D-I-S-C-I-P-L-I-N-E

We all have been guilty of pushing off an idea we’ve had to improve our lives, whether that’s starting a business, advancing our education, or losing weight. The one days become one years, and the one years become five years. We play this game constantly to no end.

We all have great goals but much of what is stopping us is our lack of discipline. Yes, you may want to lose weight, but if you do not first grow a foundation of discipline, this goal will soon become your enemy.

By overlooking the necessary ingredient of discipline to create a perfect dish of success, we return to our undisciplined lives. We experience dis-ease because we have a vision of ourselves that we are not reaching, which causes depression and creates an adversarial view of our goals. The cure to this discomfort is action rooted in discipline. Established discipline in our lives feeds our vision the energy it needs to sustain over time.

The first key to establishing discipline in our lives is by removing the negative connotations of discipline from our mindset. Our mindset is the driver of our vehicle, not the goals themselves. Discipline is not a bad thing at all! It is the required attribute needed to achieve anything, and I mean anything. An alcoholic is very disciplined when it comes to drinking. Some of us are very disciplined when it comes to procrastinating. The key is to develop discipline in the areas of your life that push you towards your greater vision. Step 1: Recognize discipline is beneficial and that it will not ruin your life. It will give you life instead.

The second key to discipline is surrounding yourself in silence when you’re working towards your goal. How can one write a book if there’s music in the background, social media alerts blaring on your phone, the TV on, and you’re talking to your friends every five minutes? That book will stay a one-pager filed away on your computer forever. When you turn off the noise, you will find the music. Noise erodes away our discipline. Everyone and everything around us is vying for real estate in our minds daily. Commit to establishing time in your day for you and only you. Your life is meant to be lived by you, not used a dump for everyone else’s interests. Step 2, when you are working on your vision, turn off the distractions because distractions create inaction.

Another key to discipline is to make discipline easy to accomplish. Discipline creates a template for your life where you do not have to guess what you need to do. It doesn’t give you those few seconds to let our minds wander and then return back to your dis-eased state disguised as comfort. If you need to lose weight, you will need to eat healthier foods. Rather than going to the grocery store wondering which foods are considered “healthy” foods, beforehand Google a list of healthy foods and write down the list of foods on a postcard. I encourage writing down a list because by writing you are establishing a commitment to following the list (i.e. it is harder to disregard something that you worked on). Step 3, cut out the guessing game by making discipline easy to complete.

Lastly, in the words of Jocko Willink, “discipline equals freedom.”

Photo Credit: Motivation Hub, YouTube.”DISCIPLINE IS EVERYTHING – New Motivational Video Compilation.” November 2017.