Chilly 'Discipline' Verses lovely 'Second Nature'. We win.

Discipline is about forcing somebody to do something they don't want to do. Like pushing water uphill, this takes energy. Running a business or a life where your team members are determined to go in opposing directions is costly, wasteful, and no fun. Especially if its the innner struggle of 'Me V Me'.

'Discipline' is the usual translation of 'shitsuke', the 5th of the '5S' philosophy made famous by Toyota. But Toyota is not wasteful. So why is this Chinese kanji translated as cold, hard 'Discipline'?

In an effort to undestand this character, I showed it to my Asian friends, asking when they would use it. All Japanese said its used by parents, on their children and dogs, to train them into good behavoir. My friend’s faces didn't look happy when they looked at this word. My Taiwanese housemate however had the opposite reaction. 'We don't have this charater in Chinese. How lovely it is!'

Its a character made up of '身', a meaning body, and 美 meaning 'beautiful'.

So literally, its about embodying a beautiful way of being. Who would resist that?

The things that will change and beautify our future often take effort and novelty, which us conservative humans are programmed to resist. Wether its planting flower seeds, flossing our teeth, or studying a new language, we can get the energy two ways: joyful anticipation of the beauty to come, or fear of consequences of not doing it.

Go for love.

Go for the first route, and make a pathway to get your team there too.

I've re-translated ‘shitsuke’ from ‘disciple’ to setting something up to become 'Second Nature'. Something that was once resisted got rewarded every time, as you do when socialising dogs and infants. Now thr feels natural: wiping a mess, stretching before bed. Not doing it is harder than doing it, as a feeling of dissatisfaction lingers.

Look at how the power of ‘Second Nature resulted in a few billion of us effortlessly ‘writing a book’ of our lives on social media. The dopamine hit of being ‘liked’, and the mirror neurones of seeing our peers write their stories then elicited our own.

In my Home Harmonising I’ve seen so many diaries with a few pages filled in, all in January. The rewards werent built in, and that was the end of that.

We can be leaders who to make sure valuable actions are packaged as fun, interesting, straightforward, or what ever it takes for ourselves and our supporters to do naturally,

Irresistibly. Its cultivated nature, Second Nature, and it makes life wonderful.