Do you ever wonder how some people make success look so easy? In this episode Jimmy and Lori share their approach to self-discipline and the outcomes realized from this powerful skill.
Episode Keys
- How self-discipline will empower you to achieve your greatest, most valuable goals in life.
- The simple method of adopting a new discipline in life!
- Why you must identify a reward for becoming disciplined in an area to maintain your mindfulness on the goal.
- To find true power, according to Lao Tzu, you must master yourself.
- Discovering positive attributes of being a disciplined person.
Podcast Transcription
JW:
This morning on Live a Life By Design is a topic I am certain will change your life. Hey, good morning. This is Jimmy Williams and my co-host with the most Lori Few. Good morning, Lori.
LF:
Good morning everybody
JW:
Today, Lori and I are gonna share with you a topic that has been transformational in our lives. And this has been very truthful and I’m not trying to be funny at all. This is an area of life that if in fact, master this area, this aspect of life, you will truly achieve greatness as whatever you define it. This is being had by not just people in politics and business and music in art, in whatever field you wish to be in this one aspect. Life can take you from dreaming to accomplishment, and that is the truth. Not laying it on too thick. Lori, just tell it how it is this morning.
LF:
We are full of truth.
JW:
We are full of truth, and that’s the whole purpose here at live life by design. Let’s talk about that one aspect it’s called discipline or my term self discipline. And that basically means, you know, correction or how to regulate one cell for the sake of improvement. Now, Lori, there’s one thing you and I are all about, and that is self improvement. Am I right?
LF:
I think so. I think that it’s a daily occurrence where we work towards self discipline in, in various areas. How I say both personal and professional. Some that more comical than others. And we’re gonna delve into that this morning and yeah. Give our listeners some food for thought, if you will.
JW:
You mean coffee for thought? Just to joke there a little bit.
LF:
I was hoping you were going there.
JW:
Hey folks, we gotta call it discipline, but you can call it something else. Bad habit. Maybe we’re gonna come all a discipline. Her area of coffee. We’ll get to that in a minute though. Hey, one of my favorite mentors, you know, a gentleman I never met, but you can have a mentor by studying what they produced in tapes and videos and books. And I’ve read everything. I’ve listened to everything I’ve even bought all of his lecture tapes he had available. I’m telling you, this guy has impressed me tremendously. His name’s Jim. You’ve heard me speak of him many times on the podcast. One of his quotes about this area of discipline is just magnanimous to me. Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. Ooh, that sounds really good. Cause Laura, you can dream about it all day, but if you don’t have a discipline to make it happen, right,
LF:
Right. You have to be willing to take those steps. You can’t just sit on the sidelines. You have to actively participate in your life. And that’s one of the great things about the fire cast is if you don’t learn anything else by all of the episodes that we’ve done is that you are con are in control and you have to be an active participant in your own life.
JW:
Ooh, I like that. There is no height requirement here, folks. This isn’t the right at Disney world. Everybody meets the mark. Everybody gets on the that’s right. Am I right Lori?
LF:
That’s right.
JW:
So there’s one other quote I gotta throw out here. You know, I’m a big quote guy, Lori. I mean, I write this stuff in my journal the time and I would go back and I look at them and I’m like, man, this just speaks to me. You know? I love this quote. He says, we must all suffer. One of two things, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and the pain of discipline weighs ounces. The pain of regret weighs to Ooh, that just makes me get chills.
LF:
So, I mean, it, it’s absolutely true because so many times we, we find ourselves in the depth of regret and it, it can carry on for years. Sometimes, you know, you, you hear people that later in their personal lives, they, they never got over the regret of not doing some thing, not taking a chance, not, you know, going that extra mile to accomplish whatever goal it was that they set out. And we do not want people to live with regret. If we learn, if we’ve learned anything in the last two years, it’s that life is precious even more now than we thought it was. And so regret can weigh tons. I, I, I, I think that’s so powerful.
JW:
And you know, another thing I love about discipline is this is when those opportunities come and guess what they will come. But if you don’t have discipline in your life to take advantage of those, you may let some really big, hairy, audacious opportunities get through your fingers and someone else that has discipline may take advantage of it. Right?
LF:
And that’s true too. So many times we don’t see opportunities that come in the traditional packaging, if you will they can come in a, a wide variety of ways. Sometimes you get smacked in the face with one and you’re like, wow, I never even saw that coming until it’s literally right there under your nose. It’s not always an opportunity. That’s wrapped perfectly in a package with a bow. Sometimes it takes a struggle to find that opportunity. And sometimes we let those opportunities pass us by we don’t wanna do that, but it, it ha it can happen.
JW:
You know, those people like discipline or where those ones that see a big, you know, chunk of coal and they look at, and they go, oh gosh, it’s a nasty little rock. And there’s some of us that look at this and look at the potential it could be. And they go, you know, with enough pressure and enough heat, that baby would look good on my wife’s finger. You know what I’m saying?
LF:
Girl’s best friend
JW:
That’s right. Hey, I want to talk just a few minutes about one example of who I call a disciplined individual. So on the show here on Live a Life By Design, episode number 157, we had a dear dear friend of mine. She’s the CEO of the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. Her name was Sue Coffey. Sue, and I have a lot in common. We’ve just been friends for 30 years for one, but we have a lot in common in the fact she’s a believer like me rise early, take command of the day she gets up. Earlier than me, I’m a 5/5:30 guy. She gets up at four 30 every day to take care of the things she needs to take care that are most important to help her become bigger and better and bolded for her team, for her organization, for her constituency. That’s in the, in that membership of the AICPA, for example.
JW:
And that to me just shows how with purpose. She doesn’t do this by accident, Lori. She has to set a self up for success, right? She gets ready the night before with all the stuff she needs for that morning. So as soon as she slides outta bed, boom, shower, get the makeup on. She said, as get started on whatever I’ve gotta do on emails or reading the paper to get ahead of whatever I’m doing today. And then meetings start, you know, at 11 or whatever. And I’m telling you that lady is so disciplined. I have called her during that time of preparation. Sometimes she won’t answer the phone and that’s one thing I wanna encourage people. Don’t allow others to use your valuable time when you need to be used it for what’s most valuable to you. That’s a discipline we have, right?
LF:
It’s a very important discipline. And I think that we tend to neglect that we tend to neglect the discipline of taking care of ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally. Those are things that we are constantly business professionals are constantly trying to make sure that we accommodate everyone. And then we forget to be disciplined for ourselves. So that’s really important to remember, it’s, it’s important to stop and say, Nope, this is my time. This is what I have scheduled today. This is what I have allotted. And if it doesn’t fit into that, it’s okay to say not gonna happen.
JW:
Yeah, absolutely. So now folks, I’m gonna put Lori on the hot seat and this has not been provided her. I have, have not talked with her. There’s no script for the show or anything here. It goes. So Lori, I understand you’re pretty disciplined at one act of the day. Like literally every day you participate in the ingestion. If you will, of a certain liquid, that’s kinda hot in the mornings and maybe, maybe it’s cold in the summers, but hot in most mornings that would be your elk cough.
LF:
Yeah. Well it’s hot all year long. It doesn’t matter if it’s a thousand degrees in the summer, it’s still gonna be hot. I, I am so disciplined and if I could apply said discipline to other areas of my life, I would probably be so much better off, but I am I my car when they invent the car that drives itself. I mean, I know we kind of already have those, but my card literally will take me to the coffee shop before I go anywhere else of a morning, I stop, I walk in the baristas, don’t even ask me, they just say your usual liar. And I say yes. And it magically appears in a cup and I it’s sets the discipline for the entire day. And, and I,
JW:
And, and
LF:
I love there
JW:
Are some, some sub aspects of that. They already know what you’re drinking. So Lori is disciplined to get the same drink every day. I love that.
LF:
I have a discipline, tends the creature of habit. And so I guess in that regard, I am a true creature of habit. I, I get very drove off my whole day when I walk in and they say, well, we’re outta good milk today. And I’m like, no, no, I can’t have anything else. It’s kinda embarrassing, but that’s fine. I will own it.
JW:
Some of my clients that are psychiatrist, psychologists might say to you, that’s not discipline. Lori, that’s a, but anyway, I’m gonna call it discipline.
LF:
Can we please call it discipline? I don’t wanna call it the other word. OK, great. We can,
JW:
We can, so, Hey, I wanna ask you some few questions, cause Lori is so just wonderfully knowledgeable on this particular question, this type of information. So Lori, tell me why do most people of the world lack discipline?
LF:
Goodness. You know, I think it’s a combination of things. Again, I think it’s because we are so focused on trying to meet the needs of other people. We’re also distracted. We get in good intentions, we have good, you know, thought processes. We make a plan, we attempt to start executing the plan and then we fall short. And then when we fall short, we start being hard and difficult on ourselves and we change our mental mindset to think there’s no way I thought about it. I tried, you know, I gave it the old try and it failed. And so now I’m just going to abandon that because I, I can’t do it. And so we get into that cycle of self doubt and we don’t ever find our true discipline because we don’t think we’re capable. And so I think it goes back to a mindset of, I can be distracted and I can still meet the needs of others around me while still having a discipline, reaching deep back into that, you know, mindset and, and deep down into your soul and priorit.
LF:
What’s important. I think that’s probably why people lack discipline is because we are so easy to just, I give up or I tried and it’s just not for me. We really have to every single day commit to ourselves to be disciplined. And no matter what it is, if it’s work relationships, goals, fitness, any type of subject matter, I, for lack of a better word, because I think discipline applies to all realms of your life and it makes a more well rounded life. So to kind of answer your question, I went around the world, why people lack discipline there. But I think it is. I think it’s a combination of all of those things.
JW:
I think you hit the nail on the head, but you know, you gotta be careful with discipline so I can be so disciplined in one area that it may cause neglect in another area. And you said something that, that triggered me to thinking this, I can be so disciplined, I’m going to gym and I’m doing all I need to, and I’m spending four or five hours there and neglecting, perhaps my significant other, my spouse, my family, my work, whatever. Right. We can get out of balance. I call it, I call it the will of life. And I will tell you, and there were times in my life that the will got flat. I mean… So, you know, certain areas weren’t perfectly 10, right? And 10 being the outer realm of the circle and you want 10 and everything, right? You want marital, social, parental, you know, career physical financial. You want ’em all to be tens. And guess what? It is hard unless we’re disciplined to keep the tire from going flat on that so of life. Right. So lemme ask you a quick question. So what is it that motivates? Cause we’re here about the deep dive on live life by design Lori, what is it that motivates you to stay disciplined once you get in a routine? What keeps you moving forward?
LF:
Oh, goodness. I think it, for me, once I get into think it’s the result, no matter what I’m working towards, being disciplined in, I have to physically see some type of result, whether it’s checking something off my list or, you know, getting on the scale and feeling better about myself in general. I think it’s a, and those results are not always tangible. So I think that’s where, you know, we have good intentions of starting that discipline and then we, you know, slack off or we give up or we get tired because we don’t physically see those things. And so I like to I’m, you know, me, I’m a list person. And so as long as I’m being disciplined and whatever it is I’m working towards, and I can check that off my list or feel like I of accomplished something. Then I think that I can stay motivated, stay disciplined and stay in that mindset that, yes, this is valuable. I see the value in this. I can tangibly touch or quantify, you know, what that discipline results
JW:
Right. Should be. Yeah. Hey, well,
LF:
What it should be, it’s always, it’s kinda a gray area. I don’t want people to be misled, but I think that it’s, it’s one of those topics that it’s really a personal topic. Everybody applies it differently. And so if you take anything away from this this morning, it’s not that we expect people to be 100% disciplined all the time. We want people that disciplines look different for each individual person.
JW:
Oh, I agree. Well said, I would say this though. I attack, attach, excuse me, attack it. I attach a reward to each of my new disciplines. I’m wishing to develop. Now you’re gonna laugh. So if I lose 40 pounds or whatever, which I’m working on, I’m trying to get back in a little thinner shape. You know, those doctors, man, they tell you stuff you can’t see on the outside of that blood thing. Right. But that’s anyway, I I’m in great shape. You know, he said, he goes, Hey man, you’re in great shape. However, and they always put the conjunctive in there. And I said, I think you mean, and cuz we don’t use the word, but I mean, nobody needs, Hey butt. That’s like a brick wall to me. But if he says, however I say doc, you mean, and right. And he goes and well, yes.
JW:
And, and so what I’m doing is I I’m, I’m working a little bit more on the diet not diet. I hate the word eating better. I guess it’s just eating. Right. And he gave me a goal and I said, I’ll tell you what doc, the way to discipline is for me is I’ve got a tie reward to it. So I’ve, I’ve got my Taylor, I’ve already called him. And I have ordered a suit that is the size of what I wish to be. And this isn’t a very inexpensive suit. It’s custom Taylor, but I’ve ordered a suit that is going to be the size I wish to be. And I’ve asked him to deliver it in six months. So I I’ve gotta get serious. I gotta stay that way. And so what I did is I set up a little recording for myself in my planner that every day I put a blow of box on it and it says D and every day I do what I should do on my discipline.
JW:
I check that box and to keep it a little sweeter than that, I also am gonna buy myself a new Mon block writing instrument. So I’m a big fan of those collect thoses as well. Shout out to the folks at Mon block for writing and they bring it and I love them. But my point to that is you’re right, Lori, we need to set ourselves up for success. So let me ask you a couple of questions. What do you think would be the easiest way to start a new discipline in your life? What would be the easiest thing that our P listeners can take from this?
LF:
The easy discipline to start, you know, and this is gonna sound, it’s gonna sound counterintuitive almost, but a discipline that I think that I need to start is saying no, and I don’t mean that in a negative. I mean that from a perspective of I’m the person that you can text me, call me, email me, ask me, Hey, we need help on this. Or Hey, would you be willing to serve on this? Or Hey, would you be willing to pick this up? And I’m automatically gonna say yes. And we’ve talked about this before, about how we get into that pattern. And then we, we quickly realize that it’s burnout it’s discussed almost because we’ve over committed ourselves to doing things that we no longer really enjoy doing. And it’s not because we don’t enjoy the activity it’s because we’re just overly committed. And so if I could say one thing that I need to work on in terms of different discipline, it’s saying no, or saying, let me get back to you because I really need to evaluate where the time commitments and time constraints already fit into my current commitments before I commit to something else.
LF:
So that’s
JW:
Gotta be honest with you. I’m a quote guys. You know, I just said, well, go Warren buffet. One of the greatest investors of our history that I’ve been around. And he said, when asked, what is the secret to your success, Mr. Buffet? And he said, say no to the 1000 requests that I get that take me away from my primary purpose for success. Think about that’s so true. True. We only have 1,440 minutes every day, how you spend them, spend them is up to you. Right? And so at the end of the day, just remember, I’ve only got so many minutes. Well, if that’s the case and I give one away, then that takes away from my primary mission, whatever I’m working on, disciplined in my life. And I’m not saying to you know, avoid charitable event. I’m not saying that I am saying there’s got to be balance.
JW:
And part of that balance is having that kind of social aspect in your life as well. For me, right? I love to get in front of people who love to help our community. That’s just part of my life, but that’s important to me. It may not be important to some other people, if that’s the case, do what you do best, whatever that is for you. But I do believe that at the end of the day, you’re right, Lori, we can allow others to dictate our day. We must focus on what’s most important. And that takes discipline in our life. A big, big fan of setting that up early in the day or better yet before I go to bed. So it makes it so much easier to go do what I need to do work out or whatever. Right? So some positive attributes, Gloria, if you would give me some positive attributes from being a disciplined person,
LF:
Positive attribute. Oh my goodness. Well, I mean, personally, if, if you are disciplined, you avoid acting rationally or impulsively.
JW:
That’s a biggie, that’s a biggie
LF:
And that one’s hard, but it’s, it’s, it’s true. And it’s very, very, very important fulfilling promises you make to yourself, to others, which we kind of touched about that that goes back to say no, because you just say yes all the time and you’ve already made commitments. You can’t do everything overcoming laziness and procrastination. And
JW:
Wait a minute. This is, you’re stepping all over my toes here. Alright?
LF:
I was going to say that does not apply to the current company, but –
JW:
Oh, good. Okay.
LF:
But of, you know, a work setting or even a social setting. I mean, I, one of the, the quotes that I love to use is procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. And let’s face it. We are around those types of people and we are going to have to be around those types of people. But your response in how you are to discipline, to deal with those is going to make the difference for you. Not necessarily for them, but for you. OK. Let’s see. Carry out decisions and tax successfully and efficiently. That’s again goes back to good use of discipline. Good use of time management and skill. Let’s see one more positive. Oh, this is hard, but I would have to say developing patience. I’m terrible. I not good at patience.
JW:
Yeah, that’s a toughy man. That’s a tough one.
LF:
And perseverance. I mean, we talk about that a lot on this podcast about how, no matter what your goals are important, you will persevere no matter your circumstance, no matter your change, no matter your position in life, perseverance is always key. Always moving forward. Always overcoming, always striving to be better, even though we don’t think it’s possible, we can do it, but those are some positives. I hope, I hope I covered what, what you were lifting for there.
JW:
Well, you stepped all over my toes on the laziness and procrastination to, but I’ll I’ll
LF:
I don’t believe it.
JW:
That’s what I get from wearing open toed shoes on an early morning. I said, had my shoes on, but anyway… No, I think, I think those are all great attributes. There is a quote that I know Lori’s gonna give us here now from an ancient Chinese wise, man. What, what is that quote, Lori?
LF:
Well, the quote, now, if I say the name, I will completely butcher it, but I will try. The quote is mastering. Others is rank mastering yourself, true power. And I say, it’s Lao. T-z-u.. You help me out.
JW:
I believe it’s Lao Tzu.
LF:
You made it way fancy.
JW:
Well, I think the T is silent there, but Hey, if there’s anyone listening that is in the great country of China, would you please let know if we butchered that? Cause we didn’t mean too disrespectfully.
LF:
No, we did not, but it’s a beautiful quote. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is through power,
JW:
You know, and that’s where we see great leaders come from folks. It takes great discipline to be in my opinion, a great leader. And if you’re gonna be a great leader, you must have that discipline within yourself to help others find that themselves and to buy into your, your path or whatever success you’re asking their assistance to gain. And you know, this has been such a great topic, but we have as always here on live life by design a big challenge for our listeners. As we end this episode, Lori, what do you wanna challenge ’em with this week
LF:
Challenge for the week, okay, we ready for this this week, examine your life and identify one area you wish to improve and become more self-disciplined in your own behavior. Start the work necessary to become a bigger, better and bold you and Jimmy. And I have faith that you can do it. You just have to start with discipline.
JW:
Absolutely. Go to our Facebook page, Live a Life By Design, and you’ll see our community page there. I would like people to go and list just one area. Don’t have to be too personal that you want a little bit more discipline in and let’s help you work through it this week. And I’m gonna go this week and be putting some good ideas on the social media page for others to listen and look at. And I hope that everyone gained as much from this episode as they needed get started. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna finish now, but get started on a more disciplined life. So you’ll have greater success as you define it in your own world. And with that said, Lori, I think it’s time for us to get our days started and let these good folks enjoy their Monday. So from all of us here at live life by design do go out and the best week.
