Leading by Example: Discipline as the Key to Being an Inspirational Leader

Discipline is often talked about as a key factor in achieving success in your career, and your life, most importantly because it creates consistency in your behaviour and actions.

Some leaders struggle to embrace discipline because they feel it creates too many rules and boundaries and feels too strict and rigid. For some, discipline implies a lack of freedom, because the restrictions they perceive come with discipline feel limiting and leaves little room for spontaneity, personal choice, or intuition. 

I have a different take on discipline: Being disciplined takes a tremendous amount of courage. To embrace discipline as a tool for success, a leader has to consistently perform small acts of courage, over and over again, day in day out.

Courage and discipline are interconnected because when you’re disciplined you are often required to confront difficult tasks, uncomfortable situations, or unfamiliar territory. Being disciplined requires you to establish new habits (or break old ones), and to do that you have to lean into courage to push through inner resistance to maintain discipline and make positive changes. Being disciplined sometimes requires you to go against the grain and resist peer pressure or societal norms that don’t align with your goals or values. Courage helps you stay true to your principles in these moments.

I’ve recently been working with a leader who openly admitted to lacking discipline. After we delved further into that, the lack of discipline was showing up in communication - frequently changing their mind about protocols without informing the rest of the team, which led to misunderstandings, delayed treatments, and even mistakes in administering medications. She struggled with time management and often arrived late to team meetings which sent a message her time was more valuable than the rest of the teams, resulting in frustration and decreased morale. And she neglected to invest time in training and development for the team, rarely organising opportunities for further learning or training, and it led to team members feeling undervalued and overlooked, and a sense of stagnation. After leaning into courage to confront her shortcomings and making a commitment to change, she was ultimately able to engage in transparent communication, embraced personal accountability, and committed to nurturing her team’s growth. The shift in discipline heightened team morale, enhanced patient care, increased workflow efficiencies, strengthened the practice’s reputation, eased the challenges of recruitment as she had stepped up and therefore the standards she held in terms of hiring staff increased too.

Embracing discipline as a leader can have a wide range of positive consequences – it enhances your focus, leads to better decision making, improves your ability to communicate, and cultivates trust. Becoming more disciplined doesn’t have to be mundane or tedious. Here are some fun and unique ways you can incorporate discipline into your routine:

• Find one thing that you can do every day and commit to doing it for the next 30 days. For example, find a song that you love, and commit to listening to that song once a day for the next 30 days. After 30 days you’ll have achieved 30 small wins, but a huge sense of accomplishment. This is training your brain that disciplined efforts lead to positive outcomes.
• Embrace the 2-minute rule: If a task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it immediately. This technique helps to prevent procrastination over tasks that seem too small or insignificant and teaches you to address things immediately and prevent them from piling up and becoming overwhelming.
• Create a “Discipline Jar” with random challenges: Prepare a jar filled with small, disciplined challenges written on slips of paper. Each day, draw a challenge from the jar and commit to completing it. Challenges could be things like taking a 10-minute walk, reaching out to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, reading 5 pages of a personal development book, expressing appreciation to a colleague, or writing a short journal entry. Be as diverse with your challenges as you’d like to be, because the element of surprise and variety keeps the experience enjoyable and engaging.