3 Ways to Build Military Discipline

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3 Ways to Build Military Discipline

Without discipline, you will never finish

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At its peak, the Spartan army was the most formidable and dominant military force in ancient Greece, and its strength was based on the distinct mentality and strategy of the art of war.

From a young age, I was very interested in ancient warriors and history was my favorite lesson. What piqued my interest was how the Spartans lived then or to put it another way, how to apply some of their ideas in my own life.

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With more research, I found the topic really fascinating and thought it was interesting to share the ideologies of the ancient Spartans and how we can apply them today.

In this article, there are 3 principles that I want to cover.

1. Appearance has Power

The Spartans terrorized the enemies before they even reached a firing range. As long as they waited for an order to proceed, they remained steadfast in information. As Jordan Peterson would say, they kept their backs straight.

Everything from their clothes to their equipment indicated strength, discipline, and savagery. The Spartan warriors were dressed in a purple-red tunic and cape. Do you think that they chose red because it hid the blood better? So they could hide their weaknesses and wounds better than their enemies. Which I think was unplayable and scary.

They also let their hair down so to speak, because it made like-minded men look even better and ugly men look scarier.

Now, the applications of this idea that there is power in appearance are quite widespread in the modern world. For example, there is a study conducted in 2012 entitled “Enclothed cognition”, which is related to the effect that clothing has on a person’s mental process and the way of thinking, feeling, and functioning, in areas such as attention, confidence or abstract thinking.

More specifically, research has shown that the way subjects dress in different environments affects their performance. They performed these experiments in which one subject was asked to wear a jacket and told that it was a doctor’s jacket. So in the experiment, they found that subjects who wore the coat received more constant attention than those who did not.

However, this only worked when they were informed that this was a doctor’s jacket. Some subjects said it was a painter’s costume and did not help their attention at all.

Cal Newport’s book “How to Succeed at University” also says something similar. He had said that you should dress well for exam days because some studies have also shown that looking professional in an exam will help your performance.

For example, if you are interested in improving your fitness this year, it is worth investing in fitness clothes to make you feel good, to feel more like an athlete. Or if you work from home and try to do a lot of things and usually wear pajamas, just try for a day or an hour to dress a little better. Dress like someone who manages to accomplish many things.

2. Always Perform a Ritual before the Battle

Keep your men busy. If there is no job, create one. When soldiers have time to speak their words they end up in fear. Action on the other hand creates the appetite for more action.

Before the battle, the Spartan warriors keep their anxieties away by staying busy with various occupations. When they were young they had to memorize turns by poets who recited to themselves and sang repeatedly as they paraded in the campaign.

In the days before, they practiced themselves before breakfast, received further military instruction, and trained after dinner. He was generally engaged in training and sports in the afternoons.

During periods of rest, men cut their hair and polished the front of their weapons. They were busy with all this not only for the battles or the moments of stress, but because they performed these rituals before great events, such as a battle. Thus they maintained the mentality of action and through action kept fear away.

I personally do not have many pre-work rituals but I am definitely thinking of starting some. I mean I have a morning routine that I do most of the time but there are definitely some great benefits from using rituals before important moments of your day.

For example, in a study I found in a journal on personality and social psychology, it was found that embodying ritual actions helped to improve the subjects’ feelings of self-discipline even if the ritual they performed was quite insignificant. That is, some of the subjects simply knocked on the table or closed their eyes and counted to a certain number, or simply made strange gestures before certain activities.

Many of the occupations chosen to complete had to do with things like weight management and making decisions about whether they want to make a healthy choice for a diet. And in this study, a significant number of subjects who had performed some kind of ritual chose the healthiest options to eat, which is quite exciting.

You can actually do these various exercises to prepare yourself for a big event, such as a presentation in front of a crowd. This could be cleaning your desk, making coffee or tea for yourself, refilling your water, or writing down the intentions for which you are currently sitting and working. It may seem trivial but having some kind of ritual before an event or even work could make a difference in your performance.

3. Gain Dexterity in Your Field But Leave Space for Variety

The Spartans were much more multi-dimensional than we imagine. Their citizens were almost universally literate, excelled in music and dance, had sculptors, philosophers, poets, and took part in various sports.

Of course, their basic discipline was to develop combat skills, to become better in battle, to become better than the most important warriors. They considered this to be their highest value. The field in that every warrior worked hard to achieve absolute mastery.

But sometimes advising other people to reach the highest level in a skill sounds a bit indifferent. Mainly because mastery takes years of work to acquire it. During this time it is useful and helpful to have interests and skills or activities that you are engaged in.

Even if you have a basic thing and you are really addicted to it, really dedicated to it, like most of us, it is always beneficial to leave only a little space to get away and get a new perspective.

The bottom line is that it’s great to focus on a field that you want to master, but always leave room for something extra to become a more interesting person.

These are the main ideas I wanted to share with you, that is, how to use the principles of the ancients so that we can become ancient warriors in the modern world. It was really fun to learn a few more things about the ancients and how they lived their lives. I hope you enjoyed it.

CONTRIBUTED BY geozee.

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