Self Disipline

"In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves ... self-discipline with all of them came first." — Harry S. Truman


Good Morning,

To me, self discipline is the act of taking action consistently. Many people are what I call coach dreamers. They sit around and dream about things they want to accomplish. They set goals, but never take any type of action to achieve them. Most of them know exactly what they must do to achieve the goals. So, why don't they just do it?

The formula: Dreaming it + Knowing It + Doing It !! = SUCCESS

Doing it is the hard part for everyone. Let's say you want to lose weight. It's easy to dream about it, you know what you must do to achieve it (eat healthy, exercise). Then the final part of the equation, doing it.

To get the self discipline to take action, you must use some kind of leverage. An extreme example of leverage would be, some one pointing a gun at you, telling you, you start exercising or I will shoot you in the leg. Do you think you would start exercising if this were the case? You bet you would!

There's different ways to use leverage to your advantage. Maybe find a partner and make a bet who ever sticks to the exercise program the longest wins. Make it a pretty substantial amount of money, you'll want to win, not lose. That's leverage. Maybe tell people about what you are going to do, will these people make fun of you and give you a hard time if you fail? That's leverage. The more extreme it is, the better the leverage. I'm sure you can thing of many examples. Let's say you love to play online games. Well, tell your spouse, parent, etc., that if you fail and don't take action, they can block you from getting online for a month. Will that be leverage for you? You bet if you love getting online. Leverage something that will bother you if you don't accomplish your goal. You can think of many creative ways to use leverage. But, the key is to really care about that one thing your going to use for leverage.

Until next time, always be aware of the decisions you make that shape your destiny!