Discipline should feel hard. If it's too hard to repeat, it's not discipline, it's your ego. So, I remember I went to it was called Body Pump.
Body Pump was where you would do like 30 reps of one exercise four times. And I remember I went to Body Pump three days in a row and then I went home and I went to go upstairs to my room and I collapsed trying to walk up the stairs. And so what I realized is that if something feels too hard or too punishing or it's too advanced too soon, you're going to associate it with negativity and you'll avoid it.
You're essentially punishing yourself. And then when we punish ourselves, that means we also avoid the thing that could potentially lead to punishment. [music] So if every time I work out, I hurt really bad after, I'm going to eventually avoid working out because I know what comes after working out is feeling really bad and sore after.
We want to make our tasks so achievable that we feel good after we've done them. And then what happens is if we do something, we feel good after we do it. Then we want to do it again because we like doing things that feel good.
High performers, they're not going to be sharper longer than somebody else. They just know when they're not and to delay the decision. There's somebody that's probably before your time if you're watching this video, but his name is Brian Tracy, and he popularized this idea, and I remember it to this day, which is called Eat the Frog.
The premise is this. If you had to eat a live frog every morning, like it's live. This thing's like flapping in your mouth, right?
[music] Everything else would be like, "Dude, it's a breeze. I ate a frog this morning. " That frog represents your hardest, highest leverage task.
Okay? The one that you would avoid, but that would move your life forward the most because we know eating frogs is powerful. Identify something you've been avoiding.
Now, we're going to plan to do it first thing tomorrow morning. We are going to execute it before you check your email, your Slack, your Instagram, your Facebook, your WhatsApp, your Signal. I don't know what you use, but before everything, you're just going to do that and you're going to say, "I am not allowed to do anything else until it's done.
" Do the hard thing first. Reward yourself second. Choosing to [music] tolerate fear and discomfort is how I've been able to transform everything that I have done, everything I've been terrified from.
From content creation to public speaking to running a giant company to buying multiple buildings. Here's the thing. Fear is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Fear means your [music] brain is working properly. It's not wrong that you feel scared. Your brain is wired for survival, not success.
It will continue to feel scared until you do the thing. The fear will be the strongest before you have the breakthrough. Say you're terrified of public speaking.
You're going to step on that stage. [music] This happens to me every time. Mouth dry.
Then within 15 seconds, my heart rate starts to go from like 190 to [music] like 150. And then within a minute, I start to feel like I've spit in my mouth again. And then within 2 minutes, I don't feel any of it.
It's not because I tried to get rid of the fear. It's because I didn't run away from the situation. [music] What I learned in doing all these things is that my emotions follow my emotion.
That is how you behave your way into confidence [music] and you build up so much evidence that it would be unreasonable not to be confident. Speaking truthfully without emotionally vomiting. A lot of people lose respect for themselves because of what they say to other people and then they walk away thinking, "I shouldn't have said that.
" This is when people speak from unmanaged discomfort rather than speaking truthfully in alignment with the results they want. A question I ask myself all the time is what do I want to have happen from this conversation? Like what's the action I want this person to take?
People go around in the workplace, in their friendships, in their relationships emotionally vomiting because it feels good in the short term and it feels really bad in the long term because you don't build that self-respect. And so if you think about it, self-respect is like fitness. You just do it one rep at a time.
Every time you choose not to betray [music] yourself and every time you betray yourself, you lose self-respect. Because here's the thing, people who really respect themselves, they just leave situations and people who don't respect them, they don't complain about it. And they certainly don't YouTube, Google, search videos about it.
They just dip. They ghost them and they leave. So self-respect is built in systems that make it easy for us to keep promises to ourselves.
Success [music] does not discriminate. Confidence does not discriminate. It doesn't care where you've come from.
[music] It doesn't care about your background. It doesn't care about your experience. All it cares about is the fact [music] that you put in the work to get it.
Here's the thing. Your brain gathers evidence. And evidence is what builds the identity and confidence over time.
Our brains like to predict [music] what's likely to happen. If you've never done something before, your brain says, "I don't know what could happen, so I'm [music] going to make you scared. " And if you're scared, you're going to avoid it, which means that you won't die.
Right? Because our brains are wired for survival, not success. And so [music] it is crazy to think that you would actually have confidence when you haven't done the thing yet.
You will become confident once you've done the thing because your brain does it. It sees you didn't die and it says it's okay. You can do it again.
Now, [music] here's the thing. I wasn't like forever confident now because just like a muscle that you work out gets weak if you don't put it under [music] pressure. So does confidence.
Confidence is like a muscle. So if you don't work out that muscle, it's just going to get weaker and weaker over time. We measure people by what they cost you, not what they say.
Just because somebody talks up a big game doesn't mean that they should be in your life. If somebody makes it harder to behave like the person I respect being, they are too expensive to have in my life. Like no matter how charming, how connected, or how important they are.
People ask me all the time, Ila, what do I do? My boss, I know they don't respect me. How do I manage them up?
You don't. You leave. Person's not going to change because of you.
People barely can get themselves to change. And I know that you're probably thinking, well, but this job, I can't get another job or like this is my business partner. like I have to make it work or I've been married for this.
Like I understand, but at the same time, there's a quote that comes to mind every time I think of this, which is like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting a different result. The situation won't change unless you do. And you don't change by wanting.
You don't change by wishing. And you don't change by feeling. You change by doing something different.
Someone can't disrespect you if you leave the situation. And so allowing someone to continually disrespect us is when you give away your own power. Discipline means stopping a behavior immediately.
But that almost always fails. So you don't need to be perfect right away. You just need to take a step towards the next best alternative.
What you want to do is identify a realistic better, not perfect alternative to [music] your habit. So instead of drinking vodka, maybe you drink a seltzer. Instead of drinking a seltzer, maybe you have a craft beer.
Instead of a craft beer, maybe you're going to have a non-alcoholic beer. Maybe then instead of a non-alcoholic beer, then you're [music] going to have a diet coke. And then but after Diet Coke, you're gonna say, "I'm gonna have a sparkling water.
" And you see how it goes. It's like you take tiny little steps. [music] You don't just make the big swing all at once.
And so small steps in the right direction turn into big changes over time. It's just that most people are so impatient with themselves. They don't allow themselves to get there and [music] they stay stuck in this cycle of going big change and then back out, big change again, back out.
Stop seeking approval. Every time that you wait for somebody else to say go, you give them control over your future. You want to have your own approval and approval from what I would call like your future board of directors.
Who are the people you look up to? Would they approve of you doing this? Most people are waiting for permission from people who aren't even where they want to be and aren't even achieving their own goals, let alone helping you achieve yours.
They ask their parents, they ask [music] their spouse, they asking 12,000 people on social media and then they feel more confused because you have contrary [music] evidence. you feel more confused because the thing is this, asking for opinions does not create clarity. Action creates [music] clarity.
Most people give you advice based on their fears, not on their knowledge. And so they're giving you advice based on what didn't work for them, didn't work for their dad, mom, spouse, partner, brother, whatever it is. And here's the thing, anyone who's successful, anyone who makes money, you know how they got there?
By conviction, not consensus of everybody in their life. I would even go so far to say this. If everybody approves of your decision, it's probably wrong.
Discipline isn't sexy. It is boring. And boring is what scales.
Boring is what works. People say all the time, "I would love to see a day in your life, Ila. " And I'm like, "Well, that's boring as because my life is a series of systems strung together every day.
I have a system for every aspect of my life. " But here's the thing. Those systems, those are discipline and they're real.
Are they boring? For sure they look boring from the outside, but they get the results that I'm looking for in my life. Doing simple things consistently is what actually leads to massive success.
I have literally never had a time where I have woken up on a single day and thought, I want to do every single thing today. Because most days I wake up, I at least don't want to do one thing. I don't want to do the workout.
I don't want to talk to the person. I don't want to have the hard conversation. I don't want to do the interview.
But I also know that feelings are fleeting. And I want the long-term satisfaction of knowing that I can stick with something, knowing I have control over myself, and knowing that I've mastered something. Discipline is not just going to bring you closer to your goals.
It's going to bring you closer to the person that you want to be. Stop avoiding hard conversations. People won't say it out loud, but they are counting every single time that you avoid doing the hard thing.
Every time that you dodge the truth, you lose your spot. And so, executive presence means being the one who will say what others won't say. I remember there was a quote from Mark Zuckerberg that I actually really like and he said, "Your job as a CEO is to be a truth teller.
You have to tell the truth even if nobody else will. " So, what you want to do is you want to replace avoidance with confrontation. It's not that you just want to confront people and loosely call people out, act like an but you want to confront them with composure.
And what that means is you want to be honest because when you're honest, that builds trust. When you soften the [music] truth, when you avoid the truth, you create confusion. And when you name names, you become the person to look for when you want solutions.
