Discipline Is the Key to Change
Discipline is the deciding factor between success or failure, victory or defeat. This one principle that is so necessary for achieving your goals is often where people will drop the ball. Why? Because discipline doesn’t feel good. It isn’t fun. It doesn’t give you that warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
In fact, discipline is the following:
Discipline is doing what you don’t want to do, when you don’t want to do it.
The hardest part about being disciplined is learning how to get over yourself. You have ‘needs’. You have wants. You have excuses. You don’t want to do it. You are tired. You don’t have the money. These are all things that many people subscribe to that will hold them back in life.
The best way to overcome lack of discipline is to be accountable for yourself. Accountability means to commit to a goal until it’s completed and live with the results. Want to get out of debt? Write down everything that you owe and commit to paying the smallest items off first. Want to lose weight? Commit to eating a healthier diet and working out several days a week. Want to save money throughout your workweek? Commit to taking your lunch to work each day and if possible, do a carpool to save gas.
By committing to these habits, you will see a huge difference in yourself and your finances. But there’s another aspect to discipline that is crucial to your success, and that’s changing your language. A key principle to disciple is learning how to take these bad words out of your mouth:
Can’t
But
Try
The word can’t is an excuse that’s used to describe how and why you can’t accomplish your goal. It enables your failure and is self-imposed. Instead, find a way to accomplish your goal and stick to it. Speak your dreams, plans and aspirations into existence and tell yourself that you can do it! If the situation is too rough for you, it is just right for God. Give your situation over to Him and He will find a way!
The word but is another excuse that tells why you can’t accomplish your goal and enables you to postpone, delay, or eliminate what you said you want to do in the first part of the sentence. The word ‘but’ only adds something negative to the sentence. Instead of saying but, say ‘and’. The word ‘and’ adds something to the sentence, and it enables you to accomplish the first part of the sentence.
The word try means that you’re not making a commitment to do what you said you’re going to do. ‘Try’ is a placeholder and a punk excuse for not committing to do what needs to be done so that you can go to the next level. Imagine if a person wakes up on Monday and after the alarm goes off, they ‘try’ to go to work. Well, did they go?
Trust me when I say that if they ‘tried’ to go to work long enough, pretty soon they won’t have to try anymore because they won’t have a job. Stop trying and just do it. It’s much easier to get it done than to talk about it.
Be blessed, Marc Wallace
