Week 1 · Discipline · Beyond FMF towards a Kingdom Mindset
In August 2025, a friend's wedding gave me a problem I had avoided for years. The dress code was a black tuxedo. I walked into a shop, took a white shirt to the fitting room and put it on, expecting the usual answer.
For years I could not walk into a shop and buy a decent shirt. T-shirts had been my default. That afternoon, surprisingly, the shirt fitted. It gaped at a few buttons, so I bought a cardigan to wear over it, and I went to the party like that. I was ecstatic. For the first time in years I was wearing a shirt, not a T-shirt.
Close, visibly close, and not yet there. That moment was not won in a day, and it was not won by feeling motivated. It was won by small things repeated on mornings when I did not feel like repeating them.
The alarm came first
A year earlier, the morning after a hard conversation with myself in front of a mirror in Bengaluru, I was on a hotel treadmill at 6 a.m. What I did not know then was how to turn one good morning into a year of them.
I started with the alarm. I used to wake at 5:45. I moved it to 4:45. Once that had settled, I moved it again, to 4 a.m. On mornings I did not feel like waking, I counted down when the alarm rang (five, four, three, two, one), the way Mel Robbins teaches, and put my feet on the floor before the argument could start. Gym clothes sat next to the bed, laid out the night before by a man who was not yet tired. I saw them, showered and put them on. No negotiation was required.
I did not carry those first months alone. For two months Isaac was my gym partner, a cue I would not ignore. Church was already a habit, so we stacked the gym onto it. After church, gym. No second debate.
The night decides the morning
A 4 a.m. alarm cannot be kept by a man who is awake at midnight. I began going to bed early, asleep by 9 p.m., with the phone out of the bedroom at least an hour before. If the clinic had an emergency, the landline would ring, loud, in another room. I was not becoming unreachable as a doctor. I was becoming reachable to my own morning.
For a year I chose solitude over loneliness. Loneliness is empty time hoping someone will fill it. Solitude is chosen quiet with a job to do. I kept a book or my notebook under my pillow, and the routine started small: one paragraph, or two minutes of writing. Because the start was so easy, I did it every day. One paragraph became a page, then two, then ten.
One habit at a time
Do not try to install every habit in the same week. One habit. Lock it. Stack the next. Only when the morning and the gym could hold without a pep talk did I add the discipline most of us skip: I wrote down every expense on a plain Excel sheet.
Food became easier when I stopped arguing with hunger. I put only fruit on the kitchen tray. What was available was what I ate. And on the hard mornings, where a mirror had once shown me a sad man, my own mirror now got a high five: you are doing well, Leonard.
None of it was superhuman. These were designed loops with rewards the brain learned to want. That is how I lost 50 kilograms in a year, and went from 7XL to XXL.
Why this matters beyond the gym
Eliud Kipchoge put it in one line: "Only the disciplined ones in life are free." Feed My Family (FMF) living runs on moods: work when the pressure is on, collapse when it lifts. Discipline is how a decision becomes a life. It is the same for a clinic as for a body: the daily loops either keep what you decided, or lose it.
This week, pick one loop. Only one. Decide it the night before.
This story is told in full in Principle 6 of my book, Beyond the Stethoscope, available from 10 November 2026. If you want help building your own loops, for your health or your business, book a coaching session in our app: ebenezerclinic.org/coaching-booking.