Are you finding that something is holding you back from getting to where you want to go?  You know you need to find your place, but don’t seem to be moving any closer to discovering it.  Or perhaps you know what you want but can’t seem to make progress towards getting it.

If you are like most people, what you are going to find is holding you back is that you don’t want to do the things that you MUST DO in order to move forward.  In addition to doing what we LOVE to do, we also have to do many things we DON’T like to do.

The word gets a bad rap.  We think discipline and we think of visits to the principal’s office leaning with our hands on the desk while a wooden paddle crossed our hindquarters a few times for errant behavior.

Yeah, I’m aging myself with that one.  Not that it ever happened to me or you! (right!).

But the word discipline takes it root in instruction and order.  Jesus called his followers disciples, because they received instruction, learned order and self-control.  We need that in order to move forward and succeed, because it gets us past the barriers of things we don’t want to do or fear doing.

Let me emphasize here:  I am as guilty of this as anybody.  I will not tell you that I have mastered this.  Like you, I am fighting this battle every day.

I love the opportunity to get up and talk before groups of people, to share knowledge with people, to help them improve, to help them grow.  But there are parts of the job that I don’t particularly care for.

But I have to do them anyway.

We are all going to have things that we dislike doing, but we are going to have to do them in order to move ahead.  Your success comes from doing it anyway; as Brian Tracy says,

Identify those things that are particularly distasteful or that you dislike and DO THEM ANYWAY!

Zig Ziglar says when we do the things we need to do when we need to do them, the day will come when we can do the things we want to do when we want to do them.

1. DO UNPLEASANT THINGS FIRST.  Do them before you do anything else.  There is a psychological aspect to this.  By doing things you don’t like first and getting them out of the way, it provides a relief factor that allows you to be more effective the rest of the day.  In addition, any thing else seems pleasant by comparison.  It also gets them done.
2. DO NOTHING ELSE UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THE MUST-DO TASKS! Even if it means you just sit in your chair and stare.  Don’t do anything else until you accomplish the things you don’t like to do.  This is a tough one but it’s where we learn discipline.  If you are faced with the prospect of doing something you don’t like or just sitting there all day staring into space, which are you going to choose?  Even if you initially choose staring into space, you will tire of it quickly and break down and do the unpleasant thing.  When I was a kid, like many other kids, I didn’t want to eat my vegetables.  My parents made it clear I was not leaving the table until I did.  I was faced with the prospect of getting it over with and going to watch Batman on TV or just sitting there.  It didn’t take me long to break down and do it.
3. REWARD YOURSELF FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING.  You want to provide a positive impact for making the right choices and doing the right thing.  It provides motivation and makes doing the things you don’t like to do that much easier.  Some argue you should also provide consequences for not doing it.  Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week and other books, shared that if he didn’t get things done during the day, he would intentionally wake himself up at 2 a.m. and force himself to work as a consequence.  I think simply not doing anything else is consequence enough.

What about you?  What do you do to practice discipline and accomplish things you don’t like to do?