Let’s walk through your self-discipline growth plan.
Assessment
Where are you needing more self discipline?
Are you perpetually multi-tasking? Are you a slave to your email? Do you know that you should be checking your email 2 or 3 times per day (once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening) but instead you respond to every buzz and beep? Have you taught the world that your email is actually an instant messenger whereby as soon as an email is sent you respond within seconds? Do you find people get frustrated with you if you haven’t responded to an email or text within a few minutes? That is because you have trained people to believe that you are available for their objectives and goals at the expense of your own. Do you have notifications popping up on your phone all day? Are you mindlessly lost in Facebook for chunks of the day as a way of easing your anxiety at work only to realize after an hour of mindless scrolling that you’re now even more stressed because you just lost an hour of productivity? Do you get interrupted by phone calls all day because you don’t have a “call period” in your schedule when clients are instructed to schedule calls with you and when you make your calls for the day? As we will discuss later, if you don’t have large blocks of time each day devoted to “deep work” (undistracted focused production) you have an opportunity to make a massive leap forward in your productivity by simply removing the distractions and committing to those blocks in your calendar.
Do you procrastinate? Are there certain things in the job that you just dislike or that cause you anxiety so you avoid them until the deadline is right on you and then frantically run around to get it done just in the nick of time? What are those things?
Are you stealing from your family time, hobbies, fitness or spirituality for the job? Are you cancelling dinners with your spouse, missing your kids’ soccer games or failing to get to yoga because you haven’t planned your work?
Are you not eating well because you are failing to prepare your food so you hit the local McDonald’s and then find yourself sluggish all afternoon?
Are you not spending intentional time studying the law and improving your knowledge? Are you not honing your storytelling? Are you not intentionally growing by attending seminars that can make you better?
The assessment process requires you to spend some time simply considering where you need to focus your energy. Where do you require more self-discipline? Whether you do it with a notebook and a pen or a computer or a tablet – spend an hour or two and really dig into what you aren’t doing that you know you should be doing. What would the highest version of yourself be doing that you just can’t seem to “find the time” to do? The truth is there is no such thing as a lack of time, only a lack of priorities.
Plan:
Once you know where you need to exercise your self discipline more simply write out your plan. The plan should be specific, measurable and objective. “Eat better” is not a plan. Plans look like this:
I will prepare all my lunches for the week on Sunday at noon, freeze them and take them to work with me this week.
I will turn off all notifications, turn off my phone and work uninterrupted every morning this week from 7am to 9am.
I will be home for dinner with my family every day this week.
I will go to the gym 4 times this week at 5:30am Monday,Wednesday and Friday and noon on Saturday.
Once you have the interventions in your plan they should immediately be blocked off in your calendar. They must be treated as a court hearing would. You don’t negotiate with yourself. You do not schedule anything in those windows. For far too many lawyers we fill our calendars with the things other people demand of us FIRST and then try to fit our goals and dreams around it. I am telling you to do the exact opposite. We will discuss this process much more in the module on time management but for now it is enough to know that self-discipline is built by making commitments to your future self first and then following through on them. Some of you will be protesting right now. “I can schedule whatever I want but if a Court Orders me to be somewhere that I have blocked off I have no choice”. I understand. I had the same thought myself when I first began this process. It is the primary reason I became someone who wakes up ever day at 5 am. I know that no Judge or client is going to be interrupting my deep work from 5:30am-7:00am. Of course there will be times when you will have to be flexible. There may be times when you truly are forced to exit a planned committed block of time due to a real emergent situation. But I am willing to bet you that once you start truly planning your days, weeks, months, quarters and years and following the calendaring systems in my time management module these “truly emergent” situation will arise far less often than you think they will and when they do you will be able to smoothly adjust with flexibility and grace. The techniques Ill teach you in the time management system of this course are devised from the very best thinking in the world on the subject including David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, “The 12 Week year”, Brooke Castillo’s “Monday Hour One”, and Craig Ballentine’s “Perfect Week” and “Perfect Day” formulas. They are time tested and they will work. . . . even for you.
Create your plan. From your assessment identify where you need to be more disciplined. Commit to taking action. Plan ahead of time. Block times off in your calendar. Have it right in front of you each day. Let your staff know what you’re doing. Put the auto-responder on your email telling the world you are only checking email at 9am, 12pm and 5pm each day. Be willing to fail publically. But, as we are going to see in a moment, the real payoff isn’t in being accountable to others. Its being accountable to yourself.
Implement:
Once you have your plan. You have set it up in your calendar. You have set the auto-responders. You know when you have to get out of bed. You know when to turn your phone off. You know when you need to have your clothes laid out for the gym. You know when you will be arriving home for dinner with your family. Once you have assessed your areas needing attention and created your plan to invest in your future self there is only one thing left to do – DO IT. As Nike used to say “Just do it”.
Yes, most coaches and trainers tell us to leverage our commitments by getting accountability partners and making public commitment so that you can leverage social pressure. That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that. However, you must understand that while it can be useful to have others hold you accountable to your commitments the most important thing is to hold yourself accountable. Keep promises you make to yourself. This is the foundation of integrity. This is how you merge the public persona you share with the world with the private persona only you know about. This is the foundation of self-discipline. The foundation of self-image. The foundation of confidence. The annihilation of fear and cowardice. The development of courage. It all begins by making commitments to yourself and then keeping them. This is how you become a person who respects themselves. This is how you become a person who can trust themselves. This is how you become a person who believes in themselves. You can’t get those things by tricking the outside world while knowing to yourself that you consistently are unreliable with the promises you make to yourself. You must learn to value your own opinion of yourself even more than the opinion of others. When you become a person that you respect, the respect of others won’t even be necessary. Paradoxically that is exactly when the respect of others will become absolutely effortless. We have spent most of our lives trying to convince the outside world that we are a better person that we know ourselves to be instead of becoming a better person than the outside world could possibly imagine. Self-discipline isn’t about getting more stuff done (although you certainly will). Self-discipline is about becoming the person you respect the most in the world.
Evaluate:
We fail our way to success. I know that’s not warm and fuzzy. It won’t make a great bumper sticker or meme. You are going to fail on your road to developing self-discipline. You will hit the snooze button. You will scroll through social media during a deep work block. You will miss dinner with your wife. You will procrastinate on the project you committed to getting done early. The same way a weightlifter misses his max multiple times before hitting it you will actually get stronger by failing – BUT, only if you are evaluating why you failed. Each week you have to sit down and spend some time evaluating how you performed on your commitments. Where did you fall short? Why did you fail? What happened to knock you off course? Be brutally honest. You don’t have to share this with anyone else. Coach yourself. . . and be a compassionate coach (or hire me and I’ll do it!).
Here are some of my real-life evaluations and how they have served me with my self-discipline plan:
- What went wrong:
I pressed snooze at 5am on Thursday and woke up 10 minutes late:
- What caused me to miss the mark?
I worked out really hard this week and I think by Thursday I was just exhausted. I didn’t even negotiate. I just hit snooze and fell right back asleep. When the alarm happened again I instantly knew I failed and started the morning annoyed with myself. I started my day with a failure.
- What could I do to prevent this failure from happening again in the future?
I used to put my phone on the other side of the room when I was first developing the early rise habit. That required me to physically get out of bed to walk across the room, hit snooze and walk back to bed.
- What will I add to my plan this week to prevent this failure from re-occurring?
This week I will put my phone on the stand on the other side of the room before I go to bed.
EXAMPLE 2:
- What went wrong:
I failed to work on my intake process and initial client packet for the law firm when I blocked off time to do it on Wednesday.
- What caused me to miss the mark?
I felt like I wasn’t sure where to begin. I felt anxiety about doing it. I didn’t want to mess it up. I had calls I knew I needed to make that day and decided to do those instead but I never came back to the intake process and packet. I continued to avoid it the rest of the week because I know that I am not completely sure with what I have to put in the intake packet in light of some of the changes to how to get medical records with the Hi-Tech Act.
- What could I do to prevent this failure from happening again in the future?
I will recognize when not knowing the steps needed to accomplish the task is causing me to procrastinate. I will then identify specifically what I would need to learn to successfully accomplish the task. I will then change the commitment to learning the required material prior to doing the task. In doing so I will reduce the task into smaller steps that make me less anxious about acting on them.
- What will I add to my plan this week to prevent this failure from re-occurring?
I will put this back on my calendar this week but I will reduce the size of the task into a smaller component first. I will reach out to Avery and review her CLE on how to request medical records so that I know exactly what has to be included in the intake packet and what the best process for requesting medical records is before I build the packet. The new intervention this week will be “Review Avery’s medical request CLE materials and call her with questions”.
Applying the APIE process to any area you’re trying to conduct a behavior change is a fool proof plan as long as you work the steps. Change is not easy. But it is achievable if you’re willing to put in the work.
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