Rowing taught me … that the secret to sustained success is NOT discipline

I go rowing a lot – in some weeks I am on the water five times or more, usually in the morning before work. I get up at 5.55am, meet my rowing partner at the club at 6.30am and get to work just before 9am.

Sometimes people ask me how much I row and when I tell them, the reaction usually is “oh, I wouldn’t have the discipline”.

Can I tell you a secret? It’s not about (self-)discipline.

Discipline is “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour, using punishment to correct disobedience.” Sounds hard – and it is hard. If I had to rely on discipline, I would have a negotiation with myself every morning whether to get out of bed and the reason I might eventually get up is because I didn’t want to feel bad about myself (my punishment) all day. Really hard and exhausting – and not sustainable.

It’s the same in a business context – yes, as a boss you can roll out a new initiative everybody is supposed to adopt. And if you can have a report which you review every week and – crucial step – have and enforce punishment for those who do not comply, you will probably succeed in driving adoption (and probably a fair bit of attrition as well). But boy, I am already exhausted by just writing about it.

So what’s a better way? A better way is to design circumstances in a way that make the desired behaviour the easy option and the undesired behaviour hard.

In rowing, my desired behaviour (at least the night before) is to go rowing in the morning. So I make sure to confirm with my rowing partner that we’ll meet at 6.30am the next morning. Now when my alarm goes off, getting out of bed is unpleasant but it’s the easy option compared to picking up my phone and making a lame excuse to my rowing partner (I hate letting people down!). She is probably already up and brewing her coffee, so I better get going.

Back to business – think about how can you make adopting your initiative the easy option and resisting hard(er). This includes designing the initiative itself, if you want a initiative to succeed make it easy – lean & mean processes, the minimum amount of red tape you can get away with, clear & simple rules.

You can also tap into behavioral science and the currently red-hot topic of micro or atomic habits: make it easy to get started, and break the new behavior down into mini chunks. So think about how can you get people to have a success moment/ feeling of accomplishment with 1 or 2 minutes and then build on this.