We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful TANJA DIAMOND. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with TANJA below.
TANJA, thanks for taking the time to share your lessons with our community today. So, let’s jump right in – one of the most essential skills for unlocking our potential is self-discipline. Where does your self-discipline come from?
Being autistic, when I was young, I was only interested in immediate gratification, and it didn’t serve me well. Sure, it was fun, but I needed help to reach my goals efficiently in the long run. I studied the neurobiology of willpower and why we have such a problem sticking to things we don’t want to do.
Willpower is finite, and in fact, it’s best in the morning. The more decisions we have to make and willpower we have to use, the less we have of it later in the day. So it’s clear we can’t just use willpower for self-discipline; there had to be something more profound.
Then, I examined habits. Research has shown that the 21-day rule is a myth. That was a study done on a couple of guys who lived in a lab 24 hours a day with upside-down goggles on, and in 21 days, their brains turned everything around to see it right side up. Remember that wearing those goggles was 21 days, 24 hours a day. And it just makes sense if it only took 21 days to develop self-discipline or create a habit; we’d all have it in spades. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, researchers found that it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become a habit, and it can vary for each person and be task-dependent.
So clearly, there had to be something else going on. What I uncovered was something far more secretive that we do all the time that erodes our ability to be disciplined and care for ourselves in ways we need to.
I found that we lie to ourselves countless times daily, eroding our self-trust. And No one trusts a liar. With a foundation of self-trust, having self-anything is impossible.
Taking an even deeper dive into the core foundations of self, I found that one of the most important ones is self-commitment. Self-commitment is the foundation of self-trust, self-respect, and self-love. Once we have those four things handled, self-discipline is incredibly simple.
Self-commitment
We build self-commitment by doing small micro-tasks daily. We need to find something that we can easily be successful doing for 30 days and remember to do it. So, that is a 30-day challenge. If you forget, even on day 29, you must start again, back to day one. So, the secret to starting this is ensuring you’re successful the first time you do it and then building on that success with increasingly more demanding challenges. Celebrating your accomplishments and holding yourself personally accountable for failures is essential. When we do this consistently throughout the year, we can rebuild our self-trust.
Self-trust-
Because our subconscious mind knows we’re lying to ourselves regularly, the self-commitment challenges help us reprogram that data to see ourselves as trustworthy. By holding yourself accountable to the challenges, you start to turn the tables in your favor, which builds self-trust. We learn to trust that we will do what we say we will do, which leads to self-respect.
Self-respect-
Once we have more self-respect, it’s easy to continue building self-commitment and self-trust like a giant snowball; you gather more credibility as you go. Once you have these three foundations in place, it’s straightforward to fall in love with yourself because you’ll like yourself; who doesn’t like a committed, trustworthy, respectful person?
Self-love-
Once we fall in love with ourselves, we’ll find that it’s so much easier to do the things we know are the right to take care of ourselves. We don’t have to muscle our way into self-discipline. We’ll find ourselves eagerly looking forward to doing things that enhance our lives. Learning and integrating these four steps leads to the ease of being disciplined and creating a healthy and balanced life.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I studied over 50,000 hours in various healing modalities, including Eastern, mystical, scientific, and more. I wanted to understand the connection between mind, body, and spirit, why we do what we do, and how we can do better. Why do some transcend suffering while others succumb, and how can we end needless suffering?
I explored spiritual and mystical teachings outside the norms I had grown up with. After years of apprenticeships in African, South American, and Asian countries with traditional energy masters, I discovered many thrilling things about the workings of energy and our inner connections.
My intensive training became the foundation of my life purpose—guiding others to resolve trauma through nervous system regulation and optimizing their mind and body for resilience and mastery. Most importantly, I wanted people to have efficient tools for self-healing in their hands and understand that they have the power to heal and optimize their lives, regardless of their income or where they live. I have worked with over eighty-two thousand people in over sixty countries… and twenty-two thousand animals. It’s been an immense privilege.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I wholeheartedly believe these three qualities are crucial to joy and making a difference in the world: the willingness to change one’s mind, the understanding that life’s purpose is self-management, and being personally accountable.
Let’s all be curious. When we’re curious, we stay open and exploratory. We’re more likely to ask questions than make a snap judgment. I believe that curiosity, the ability to be willing to see if your mind can change, leads us to our most incredible understanding and our ability to create.
Second, we should all understand how our human body functions and how to regulate our nervous system and energy. When we can do this, we can self-manage our state at any given time, becoming responsive rather than reactive to life circumstances. I believe our life purpose is to self-manage, and even though that doesn’t sound sexy, it leads to the ability to have an extraordinary life.
Self-accountability is the third skill or quality we could all possess to make things better. Accountability is the art of looking at oneself as part of the solution if there is a challenge. So if something’s going wrong in my life, I like to ask myself what my part is in this. It’s too easy to become a victim of circumstances instead of realizing that every day, you make choices that could lead you to situations you don’t want to be in.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
My ideal client is ready to take action to optimize their life! They have tried “so many things” and are still stuck in areas that need effective strategies NOW.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.inspirelifellc.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tanjadiamondunleashed/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tanja.diamond/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanjadiamond/
- Other: www.learningtantra.com
www.https://tanjadiamondspeaker.com/
