Motivation vs. Discipline: What are we teaching students?

Motivation and discipline are both about getting things done.  

• Motivation is emotional, we work when we “feel” like it.
• Discipline is intellectual, we work because it’s a good idea.

When I think about emotions that make me “feel” like doing things, my short list is:

1. Love: I just REALLY want to do things I love and be with people I love.
2. Happiness: I enjoy feeling happy (who doesn’t?), and I find it easy to indulge in things that make me feel happy
3. Hunger: The need to fill myself, physically or metaphorically, is insistent and grows continually until it is fulfilled.
4. Anger: Sometimes I just really want to GET someone or GET BACK at someone. It’s hard to think of anything else when I feel that way.
5. Fear: I don’t like bad things to happen to me.  Avoiding trouble and pain is important enough to put everything else on hold until I’m out of danger.

All of those things are very MOTIVATING.  I act after I FEEL.  Motivation is REACTIVE, based on circumstances.  If you exist in a motivation mind-set, someone or something else is always controlling you.

I often hear people talk about ways they try to motivate people.  Based on my above understanding, that suggests to me what they actually mean is that they are trying to control people.  That’s a problem for a few reasons.  First, it’s temporary, and will not be sustained when the motivator is gone.  Second, it’s dangerous because even when it is done with love and for the best reasons, people simply resent being controlled.  Lastly, it’s self-centered, as if the people’s achievement was about accomplishing your goal of making them do something.  Working with people is about helping THEM, not satisfying your own need for control.

When I think about things that are a good idea, my short list is:

1. Exercise: I feel better and have a better life-view when I’m exercising regularly
2. Practice: Improving my skills, polishing my chops, and generally improving my professional facility helps me be ready for professional opportunities
3. Metronomes and A/V recorders: “Honesty Devices” as I call them.  Intended for daily use.
4. Reading: Learning new things and having new experiences through reading keeps me in touch with the world and fills me with humility and wonder.
5. Writing: Creating valuable things and passing my ideas on to others can have positive effects and start new ideas in others that I will never know about
6. Adding Value: Teaching, talking, and pouring myself into others for their benefit will always have a good return.  I don’t know anyone who ever regretted it.

These things are not particularly emotionally energizing.  They all require DISCIPLINE.  As my leadership guru, John Maxwell said, “no one is excited about a paper when they’re still writing it”.  They’re VERY excited after it’s done.  Discipline is PROACTIVE, based on the goals, and the will of the individual.  It is internal, and if you exist in a discipline mind-set, you control yourself.

“To do right is wonderful.  To teach others to do right is even more wonderful – and much easier.”  ~Mark Twain

When I hear people talking about discipline, they’re usually talking about punishment. It is not possible to “discipline” someone.  The only kind of discipline is self-discipline, it’s an unemotional choice made freely by a person to improve their situation.  If you got someone to behave how you wanted by doing something bad to them, you didn’t discipline them, you motivated them with punishment.

I find the public schools to be very motivation-heavy.  Social pressure and grading creates a fear environment, and students learn how to survive, being led from one emotion to another all day, avoiding pain when they can, and generally escaping punishment as much as possible.  There are plenty of individual exceptions, but that’s how the system is set up.  The expectation is: do as you’re told, or else.

In my teaching, all my assignments are discipline-heavy, the early ones especially.  I teach with a discipline-bias for two reasons:  First, because so much of my success comes from consistent discipline.  Second, because it makes the experience of learning with me instantly different, and quickly removes any negative school baggage from the relationship.  In the first few weeks that I work with students, I see most transform from being semi-directionless, looking for instructions and an emotional charge, to being disciplined, focused, and looking for accountability.  Their capacity for self-determination was always there, they were just used to not connecting with it.

The first and most important large assignment I give is “Artist Scales”, which I adapted from my work with Leigh Howard Stevens.  It is a colossal undertaking, but any 6th grader with a 4 octave instrument can do it if they are willing to follow the process.  No one has ever finished it for me in less than 4 weeks (it’s more likely to take upwards of 10), but by the time they can do it in under 3 minutes, they have a complete set of learning tools for any piece, and a disposition to match.  As they get closer to 3 minutes, we cover other things as well in lessons, but we start every time with Artist Scales without fail until it’s done.

Most of my worksheets, lessons and literature expectations flow from this first assignment.  The patterns of discipline developed early on form the basic habits of preparation in all music, and eventually, I hope, in all of life.  Some day, I would like to look at the lives of my former students, and see that they met their highest ambitions in their chosen fields because they learned their Artist Scales 😀

The principal of discipline is not about punishment.  It’s about self-determination and a striving to achieve your personal goals whether you feel like doing it today or not. Motivation is powerful, and has its place, but it is fleeting and unsustainable. Discipline is powerful because it is sustainable, and its power grows the longer it is sustained.

If you wait to feel like doing something that is hard, you likely never will.  If you do something anyway because you know it will help you, eventually the results it gives you will make you feel like continuing.