(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day. Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.

Discipline

Disciplined For the next couple of months, I am going to draw motivation for my Monday Morning Motivation from Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art.” You can find a summary of this awesome book here. This book is one of my all-time favorites as it takes on the topic of “resistance,” which you might think of as that strange force that makes it difficult to accomplish things in life. Pressfield does an awesome job of describing what resistance is, discussing how to overcome it, and framing it in the context of a larger power. The basic premise behind “The War of Art” is that to be successful you need to “do the work”. And doing the work is all about discipline. This is a huge area of focus and importance to me. So much so that I consider discipline one of my four core values. I describe its importance as follows:

• Life is a gift we value and revere through our thoughts and actions. As a way of expressing our gratitude, we employ the discipline it takes to honor the blessings of time and relationships.

Gratitude (see last week’s post!). Blessings. Time. Relationships. Only when we take a disciplined approach to our personal, professional, and spiritual lives are we able to realize the blessings that we have available. And, in my opinion, the two biggest blessings we have are time and relationships. Staying disciplined, for me, is a HUGE challenge. There is always some new bright and shiny object to pursue. However, experience has shown me that rarely do these shiny objects satisfy for long. Nevertheless, I still struggle with getting on the right track each day! Three things have proven useful to me in becoming more disciplined:

• First, I have done my best to establish firm routines. This takes the distractions away and allows me to focus on what I know is important.
• Second, I make sure that I fully understand my motivation behind my actions and goals. When I begin to lose discipline, calling on these motivations helps to keep me on track.
• Third, I surround myself with others who are like-minded and know what I am looking to achieve. These accountability partners can really help in the area of discipline.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Do you have routines, motivations, and accountability partners in place to ensure that you remain disciplined?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.

Blog post from this past week:

• Monday Morning Motivation – Gratification

At F5 Financial Planning we focus on helping individuals and families find balance between faith, friends and family, fitness and finance.  We make sure that they have the financial freedom to enjoy those things in life that are important to them.  And while we believe the left-brain facts and data are critical; we work with our clients to get them in the right state of mind to focus on the goals they want to achieve.

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