Discipline: The Secret of Excellence

Something wonderful happens once you can get over the negative press that surrounds the word discipline and reframe it so that you see it as a powerfully positive trait—as a description of a life-style under your own control. Suddenly, you discover just how awesome discipline is as an accelerator of success, effectiveness, and productivity.

How does discipline accelerate your personal effectiveness? There’s many ways it does this. First and foremost, now you can get yourself to do what you know and need to do. As a “course of action” discipline now becomes your action tendency and your strategy for getting things done. And isn’t that the problem when you lack discipline? Without discipline, people utter all kinds of complaints—complaints that highlight that they can’t get themselves to take action.

• “I just don’t have the discipline or the will power to go to the gym.”
• “Why does the skill development of the coaching skills require so much discipline? Isn’t there an easier way?”
• “But discipline seems like such an imposition, like someone is forcing me to do something.”
• “I’d be okay with discipline, but there’s so many procedures and not enough options.”

Because what you once considered a discipline is now a life-style of choice and desire, you are easily able to get yourself to do what you plan or decide. You are no longer like a child who opts for ease, comfort, and pleasure. That’s because discipline is an adult choice wherein you guide yourself by your knowledge and understanding rather than by your emotions. Children are naturally undisciplined. They have not yet learned the art of being disciplined.

To accelerate your personal success, you need to know what “course of study, course of action” to take and then you need to act consistently in doing what needs to be done. That’s why discipline is a critical factor for success. It is a consistent practice which enables you to live out your knowledge and your competence. It is the ability to follow-through on what you start.

Discipline is also the inner lifestyle of valuing your objective. In the process of setting a goal, you identify why it is important to you—its value. And it’s in seeing and feeling the value of something that activates your whole mind-body system to go after it. No wonder Roy Smith spoke of discipline as a fire, an inner burning that generates the energy and motivation to make it happen. “Discipline is the defining fire by which talent becomes ability.”

Discipline accelerates your success because it is inward control. It is a controlling of your mind and controlling of yourself. Now because we call that self-control, no wonder we positively equate ‘discipline’ and ‘self-control.’ That’s because when you learn to think in a disciplined way, you are truly in charge of your mind and therefore of yourself, your person. Two thousand years ago Marcus Aurelius understood this inner power of discipline and how discipline gives you an inner strength from which to operate. “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Discipline accelerates your personal success to the extent that you can now so “No” to yourself, to mis-using your time, energy, focus, money, resources, etc. You can say “no” to every temptation that would pull you aside. And with the ability to so “No” comes the ability to say a resounding “Yes” to all that truly matters.

“Self-respect is the root of discipline: the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.” Abraham Joshua Heschel

“The price of excellence is discipline. The cost of mediocrity is disappointment.” William Arthur Ward

“With self-discipline, most anything is possible.” Theodore Roosevelt

Do you get the picture? As strange as it may sound at first, discipline creates and accelerates success. It gives you the inner control, motivation, and structure to make your dreams come true. And it begins inside with your mind. As “a course of study” you first develop a mental discipline, a disciplined way of thinking, and from there it cascades down through the rest of your life. People who lack discipline lack the mental power of focus. And that leads to the sad fact of the undisciplined, namely, no discipline—no excellence.

Every Olympic athlete is a living emblem of that principle—each person who becomes a champion does so precisely because of the discipline he or she brings to the sport, and without the discipline to learn, to practice, to consistently practice, to persist, to bounce back from defeat again and again— there would be no excellence. This is true freedom—the freedom to pursue your goals by following the procedures that can dependably take you to the edge of expertise. How about that? True freedom is inside of discipline!

Today is President Trump’s Inauguration for his second term ... and if all goes as planned, he and his team will make America great again by bringing discipline to the government and to the rule of law.