Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained

Vision produces discipline. When you see a strong vision, you will see disciplined people. Where there is no vision, there is no discipline.

A clear vision inspires discipline

I love to learn about life. It excites me to seek and discover the factors and habits that enable successful people to enjoy success.

I’ve found that mindset (or paradigm) is at the center of success. To talk about specific habits of success, I’ve seen that the habit of self-discipline is indispensable.

Without discipline, you cannot get anything done. I’ve also seen that when a person is motivated by a strong vision, that vision itself creates some restraints that make the person more likely to achieve their goals. It focuses their efforts and in a sense, keeps them from doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

Think about the woman who tried to lose weight and failed many times. When she gets engaged, she decides that she wants to look great in her wedding pictures which will be memorialized on her wall for the rest of her life. She doesn’t want to see a “fat” version of herself on her wall for the rest of her life. She has a vision that motivates her. By the time her wedding comes around, she has lost 80 lbs and fits beautifully in her wedding dress. She takes a lot of pictures. What happened? Why did she fail numerous times before and is now succeeding? The vision of her wedding day and how she wanted to look and be remembered was a powerful and compelling vision that empowered her to focus her efforts. That vision gave her the courage to say no to her favorite ice cream and to say yes to a healthy diet and exercise.

But when there is no vision, people are unrestrained. They do what they want when they want. They are blown around by any wind that comes through. But a person with a compelling vision will be disciplined and is going to live out their core values – out of which the vision came –and will be happy in the end because their focus will help them achieve their goals.

A compelling focused vision always produces discipline. If you don’t see discipline, it’s because the person doesn’t have a vision – a mental picture of a desired future that is so compelling they will give up everything to get hold of. That’s vision! True knowledge and consciousness of your vision help to harness and discipline yourself keeping you from being distracted and sidetracked. When a person lacks a focused vision, he lacks discipline.

When you look carefully at people who have a discipline problem corporately or in their personal lives, you will find a common thread that runs through their lives. That problem is the lack of a focused compelling vision. You’ll see this 100% of the time. Corporately they may not yet be sold out to the vision of the organization because it is not clear to them, or they just don’t want to embrace it. Individually, they may not know what they want or what their vision is. Whenever you have problems with vision, you will also have problems with discipline. Self and corporate discipline in our lives are tied to vision.

What happens when you want to learn discipline without vision?

What happens when you try to focus and discipline yourself without a focused vision?  If you try to create discipline without a focused vision, you will become legalistic feel guilty when you inevitably fail.  When people try to create disciple without vision, they forget that you don’t get discipline before vision. You get vision first, and vision has the potential and the ability to produce discipline.