What Happens When You Actually Live By Your Principles
Self-discipline as the practice of returning, and why your relationships feel it first
I have been writing about self-discipline for a while. I keep circling the same idea, even when the stories change.
People often imagine discipline as force. Push harder. Hold your breath. Try not to break.
You name it.
For the last year or so that picture hasn’t really felt true for me, and at this point if you are not new here you are probably aware of it.
For me, discipline feels closer to study and deliberate practice. It is how I train myself – or more specifically my brain – to return when I drift, instead of pretending I will never drift again.
I’ve been playing with the idea a lot, but I think that the phrase that fits best is actually very simple.
Discipline is the practice of improving your comeback speed.
I wrote about this more directly in What If You’ve Been Measuring Progress the Wrong Way All Along?
Life pulls you away from your values. You fall into habits you thought you had left behind. You say things you regret. You work past your limits and only notice when your body starts to complain. You avoid the hard thing that would actually help.
I have gone through it, and you probably have too
That movement away from what you believe is what I call drift.
Each time you come back with newer knowledge, sharpened accountability and a bit more of self-compassion, something shifts. Your returns stop feeling like lucky accidents and start looking like a pattern.
If you keep training that return, it stops feeling like a special event. It actually starts to feel like you. Your decisions line up more often with what you say you care about. The majority of the time your life points in one specific direction.
You reach a state I call coherence.
Today we are going to talk about what happens when that coherence does not stay private. We will discover that it shows up in the way you love, in the way you raise your kids, in the way you build things with other people. The same pattern repeats at every scale you touch.
Coherence is fractal. The hard part is that drift can be fractal too.
From self-discipline to self-governance to coherence
I want to be precise with the words I use.
When I say self-discipline, I mean a repeated and conscious practice. Deliberate practice.
You study how you drift, you learn from it, and you train specific ways to return faster next time1.
Drift never disappears.
You can say you believe in health, then work late and cut your sleep.
You can say you care about presence, then scroll through dinner.
You can say you want a solid partnership, then avoid the conversation that would keep it alive.
There is always a distance between what you value and what you do. The only thing we can do is to minimize it.
Self-discipline helps you achieve exactly that.
It builds what I call alignment momentum. Each time you return, the next return becomes slightly easier to start. You begin to trust that you can move back into your values without destroying yourself in the process.
If you stay with that long enough, the quality of your decisions changes.
You are no longer bargaining with yourself every day about the basics. You still adjust, and you still change your mind, yet the foundation of your choices reflects work you have already done. The effort moves backstage.
That is what I mean by self-governance.
If you want a deeper look at that identity shift, I explored it in Growing Into the Identity You Desire.
From there, coherence becomes possible.
Coherence is not a spotless record. You still have tired days, reactive moments, and blind spots. The difference is that your returns are frequent and real, and the overall direction of your life feels more stable. You can look at your actions and recognize yourself in them.
That is coherence at the level of one person.
Before going into a concrete example, I want to clarify what I mean when I say that this coherence is fractal.
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What I mean when I say something is fractal
Fractal is one of those words that sounds abstract. In practice, it points to something simple.
A fractal is a pattern that repeats at different scales. When you zoom in and zoom out, you keep seeing the same structure2.
Think of a tree.
If you look at a small twig, you see a thin line with even smaller twigs coming out of it. If you step back and look at a thicker branch, you see something similar. A main line with smaller branches coming out of it. If you step back again and look at the whole tree, the silhouette repeats the same idea. One main trunk. Big branches. Smaller branches. Then tiny ones.
The details change. The rule stays the same. A larger piece looks like a scaled version of a smaller piece.
Coherence behaves in a similar way when it is real.
At a small scale, you can look at one situation and ask a simple question.
Do my actions here resemble my values?
At a larger scale in time, you can look at how your week or your year usually feels and ask a similar question.
Does the overall way I live resemble what I say I care about?
At a larger scale in relationships, you can look at your family or your team as a whole and ask it again.
Does the way this group behaves resemble the principles we claim to care about?
In each case you are testing the same pattern at a different level.
When coherence is fractal, you can move between different scales, contexts, and timeframes of your life and still recognize the same structure. Just like the tree, coherence ramifies in other areas, following the same pattern.
This is the lens I have in mind when I say that coherence repeats across relationships, families, and teams.
A simple example of fractal coherence at home
Take one value. Let’s pick honesty.
You might say you are someone who values honesty. You try to tell the truth at work. You see yourself as transparent with your friends. In your mind, you are a coherent person in that area.
You also expect honesty from the people around you. From your partner. From your kids. From your team. You want clean conversations, no hidden agendas, no lies.
Now move to one fight with your partner.
They bring up something that hurts. Maybe you forgot a promise. Maybe you have been distant. A part of you knows they are right. Another part feels exposed and wants protection.
We’ve all gone through that.
So you bend the story.
You minimize your part.
You leave pieces out.
You change the focus to something they did.
On paper you value honesty. In practice you are hiding from responsibility. In that moment you are not coherent. Your actions do not match the principle you claim to care about.
If this feels familiar, it is close to what I described in How Ego Turns Discipline Into Control (And How to Take It Back)
There is another layer here.
You still expect your partner to be fully honest with you. You still want your kids to tell you the truth. You still want your team to bring you bad news early. You demand coherence from the system while breaking it at your own level.
That gap does not stay private.
If this pattern repeats, it becomes part of the relationship. Both of you learn that hard truths are unsafe. Arguments drift away from what is real and toward whatever protects each ego. The space between you is now a little less honest than the value you say you share.
Zoom out again and include your kids.
They might not understand the content of the argument, yet they can feel the pattern. They see tension that never lands on clear ownership. They hear half-truths, raised voices, and long silences. Over time, this becomes their template for what normal looks like when something goes wrong between two adults.
You can see the structure at three levels.
One person who says they value honesty but escapes it when they feel exposed.
Two adults who say they want an honest relationship but avoid the truth when it is uncomfortable3.
A family that says it cares about honesty but behaves in a way that teaches something else.
This is fractality.
One value.
One pattern of drift.
The same structure is repeating within the self, the couple, and the family.
Here discipline becomes useful. It begins with the decision to notice that you are escaping honesty, to name it, and to practice telling the truth about your part. At first it feels awkward and risky – I know, but it’s necessary. With repetition it becomes self-governance. With time, it becomes part of how the whole family handles conflict.
Drift still happens. There will be messy nights and awful weeks. Your nervous system will still reach for old defenses. Some nights you will only notice after you have already snapped or shut down. What changes with practice is how much room those instincts get. Over time those moments start to feel less like failure and more like information about where the system needs care. Then you can take responsibility, repair, and return on purpose.
If coherence is missing in you, the relationship cannot stay more coherent than its parts. If coherence is missing in the relationship, the family will inherit that drift. Asking the system to be honest while you bend the truth yourself is a form of incoherence. The pattern scales anyway.
The work is to make sure it is the right pattern.
The same pattern in teams and organizations
This sample pattern is not limited to families. It can show up as drift, and it can show up as actual coherence.
Imagine a small founding team that says it values ownership, learning, and trust. Honesty, as in the case we described in the previous section, is also part of that picture. They want people to bring reality early, even when the facts are uncomfortable and tough to share.
The difference, though, is that in this case the team practices what they preach.
In their product reviews, they start with what is not working. Each founder names their own mistakes before pointing at anyone else. When someone has bad news, they are thanked for bringing it. Hard conversations still feel uncomfortable, yet they happen in the open.
Now zoom in on one specific meeting.
A launch is behind schedule. A big client is waiting. Everyone feels the pressure. One founder notices the urge to soften the truth. It would be easy to blame a vendor or hide part of the story.
Instead, they name the thing everyone wants to avoid. They explain exactly where they drifted. They take responsibility for a bad call. They invite the others to correct them.
Here the pieces line up.
The value is honesty.
The emotional reaction is still there.
The default move has been retrained.
The behavior matches the principle under stress.
That is coherence at the level of one person inside the team.
Now zoom out to the team across a quarter.
You start to see a pattern. Issues surface earlier. Decisions are made with better information. People feel safer saying “I do not know” or “I got this wrong.” The team still feels pressure and still misses goals, yet the way they respond is consistent with the values on the slides they present4.
Zoom out one more step to the company that grows from this team.
New hires are picked for how they handle truth and for the skills they bring. Performance reviews look at how people behave when things go wrong and how they carry themselves when things go as planned. Leaders show the same honesty in all-hands that the founders showed in small rooms. Over time, the organization becomes known for being direct and fair, even during rough quarters.
Here again, the pattern repeats at three levels.
One founder who tells the truth when it would be easier to hide.
A team that treats reality as a shared asset, even when it stings.
A company whose culture around truth feels predictable and safe enough to trust.
The same way hiding from honesty at home can echo from you to your partner to your kids, practicing honesty under pressure can echo from one person to a team and then to a whole organization.
Drift and coherence share the same structure. Your life amplifies whichever pattern you rehearse, and once you know how to see it, you can trace that pattern from self to couple, from family to team, from team to company. That is what I mean when I say coherence is fractal.
Why this matters to me
This is not an abstract model for me.
Learning about myself has changed how I show up as a father, as a husband and as a son. It has shifted how I read tension at home, how I respond to my kids when I am exhausted, how I speak to my wife when I feel fragile, and how I talk to my parents as an adult. I wrote more about this angle in How Parenthood Teaches Self-Governance.
In earlier phases of my life, I thought I needed more willpower or more love or more talent. Today I see something else. What I lacked was coherence. My actions and my values did not match often enough, and I did not yet know how to return.
I can feel the difference now in small ways. Shorter gaps between a mistake and an apology. Less time pretending I am fine when I am not. Fewer conversations that loop for days without landing on the real issue. The distance between what I say I value and what I actually do is still there, yet it is smaller and easier to cross.
Writing this newsletter has been part of my own training in self-governance. Every article forces me to look at my patterns with a bit more honesty. Every reflection becomes a reminder that my kids are watching the system I create around them, not only the words I say to them.
I care about discipline because I want to keep improving my comeback speed. I care about coherence because I want my behavior, my family life and my work to move in the same direction instead of pulling apart.
If you decide to work on your own self-governance, keep in mind that it will change your inner world and in consequence, you will also shape the systems that grow around you.
Your relationships.
Your kids.
Your teams.
The companies and communities you might lead in the future.
Coherence starts inside one person and then repeats.
You have more influence over that pattern than it sometimes feels.
How to live as a source of coherence
If this still feels abstract, bring it down to one relationship in your life and remember that the pattern you practice there will echo in other places.
Think of a place where you sense dysfunction. It can be your partner, your cofounder, your child or a friend. You do not need to fix everything. You only need one clear starting point.
The people around you may not be ready to do this work at the same pace. Some will resist. Some will ignore it. Your leverage lives in your own returns. You can invite, model and hold a certain standard, even when the rest of the system moves slower than you would like.
You can use questions like these:
Where do my actions contradict my stated values in this relationship?
What scenes repeat again and again, even though I say I do not want them?
What do I usually do at that moment, and what result does that choice tend to produce?
Treat the answers as data, not as a verdict on your worth.
Then choose one small way to practice a different return.
You might decide to name your emotion before you argue. You might ask for a few minutes to calm down and then actually come back. You might admit that a certain sentence you use is hurtful and commit to dropping it.
Pick something that fits inside your current energy, not inside an ideal version of you.
Repetition matters. Coherence does not appear after one intense effort. It grows out of many small returns that stack. At first, the new behavior feels stiff. With time, it starts to resemble you.
Change in the system will probably lag behind your own practice. The other person may take longer to trust the new pattern. A team may need several cycles before it believes that things will stay different. A child may test your consistency again and again.
That delay is normal.
Your task is to keep governing yourself inside the relationship, even when the external response is slower than you wish.
You control how you show up. You influence the rest through example and stability, not through pressure.
Because coherence is fractal, work you do in one place rarely stays contained. The way you learn to repair with your partner leaks into how you repair with your kids. The way you learn to speak with your team leaks into how you speak with your parents. Skills move across layers.
What to take from here
After all of this, there are a few things I want you to leave with.
Your coherence creates ripples. When you learn to return, your relationships feel it. Your family feels it. The work you touch feels it.
We do not start from coherence. We start from drift. Every human drifts, which means every system we build tends to drift too. Families, teams, companies. None of them are immune.
That is why you need a foundation to manage drift on purpose. Self-discipline is that foundation. It is the practice that helps you see where you are drifting, choose a cleaner return and repeat that choice enough times that coherence stops being a theory and becomes something people can feel around you.
As the old adage says, “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.” Coherence makes sure that what you do and what you say are finally pointing in the same direction.
In our next paid companion we will train how to improve our awareness and detect drift early on.
If you remember nothing else from this piece, remember this: you cannot control every system you are part of, yet you can train your own returns. That work is enough to start changing the shape of the ripples you send out.
Have a wonderful week!
If you want the full, more technical version of this model, I unpack it in my Coherence Dynamics Theory (CDT) whitepaper.
A note for early founders and solopreneurs
If you are building something and feel the drift in your business more than in your life, I am running a small experiment.
I am reaching to early founders and solopreneurs who feel stuck between too many priorities, unclear direction and constant fire-fighting. For each person, I take the chaos of their current situation, turn it into data and share a simple diagnosis plus one short experiment to test a better direction.
Because this is an experiment for my learning, the engagement is free.
If this sounds like you and you want to see how coherence could look inside your team, reply to this email with FOUNDER or leave a comment with that word and I will follow up with details.
✨ Ideas Worth Exploring
If this piece resonated, here are a few more that go hand-in-hand.
Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2007). Self-regulation, ego depletion, and motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00001.x
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999