We discussed the last few pages of the chapter on Self-Discipline during this session.  We covered the topics surrounding “Accepting Accountability”, “Pay Now; play later” and “becoming character-driven instead of emotion-driven”.

As we were summing up the chapter several interesting ideas came to fruition.  One of them was “forced self-discipline”.  Some of the participants shared how their force the self-discipline needed through alarms, reminders and spending money.  The classic example is paying for a gym membership automatically in order to force yourself to go to the gym regularly.  Another example is forcing to work-out by reminding yourself that you could become decrepit by the time your son is ready to play ball

I also shared my way of following through with commitment.  I call it “Self-discipline through association”.  I associate unpleasant tasks (e.g. walking, workout etc.) with something I like (e.g. music, podcasts etc.) so that I don’t get discouraged on an ongoing basis.  You could use your imagination to the extent in this area.  Some examples floated were:

• walking/jogging (or going to the gym) together with other like-minded people so you can talk about things you love.

This session marked the end of the chapter and the end of the book as well (we decided to skip the next chapter on Staff Development because of its very specific focus on managers)

We planned to use the upcoming session to decide on what book to work on next…