In the first post, I wrote about the weight of holding two callings at once. The arithmetic that never quite worked. The mornings I kept redesigning that never actually held. In the second, I wrote about what the “and” produces, about a June workshop where twenty five years of nonprofit leadership and everything I have built through Mission ENSPIRE met in one room and made something neither one could have made alone. In the third, I wrote about how uneven that “and” actually is, and how I am learning that uneven does not mean unequal, that a slower season is information and not a verdict.

Four posts is longer than I usually stay with one idea. This one would not let me go until I had said the whole thing, and I think that is because I was not only writing about the “and” this summer. I was living inside it while I wrote.

So here is where all of it has brought me, and where I want to leave you before I close this series.

What I Know Now That I Did Not Know in June

I started this series thinking I needed to explain myself. To account for the hours that do not divide evenly between my full-time work and Mission ENSPIRE, to justify why one calling gets Saturday afternoons and stolen evenings while the other gets a whole calendar built around it. Somewhere underneath that instinct was a fear that if I could not make the math work, I had no business calling both of them real.

What I know now is that the math was never going to work, and it was never supposed to. Both callings are real. Neither one is the thing I am doing while I wait to do the other thing. And wholeness, the word I used back in post two, does not mean equal. It means I get to stop treating the quieter calling as evidence against myself, and start treating the unevenness as the actual shape of this season instead of a problem I still have not solved.

I also learned something about returning, the thing I wrote about in the very first post. Consistency, at least in this season, was never going to look like rhythm for me. It looks like coming back to Mission ENSPIRE again and again, in whatever hour I can find, without needing that hour to resemble anyone else’s business hours. That is the truest thing this series taught me. I did not arrive at it by figuring something out. I arrived at it by staying honest long enough, post after post, to let it become true.

One Thing Is Necessary

There is a passage in the Gospel of Luke I have found myself returning to more than once this summer. Martha is doing what needs to be done in the kitchen while her sister Mary sits and listens, and Martha finally says what so many of us have felt, tell her to help me. Jesus does not tell Martha that her work does not matter. He tells her she is anxious about many things, and only one thing is necessary.

I used to read that story as a lesson about priorities, choose the better thing over the lesser one. I read it differently now. I think it might be a lesson about seasons. Not every good thing gets to be the one thing at the same time. Some of what matters to you is allowed to wait its turn without becoming less true while it waits.

That is the practical piece underneath everything I have written in this series. If your “and” is uneven right now, the question is not which calling deserves more of you. The question is what this particular season is actually asking you to give your full attention to, and whether you can let the rest of what matters stay real without demanding equal time to prove it.

Maybe your “and” does not look like mine. Maybe it is a job and a marriage that both need you fully present. Maybe it is a caregiving season and a dream you have not put down. Whatever your version looks like, the season itself usually already knows which one needs your full attention right now. The work is trusting that knowing, instead of arguing with it.

What I Am Protecting This Season

For me, right now, that one thing is a self-paced course built out of something I did not expect, talks I have already given.

Since last July, I have shown up again and again in virtual rooms, speaker showcases, summits, sessions, and spoken about worth, confidence, boundaries, courage, more times than I expected to when I started. Somewhere in the middle of this season, I went back through those recordings and realized the teaching I needed to build was already there. What it needed was structure, sequencing, a way to guide a woman all the way through it on her own.

So, I built it that way. I recorded a new opening to welcome you in and a new closing to help you leave with something to carry, and everything in between draws on talks I have given since July, to women I never met in person but still watched recognize themselves in real time, in a chat window, in a room I could not see but could feel. Five lessons, moving from reclaiming your own story to building a rooted kind of confidence, to protecting your energy without guilt, to naming the perfectionism that keeps capable women stuck, and ending with something simple and repeatable to carry forward.

That is part of why I am proud of it in a way that surprises me a little. It is not a course I built from nothing under a deadline. It is a course made of everything I said out loud this year, every virtual room I showed up to and told the truth in. Both callings built it, honestly. The years in leadership taught me what a woman actually needs to hear to move. Mission ENSPIRE gave me the rooms, virtual as they were, to say it in.

It is not ready to sell yet. There are still pieces standing between what exists and you being able to walk through it, and I am not going to rush past that just because I am proud of it. But I wanted you to know it exists, that it is real, that it is the one thing I am protecting on my calendar for the rest of this year, and that when it is ready, you will be some of the first to hear its name.

I did not set out four posts ago to find a system. I do not think I even believed one existed. What I was looking for, without fully naming it, was permission to stop treating the unevenness as a problem I still had not solved.

What I have instead is something I trust more than a system. The “and” does not get lighter because you finally understand it. It gets sustainable when you stop requiring it to be even, choose the one thing this season is actually asking of you, and trust that everything else you carry is not gone just because it is waiting.

That is the whole series, really. Not a formula for holding two callings well. Just permission, the kind you give yourself, to hold them honestly, protect what this season can actually carry, and trust the returning.

What is the one thing you are choosing to protect this season, and what are you letting wait without deciding it matters less?

In the first post, I wrote about the weight of holding two callings at once. The arithmetic that never quite works. The mornings that do not hold. The work of building something meaningful in the margins of a life that is already full.

In the second, I wrote about what the “and” produces. I shared how twenty-five years of nonprofit leadership and the visibility I have built through Mission ENSPIRE met in one room, strengthened one another and created something neither could have produced alone. That post ended with a realization: I did not walk out of the room as a divided person trying to serve two separate worlds. I walked out as a whole person, drawing from everything I had built.

I have continued thinking about what it actually means to live as that whole person, because wholeness does not mean everything receives the same amount of time. It does not mean every calling moves at the same pace, every goal is pursued simultaneously or every part of your life produces visible results at the same moment.

Sometimes the “and” is deeply uneven.

Looking at What Was Built

As I reviewed the first half of 2026 for Mission ENSPIRE, I could see a lot that had happened. I spoke to more than 200 women on a global stage. I delivered workshops and leadership sessions. I launched a newsletter, grew my email community and completed the content for a self-paced course, including the videos, workbook and supporting materials.

There was real progress. There were also things that did not happen as planned. The course was built, but the technology required to launch it was not complete. Some of the visibility I worked hard to create did not translate into sales. A social media schedule that worked well in May fell apart in June when a workshop, course development, vacation preparation and the rest of life began competing for the same limited space.

The record of the first half held both accomplishment and unfinished work. It would have been easy to look only at what remained incomplete and decide I had not done enough. It would have been just as easy to focus only on what went well and avoid asking harder questions about what the business needs next.

Neither response would have told the whole truth.

The fuller truth is that Mission ENSPIRE was growing, but it was growing inside a season that did not have unlimited room for it.

Both Does Not Always Mean Equal

My full-time role receives the largest share of my working hours. That is not an accident, and it is not an inconvenience standing between me and my real work. It is real work that asks for leadership, strategy, judgment, presence and responsibility. It allows me to contribute to communities, organizations and leaders doing meaningful work across Illinois, and it continues to deepen the experience I bring into every Mission ENSPIRE session.

Mission ENSPIRE is also real work, but it is built differently. It is built on Saturday afternoons, in stolen evenings and in deadline-driven bursts. Sometimes I have an uninterrupted block. More often, I return to it in pieces. For a long time, I treated that unevenness as a problem I needed to solve. Surely, I thought, the right morning routine would create the hours. A better calendar would make everything fit. More discipline would turn unpredictable pockets of time into a reliable rhythm.

But I am beginning to understand that the unevenness is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong. It may simply be the actual shape of this season. Choosing both does not guarantee that both will receive equal time. It does not mean they will produce equal results or require the same kind of energy. It does not mean the balance will remain the same from one month to the next. Equal importance does not require equal expression.

That has been an important distinction for me because when one calling receives more hours, it can be tempting to believe the other must not matter as much. When progress is slower than expected, we can begin questioning our commitment. When a plan moves into another season, we may interpret the delay as fear, failure or evidence that we were never serious.

Sometimes those conclusions are worth examining. We can use the language of capacity to avoid action just as easily as we can use ambition to ignore our limits. But a slower pace is not automatically avoidance, and a quieter season is not the same as abandonment. Uneven progress does not necessarily mean unequal commitment.

A Plan that Fits this Season

My original plans for the second half of this year held several significant offers and ideas. The revised plan holds one central offer. A group program I hoped to launch this year has moved to 2027. So has the retreat I have been envisioning. My social media plans will be lighter during the course launch, while the blog and newsletter remain protected. Instead of trying to force several major goals into the same limited space, I am choosing one primary focus and allowing the rest to wait.

On paper, the plan became smaller. In practice, it became a better fit for the season I am actually living. Those decisions do not mean I no longer believe in the strategies that I moved. They do not mean I am less ambitious or less committed to the vision. They mean I am making decisions that reflect my actual capacity instead of the capacity I wish I had.

There is a difference between giving up on an idea and giving it the time it deserves. There is a difference between shrinking a vision and refusing to build it under conditions that would require depletion. There is also a difference between moving slowly and standing still.

I am learning to treat slow seasons as information, not a verdict.

The information from the first half of the year was clear. I can create meaningful work. I can build visibility. I can speak, facilitate, write and develop programs while continuing to lead in my full-time role. I cannot do every version of all those things at once, and I do not need to.

Wholeness Is Not Sameness

When I wrote about leaving the June workshop as a whole person, I was not describing a perfect merger in which every part of my life finally fit together neatly. Wholeness is not uniformity, and it does not require every part of me to speak at the same volume. It means I no longer have to dismiss the quieter parts simply because something else is louder. I do not have to treat my nonprofit leadership as separate from the coach, facilitator and entrepreneur I am continuing to grow into. I do not have to devalue Mission ENSPIRE because it currently receives fewer hours than my full-time work.

Both are shaping me. Both are drawing from the same values, experience and desire to support people as they move forward. Both belong to me, even when the calendar does not divide itself evenly between them. Maybe your “and” looks different from mine. Maybe you are growing a business while building a career. Maybe you are leading professionally while caring for family. Maybe you are holding a present responsibility alongside a future you can already see but cannot fully enter yet. Perhaps one part of your life is moving quickly while another is barely moving at all.

You may not need to make a permanent decision based on a temporary imbalance. You may simply need to recognize the season you are in, decide what can be carried well right now and allow what matters to move at a pace that does not require you to disappear in order to sustain it. I still do not have an even calendar. Mission ENSPIRE is still being built in the margins. Some goals are moving into another year, and some completed work is still waiting for the conditions that will allow it to be released. None of that makes the calling less real.

This is what I understand now that I did not fully understand when I began this series: the “and” does not become sustainable when the math finally evens out. It becomes sustainable when we stop requiring evenness as proof of commitment.

What would it look like to let something important move at the pace this season can hold, without deciding that it matters less?

The room was already beautiful when I walked in.

White roses on black tablecloths. Quote cards in wooden stands. Branded tote bags at every seat. The kind of care in the setup that tells you immediately this is not a standard professional development session. The ERG leaders had built something before I ever arrived, and I walked into it carrying my workbooks, my slide deck, my handouts, and twenty-five years of accumulated experience that I was about to find out still knew exactly what to do.

I had been invited to lead this workshop by a woman I met through the Women Thrive Summit. We had both spoken there, connected across the virtual space the way you do when you recognize someone doing work that resonates with yours, and eventually she reached out. Her ERG was planning a gathering called Rooted and Rising. They were looking for someone to lead a session. Would I be interested?

I sent a proposal with three options. They chose the one that became Leading From the Inside Out: Strengthening Mindset, Boundaries and Self-Trust. Then came a few months of email exchanges, one planning call, and then June 18th.

This was our first time meeting in person.

I want to hold that detail for a moment because it matters to what this post is actually about. The door to that room opened because of Mission ENSPIRE. Because I had been doing the visibility work, showing up on stages, building a platform, saying yes to rooms that stretched me. But the person who walked through that door and knew what to do once she got inside, that person was built by twenty-five years of nonprofit leadership, facilitation training, and the particular kind of confidence that only comes from having held a lot of rooms over a long time.

Both callings got me there. Neither one could have done it alone.

Before 2020, in-person facilitation was woven into my professional life so regularly I rarely stopped to think about it. The world shifting inside changed that, and a promotion in 2024 shifted it further. I had been back in an in-person room just six weeks earlier. But there is something about walking into a new room, with a new audience, built around work that is entirely yours, that asks you to show up differently. The familiarity of the format and the newness of the moment were both true at the same time.

And still, the body remembers. The instincts came back before I finished my first sentence.

I told the room at the start that I was not there to lecture them. That this was not a session where I would talk at them for an hour while they took notes and waited to leave. We were going to reflect. We were going to write. We were going to share with the woman sitting beside us. I said it because I meant it, and because I have learned over a long career that a room does not open until the people in it believe they are actually safe to be honest. You cannot create that with a slide. You earn it with how you enter.

We started with short introductions, just enough for everyone to hear their own voice in the room. Then we went to work.

The workshop moved through three roots: mindset, boundaries, and self-trust. Not as a list of concepts to memorize but as an invitation to look inward, to ask which one was asking for their attention right now, and to name one practice small enough to actually keep. There were workbook prompts and four full minutes of writing in silence. There were partner shares with specific instructions: listen, do not advise, say thank you, then switch. There was a moment where I asked everyone to hold one of the gardening tools from their tote bag and think about what it means to tend soil before you expect anything to rise from it.

None of that structure came from a facilitation playbook. It came from years of coaching work, from the belief I have carried through Mission ENSPIRE that women already hold more than they give themselves credit for, and that what they need most is not more information but more space to see themselves clearly. That sensibility shaped the design of the entire workshop.

And the facilitation training, the pacing, the silence, the instinct for when to push and when to pull back, gave the coaching content a container strong enough to hold it. One without the other would have produced something thinner. A coaching session without the facilitation structure might have felt unmoored. A facilitation workshop without the coaching underneath would have been information delivery with good activities. What happened in that room on June 18 was neither of those things.

The feedback forms told me what I could not fully see from the front of the room. People named validation. Self-reflection. Being asked to look at themselves. One person wrote that they do not normally do things like this. That is the sentence I keep returning to, because that is exactly what the workshop was designed to do. To take a professional development moment and make it personal. To invite the woman, not just the leader, into the room.

When it was over, I walked to my car and sat with the quiet for a minute.

I felt good. I also felt drained in that particular way that only happens when you have given a room everything you brought with you. It is not the tired of depletion. It is the tired of full effort, the kind that tells you something real happened, that you did not hold back, that the work cost something because it was worth something.

That is what the and produces when both callings are allowed to show up fully. Not a divided self trying to serve two masters. A whole person, drawing from everything she has built, in a room that needed exactly that.

What does it look like when everything you have learned, across every season and every role, shows up at the same time? Have you stopped long enough to let that be something you claim?

I have lost count of how many times I have designed the perfect morning.

You probably know the one. Up early, coffee ready, a quiet hour of focused time on Mission ENSPIRE before the workday begins. I have imagined that morning in detail. I have told myself, more than once, that this would be the week I finally put it into practice. And then Tuesday arrives. The early meeting. The message that cannot wait. The morning I designed in my head stays in my head, and the morning I actually live belongs to everything else. By the following Sunday I am designing it all over again, convinced that this time I just need a better system.

Some mornings the time does not go to any work at all. It goes to sleep. It goes to rest, to errands, to being a person with a life and not just a woman with two callings. I used to count those mornings as evidence against myself. I am learning to count them as part of the math.

If you have ever built a routine in good faith and watched it dissolve by midweek, this post is for you.

The Math I Do Not Usually Say Out Loud

Here is what a normal week actually looks like for me. LISC takes the largest share of my working hours by far, and it is demanding work. I lead people who lead people, which means it does not always stay neatly inside the hours assigned to it. It follows me into the evening in the form of things I am still turning over in my mind.

And then there is the rest of a life. Family. Friendships. Rest I actually need. The ordinary maintenance of being a person. None of that disappears to make room for a business, nor should it.

So, Mission ENSPIRE gets what is left, when I can find it. And there is no rhythm to that time right now. I do not have business hours. I do not have a sacred morning block that actually holds. I claim time in chunks, when the energy is there or when something is time sensitive. A Saturday afternoon here. A stolen evening there. A burst of focus when a deadline makes the decision for me.

I am naming this plainly because almost nobody does. Every piece of advice out there says build the routine, protect your mornings, treat your business like a business. I have tried all of it, sincerely and more than once. And what is true for me in this season is that the business gets built in the margins, irregularly, by a woman who coaches other women on consistency and knows exactly how this looks from the outside. I am naming that tension on purpose, because I do not believe I am the only one living inside it.

Not a Job and a Side Hustle

Here is where I need to correct an assumption before it settles in, because it is the assumption people make most often when they hear about my two worlds.

LISC is not the day job that funds the real dream. Mission ENSPIRE is not the passion project waiting for me to escape into it. I have given 19 years to community development work, across Chicagoland, Central Illinois and nationally, and that work is not what I do while I wait to do the thing I love. It is calling. And the coaching, facilitating, and writing I do through Mission ENSPIRE, supporting women to lead themselves well so they can lead everything else well, that is calling too. Same calling, honestly. One purpose, expressed in two places.

I used to think that clarity would make the carrying easier. It does not. In some ways it makes it heavier, and here is why. If one of these were just a job, the math would be simple. You protect the real thing and you endure the other one. You give the job what it requires and not an ounce more, and you pour everything else into the work of your heart. There is a whole library of advice built on exactly that math.

But when both are calling, there is nothing to demote. There is no lesser thing to put down so your arms can be free for the greater thing. The and is not between an obligation and a dream. The and is between two things I would choose again. And the hours still do not divide evenly. That is the weight nobody hands you a framework for.

What the Hours Tell Me

Now here is the part that took me a while to see, and it might be the most important thing in this post.

When I do claim those chunks of time for Mission ENSPIRE, when I finally sit down on that Saturday afternoon or in that stolen evening, I do not feel resentment. I do not feel guilt about what got bumped. I feel good. I feel accomplished. I close the laptop genuinely glad that I took the time to work on the business.

Sit with that for a moment, because there is evidence in it. The hours themselves are never the struggle. Being in the work confirms the calling every single time I get there. The struggle is only ever reaching the hours. Getting to them through the noise and the meetings and the legitimate demands of the other calling.

I think some of us have quietly concluded that because the time is so hard to find, we must be pursuing the wrong thing. That if this were really our calling, the path to it would be clearer and the calendar would cooperate. If that is the conclusion you have been quietly carrying, I want to offer you a different reading. The difficulty of reaching the work is not a verdict on the work. Pay attention to how you feel when you are actually in it. That is where the truth lives, not in how hard it was to arrive.

Returning Is Its Own Kind of Consistency

Earlier this year I wrote about consistency as quiet courage, about showing up before the results arrive. I believed every word when I wrote it, and I believe it now. But this season has taught me something I did not fully understand then.

Consistency does not always look like rhythm. Sometimes it looks like returning.

A rhythm carries you. Once the routine is established, the routine itself does some of the work. You show up because it is 6am and that is what 6am is for. But when there is no rhythm, when the week refuses to repeat itself and the perfect morning keeps dissolving, every single return is a decision. Nobody and nothing carries you back to the work. You carry yourself. You come back to it again on Saturday, again next Wednesday night, again after two weeks when the season swallowed everything. And in some ways that takes more than a routine ever would, because you are choosing the calling fresh every time instead of riding a habit toward it.

So, if your version of consistency looks like returning rather than rhythm right now, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not failing at consistency. You are practicing its hardest form.

There is a song by Jonathan McReynolds called “Make Room.” I have been sitting with the idea at the center of it, the work of making room for what matters most even when your life is already full. That is what this season has asked of me. Not a better system. Not a perfect morning. Just the willingness to keep making room, again and again, for a calling I refuse to set down.

I do not have a tidy resolution for you, and I am not going to pretend that I do. As I write this, the hours still do not divide evenly. The perfect morning still does not hold. What I have instead is the truth of this season, written down plainly and the knowledge that I am not carrying the and alone. Neither are you. There are more of us living in this exact arithmetic than you would ever guess from the outside, building what we are called to build in the margins, returning again and again without a schedule to carry us there.

This series is for us.

What does returning look like in your week right now?

Picking up from last week’s theme, I wanted to share some additional tips for making discipline a habit.  Some of these may be familiar concepts to my regular readers–for example, accountability.  Accountability with a trusted friend, colleague, or family member can help with developing discipline.  Many people think self-discipline means doing it all on your own, but it does not mean that at all. In fact, having a coach, or a group, or an accountability partner can really help you to develop more discipline.  An example would be when someone puts off housework until they know someone is coming over, and they race around to get the house all tidy before their visitor arrives. It is far easier to give in and be less disciplined when you just have yourself in the picture. When you have a person or people hold you accountable, though, you are far more likely to make sure it happens.    

An accountability partner is someone you set up a contract with to hold each other accountable for reaching goals. This is a mutual pact and is probably the easiest to set up. The goals do not have to be the same ones, the point is to connect on a regular basis, often once a week, and share with each other how much you have accomplished.  The best way to do this is to break up the task into daily chunks and do each one each day so that you are not trying to finish up the project the night before you meet with your accountability partner.  (For more on accountability, check out this blog post from April 2023.)

Using Challenges to Develop More Discipline

One way you can develop more discipline is to use challenges. This makes it more like a game and less like a chore. Also there can be the element of friendly competition with others and having others help hold you accountable which improves your odds of success.  Challenges are very popular and you can find them in many places across the internet and social media. Or you can make up your own and share it with a group of people. However, you end up doing it is up to you.

When looking to see if a challenge will be useful to you, there are some factors to look for, so you can best benefit. Is the challenge realistic? You want to stretch yourself, but not to the point where it might be too difficult to succeed. For example you could challenge yourself to cook all your meals at home for the next 30 days in order to save money on take-out or restaurant food, but that might be challenging if, for instance, you have travel planned away from your home during that time, or if you have an especially busy few days with work, kids’ activities, or other family obligations on deck. You also want the challenge to not be too easy. You need to see if you have the time to devote to it. Be sure to include time for learning new things, for example if you challenge yourself to build a new blogging website in 30 days, remember that if you have never done one before, you will have to learn some things and that will be extra time above just writing the blog posts.  (Having launched this blog earlier this year, I am all too aware from personal experience the time it can take to learn new website-building systems! )  

If the challenge is a large one over a longer period of time, are there clear-cut milestones along the way to help you have a sense of accomplishment? If your challenge, for example, is to find a new job or change careers entirely, you may want to build in smaller steps and milestones along the way–such as making a list (written or mental) of what you’re looking for in your new career, writing or revamping your resume, researching job leads, networking informally or through informational interviews with people in the field you have your eye on, and so forth. 

When you do a group challenge, you have some added benefits. There is a sense of camaraderie when working together on a goal that you don’t get when just “competing” with yourself. Other people can give you ideas, too. For example, if you are in a group challenge focused on cooking more or eating out less, the group members can share recipes and support.

Organization Is a Major Tool in Developing Discipline

If you want to develop more self-discipline, it helps to get organized. Organization helps you feel less overwhelmed and makes it easier to get things done. You also can focus easier on your goals if you have a structure to both your day and your work environment.

For example, say you have a goal of writing a book. Lots of people want to write books, but many never end up finishing one–why? Because a monumental goal like that requires discipline and organization, and especially if there isn’t a fixed deadline imposed by someone else, it’s easy for our goals to fall to the back burner as day-to-day obligations get in the way. You cannot successfully write a book if you only write when you feel like it. You also are less likely to get much writing done if you are not organized. If your research for your book consists of pages that you have to search through every time you need something, or worse yet, find the notes buried in a pile of paperwork, you will find you spend more time on finding things instead of actually writing.

Scheduling your day is another way of organizing that will help you develop discipline. This is more than just having a to do list. You need to look at when you get up, when you go to bed, and block out times like work hours that cannot be used for accomplishing your goals. Then you need to take a look at the time left over and figure out how to best use it. One of the ways a lot of people add more time in their day is to get up an hour earlier and devote that time to their goals. Some people go to bed an hour later and use that time. Be realistic about how much time it takes to do the steps needed to accomplish your goal.

Organizing your workspace and your files on your computer are also ways to help you with developing discipline. By making sure you cut down on the time it takes for related tasks to accomplish your goals, you allow more time to actually do the work of the goal itself. To go back to the example of writing a book, if your research is well organized either in your workplace or in well-marked files on your computer, you will spend less time looking stuff up and more time actually writing. This will lead to faster writing as well since you are not interrupting the flow to spend time searching for something.   You will then be far more likely to actually finish writing that book. 

This is another example that really resonates with me from personal experience. In 2022 I was invited to contribute a chapter to The Entrepreneurs’ Toolkit for Success and I got a taste of the organization and discipline that writing required–and that was for a single chapter, not even a whole book!  Some of the tips and techniques that I described above really helped me stay on track, and I definitely plan to use them when I tackle my next writing goal of writing and publishing an entire book someday!  How have discipline and organization helped you get closer to achieving your goals?   

This week and next, I’m focusing on the topic of discipline: how we can develop it and how we can use it to our advantage in our learning and development journey.  Many of us might have an initial gut reaction to the term “discipline” that isn’t the most positive: perhaps we had childhood experiences that cause us to associate discipline with punishment; or even if we think of discipline as being more along the lines of self-discipline, it’s also common to think that self-discipline revolves around rule-following, working, or denying yourself treats or other indulgences. But productive, meaningful discipline shouldn’t be punitive, and it doesn’t have to be a chore. Instead, we can harness the power of discipline for our learning and development.     

Benefits of Self-Discipline

When you develop self-discipline, you have many beneficial results. These include a sense of accomplishment, more self-respect, and a better understanding of what you can do.  Discipline is not always easy, but it is well worth it. When you set goals and work on them every day until you accomplish the goal, you feel proud of yourself. Not only because you accomplished the goal, but because you did not quit. You stuck with your goals and made them happen. Think back to when you had a goal and worked on it every day until it was done. How did you feel?

When you discipline yourself to accomplish a goal, you also increase your self-respect. Think of the people you have the most respect for, and why you respect them. Chances are one of those reasons is that they have self-discipline. They set out to do something and they accomplish it. By doing the same for yourself, you can have more respect for who you are as a person.  You learn more of what you can do. When you set goals and challenge yourself to meet them, you will find out that you can overcome obstacles that you might have thought were too difficult. You learn more about who you are and what you can accomplish when you set your mind to it.

Many times, we put limitations on ourselves that aren’t really accurate.  In the coaching world, we sometimes call this phenomenon “limiting beliefs” and they can pertain to topics large or small, specific or wide-ranging.  “I’m not athletic, I could never run a 5K race (or a half-marathon, marathon, etc)”; “I’m too old (or too young) to do ____”; “I’m not creative enough to be an entrepreneur”; “I’ll never get ahead in life” are all examples of limiting beliefs that can hold us back. These beliefs can be shaped by a whole host of deep-seated factors, sometimes going as far back as our childhood.  Many of us have limiting beliefs that were influenced by the habits, mindset, or circumstances of our parents or our extended community–perhaps without us even being consciously aware of it at the time. Or negative experiences in school or the workplace might have shaken our confidence and caused self-doubt to take root in our minds. Limiting beliefs can be powerful, pervasive, and persistent.  

Think about something you think is not possible. Is it really impossible or are you setting a limitation that is artificial? One way to find out is to set a goal and make it happen. Obviously, some goals won’t happen overnight. Progress might be slow and gradual, depending on your starting point, the magnitude of your goal, and the distance between those start and finish lines. (If you’re really feeling bogged down by your limiting beliefs and need some extra support, a skilled coach can be a great resource for helping you get “unstuck” and chart a new path forward.)

You can use this mindset to practice embracing some of the benefits of discipline. Figure out a goal that you want to do and set up milestones along the way. Then each day do something to make those milestones happen. It doesn’t have to be anything major, just one more small step on the way to your final goal. When you reach that final goal, take stock of how you feel about yourself and what you are capable of doing. (For much more on goal setting, see my April 2023 blog series.)

Discipline in Bite Sized Steps

But what are some ways to begin practicing self-discipline that are manageable, achievable and don’t reinforce those negative perceptions of discipline as being too limiting and deprivation-focused?  One of the ways that people struggle with developing self-discipline, is trying to make too many changes at once–not just by doing more than one goal at a time, but by making those goals way too large. Either of these approaches can lead to us feeling deprived, discouraged, and ultimately demotivated.

An example of too many goals at once might be someone choosing to quit smoking, improve their eating habits, exercise regularly, build a successful business, and get out of debt, all at the same time. All of these goals are common things that many people strive to achieve and that can be beneficial for our longer-term health, wealth, and quality of life.  But if you try to do them all at once, though, you will probably find it to be too much and quit. This is one of the reasons why some of those big, bold New Year’s resolutions that we make every January 1 tend to fizzle out as the year goes on. Instead, focus on one or two of your goals for the first several months, to give yourself time to make new habits, notch some small “wins” to celebrate, and use that momentum to move on to other goals. 

For example, if your most urgent goal is to quit smoking because you’re concerned about the long-term health effects and the day-to-day impact on your budget, you might start by focusing just on that goal. You could spend a couple of months getting rid of the cigarettes and using aids like the nicotine patch to help. Then once you feel that you’ve reached a place of stability and confidence in meeting that goal, you can move on to tackle others.

You may find changing your diet and exercising more to be really overwhelming goals because they are huge ones–and so generic that it can be difficult to pinpoint where to start. So, another tactic to help you with discipline is to break them down into smaller goals. If you look across your food and drink consumption and decide that you want to focus on cutting out soda, for example, maybe you break it down into this week you cut your soda intake in half, then week two you cut it out completely. If you do this week by week making one small change, you may find it easier to stay in control.

Another way you can break it down is by intensity. So, say you want to exercise more, but you have not exercised in years. If you start with something like a full workout, you may give up or get injured and then be unable to exercise at all. So instead of going full tilt, you can start by doing mini workouts at a lower intensity for a few days, and over time add more minutes to your workout until you reach at least 20 to 30 minutes of activity. You can also over time increase the intensity of your workout as you get stronger and in better shape. By breaking down the goals into bite-sized steps, you can make it easier to develop the discipline you need to accomplish them. You will also improve the chances of success in changing your habits.

Self-discipline doesn’t have to be a practice that we dread or fear! When we start to see discipline not as something that’s imposed on us but as a tool that we are in control of, we can use it to further our personal and professional development goals.  Next week, I’ll share more tips about how to practice discipline in a healthy and effective way, and in the meantime, feel free to share any examples of a time when you broke discipline down into some bite-sized steps!