Lead July 12, 2018

Hello friends. Though Thursday is usually a Love, Learn, and Lead day, today, we are solely going to focus on a Leadership Tip that I feel applies to all of us. One, that if we follow, will help us succeed in the longterm, whatever our calling or vocation.

Leadership Tip #17: Get Disciplined

Growing up, for me, the word discipline always meant punishment. So sometimes, I still cringe when I hear it used. But as I have gotten older, I have begun to see that there is this whole other meaning to this word that is crucial to us succeeding as leaders. And it is this idea of discipline as training, like I talked about on Monday. In order for us to be different, to be better—in almost any area—a degree of training is involved.

Often, when certain things or people make success appear seamless, we get the impression that it is easy. When there’s actually often a lot of work involved. A great example of this is from the Imagine Dragon’s concert I went to recently. When the band stepped out on stage, the lead singer, Dan Reynolds, came out shirtless—revealing a rather chiseled physique.

Tony, who has been on a fitness journey with me for the past six months (and succeeding more than I have), wondered how a touring musician can maintain such good physical shape. Knowing other famous people, like Tom Brady and Michael Phelps have shared their regimens, he googled “Dan Reynold’s diet.”

Sure enough, up came a very limited list of foods that he eats exactly five times a day. In addition, he has a personal trainer and a strict workout schedule. While he is touring, a lot of Dan’s life is working out, eating, performing, and sleeping.

Nothing in this world is accomplished without discipline.

As leaders, we can feel tempted to take short cuts, to eat for comfort, to skip workouts in favor of longer hours at work, to live on caffeine and limited sleep, etc. But none of this actually helps us in the long run. And though none of us needa Dan Reynold’s body, we do want our bodies to keep up with us for the marathon that we hope will be our leadership journey. To enable them to do so, we need to be disciplined.

Perhaps we aren’t performing almost nightly to throngs of adoring fans, but it doesn’t mean that what we are doing isn’t important. That we aren’t worth taking care of. For this reason, we need to look at what we are eating and ask “is this giving me energy or just comfort?” We need to look at our work hours and our at home hours, and ask “How many hours have I been sitting? When and where can I move?” And although it’s tempting to binge our favorite shows when their new season’s come out on Netflix, we need to ask ourselves, “Am I getting enough sleep?”

Though these questions may seem more like chores than disciplines, the right answers to them will in fact help to train our bodies for the long haul. None of us want to burn out before forty. We need to figure out what disciplines are going to help carry us for the next fifty years or more.