How self-respect leads to discipline

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Take a moment and think of your best friends. What is it about them that you like? If one of them called you and asked for a huge favor – one that would put a bit of a dent in your schedule or pocket book – would you help him or her out? More often than not, you would.

As a matter of fact sometimes, we go to great lengths to not let other people down, but we come up short when it has to do with how we treat ourselves. This month, we are talking about Three Ways to Build Self Discipline:

Love what you do.
Like who you are.
Respect yourself in others.

Today’s post covers the second of three parts: Like who you are. When we like who we are, we don’t want to let ourselves down.

How do you feel about yourself? Do you like who you are? Some of us treat ourselves like terrible friends. We are disappointed with ourselves. We talk negatively about ourselves. We may spend time with lots of other people so that we avoid having to spend time alone with ourselves.

One of the best ways to establish discipline is to treat ourselves the way we would a treasured friend. The way we treat ourselves is a reflection of our self-respect. When we like ourselves, we believe that we are worth the investment of self-development.

“Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power. “ ~ Clint Eastwood

One of the truisms that I’ve learned over the past year or so is that there IS value in the attempt. Your efforts can command respect, regardless of the outcome. Through mindfulness and measurement, you can assess the effectiveness of what you do and then make adjustments accordingly. When you give yourself credit for the things that you do well, you expand upon them. Here are some ways to recalibrate and keep moving forward:

Pause.
Breathe.
Assess.
Celebrate.
Start again.

Belittling yourself for trying leads to a self-destructive cycle.

“Self-respect is the fruit of discipline…” ~Abraham J. Heschel

When you begin to establish good habits, you start to like yourself more. Your head clears, and you smile more. Good choices stand out in stark relief and your vision/discernment develops. Paradoxically, by taking baby steps toward better choices, you are able to fortify your self-esteem, which feeds back into greater amounts of discipline. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg as to which comes first, but both self-respect and discipline exist in tandem.

Are you kind to yourself?
Do you take care of your health?
How do you sleep?
Is your clothing shabby? Your personal hygiene sloppy?

Although these may seem like odd questions, each is an indicator of how much we value ourselves. One of the questions on the participant assessment for Women With Drive Foundation is, “Do you floss?” Faithful adherence to flossing indicates an attention to detail, consistent effort in small tasks and a commitment to the care and health of the individual. These skill sets transfer to the ability to save money, attend classes, follow through on administrative banalities and the like…all of which are skills which build independence.

“The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” ~ Joan Didion

This is the clincher. When we accept responsibility for our life, we begin to see how our choices have consequences. When we identify the variables over which we have control and take ownership of them, our self esteem soars. We no longer “believe in luck.”

As an exercise, over the next few days, when you are tempted to give up on yourself, literally say aloud, “I am worth the effort.” Honor the fact that your heightened awareness is in itself an achievement. Commit yourself to reaching your goals.

When the going gets really rough, pull on a fuzzy sweater and take a page from Stuart Smalley, who so famously states, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.”

And they do.

——-

Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive Foundation) or “Like” them on facebook.

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How love anchors discipline

Filed Under Guest Writer, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

Discipline is the mortar that binds the foundation of achievement – built brick by brick; habit by habit. Choice by choice, the decisions we make forge our future. Last Sunday, we talked about Three Ways to Build Self Discipline. As a brief recap, these were the points we covered:

How do you begin to build?
How do you harness, mold and focus your energies?

Over the course of this and the next two blog posts, we’ll explore the following in greater detail, but for now here are the essentials:

Love what you do.
Like who you are.
Respect yourself in others.

Today, we’re going to talk about love. Hearts, chocolates and flowers are only the merest wisp of what love is. Those who operate from this most peripheral comprehension of love usually balk at the idea that love has anything whatsoever to do with discipline.

But the underpinnings of love are the most central and essential components of REAL commitment vis-à-vis discipline. Have you ever hung in there when your kid screams at you, “I HATE YOU!!!”? I have. My answer to my child? “I love you enough to let you hate me.”

Love is the highest vibration of excellence that exists. It is so pure, so elemental, that we cannot define it; we can only sense when it is present. Have you ever teared up at the sound of someone’s voice while singing? Had a lump in your throat when witnessing a kindness?

That’s love made manifest, and it’s the most galvanizing force in our reality.

It’s the grist that fuels effort. It’s the ballast that centers us and it’s the driver that sustains us when we want to give up.

The easiest way to discipline yourself is to expend your efforts toward a goal you love. If you hate running but love riding your bike, what would you say is the better way of the two options to achieve a daily cardiovascular workout? (Hint: Riding your bike). Torturing yourself by forcing yourself to run is not discipline. It’s torture. Celebrating the movement of your body by riding your bike into the wind is joy (and much easier to sustain over the course of your lifetime).

“Love is work made visible.” – Kahlil Gibran

Love your job; love the product your work creates. Having the glue that love for your work provides sustains you through the grunt work aspects of mastery. EVERY job/vocation/chore/task has its slogging phase. Do not kid yourself by thinking that there exists some magical job wherein no crappo tasks occur. However, loving what you do keeps you moving forward. At some point, you will make the realization that the product is secondary and the process is that which is to be celebrated.

If you have ever run long distances, you will be familiar with the “runner’s high,” which is a discharge of endorphins that your body releases when it is pushed beyond a certain limit.

When you commit to a goal and truly love what you’re doing and why you are doing it, the same sort of metamorphosis happens in the figurative/spiritual sense. Love exists in symbiosis with aspiration and inspiration. When these three factors coalesce, discipline morphs into a privilege. You begin to view yourself as a co-creator with your goals. No minutiae is too trivial; no detail too mundane.

You will not deign to tarnish your goals with slapdash, half-assery.

When you ascend to this state, others will marvel at your energy; your output. You will cease to comprehend that you are making sacrifices, because you will have flipped a switch somewhere along the journey.

Discipline will become your default setting.

What do you love? What are the things that cause others to marvel about you? What are things that naturally filter to the top of your awareness? The answers to these questions are all hints, helping you to realize your intrinsic gifts and may be a clue to what you were born to do. Meditate on these things and see where your heart takes you.

——-

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How does your money speak for you?

Filed Under Guest Writer, Successful Blog, Trends | 9 Comments

Money doesn’t make the world go ‘round. Although commerce is, in many ways, the physical manifestation of energy which the global civilization agrees upon as a unit of measure, money itself isn’t the force that propels the world forward.

The emotion behind the expenditure of money is.

Since money is a manifestation of energy, its ebbs and flows are also subject to physics. Stagnation begets atrophy; circulation, vibrancy. Investing in people, ideas and ingenuity brings growth.

“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This week’s installment is pretty esoteric. There are no solutions, only questions. I’m interested in your perspective more than I care about my own digital $.02. I’d rather your comments fill this space than my words. Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to comprehend the confluence of love and money, and finding that I’m coming up short.

As I am wont to say, I’ve run out of brain.

How do we make this a better world?
How do we invest in each other?
How does empowerment translate in the specific?
How is consensus built by disparate groups?

Using the analogy of water as money as an illustration, I sometimes see pennies as water drops that run down the windshield of a car that is moving through the rain. Smatterings and droplets become rivulets that build larger and larger drops (dollars) until the collective mass of the drop becomes so large that physics kicks in and the water rushes past toward a target.

What property of the “pennies” drives cohesion?
What propels the dollars forward?
At what point does money reach critical mass and drive action?
What is the symbiosis between money and intention?
What serves as the gravitational center that determines the money’s endpoint?
What does the shift between love and money resemble?

Will we recognize it when [as] it happens? Is it “impact investing?” Is it social capitalism? Is it social entrpreneurism? How do you reconcile the physical manifestation of your values? What does your money say?

——-

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Are you responsible?

Filed Under Guest Writer, Successful Blog, leadership | 4 Comments

We pay our bills. Our kids have shoes on their feet. There is food on the table. Our deadlines are met at work. We make sure that our garbage gets taken out every week. We are responsible.

But is that all there is to our “responsibilities?”

“Sometimes I want to ask God why He allows poverty, famine and injustice in the world when He could do something about it, but I’m afraid He might just ask me the same question.”

I posted this to my personal facebook updates on Saturday evening. Within minutes, it had received multiple “likes,” been shared by others 3 times within facebook, uploaded to Google+ and uploaded via twitpic (each social network link was in turn shared by others).

The original picture had been “liked” almost 400 times and shared an additional 385 times at the time of this writing. Clearly, this message resonates with people. Without getting too entangled in the theological underpinnings of the statement, I’d like to think that it has this sort of impact because it is TRUE.

Each of us understands that we have the capacity, however small, to make a positive impact in someone else’s life. …to lessen another’s pain or to help shoulder another’s burden. Whether we do so or not? Well, that’s why the quote hits us where we live. More often than not, we don’t as much as we could.

Are we ‘our brother’s keeper?’ Is it ‘every man for himself?’

Yes. And sometimes, yes. It’s the negotiation between those two statements and the navigation of the grey areas that consumes our lives as we make our way through this earthly journey. In terms of its relevance to “Independent Ideas,” my interpretation is that we, and we alone, are responsible for our individual actions toward our fellow human beings.

At the risk of committing blasphemy, it is my understanding, therefore, that we are to serve as best we can in the role of “God” in the above quote.

“If it’s to be it’s up to me.” – Anonymous

I think we sometimes get hung up on doing (or not doing) “something” because we can’t do everything. We underestimate our own strength or we feel as though our gesture is too small. I am not Bill Gates; nor am I Warren Buffett. I don’t have billions of dollars at my disposal to invest in my fellow human beings.

However, I do what I can with what I have, where I am (which, speaking on a scale of ratios, is 100% – everything – by the way). This being said, when we give, we give best when we do so from a position of strength. By illustration, to paraphrase the disciple Luke, who said, “If you have two coats and you see someone without one, give him one of yours.” He did not say, rip your coat in two so that you each have half a coat and are both still freezing.

To satisfy the ‘every man for himself’ philosophy cited previously, in order to give from a position of strength, you must consider your own health/welfare first. In order to help someone on the plane in the event of a crash, you must use your own oxygen mask before helping another.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” – Walt Kelly via Pogo

This underscores our collective responsibility to each other. Just as we are “the enemy,” we are also each other’s salvation. The balance hinges upon our individual choices that we make each day. What will you choose?

——-

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How your lenses affect your vision

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It would be difficult for us to walk around all of the time in a state of complete awareness. I say that because, at least for me, when I receive an “aha” transmission from the ether, it tends to rock me back a bit. My inner world tilts a bit on its axis and I need to recalibrate my understanding of how my perceptions and realities have shifted, based upon the influx of a new comprehension. I’m not sure that I have the fortitude at present to stroll around with the receptor dial cranked up to eleven. It may fry a circuit or two.

It has been said that when the student is ready then the teacher will appear. That was my week in a nutshell. Wednesday, I had a chance to talk with a mentor and one who has already achieved many of the goals I have set for myself. In retrospect I understand that his role was to prepare me to understand the subsequent teachers I met on Thursday and Friday.

I began to consider perception and lenses in earnest when I heard Eva Timothy speak earlier this year at a conference in Rhode Island. Central to her message was the integration of the perspectives, perception and understanding of the world through our individual “lenses.” Through her body of work, we were invited to consider objects through both literal lenses and alternative vantage points.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. ~Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris, 1935

Our eyes actually lie to us every day. Through some bizarre camera obscura sort of filter, our brain actually “flips” the incoming images that pass through our eyes and “rights” them as we perceive them. All this aside, if you paid close attention to the aforementioned link, you will have read that the brain can be trained to accept any information fed to it, as long as the information follows a consistent pattern. Pretty wild, eh?

Be careful how you interpret the world: It is like that. ~Erich Heller

This explains why negative people perceive the world as hopeless, thieves distrust others and positive people assume the best in their fellow human beings. In order to change your world, you must first change your perspective. It sounds ludicrous, but it is true, nonetheless.

It is not easy to overcome negative programming. If you were raised with negative emotions from your friends and family, quieting those voices will take time and consistency. However, it can be done.

Sometimes, our “lenses” are set by adverse circumstances, but we can always choose to change them to something else. As an exercise, just for one day, pay attention to the times you say something negative to yourself (ie. “That was stupid,” “I’ll never figure this out,” “Nobody listens to me.”). Once you are aware of this negative thought, replace it with its opposite (ie. “I am smart enough to find another way,” “I just learned another method that didn’t work,” “I have something valuable to say”).

Notice positive things about yourself:

When you do something “right.”
Learn to say a simple and sincere “thank you” when given a compliment
Genuinely smile as often as possible

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. ~Anaïs Nin

Take the time to see who you’ve chosen as friends. We project ourselves onto our friends and choose those who mirror our perceptions of ourselves. Also notice those in your life you may consider to be “enemies” or people who annoy you. Chances are good that they possess a trait of your own that you don’t like about yourself. These people/models present opportunities for you to develop your own character.

With practice, you will get more attuned to your shifts and will actually be able to sense when you are changing. Your “aha moments” will become more apparent, and you will be able to transition between life phases more easily. You will also be able to identify crossroads opportunities and times when you are consciously aware of “settling” or choosing to grow.

Just remember to turn your amp back down to seven once in awhile. You don’t want to blow a speaker.

Have you had any ‘aha moments?’ How did they change your life? Were there teachers who influenced your path? How have your “lenses” affected your life’s journey?

——-

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