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BALANCING FLEXIBILITY and DISCIPLINE
One key to personal satisfaction and professional results might be the "Art of Balancing Flexibility with Discipline". Discipline in WHAT you do - your goals, your targets, pushing yourself, removing distractions and eventually focusing...
...on completion. Flexibility in HOW you go about doing it - change your patterns, embrace a newer approach, find another path, Innovate and take (intelligent) Risks. The challenge is to strike the right balance (between these two "forces").
Imagine being flexible with your goals, targets and completion and being disciplined (Rigid) about your ways of doing it, your approach, methodology and a consistent system (framework).
Finding a balance is not about doing the same thing everyday, in the same way, at the same time. But it should be about being disciplined about what you want to achieve, being consistent and disciplined in your efforts - but having the ability to look at different possibilities, better ways of achieving the results.
You may like to be disciplined about starting your daily, disciplined routine. However, I like to stay flexible with WHERE and HOW I fulfill this plan, being flexible about exploring a new path (this may help you breaking your set pattern - and it's wonderful how much impact this can have on our ability to take other risks). From a work context, as a facilitator my biggest learning continues to be in learning to balance between Structure and the Value of grasping new, spontaneous ideas.
Here too, one can learn that as long as I am disciplined about the outcome that my client wants - I am more effective when I am flexible with my approach and method of achieving it. Flexibility in this case is about being connected with the group, experiencing them in the moment and doing what is necessary and helpful in that moment - even if that isn't in the (laid out) plan.
Just because I have a 40-slides presentation doesn't mean I need to go through it the way I made it or even show all of them or maybe any of them! So, I guess we need to really explore what aspects of our lives/ work we need to be disciplined about and try and take risks and different ways (break patterns) to flexibly achieve our goals.
links:
https://media.licdn.com
http://transforme.in/learning-zone/balancing-flexibility-discipline
