6
Self-Discipline: Be the Master, Not the Victim

“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.”

~ H. JACKSON BROWN, JR.

Before you can lead others, you must have the self-discipline to lead yourself. However you define success in your firm, you must set the example. Your team must see you demonstrate your total commitment and effort toward your definition of success. When you model this approach, most of your team members will follow your example. You’ll be able to identify those who are not committed, and you can determine whether you can develop this commitment in them.

There are a number of ways to define self-discipline. We all know what it is in a general way, but some ways of looking at it may provide more ideas on how to benefit from it. Standard definitions emphasize controlling yourself and your desires. When you control yourself, you have the ability to master your future rather than be the victim of circumstances, feelings, and emotions. I prefer the following definition: the ability to take action, regardless of your feelings.

Some would advise you to control your desires or emotions. I don’t believe that you can control your emotions; you can only deal with them. In his landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey defines proactive as the ability to choose your response after you’ve had an emotional stimulus. His very first habit is be proactive. I think he means that when you live your life according to the principles of human interaction, you can master your response to any situation.

In this chapter, we will discuss the benefits that self-discipline can have on your leadership focus. Such focus is one of the keys to business success. I’ll introduce two extraordinary leaders who’ve built their leadership style around different styles of self-discipline. Lastly, I’ll share some practical tips on improving your focus and self-discipline.

When you put off firing someone, giving critical feedback, or talking to a hostile client, you are not leading. Don’t let your emotions, feelings, and preferences interfere with doing the jobs that need attention. That’s self-discipline and leadership.

When you develop self-discipline, you will clear your life of distractions that stop you from achieving your potential. You will have a focus that is rewarding in itself and that keeps you functioning at a high level. Discipline grants you a freedom that isn’t possible to attain any other way.

This isn’t a popular view. Our society tells us that discipline or structure means constraints—that rules are bad. But in fact, accountants are ideally trained to deal with disciplined structures like the tax code, auditing standards, and financial reporting guides. Although external rules may chafe, internal rules (self-discipline) allow us to become our best selves.

Self-discipline is required to rule your thoughts and be in control of your mind. The stronger your self-discipline, the more control you have over your thoughts, and consequently, your powers of concentration get stronger. When you are the master of your mind, you enjoy inner peace and happiness. Outer events do not sway you, and circumstances have no power to unsettle your peace of mind. This might sound unbelievable if you have not focused on self-discipline before, but experience will prove to you that all the preceding is true.

Self-discipline does not mean following a restrictive lifestyle. It is a very useful inner power that enables you to persevere and not give up, in spite of setbacks. It grants you the ability to resist impulses and distractions that stand in the way of attaining your goals. In fact, it is one of the most important pillars of real and stable success as a leader. The possession of this power leads to self-confidence and self-esteem and, consequently, to happiness, satisfaction, and real strength.

So long as you are operating alone, such as playing golf or tennis, or as a sole practitioner, self-discipline alone will take you far. And if you want to go fast, you can choose to go alone. But if you wish to go a long way, you will build a team to go with you. As we’ll discuss in later chapters, building a team requires a new level of team discipline—a willingness to be governed, as Neal Spencer, CEO of the megaregional firm BKD, LLP, in Springfield, MO, calls it. But first, we’ll explore the power of self-discipline.

Rick Dreher, CEO of the megaregional firm Wipfli LLP in Green Bay, WS, believes that his firm offers much more than a commodity service because of the personal discipline of his partners. “The differentiation between the firms is going to be in the execution and behavior. I think those are critical—who can get there quicker, better, bigger, faster. To reinforce the firm’s value to clients, Wipfli returns to its service theme: we create lifetime relationships.” In a firm as large as Wipfli LLP, it takes many self-disciplined leaders to carry out their competitive advantage as expressed by Dreher: execution and behavior. When leaders of a firm begin exercising self-discipline, a corporate culture of discipline begins to form, and such a culture can last for decades.

Leadership Demands Sacrifice

Leading any organization is no easy task; it can be lonely at the top. Leaders are pulled in many different directions, yet they must keep a clear vision of where they are headed.

One of the most difficult challenges of self-discipline comes when the leader must sacrifice for the greater good of the firm. Sacrifice is constant in leadership. As you rise in leadership, you give up many rights (the right to go home at 5:00 PM, the right to the biggest paycheck, the right to blame someone else for failures, and so on), and you assume many responsibilities.

As an example, Bill Haller, managing partner of the national firm CapinCrouse LLP in Indianapolis, IN, emphasizes

In our firm, to be a strategic, high-earning partner, you have to be able to grow the practice. Once you start focusing on and branding as a niche firm, your communications turn off as many people as you turn on. You want the whole brand to help market for you. Now, we are getting smarter and smarter on how to protect the brand. Our brand permeates everything we do, from how we recruit, to how we do an audit, to how we interview, to how we relate to our own people, so we are just branding what we have an interest in doing.

We have an empire strategy—some might call it a category killer. With the empire strategy, we do a few things really, really well, and we focus on one industry: Christian not-for-profit organizations. An empire strategy can be good news and bad news. We travel a lot; we operate out of over 30 states. A fortress strategy would be if we were in a particular town, and we wanted to grow and protect our clients, we would be developing a lot of product lines and serving many industries.

As they climb higher in the organization, successful leaders learn that their level of sacrifice grows. You will never be asked to sacrifice your life by leading your accounting firm, but sometimes, the pain of sacrifice may be very great.

Self-Discipline Makes You the Best You Can Be

Rather than taking a walk, you feel too physically lazy and prefer to work at your desk until you have mentally exhausted your mind and body. You might know that you need to improve your eating habits, stop smoking, contact your best client, or meet your lawyer or banker referral source for breakfast, but you put it off another day. You don’t have the persistence to change your habits.

Does this sound familiar? We all have had experiences like these. It seems like we all have some habits that we wish we could change, such as procrastination, smoking, excessive eating, physical or mental laziness, or lack of willpower. Self-discipline makes a great difference in our lives and brings inner strength, self-mastery, and decisiveness. Rather than being the victims of our impulses or circumstances, we master our lives.

Self-discipline is the ability to reject and overcome procrastination, bad habits, and impulses. It is the ability to make a decision and follow through with it, the inner strength that overcomes resistance for taking action, and one of the cornerstones of spiritual and material success.

Everyone has inner impulses that can make us act or speak inappropriately or fail to act or speak as we should. Self-awareness enables us to become conscious of the impulses, and self-discipline enables us to reject those impulses when they do not align with our values and the principles of human interaction.

The first 22 years of my business life had been constant change and lack of focus, so that I could never establish any momentum. During 6 years with Price Waterhouse I moved twice and had to reestablish relationships. During 8 years at Advantage, I bought or sold more than 40 of our businesses trying to find the right mix. During 8 years at Jacques Miller, my role went from one thing to the next almost every year. Little did I realize that the frustration I was experiencing was the perfect preparation for building a new business devoted to helping accounting firms grow. The Price Waterhouse experience gave me the credibility to relate to accountants and consultants. The Advantage years gave me intense leadership lessons about leading a large organization and reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholders. The Jacques Miller experience gave me experience in segmenting and targeting a market. All of these are skills that I have relied on as I have led FiveStar³, LLC. At the beginning of FiveStar³, LLC, thankfully, I had built a great deal of the self-discipline that it would take to build a new business from the ground up.

Self-discipline helps us choose our actions and reactions instead of being ruled by them. Possessing self-discipline won’t make life dull or boring. On the contrary, you will feel more powerful, in charge of yourself and your surroundings, happy, and satisfied. Believe me, it is not difficult to develop these powers. If you are earnest and willing to become stronger, you will certainly succeed.

Your Inner Circle Values

Former Corning Incorporated CEO Amory Houghton shares the advice that his predecessor gave to him. “Think of your decisions being based on two concentric circles. In the outer circle are all their laws, regulations, and ethical standards. In the inner circle are your core values. Just be sure that your decisions as CEO stay within your inner circle.”

We are all aware of leaders who pushed beyond the outer circle and got caught, either by the law or their financial failures. More worrisome are the leaders who moved outside their inner circles and engaged in marginal practices, albeit legal ones. Examples include cutting back your long-term investments to meet the short-term compensation goals, bending compensation rules to pay partners in spite of marginal performance, using accounting tricks to help clients meet the quarterly expectations of security analysts, and booking revenues before products are shipped or services are delivered in order to pump up earnings per share.

All leaders feel the pressure to perform. As CEO, I feel it every day when problems mount or sales lag. As a leader, you know that the livelihood of your employees rests on your shoulders. Little by little, the pressures to succeed can pull us away from our core values, just as we are reinforced by our success in the market. The irony is that the more successful we are, the more we are tempted to take shortcuts to keep it going. The external rewards, such as compensation increases and admiring peers, reinforce our actions and drive us to keep our actions going. In order to avoid these traps, a leader must remain vulnerable to the advice of others, stay humble, be willing to take all the blame and give away the credit, and continue to invest in the elements described in chapters 2–6: self-knowledge, trustworthiness, critical thinking, preparation, and self-discipline. No one is perfect in these areas, and we must resist the notion that when we achieve success, we have achieved perfection.

Delay of Gratification

There is a potential paradox in self-discipline. Some people exhibit self-discipline, and some don’t. Even more complex, some people exhibit self-discipline in some situations but not in other similar situations. For example, I exhibit self-discipline in my work, but when I’m on vacation, I just allow my feelings and moods to guide my days. Recently, one of my clients shared that she was very structured and disciplined at work and in her personal life until a few years ago. She said, “I found the discipline, structure, list making, adherence to schedules was destructive with my family. So, I found that I needed to change at home to be less structured at home.” I suggested that those same consequences may be occurring in her work relationships, and she agreed to work on them.

In a related vein, many people say, essentially, “I could have self-discipline if I wanted to, but I don’t particularly want to.” Shy accountants say that they could sell their services, but they don’t like the sales image. People who avoid decisions say that they could make a decision, but they don’t really need to now. Leaders say that they could forge a new vision for the firm, but they’re doing just fine without it.

Considerable research has accumulated to suggest that many of these examples stem from a habit of not delaying gratification. Delaying gratification means waiting for a larger reward rather than taking a smaller, immediate reward. For instance, a young child who delays gratification will wait one hour for a full candy bar instead of taking the half candy bar offered to him or her now. Many studies have found that young children’s tendencies to delay gratification can predict success years later as an adult.

Some of this delay of gratification effect may stem naturally from biological-based impulse control. However, people can be trained to delay gratification. In the final few pages of this chapter, I’ll share with you some tips to help you build stronger self-discipline.

Self-discipline is the ability to reject instant gratification in favor of something better. It is the act of giving up instant pleasure and satisfaction to meet a higher goal. However you’re inclined based on your childhood impulses or the way you’ve achieved past rewards, you can control and apply self-discipline now. It gives you the power to follow your values; stick to your decisions; and not change your mind too often, thereby enabling you to reach your goals.

Self-discipline enables you to follow thoughts and behaviors that lead to improvement and success. It also gives you the power and inner strength to overcome bad habits, procrastination, fear, and laziness and to persevere in whatever you do. Self-discipline is of vital importance for mastering any subject and developing any skill.

Five Qualities of Self-Discipline

I have struggled with self-discipline myself, so I have focused on changing several of my habits over the years. As I changed my habits, I thought of the practice of self-discipline as having the following five facets:

1. Self-knowledge

2. Strong relationships

3. Commitment

4. Living your values

5. Self-coaching

Self-Knowledge

We talked about self-knowledge in chapter 2, “Self-Knowledge: The Inner Accelerator.” To achieve self-knowledge, you must develop an awareness of your purpose. Many people want to become leaders without giving any thought to their purpose. They are attracted to the power and prestige of leadership positions and the rewards that go with them. But without a sense of purpose, leaders are at the mercy of their egos and vulnerable to impulses. You can’t adopt someone else’s purpose and still be an authentic leader. The purpose for your leadership must be uniquely yours. When you have this self-knowledge, you can apply the principles of self-discipline to realize your goals.

Chris Allegretti, CEO of the regional firm Hill, Barth & King, LLC (HBK) in Boardman, OH, shares, “One of the things that I think separated me was my discipline to learn practice development. I always had very real goals around practice development and made sure that I pushed that.”

A business can have very disciplined employees who daily punch the clock; sit at their desks for eight hours; produce their workpapers, returns, and reports; and give their firm a day’s worth of production for a day’s pay. Some firms have learned to engage the hearts of their team members and, by doing so, have harnessed additional energy to accomplish more. In recent decades, businesses have evolved from maximizing the physical output of their workers to engaging their minds. To excel, great companies go one step further by engaging the hearts of their employees through a sense of purpose. When employees believe that their work has a deeper purpose, their results will vastly exceed the results of those employees who use only their minds and bodies. This becomes the company’s competitive advantage.

Most of the accounting firms of the leaders who I interviewed for this book have been selected, either nationally or locally, as one of the best places to work. This is symbolic of firms that are capturing the hearts and minds, as well as the billable hours, of their staff members. Many accountants do not see the need for capturing their team members’ hearts, so they flounder along in mediocrity.

The discipline one needs to capture the work hours of employees is modest; however, the self-discipline that it takes to capture team members’ hearts require a high level of thinking and doing by the leader.

Strong Relationships

The discipline to develop close relationships is another mark of a leader. In today’s world, relationships take discipline to build and maintain because there are so many distractions. Unfortunately, many leaders of major accounting firms believe that their job is to create the strategy, structure, and processes. Then, they just delegate the work to be done, remaining aloof from those doing the work. This detached style will not work. Today’s employees demand more personal relationships with their leaders before they will give themselves fully to their jobs. They insist on having access to their leaders, knowing that it is in the openness and depth of the relationship with the leader that trust and commitment are built.

Focusing on relationships in a successful firm is important to Rick Dreher. “There are a whole bunch of firms that are really more of a loosely associated group that comes together to share administrative resources—you know what I mean? Don’t kid yourself. They call themselves partners, they come together in a very loose association, but they’re all in it for themselves.”

Commitment

When you begin to develop self-discipline, you will likely fail to meet your standards at first. Expect yourself to fall down several times, whatever habit you are working to change. Perhaps you’d like to check e-mail just three times per day and focus on a major project at other times. If you’ve been in the habit of checking your e-mail every time you get to a stopping point in your work, it’s likely that you’ll continue to do this unconsciously.

For all our rainmaker students, we advise them to invest the first hour every work day to their practice development activities. We have learned that for most of them, it requires enormous self-discipline to change the old habits of putting off the important work of practice development. One managing partner told me, “Our staff put off marketing and practice development activities until after their billable hours, their vacations, their holidays, their video games, and smoke breaks. When we allocated the first hour each day to business development, we started getting results.”

When you fall down, don’t berate yourself; instead, seek clues to strengthen your commitment to self-discipline. When you can hone in on the reasons you slip up, you can avoid those issues and improve your self-discipline. Commit to persistence, and keep going even when you feel like quitting.

Write down your goals and keep track of the times that you succeed in your new efforts at self-discipline. This commitment will improve your efforts.

Living Your Values

You may have a great deal of self-discipline, but to teach it, you must demonstrate it. Without self-discipline, you can’t gain the respect of your followers. During the years 2008 and 2009, the economy in the United States declined. The major thing that I learned during these difficult years was that I had lost some of my self-discipline. Being a leader of my company, my lack of strong self-discipline became evident in others in my firm. Some of them watched me come in late, leave early, and take long lunch breaks. They saw me do this for years, and they didn’t appreciate the fact that I worked early mornings and late nights at home on projects and traveled 150 nights per year to our clients. What they saw was my lack of self-discipline on office days. I had to change that because the tone that I set was the one that they would follow. Today, I am in the office before 8:00 AM and rarely leave until 6:00 PM. During my office hours, I set a pace that demonstrates a sense of urgency.

Sam Coulter, founder and president of the local firm Coulter & Justus, P.C., in Knoxville, TN, says, “Farming taught me determination as much as anything. We didn’t have a lot of good equipment, so what we did have broke down a lot. My farm family taught me you had to get the job done no matter what. I believe this is also necessary in an accounting business; we must meet our client’s deadlines and achieve their goals no matter what.”

Sam is still learning to be a better leader, even though he is 62 years old and working 3 days per week. “One of the strange benefits of this 3-day week I am working is that there is a 4-day weekend every week. During those 4-day weekends, I have time to think about the opportunities and problems we are encountering. Those days are the days when I probably accomplish more for the business than I do the 3 days here in the office. I am able to clearly think about our business and then make an impact when I return the following week.”

Leaders are defined by their values and character, which are shaped by personal beliefs developed through study, introspection, consultation with others, and a lifetime of experience. These values define the leader’s moral compass. Ethical leaders know the true north of their compass, the difference between right and wrong, and have a deep sense of the right thing to do. Integrity is required in every leader. Integrity is not just the absence of lying but telling the whole truth, as painful as it may be. Without complete integrity in your interactions, no one can trust you. If they can’t trust you, why would they ever follow you?

Self-Coaching

You will set the tone for developing your self-discipline. Even when you share your goals with others, you are your own most important coach. Self-discipline can be learned and developed, but it is often a significant challenge. Look for smaller challenges at first to practice your system and develop your confidence. In the last couple pages of this chapter, I’ll share with you some self-coaching methods that will help you build a stronger commitment to discipline.

Scott Dietzen, managing partner, Northwest Region, of the national accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen LLP in Spokane, WA, shares, “You’ve probably heard the story of John Wooden training people to put their socks on. I forced my players to iron their shoelaces. They could not have a twist in their shoelace. I wanted them to be disciplined to the small details. Part of it was just the discipline of making sure that their shoelaces looked really sharp; it’s to send a message: you need to be disciplined in all areas.”

Most of all, be an encouraging coach for yourself, not an overly critical taskmaster. Anticipate imperfection, but strive to eliminate it. Celebrate your victories. When you waver, think about this quote from motivational speaker Robin Sharma: “The price of discipline is always less than the pain of regret.”

What Are We Leading Toward?

As this is written in 2011, the United States and other countries are still recovering from the financial shock waves caused by the collapse of several major corporations, prompting a massive government bailout. Looking back at the scandals, the disruption in the world economy, and the unsettled stock market, leaders of accounting firms are more uncertain than ever before. Rather than allowing this uncertainty to immobilize us, we must recognize the power that we have as the most trusted business advisers and use that power to be a force for good in the world.

What if all business leaders were committed to improving the lives of their customers, employees, and shareholders? Are we prepared to

▴ be inspired by our mission, not our money?

▴ live by our values, rather than our egos?

▴ build relationships through our hearts, rather than our status?

▴ model self-discipline, so that we would be happy for our families to read about our behavior on the Internet?

Money alone is insufficient to provide either security or happiness for our families and employees. Making a difference in the businesses and lives of others can bring unlimited joy, and leading a life of service can bring fulfillment.

In the movie Coach Carter, Samuel L. Jackson played the title role: a basketball coach asked to coach a team of losers. The main thing that he taught his players was self-discipline. Through self-discipline, conditioning, and some talent, the team became a championship team. It takes a leader to set the example of self-discipline. Other leaders follow it, and managers are able to continue it once it has begun. However, self-discipline must first be demonstrated by the leader.

At some point, a business will gain momentum. When I was moving from job to job in my early career, I was never able to gain momentum. Finally, after beginning my accounting consulting business in 1991, strong self-discipline enabled me to gain business momentum. Momentum is a leader’s best friend. With momentum, you look better than you really are, and it will make a huge difference in your firm. Once you gain some momentum, it is much easier to continue and guide than it is to initiate.

Focused Growth Is a Priority

The best leaders always seem to have a clear set of priorities before them. It’s something that good leaders do, whether they are leading a large firm or a small one. Using the Pareto rule, we know that 20 percent of our effort produces 80 percent of our results. It’s easy to look back and see this play out in hindsight, but when looking forward, it is sometimes difficult to know what falls in the important 20-percent category. Start out setting priorities for small projects and build your priority muscle, so that when large assignments come along you can determine which actions will make the most of your time.

Tony Argiz, founder, CEO, and managing partner of the megaegional firm Morrison, Brown, Argiz & Farra, LLP, in Miami, FL, has learned that developing a greater understanding of his clients’ businesses pays off.

In the old days, you could go out on the golf course and sell yourself with just your title and a friendly face. Then, about 15 years ago, the world began to change; people also really valued your intellectual knowledge. What I tried to do in auto dealerships is to know that business like an auto dealer more than an accountant. I wanted to learn, How do they make money? How do you generate more profits in your repair shop, in your parts department? Why are some people successful in used car sales and others aren’t?

To focus your priorities on the most valuable work, you have to consider the following three elements:

▴ Where will I get my best return?

▴ Where will my talents make the most impact?

▴ What is necessary?

Terry Harris, managing partner of McKonly & Asbury LLP in Harrisburg, PA, believes

In the public accounting environment, it is important that your organization have a clear mission and that you have the ability to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our organization, things that differentiate us are the service attitude of our team, our focus on technology tools for our team, promoting a culture that values individual team members, and niche practice areas where we excel in our markets. Creating a culture of “fun” is also at the core of who we are as an organization.

Terry’s firm also sets its priorities by defining its niche.

You gain efficiencies by having a niche because you’re knowledgeable at it. You’ve got people who can perform at a higher level because of that niche. Secondly, you can develop tools that make it more efficient to implement the process. Third, you become known in a region or the state or whatever, depending on how large a market you’re playing in. You can add value to your clients, and you have some pricing power when you have a niche, as well. All this helps to create a barrier to entry for competitors.

Using Self-Discipline to Focus

In many cases, the leader’s best return will come from properly delegating action steps to people and empowering them to accomplish their jobs. If you delegate a project when you have the most expertise, it won’t get done with the same quality that you would do it, and it won’t get done as quickly. But, you must also know that if you do the project yourself, then you can’t do something else that may have more impact, and your subordinate won’t gain valuable experience. Leaders must learn to get their best returns in working with people by delegating and empowering them. This will help you obtain the best long-term return on your time.

Veteran consultant Jay Nisberg says, “When you focus on expertise in industries rather than service areas like audit and tax, you can develop a regional or national identity. A good example is Gary Shamis in the food industry. His firm SS&G grew to a certain level in Cleveland, expanded it to include Ohio and surrounding states, and now his firm is national in scope in their service to food-service companies.”

Next, consider where your talents will make the most impact. Are you better at accounting or communicating? Are you better at looking forward or looking back? When you focus yourself in your area of your best talent, you will be happier, and your returns will be greater.

Lastly, we must understand what is necessary. We all have bosses. In some cases, our boss is a team member, and in other cases, our boss is a client. We must ensure that we’re meeting the boss’s needs with our actions, regardless of whether the boss is someone else at the firm or the client.

One of the most notable business leaders of our time is Jack Welch, the former chairman of the General Electric Company. When he assumed leadership in 1981, the company was already a great success, but Jack believed that you could only coast one way. He set about to reprioritize GE’s business on a worldwide basis. In his book Jack Welch Speaks: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest Business Leader, Jack said

To the hundreds of businesses and product lines that made up the company, we applied a single criterion: can they be number 1 or number 2 at whatever they do in the world marketplace? Of the 248 businesses or product lines that could not, we closed some and divested others. Their sale brought in almost $10 billion. We invested $18 billion in the ones that remained and further strengthened them with $17 billion worth of acquisitions.

What remained, aside from a few relatively small supporting operations, are 14 world-class businesses … all well-positioned for the [coming years] … each one either first or second in the world market in which it participates.

You must develop the self-discipline needed to focus on a small scale before you can focus on a large scale. What about you and your firm? Are you first or second in your market in your service and product lines, or do you have a series of products and services that are just average? What can you be the best at in your market? Becoming the best takes strategy, selfdiscipline, and focus. Take some time to reassess your own priorities. Are you like GE was, spread all over the place with many services, or are you focused on a few things that will bring the highest return?

In the mind of effective leaders, time is a tangible commodity. It cannot be recovered once it is lost. However, time used correctly is among your most potent assets. Many ineffective leaders struggle with time. It is intangible in their minds, vanishing without any trace of results. A leader must not mistake activity for achievement.

Without self-discipline, you will fail as a leader. Nobody is entitled to leadership. In fact, most of the people who take over leadership roles because of their entitlement (longevity, family relationship, book of business) will fail miserably at leading others. They tend to lead by saying, “Do what I say, not what I do.” You will not be able to identify a single great leader who has achieved success without diligent hard work and self-discipline.

Call it focus, persistence, or determination; they are all the same thing. Losing focus or quitting before the task is complete is a failure in leadership. Few things are more important than leaders who possess an unyielding relentlessness toward the vision and goals of the firm.

Building Habits of Self-Discipline

Self-discipline is critical to a successful life. As they say, “You make your habits, and your habits make you.” Some people have natural leadership instincts, yet the ability to lead is actually a set of skills that can be learned. The following daily habits will help you, your staff, and your clients grow.

Invest Five Minutes Each Morning to Meditate on the Major Areas of Your Life

Particularly look for areas in your professional life, your marriage and family, your community, and your spiritual life where you may have not done what you said you would do. Think about any instances where you have been dishonest, cut corners, been inconsistent, or not kept your word. Then, commit to correct those instances by appropriately dealing with the consequences of your actions.

Bill Hubly, founder and managing principal of the local firm Corbett, Duncan & Hubly, PC, in Itasca, IL, believes, “For a leader, everything starts with discipline. I get up in the morning and exercise first thing. It’s a discipline of setting good habits. It starts the day out right. That puts me in the proper mindset and frame of mind. When I come to the office, I must be in a positive mood, show positive energy, and give people the right example. Discipline, for me, sets the entire tone for what I do. I determine my attitude.”

Make Self-Discipline a Part of Your Daily Ritual

When beginning any skill development, you should begin small and build up over time. Perhaps setting aside one hour per day in which you will exercise extreme self-discipline then adding a new hour each week would help you get started. You might consider engaging a coach to support you during the development of your routine of self-discipline. Most research proves that just thinking about developing self-discipline will be successful in less than 5 percent of professionals. Writing your self-discipline goals will have a dramatic effect by raising your probability to more than 25 percent (that’s a whopping 500 percent increase). Sharing your plan to increase your self-discipline with someone else will increase your probability to more than 50 percent, and asking this person to hold you accountable increases your odds to more than 75 percent. When you and your coach have met regularly for 24 months, and you have been credible with your efforts, you can ensure success nearly 100 percent of the time.

No matter how busy he is, Ken Baggett, co-managing partner of the national firm CohnReznick LLP, always returns phone calls and e-mails.

I’m a real big believer in returning phone calls and e-mails quickly. I’ll give you an example of it. That is my call sheet today. Before I go home tonight, all five will have been called.

I have one particular partner who struggles with that concept sometimes, and I was chatting with him one day, and I said, “So, why don’t you like me?”

He said, “What do you mean?”

And I said, “You must not like me. You never return my phone calls; you never answer my e-mails.”

Of course, Ken’s partner assured him that this was not the case, but Ken’s concern was not about his personal relationship with the partner.

I said, “God only knows what you’re telling your clients because I’m your partner, and I see you; I know you like me. If you are responding to your clients in that same manner, it’s even worse. You’re telling them not only you don’t like them, but you don’t care about them.”

Bill Haller adds, “I don’t think a leader could lead if they don’t have great discipline and project management support. I return phone calls and e-mails in real time because when somebody is asking for my input or asking for a direction or decision, it’s happening now.”

Dedicate Yourself to Lifelong Learning

Leaders become great by dedicating themselves to a high level of learning, growth, and improvement. Use your self-discipline to invest at least four hours each week to learning something new. Do not settle for just knowing how to do something. Dig deeper by asking why, and then, go find the answer. Interview an expert, write an article, make a speech, or enroll in a class to find the answer to a question that is on your mind or the minds of those who follow you.

When I joined Price Waterhouse, the office managing partner, Fred Frick, advised me to invest at least an additional 10 percent of my work week in self-improvement, such as reading, taking classes, participating in Toastmasters International or other community activities, and listening to audio programs. Fred reasoned that if I invested an additional amount of time in self-improvement, then I would advance more quickly in my career. It took a great amount of self-discipline to follow Fred’s advice, and I am eternally grateful to him for mentoring me in this manner.

“Competency is crucial in an accounting firm leader,” Bill Haller says. “When I walk into firms that are struggling, I often encounter partners who have lost their CPA competency. They are not good tax guys or good auditors. People don’t respect them. They have delegated technical competency to the people underneath them.”

Accept Responsibility

Great leaders master their lives; they never play the role of a victim. They recognize that part of being a great leader is ultimately being responsible for all of your successes and failures. Analyze your current projects on a daily basis and ask yourself, “Have I done all that needs to be done? What have I not done that I should?” Once you have analyzed each project, if you find a weakness, go the extra mile by working extra hours, hiring an outside expert, or getting creative to repair the weakness—or to turn it into a success!

Phil Holthouse, founder and managing partner of the top-100 multioffice firm Holthouse, Carlin & Van Trigt LLP in Los Angeles, CA, says it’s critical for leaders to facilitate effective communication as part of accepting responsibility. “I see e-mail as very dangerous. If people are upset about something, it’s so much easier to take a hard shot in an e-mail than it is to say it to somebody to their face. So, if I’m copied on e-mail exchanges, and I see them start to escalate, I will jump in and just say, “You two need to get in the same office or get on the phone.”

Face Your Fear to Develop Courage

Leaders inspire others when they face their fears and demonstrate courage. There can be no courage without fear. Invest at least two to four hours each week doing things simply for the sake of developing courage: make a difficult phone call, speak to an audience, hold a difficult conversation, learn a new skill, write an article or a top 10-list, or visit someone you have always wanted to meet.

The Truth About Self-Discipline

There is a misconception in the public mind regarding self-discipline or willpower. It is erroneously thought to be something strenuous and difficult and that one has to exert and tense the body and mind when expressing it. Because people believe it to be so difficult, they avoid using willpower, though they are conscious of its benefits. They acknowledge that the employment of willpower in their lives and affairs will greatly help them and that they need to strengthen it, yet they do nothing about it.

Your discipline gets stronger by not allowing the expression of unimportant, unnecessary, and unhealthy thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions. If this negative energy is not expressed, it becomes positive and is stored inside you like a battery. It then becomes available at a time of need. By practicing appropriate exercises, you develop your powers the same way as a person who trains his or her muscles in order to strengthen them.

Conclusion

Self-discipline involves choosing your actions according to your values instead of how you feel in the moment. Often, it involves sacrificing the pleasure and thrill of the moment for what matters most in life. Therefore, it is self-discipline that drives you to

▴ continue your work on a project after the initial rush of enthusiasm has faded away.

▴ devote the first one to two hours each day to an important project without interruptions.

▴ go to the gym when all you want to do is relax.

▴ wake early to work on yourself by meditating, studying, or writing.

▴ say no when tempted to break your diet.

▴ check e-mail only at specific times of the day.

▴ limit text messaging to specific times.

▴ leave your phone behind when attending meetings.

▴ hire an accountability coach who will challenge you to grow