Are you leading with self-discipline? (73-2)
Effective leaders must develop self-discipline. The first person a leader needs to lead in this area is themselves. Read Numbers 33:1-49.
Numbers 33 provides a review of the entire exodus journey from Egypt to Jordon. Why didn’t the Israelites get to the Promised Land more quickly? Not because it was such a long trip in distance, they could have made the trip across this distance in less than a year under the worst of circumstances even with small children. The real reason was that God needed to prepare the Hebrew people, teaching them how to move from a slave mentality to a free mentality where they chose to be obedient to Him from a free disciplined spirit.
If your desire is to be a godly leader, self-discipline is required. There are some action points that can help you develop self-discipline:
- Develop and follow your priorities. Every leader is pressed for time but the more successful leaders have a plan and hold themselves accountable to that plan. The essence of self-discipline is to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing. Forcing yourself to constantly focus on the “planned” actions to accomplish the important thing develops your ability to be self-disciplined.
- Make a disciplined lifestyle your goal. Establish self-discipline as a core value. Self-discipline is not a one time event. Self-discipline is a lifestyle. Your actions will be controlled by your core beliefs.
- Challenge your excuses. Once you start seeing excuses for what they are, you will get past these barriers to success.
- Remove rewards until you finish the job. My mom established the rule that no one ate dessert before they ate their vegetables. Every leader reading this knows why. If we can get the reward without doing the work, why bother with the work. Only as you willingly voluntarily delay your reward until the job is complete will you begin to develop the discipline to do the work needed to be an effective leader.
- Stay focused on the benefits. When a leader focuses on the difficulty of the work rather than the benefits, it is easy to become discouraged. Discouragement is the enemy of self-discipline. Forcing yourself to keep your focus on the final outcome and counting the benefits of doing what is right to accomplish the goal benefits your efforts to be self-disciplined.
What is your system for prioritizing tasks keeping the important separated from the urgent? If you do not have a system, do some research, choose a system and give it a 60-day try. If it works, great; if not, modify it to make it work for you. If it still isn’t working for you, scrap it and try another system.
