kevin: Yeah. Because, you know, I had, I ran the journaling meeting today where we, I come with a prompt and we journal and then we talk about it, we share, and today's topic was about our tools, because I brought it up because of yesterday, zoom went out and for a period of time there was an outage.

People couldn't get into meetings and things like that. I'm like, what's your plan B? What's your plan C? What do you do when? So let's, let's look at our maintenance toolkit. Let's look at our emergency toolkit. Let's build that out and add things to it. Because even if something works, we don't always feel like meditating or doing some breathing exercises.

Sometimes I just need to distract myself. [00:10:00] Sometimes I need to get outside. But yeah, not all tools are created equal so that's a great point.

Emma: Craig, I'm wondering when you were going through those anxiety and panic attacks and what was it, did someone suggest to you, maybe you might like to address your relationship with alcohol?

Or how did you figure out that was something that you needed to look at?

Craig: The painful hangovers were the, the, definitely the first thing. And I knew that what I was doing it didn't take much self-reflection to realize, hey, doing this every weekend, blackout drunk, you're 27 years old you need to outgrow this.

And I knew where it would eventually end up. My father was an alcoholic who drank himself to death, but he was an everyday alcoholic. And I, so I justified. I only drink on weekends. I'm only drinking with friends. My alcohol intake is therefore not a problem, but it clearly was because, certainly getting sick from drinking too much alcohol is not something that would be tolerated as a normal behavior.[00:11:00]

So I knew that. One of the things that I've known for almost all habit changes in all my life and especially with my background as a personal trainer, was that in most cases, removing the negative is far better than any positive you can add. For example, as a personal trainer, people come in and they wanna lose, 30 pounds or 15 kilos, whatever measurement you want to use, right?

They're working out three or four times a week and they're like, you know what, if I work out five or six times, I'm like, that'd be fine. But maybe the fact that you eat. 3000 calories at Cheesecake Factory on Friday night. Like maybe we should address that. Maybe we should just remove you going to Cheesecake Factory on Friday night and let's see if we can lose weight.

And the thing is, adding an extra workout might burn 500 calories, but removing you from Cheesecake Factory removes 3000 calories, which is almost a full pound of body weight, that body fat that you're gonna lose if you simply make that. Change, and I use this ridiculous analogy [00:12:00] in the dark sided discipline book that, imagine Emma and I were at the start of the Boston Marathon and we were both three hour marathoners and somebody from Nike walks up to us and they got two gifts for us, one for Emma, one for me, and for her.

They give her, the same shoes that the two hour marathon runners are using. So it's gonna shave 15 seconds off her time. And then I'm like, I'm really excited. Okay, whatcha gonna give me like some shorts or something And they hand me a 60 pound bag of sand. And they say, you gotta run the marathon with this.

Which one of those two things, the lightweight shoes or the 60 pound bag of sand is gonna have a bigger impact on the race, and obviously it's gonna be the negative. And so for everybody. In our lives, the ball and chains that keep us stuck to the ocean floor are much more powerful than any swim lesson that you could give somebody stuck to the, bottom of the ocean floor with a ball and chain.

And it's until we get rid of those things. And what are those things in life? Often they're the toxic environments and unfortunately the toxic people that's drag us around. Drag us down into [00:13:00] drinking and if we simply removed ourselves from drinking environments or from around being around people who only, their only purpose in life was to get us to drink our lives would be a whole lot better.

The controlling our alcohol intake would be so much easier in most cases. And so that's what I aimed to do when I had my anxiety attacks, was I simply looked at what could possibly be causing this and. Alcohol was an obvious one. Now, there were other things that were probably. Big factors such as I'm very introverted by nature and I didn't have an outlet, so I didn't do journaling.

I was an introvert. I didn't really talk to anybody. I messaged people on MSN Messenger, which was the thing, 20 years ago, for a throwback. And, but other than that, and I've talked to my personal training clients, I didn't call somebody and chat with them for three hours a night because that's just not my thing.

But that probably would've been super helpful for me. But I didn't have those things. And so, you know, I even went and I got a [00:14:00] dog. And that was helpful. But I think what the things that I did add, so in some cases there are things that you can add, was learning how to breathe properly. So I was, I.

Spending a lot of time at my desk, hunched over, and, you're hunched over, you're stressed out, and you don't breathe properly. You end up actually hyperventilating, breathing in and out really fast, and that makes your anxiety worse. So I learned to sit better. I learned to do tai chi breathing and Qi Gong breathing, and yoga, breathing, and meditation, breathing, the same.

It's all the same type of breathing, and that was a real benefit to me. And then that even if you've never had an anxiety attack, that's gonna be incredibly beneficial to you. When you're stuck in traffic, when you're stuck in line in an airport, whenever you feel like, oh man, there's something in me that's rising up.

Learning how to do box breathing, whether it's four seconds in hold for four seconds, four seconds out hold for four seconds and repeating that or doing, I first learned this one from, and Dr. Andrew Weil, he had I think it was four seconds in seven second hold, eight seconds out. [00:15:00] And that, I can put myself to sleep in three minutes at, if I'm lying in bed just by going through a few rounds of that.

Wow. Yeah, so learning those breathing techniques that calm down what's called your vagal nerve. So your vagal nerve is in charge of your digestion and so many of your organs. And if you're really stressed out. People who ever get constipated 'cause they're stressed.

It's 'cause your like, vagal nerve is either frozen, I can't remember which. If it's either firing too much or frozen or something like that. And you need to calm it down. And then, if you just relax, relax, dude, don't be so clenched up. Don't have your butt hole puckered and you'll be all right.

And so what

Emma: of the, I don't know, sorry to interrupt, but one of the things I teach in New Zealand, we've got this, parenting. It's a, an organization called Plunket, and it's funded by the government. And when babies are born, you get this Plunket nurse. And so you go to Plunket and you meet with nurses and they've got lactation consultants and they've got all of these people to get your child through the first few years of their lives.

And one of the things they teach you is if your child is. Like a [00:16:00] toddler is constipated. You teach them to like, pretend they're blowing through a straw. And I guess that's the same of, and it like relaxes everything.

Craig: That's a potty training technique. Yeah. Yeah.

Emma: So you, there's Yeah.

Toddlers all throughout New Zealand sitting on the toilet going.

Craig: In Canada too. We had our toddler was blowing bubbles in her apple juice the other day on the potty. So yeah, I trying to un pucker the butt hole.

Emma: I didn't realize it was like a vagus nerve, like actual medical thing. I just, yeah, I don't know what, I thought it was some weird New Zealand distraction technique.

Kevin: So is it too spot on

if I use that for my nugget? That I learned this week later there. There you go.

Emma: Definitely. I'm going to the toilet to blow through a straw. I just had,

Craig: Just don't start blowing bubbles in your water as we, we do the podcast. That's all. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin: Nice. Sorry guys.

I just got, as a kid, I didn't have a straw. I just had poop candy. That was my parents like reward system, that there was a little jar out there that.

Emma: Oh

Kevin: [00:17:00] gosh.

Craig: Yeah.

Emma: So my eldest who's now, which sounds

Craig: awful, right? Yeah. I mean it was just yeah, that, those two words together. But yeah,

Emma: my eldest, who's now 16, she's gonna kill me if she hears this podcast, whatever.

She, when she was a toddler and I was potty training her. One of the techniques that was given to me was put the potty in front of the tv, put on something that they enjoy watching, and they just they go and then they realize the sensation and like when you're first taking their nappy off or their diaper off.

Yeah. And what we were really into at the time was the Sound of Music movie musical. Yeah. Yeah. So then when my, I met my now husband and we moved in together when she was about three and one day he. Is she singing Do a Dear On the Toilet? And I was like, yeah, she's pooping. He was like, why? And so I told him the story and so you can just hear from the lounge room.

Do a dear

Craig: Toddler pooping stories. Oh man. That's good though, because that'll be a good one for our, ours are still getting through it, [00:18:00] so

Emma: We need those help. Yeah. You need videos, you need mental notes of,

Craig: whatever. I don't know. You need everything. You need everything.

Emma: Just things to bring your teenagers back down to earth. Kev, like

Kevin: I lived my, yeah, my daughter's gonna be 18 this summer, and I live to embarrass her as much as I can. Whether it's on here that she doesn't listen to or elsewhere. No. Sorry,

Emma: I derailed, I'm quiet. Yeah no, I think

Craig: I was ending up there.

Basically that, you had asked me how did I know alcohol had to go and, it was just pretty obvious. And so I started removing myself from toxic environments and, the toxic people that were dragging me down. And that's part of the effortless discipline system. So earlier I mentioned elimination, preparation and connection.

And when you're a binge drinker, if you're an alcoholic, like my father was, I. These probably won't help as much, but if you're like, man I just, once a month I drink too much and whatever. Okay, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna eliminate yourself from those environments. [00:19:00] You're gonna eliminate alcohol from your home, and you're gonna eliminate the toxic people whose only purpose in your life is to drag you to drinking.

Now, here's the thing is you're gonna have friends. Who aren't toxic people, but you do end up drinking with them, or they're friends with the toxic people and you all end up together and they drink too. What you need to do is flip it to the planning and preparation side, so it's elimination first, then planning and preparation next.

And what I needed to do was, there were friends of mine who, I'd been friends with for 30 years and I didn't want to give those friends up. I made plans with them to do non-drinking activities, keep that friendship going, keep the social aspect of it going when I was doing my moving away from drinking.

And then the final part, the connection is let me just say one more thing on the elimination and the preparation is from Jam James Clear's atomic Habit Books we want, or Habit book, we wanna make the path to the bad habit as. As hard as possible, we might put as much friction up there so that, oh my gosh.

It's [00:20:00] like even if you binge eat potato chips, if you don't have potato chips in the house. You're not gonna eat them. If you have 'em in the house and you put them at least up in a cupboard that requires two ladders and a password to get to, you're not gonna eat 'em. But if you have a bag, potato chips right beside you, you're gonna eat the whole darn thing.

So put the friction in front of. You and the bad habit. And you can even do this with your phone 'cause a lot of people listening to this are gonna be addicted to their phone. You can use something like the Opal app. We talk about it in the book. We have so many of our clients use it. And the Opal app, OPAL for apple iPhone is.

Scott, it has 4 million downloads. It has 4.8 star review, and you set it up so that between the hours of two and five when I need to be the most focused at work, I can access social media, YouTube, email, text, anything on my phone, and therefore I've put friction in the way of distraction, and that will work.

On the flip side, you wanna plan and prepare to make the path to the good habit as easy as possible. So a [00:21:00] simple analogy for this is. As a personal trainer, we encountered a lot of people who just, you know, on their days off, they were supposed to do some exercise that we would give them or even just go for a walk and we'd hear all types of excuses because there was too much friction in the way of them doing it.

So we would tell them, put your workout clothes beside the bed. Put your workout shoes there, have your workout plan, print it out, and try and find a workout buddy. And that then makes the path to success less full of obstacles, less friction, and it's easier. So make the bad habit hard, make the good habit easy.

And then finally, the third component, which is a missing link in most people's lives is connection, which is another way to say. Accountability. So you know, through the coaching and work that you do at Reframe, you have a community of like-minded people. And what we found in our weight loss transformation contest, which was my original business that I ran for 15 years, is that when somebody came into the contest.

They posted a picture of themselves on [00:22:00] day one, and if anybody's familiar with the before and after fitness competitions, they're always like, Hey, take a picture at your ugliest on day one with a newspaper in the worst lighting possible. No makeup your hair all over the place and poof your belly out.

If somebody did that, if, because you didn't have to do it, but if somebody did that, that was a burn the boats moment. You're in a community of like-minded people. You said, this is me at my, not my best. And in 90 days from now I'm gonna lose a bunch of weight. And when you do that, even though they didn't like, this was all virtual community, this wasn't like, we're all in a room together, in a room together works great. If you go to a bootcamp workout or a class workout, that's really powerful. But this was all online and it was still as powerful as being in person. So they said this to all these people who they never met, never will meet. And those people held them accountable. Everybody was posting their updates.

And if somebody went two days without posting, they'd get all these messages from all the other people. Hey, where are you? Are you still doing good? And those [00:23:00] people who did post the before photos on day one. Tended to have the highest completion rate and the highest success rate and had the greatest chance of actually winning the contest where I was giving away, thousands of dollars to the people who won it in their categories.

So that connection component, which we call accountability and, there's the community aspect, but there's another aspect where it's accountability just to one person. And we frame this person as accountability to somebody you deeply do not want to disappoint. If you can find somebody in your life who you deeply do not want to disappoint, and you tell them what you are going to accomplish, your brain will not allow you to not move the mountains that have to be moved in order for you to accomplish that.

It's, if you have integrity and you tell somebody something, you will follow through on it. 'cause you don't wanna be seen as a hypocrite, especially by somebody you deeply do not wanna disappoint. So whether between those two things, you'll either have a community or you'll have a single person that you don't wanna disappoint.

The problem is when [00:24:00] people have a goal I'm gonna quit alcohol, but I'm not gonna tell anyone, man, you're the easiest person to let down. And you have no accountability. You have no support, and it's very hard to do it alone. But also there's no consequence if you let yourself down. But there is a consequence if you let others down that you don't wanna disappoint.

So you do the elimination, the preparation, and have that connection. And my goodness, you can make amazing changes in your life in a very short time.

Emma: Oh, a hundred percent. I love it when the meetings that I host, so I host meetings for people down under, it's when New Zealand, Australia time zones predominantly.

We do get other people. We get some people in the states who can't sleep or, their, whatever their life habits. We get Kevin when he can't sleep. But the people that come on my meetings, and it's a small group. There's maybe 60 to 70 of us. And it's the same people three nights a week.

And the people that'll come on and be like, okay, I've got a really tricky day ahead of me tomorrow, but, so I'm letting you all know that I don't wanna drink tomorrow, and so it'll be Monday night.

Emma: I don't wanna drink [00:25:00] tomorrow. I will see you on Wednesday. And and that's, you've just announced to a room, a virtual room of 60 odd people. I want you to hold me accountable. And just that, like declaring it and saying it out loud makes such a difference. And then, when the person comes on two days later and they're like, I got through it and I did it, and the whole room just, applauds and it's a huge sense of achievement.

And reward. And reward. But yes, that, so like you were saying, that community announcing it and knowing that you're not just letting yourself down, but you're letting other people that you trust and respect and admire down as well. It's huge. It's a huge motivating thing to just keep going.

Yeah. Because when you're in that Tuesday where it's tough, in that moment of temptation, you can channel back and think.

Those people, I'm doing it for those people. And even though they're not there, you can imagine them encouraging you.

Craig: And,

Emma: And

Craig: you know,

Emma: Napoleon Hill talks about this in this book that's very popular in America, called Think and Grow Rich, and he talks about the power of the mastermind.[00:26:00]

Which was the first time I ever heard about it. And most people today think of Mastermind. So you know what you just described, like people getting together in real time. But he talked about having like Abraham Lincoln in his mastermind and that works too. Like you can just in. Take people from your life and imagine, what would they do in this situation or what would they say if they saw me doing this right now?

And use that as the power and strength and support that you need to get through a tough day or a challenging evening or a business meeting or whatever, where the peer pressure is coming at you. And even though positive like-minded people aren't there, you can imagine them on your shoulder and them cheering you on and supporting you and getting you through it.

The power of connection is so vitally important, and unfortunately I think that people discount it in this day and age

Kevin: or feel like maybe I. They have it with just a superficial, whether it's just likes on social media or, that kind of connection, which, I think can be very powerful too.

Mm-hmm. [00:27:00] I mean, I'm not discounting that because that's what I used to become alcohol free myself was pretty much Instagram that community.

Craig: Because Kevin, what most, what a lot of people will say when I post about the power of people is that the biggest criticism or question that I'll get is, I'm just surrounded by negative people, but I'm surrounded by negative people.

Where do I find these people?

Kevin: Yeah.

Craig: And yours is the greatest example of all. Like when you go and take positive action, you'll attract them. You can use, you're using social media. There's a great phrase one of my friends gave me, he said, use social media, but don't let social media be used on you. And I think people can understand that.

Use it for your purposes. Create content for it. Change your habits through it, but don't let it be used on you by you seeing something on Instagram and then you know, you rushing out and doing it without thinking. But that's brilliant what you did because. I've never heard anybody say that they used Instagram in that way, but it is absolutely [00:28:00] brilliant and when you are in a position like that, you gotta use everything to your advantage that you possibly can.

So you know. There are, I think one of the most important messages for the people out there who think they're surrounded by negative people is for them to, first of all, believe that there are positive people out there. And there are, and they are. They exist in your town. They exist online. Yeah. There's a lot of cruel people online too.

Don't get me wrong. But if you have a way of filtering that out and blocking people and you can curate, you know who sees your stuff and get it down to just positive people, then you can really tap into that power. And I don't think that there's anything as powerful as accountability.

Kevin: Yeah, especially external accountability to a point, like I'm very externally motivated.

By what you were just saying, like I'd put out there, that's why I would put like a day count like, hey, I'm this number of days. Or I would. Connect with people and use it for, I would [00:29:00] create, I created a new account. So I had my old account, which was a lot of alcohol, coffee, and probably barbecue pictures.

And I was like, okay, that's what my family is and that I'm gonna come over here and create this new account and follow new people only that I want to see related to this so it was just a very well curated thing that I could go into when I needed it. And it starts with a, like on someone's post commenting, a comment here, a comment there, them commenting on a post that you make.

And we sometimes feel this need to. We see other people have connections already, like in reframe with, in community meetings or in the forum, people see connections that are already built and they like, I want that, or they feel left out when it's, I. Those people have made those connections over months and years.

Be patient, take your time and just, as far as doing something that you [00:30:00] know is gonna be beneficial even if you don't see the payoff right away. I.

Craig: Man, I just think that's so genius at what you did and I'm, proud of you and applaud to you for doing that. And I think it's a great thing because you don't, Instagram accounts are free.

Yeah. And you can use these things in as a tool, it's another tool to go in the toolbox for people to use in a positive manner.

Emma: Absolutely. Yeah. When I joined Reframe, it was a big thing to have your Instagram handle in your Zoom name. So when you were joining meetings. So when I first joined, before I even got sober, I just started following every single Instagram handle I could see on the Zoom, and I eventually just liked, commented hearted my way through to a algorithm on Instagram that's.

Sobriety posts, alcohol free posts, funny pandas, Labradors, and raccoons. It's all that I get on Instagram now, which is awesome. It's,

Craig: yeah. You're using it and not letting it be used on you. Yeah. If I could bestow a [00:31:00] lesson upon everybody, especially young people today it's that technique that you are doing.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. My, my wife will still wake up with maybe 10 to 30 reels that I sent her overnight but one of the things I wanted to, I. Ask you too was, about just discipline in general. 'cause I tend to lump discipline in with things like willpower and self-control and these words that people use.

And it's hard to put a, we all have a feeling or we all know how we would explain it. But we, I think we look at people and say oh, that person's so disciplined, or they have such self control or willpower or that, and I feel all of these things are a tool. But they're gonna run out willpower, motivation.

Those things are gonna run out. And you talk about how discipline isn't one size fits all and focusing on I believe you refer to it as putting we wanna put a level 10 effort into our level 10 problem, like our big problems. We wanna [00:32:00] dive into that versus putting all of our effort into something that may not move the needle at all.

How do we go about that and what does that mean, like a level 10 effort into a level 10 problem? Because. Sometimes is that a lot of pressure? Is there a way to, okay, you know what? I'm not feeling it today. How can I rest? Is that part of it? What do you suggest to people?

Craig: So one of the big lessons there, we'll get to the definition of discipline and then we'll go to that level of 10 level 10 effort and level 10 problems.

Situation is that when we see somebody and we think that they're disciplined, because they are physically in good shape or. They do something that we just say, oh, they are disciplined. It's not a transferrable trait. And I'll give you two examples of this. So first, imagine a guy who's number one in the world of this sport and he spends 12 hours a day practicing saying this sport.

You are gonna say, man, that guy's the most disciplined. And Tiger Woods was [00:33:00] the most disciplined golfer in the world in 2007. He was also the most undisciplined husband in the world at the same time. So simultaneously, you have a man who is number one in the world in a discipline, and he's disciplined at it, and everybody went around fearful of him in terms of his golf game.

But when we found out what he was doing with 10, 20, 30 other women behind his wife's back, that's the most undisciplined thing you can do. So this is a man who. Had both of those categories. So when you see somebody disciplined at one thing, it doesn't mean that they're disciplined at all things. Yeah, and the other story that I have around this is from 2010 to 2018, I spoke at an event every year in the fitness business industry where all these personal trainers would come in.

We had trainers from Australia, New Zealand, come all the way over to California to attend this event. And every year I spoke, I would see the same people in the audience. I'd be like, oh, there's Kevin, there's Emma, and this year they're 8% body fat. They got eight bucks in their [00:34:00] bank account.

'cause they don't know sales and marketing, they haven't done anything. Alright. We up, we stand up there for two days and we teach 'em sales and marketing. But during the breaks they're off talking to the other trainers about workouts and nutrition. So what happens after a year, they go home and they put all the sales and marketing stuff up on the shelf.

All they do is take the work out and nutrition information that they learned on the break from other trainers and they put a level 10 effort into it and they come back the next year and I look back up and there, there's Emma and Kevin back in the same uh, seats as they were last year. And this year there's 7% body fat with $7 in their bank account.

And it's, it was, that was when my mind lit up here's a person who you would describe as disciplined. Wow, you got six pack abs. People think that's a level of discipline, a mark of discipline, but they had no discipline around building sales and marketing systems for their business. They were too scared to ask Mrs. Jones for $500 for a personal training package. They had no discipline. In another area of their life. [00:35:00] And so discipline is not this once you got disciplined here, you're disciplined everywhere. Like just because you read a book a week doesn't mean that you're gonna have a hard conversation with your wife about how your marriage is not as strong as it should be.

Just 'cause you work out twice a day doesn't mean that you're gonna be able to talk to your team member at work who's, not performing on a project and you need them to step up or you're both gonna get fired. Or you're gonna have to fire them if you're the bots, like I've seen people who can do amazing physical things but can't have a hard conversation because they're not disciplined in that area.

So forget everything you believe about just because someone's disciplined in X, it means they're disciplined in A through Z. It's not true. And because I saw that, that with the personal trainers, that was the first time that I went. They're putting a level 10 effort into a level one problem, which was their body fat.

Going from 8% body fat to 7% body fat has absolutely zero benefit to anybody's life.

Kevin: They're at the starting line and putting

Those shoes on instead of taking off the backpack.

Craig: Yeah. It's absolutely [00:36:00] nothing. And they're putting a level one effort into a level 10 problem.

Now, why do we do that? We put a level one or level two or level three, or even like a level six effort into our level 10 problem 'cause it's so darn scary and big. Yeah. For example, if you're, if you've been married for 20 years and you know your kids are very busy teenagers and you and your wife are just.

Uber drivers who live in the same house and you barely see each other and you maybe get five minutes a week and your marriage is going cold, that's a level 10 problem. For the average guy to look at that, he's I don't even know where to start. And if I send her flowers, maybe take her out once a month.

Like it's gonna take five years before anything actually, before it becomes a level nine problem. Like it's just such an elephant in the room problem that people wanna ignore it. But if you flip it and you look at like, oh, you know, I can go and start a YouTube channel, I can start a YouTube channel today, put a YouTube video up, and man, now I'm a YouTuber.

And you can get that done in 24 hours. It's like a level one or two problem and you can put a level five effort into it and get all the dopamine hits you want. [00:37:00] So that's why, humans are wired that we want to take the path of least resistance. So we don't put that effort into our level 10 problem.

And so back to the definition of discipline that we have in the book is that I. Once you've identified your level 10 problem in life, whether it's your marriage, whether it's your alcohol intake, whether it's your health, whether it's your financial situation, maybe you're in $30,000 worth of credit card debt, or maybe it's an opportunity that you have in life.

Oh my gosh, I, if I write three chapters of the book and I submit it to a publisher that can gimme a huge book deal, that's my level 10 opportunity. It doesn't have to be a problem. But if you have a level 10 problem or opportunity. You have to give it a level 10 effort, and if you're giving it a Level 10 effort, what it deserves, then you're disciplined.

And if you're not, everything else that you're doing from cold plunging to working out twice a week to doing marathons, ultra marathons, triathlons, it's all entertainment and distraction. I. If you are taking any time away from fixing the biggest problem in your life, now I'm [00:38:00] not saying you can't do those things, but it's only after you've made sure that you're giving your big problem a level 10 effort, and then you're like, okay, I still got four hours a week left so I can do, I can entertain myself in those four hours a week, but until I give my big problem the effort it deserves, I'm being undisciplined.

And I'll give you an example of that because people might be still trying to figure it out. So my marriage, my wife and I would describe our marriage as a nine outta 10. We've only been married for four years, but we have three kids under three. And so when you have three kids under three, you're busy and the kids are first.

And so the marriage, like when you just got married compared to what your marriage is like when you have three kids under three, there's a lot of differences, right? And so if you don't proactively. Go after your marriage and making sure that it's as strong as possible. It can slightly decay.

So we said, you know what? It's a nine outta 10. We wanna get it to a 10, outta 10. Fortunately that's the biggest problem in my life. I don't have a lot of other problems. Used to [00:39:00] have a lot of big problems, but right now that's the biggest problem. So we sat down and this is what everybody needs to do, and this believe it or not.

I didn't even realize this exercise until after I'd written the book, so it's not in the book, but if you read the book and you're like, you find out, okay I've figured out my level 10 problem and I'm putting a level six effort into it. Now what? Here's the, now what, you sit down and you describe what would it look like to put a level 10 effort into my level 10 problem?

What would it look like? And just come up with 10 or 15 bullet points. For us, it was like reread five love languages, make sure that we have dinner dates every night. So we have three kids, but we're fortunate. We have two nannies. So we have dinner at four o'clock while our nannies are still here.

We eat from four until four 20, and we have that 20 minutes together at the dinner table while the kids play with the nannies. We cook dinner together five or five nights outta the week. And then we also make time for 15 minutes in the morning before the kids get up and we do this, and we do this, and we do this and we do this.

And there's some, some communication stuff I have [00:40:00] to work on as an introvert and I'm working on that and active listening and all this stuff. But we made it clear here are all the things that would look like if I would, if my job was to give, Joe Blow a level 10 plan. For his level 10 problem.

That's what I would do. I'd say, here, Joe, this is what it would look like to put a level 10 effort into your problem. Go and do those things. Now, some of them are gonna be more effective and more important, so I'm gonna prioritize them here. Number one, do this. Do this one thing, man, and it'll get you like 40% of your results.

But that's what you have to do. And then it's.

How important is it if it's very important for you to solve this problem? Don't take a day off, like I'm not taking a day off from the habits that we listed. Because, it's not like it's an exhausting thing, it's just being cognizant of doing things. And so you build out that plan and that's the ultimate definition of discipline.

And then when you have free time, you can go and do some of these other things that you find beneficial to you.

Kevin: Thanks for sharing that. A couple of [00:41:00] questions that popped into my head. Were like, I'm sure people are like I have six level 10 problems that I need to solve.

Craig: Have a, now everybody, you have a 10, you might have a 9.9, you might have a 9.8 as well, but you have a 10.

You have one 10.

Kevin: Yeah.

Craig: And you may have one 10 in your professional life and yet, and a 10 in your personal life. And you can have those two tens. Yeah. But we fixed 10 and obviously you're gonna give the effort to the other ones. And then eventually you're just gonna get rid of 'em.

Kevin: Yeah. The new ones will pop up. It's a picture like the life wheel because I always think about that and, the life wheel has those different areas on it where it's your relationships, your your work, your finances, your Health. Your hobbies, all of that. And you assign a number to it, one of 10.

And the one thing I always tell people okay, that's a five. I don't start we can talk about what would it look like if it was a 10 and yeah what does that look like at a 10? But if it's at a five. What do you need to do to get it to a six? What's that next incremental [00:42:00] step that 1% better atomic habits like the, that entry point?

Because two, if I'm looking at going from a five or a two, whatever to a 10 and something that's really important, that can be why I'm procrastinating or avoiding it to begin with because it's too big. Yeah.

Craig: You make a very good point.

Kevin: So how can I break that down? And it sounds like that's what you do too.

You're like, here's the steps.

Craig: I do. I do. The 80 20 principle to it. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in 80 20 principle. And for anybody who's never heard that technique before, it's that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. So if you were go to, if you go to the gym and you do five exercises in a row for your biceps, the first one is really giving you about 80% of your results.

And then the other four, it's diminishing returns as you go. So I would look for, what's that thing, that one activity or change that you can make right now. And in terms of the alcohol, it's probably eliminating toxic people from your life. We're just gonna block their phone numbers.

We're not gonna [00:43:00] go near them. We're not gonna go to their haunts wherever they are because those are the things that are dragging you down to drinking probably the most. So we're removing the balls and chains by, attacking the, getting rid of the 150 pound ball and chain before we get rid of the 10 pound ball in chain.

'cause that's gonna make a big difference.

Emma: So just before we wrap up, if you were to give someone listening one takeaway, one like key thing to help them be more disciplined, where would, what would it be?

Craig: It's absolutely the power of accountability. And one thing that we do with our clients, and you can do with a pure friend that you know, someone you deeply do not wanna disappoint, someone from that you meet in the Zoom room and find their Instagram handle is these three questions.

And the three questions are customized for every person. So we might have a client who struggles to get up on time and hit snooze. So we'll say, okay, every day at eight o'clock in the morning, you have to text me. The answer to three questions and it'll be, did I get up on time? Did I go to bed on time?

And did I get done [00:44:00] work on time? 'cause if I get done work on time, then I have a better chance of going to bed on time. And if I have a better chance of going to bed on time, I have a better chance of getting up on time. And in addition to those questions, we end each one of those with, if not, why not?

Because if we do that, did you leave work on time or get home from work on time? Yes. Okay, great. So you're doing everything right, but if you say no. If not, why not? And now we start to reverse engineer. Joe came to me at four o'clock and said, what do you, would I help him with this?

And I said, yes, even though I knew I had to go home, I'm just not very good at saying no to Joe. Oh, okay. So now we've identified a problem that we can start to reverse engineer with solutions and then, did you get to bed on time? No. If not, why not? Because I helped Joe till five 30. I didn't get home on time.

Then everything was delayed and my, my wife Mary was upset at me. So instead of watching Netflix for 30 minutes, we argued for an hour and I didn't get to bed until nearly 11 o'clock and I wanted to get to bed at nine 30. Okay. Did you get up on time? No. Because of all of those other things. So we can reverse engineer and it [00:45:00] and what's the linchpin in all of that?

That Joe Guy, we need to figure out how to deal with Joe. So you get up on time and you can extrapolate this to the drinking and all that sort of stuff. 'cause usually there's like that one trigger, that one negative domino. And maybe you've seen the Instagram meme, whereas a guy with like tweezers knocking over a tiny domino and then six dominoes later, the domino is the size of a door.

And that's just the power of negative dominoes going wrong. Yeah. So that accountability to somebody, those three daily questions with the, if not, why not that keep you on track and then allow you to reverse engineer and get 1% better every day so you change your habits and improve your life.

Emma: Amazing. If not, why not?

Yeah. So good.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. I love looking back at the, what went wrong here or, what could I do differently? Appreciate you sharing that. Thanks Craig for joining us today on the re FRAMEABLE podcast. Really appreciate it. Anything you would like to say parting, feel free.

Craig: Yeah. One of the philosophies I live by is, everything in life is [00:46:00] easier when you know more good people.

And so when you know more good people, it's gonna be easier to get out of those toxic environments. It's gonna be easier to get away from toxic people, and it's gonna be easier for you to put together new good habits. So even if you're an introverted like me, going out and building a network of good people will bring you.

Everything in life so much faster and so much easier.

Emma: So true.

Kevin: Thank you so much for sharing with us.

[00:47:00]