SELF DISCIPLINE

By Pastor Sam Adeyemi, edited by Ik Solomon

 Supposing you set your alarm to wake you up in the morning, and you are woken up by the alarm, and what you are purposed to do in the morning is to do some exercise, you feel like you’ve been piling up the pounds or the kilos. The alarm goes up, you wake up, you look at the time its 5:30am, it occurs to you that may be you really don’t need to stand up yet, may be you could leave it till tomorrow, and then you check your bed, it really feels very comfortable, and you feel you can do a little bit more minutes of sleep, so you go back to sleep. Ok, the big question is how do you really feel at end of the day? Usually you feel a sense of lose because you know what you could have gained that you wanted to gain that you could not. Will that be a disaster? May be not, not on the immediate but the reality about life is that those decisions either to get up in the morning, or to get some more sleep, or to eat those particular kinds of food that you like or it may be a particular type of drink and you know that it’s not healthy for you, those decisions where we choose to avoid pain and to take the easy road will make them one day at a time the things eventually they add up. The more we choose to go the easy path to do what is easy, the more difficult it is to do what is difficult with time. But then wisdom tells us that it’s those difficult things a lot of the time that creates progress in our lives. When I was very young in high school, there was a day I had this exam to write the next day, then some of us decided to play a game of football and I was enjoying the football and I knew in my mind that I was supposed to go and read, it was a paper in chemistry and it kept coming back but it was more pleasurable to play the football, so I stayed a bit longer playing the football, and the longer I stayed the more difficult it became to leave. Let me cut straight to the chase; I did not pass the paper. I learnt a very clear lesson that you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do when you’ve got to do it. In life some things are pleasurable and easy, some things are difficult. Human nature naturally runs away from what is difficult or painful and naturally gravitates towards what is pleasurable and easy but somewhere along the line you have tell yourself the truth that sometimes when you choose to play today you pay tomorrow, that’s the way it works.

I like the way a wise old man described it, and he said it was a wise old man that told him the parable that every human being is born into this world with two pillows, the pillow of enjoyment and the pillow of pain. And he said some people take the pillow of pain first and use it with intensity, use it frequently and they wear it out because the more you use the pillow the more it wears out. So they wear out the pillow of pain quickly so what they have left is the pillow of enjoying for the rest of their lives. So this wise old man said that that wise old man told him that some people avoid pain and in a bid to avoid pain they take the pillow of enjoyment first and gets use to it, it satisfies them over and over so they want more and more and more and before they realize it they’ve worn out the pillow of enjoyment and then the rest of their lives they have the pillow of pain to deal with. This is just an expression to buttress the fact that if you play now you will pay later, either way you pay; it’s just the way life is.

I sincerely believe that you have a great future ahead of you and to be able to realize it you need to be able to move yourself to do whatever you need to do on time. All of us need discipline to be able to achieve our goals and to become the people that we see in our dreams. The big question with all these is how do I develop discipline?

Leadership has become a subject of interest in recent times because it’s become apparent to everybody that everything rises and falls on leadership. There is no leadership if there is no movement, if there is no motion, if we are not moving forward, if somebody’s life is not improving, if someone is not been empowered to become a better person to do things in a better way. Imagine that you’re a leader; the extent to which you can help the person behind you to gain motion is to the degree to which you move. You can’t take people further than you have gone, that makes self discipline a big issue in leadership. You discover then that the most powerful and the most difficult thing in leadership is leading yourself. We want to conquer the world when we have not conquered ourselves; the best way to conquer the world is to conquer ourselves. Many people don’t realize that before you have power conferred on you, it better for you to have power over yourself; power over your appetite, power over your desires, your thoughts and your emotions. When power or I would say wealth comes into your life, you know what they do? Those two things multiply whatever it is they meet in your life. There was a research people were asked what they needed to be able to develop more will power, they said that they will be able to develop more will power if they had more time to themselves. They did not realize that more leisure time will not necessarily increase your capacity for self discipline; it in fact will give you more time to exhibit your lack of self discipline.

Real power is when we can control ourselves and that is what saves us from abuse of the power that was conferred on us either by position or by our control of resources. To achieve success in the first instance we need discipline, we need the capacity to make ourselves to do what we need to do. Whenever you set a goal, you will realize that there are things you need to do or steps you need to take to achieve your goal, the ability to make yourself to take those steps is discipline. Without discipline goals will be frustrated, without discipline our dreams turns into fantasies which is mere wishes that will never come to pass rather than become a source of joy they become a source of frustration because we know what to do but we don’t have the capacity to do it. We know when to wake up, when to stop watching the soap opera, when to stop playing the video game, when to stop surfing facebook, twitter, pintrest, Instagram, when to stop chatting and shopping online, but we find it difficult to pull ourselves out and do what we need to do. The more we choose the easy way the more difficult it will be for us to make the right choices. Someone said that it was in the bid to avoid obstacles that the river became crooked. In life you don’t run away from challenges, its human nature to want to get something for free but the unfortunate thing is the person you become in process of wanting to get those free things.

Without self discipline achieving our goals becomes very difficult, without self discipline it becomes difficult to even preserve the success that God has given us. One tricky thing about this self discipline thing is that sometimes we cultivate the self discipline but when success comes we are tempted to not try as much as we did before, then we begin to take things for granted and then some people find out too late that what it took you to get there is what it will take you to stay there. We need to continue to cultivate self discipline in other to be able to maintain success that God has helped us to achieve.