What is Leadership and What is Discipline?

Leadership VS Discipline, are they the same, can they work together, and what exactly do they mean? It's a hot topic in my house lately and frankly probably any household with kids old enough to tell you where they think the bear craps in the woods. Parenting is full of huge grey areas, Hell who am I kidding the damn mess is a grey area!! There is no real black and white manual and over the years it has morphed and changed. As we become more modern with less time and more disconnected from family, its easy to see why we have short cuts and short comings with parenting. What we do today is probably not even a shadow of how things used to be when people didn't have all the modern distraction of today. Families aren't flowing together, instead we are all working against each other and our inner nature to try to make things fit the way we are having it sold to us.  This is were understanding the real definitions of leadership and discipline come into play.

I am going to use the Army standard of leadership(for you my sweet).  The Army defines leadership as:

 “the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.”

 Lets change "people" to spouse/kids and change organization to Family.  So now we are influencing our kids and spouses to improve the family.  That makes a lot of sense.  We don't want outside forces having a stronger influence on it, so we need to make sure we are the ones providing it.  Lets start breaking this down.

Influence is the power to change or effect someone or something: the power to cause changes without directly forcing them to happen.

That's powerful.  Being able to change someone without force.  Basically being such a strong presence that they would want to make the changes and do as you guide them or on the flip side be so turned off they are influenced into the opposite direction.

Purpose is the reason why something is done or used, its the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something.

Influence with purpose, that means having a plan or goal you are trying to get to without force.

Direction is the path or course in which something is moving.

Ok now we are guiding the way down a path toward a goal without forcing people into it.

Motivation is the act or process of giving someone a reason for doing something.

I think with that we can define family leadership as guiding our kids/spouses down a planned path toward an end result while showing them why its such a good idea.  Sounds like a lot of work, but that's what a leader does, works for a common end goal. With a family we are working towards guiding our kids into functioning adults, helping our spouses work out problems and even moving the whole household into a cohesive unit. None of that can be done without a good positive influence.  Everyone is going to run opposite directions otherwise.  You can't force people to like your ideas, you have to show them why your ideas are so good to begin with and you have to be the model of your anticipated end result; IE functioning adult.

I think leadership is probably a GREAT family value to have, providing it's done correctly and people are benefiting and goals are being met.

Now I am going to move onto discipline.  We all say it, do it and suggest it, but what is discipline exactly and how does it play a role in family life?

I believe in most situations when we think of discipline we think of it in the following context:

gaining control by requiring that rules be obeyed and punishing bad behavior.

I think that's a fair representation when we think of disciplining our children. We do something to our kids to make them pay for their infractions and we call it discipline and we call it just.

Lets take a look at the meaning of punish.

To punish is to make someone suffer for a crime or bad behavior.

Yes, your kid breaks the rules you do something to them, spank maybe? Ground them? Take away time from the TV or their game station in an effort to make them suffer for doing bad. This is after all how the American justice system works and they got at all right, right? 

To suffer is to experience pain, something unpleasant or to become worse because of being badly effected by something.

Ouch, that looks nasty. Pain, unpleasantness and being adversely effected.  

Pain is the physical feeling caused by something that hurts the body, its mental or emotional suffering or something that causes or makes trouble for you. 

It's not getting better.  So discipline is the act of causing physical pain or mental suffering for rule breaking. When our children are born has it ever crossed our minds ONCE to purposefully cause them harm?  Have we ever thought that harm would make them great people? Are we great parents when we cause harm to others? 

That's the definition of discipline as we know it to cause change in behavior at the time.  There is another for discipline. 

A way of behaving that shows a willingness to obey rules or orders

That's called self discipline. A behavior you show.  I know being a leader takes self discipline. Always doing the right thing in efforts to influence others to follow in your steps. 

Leadership and discipline have VERY obvious different meanings and quite clearly cannot coexist. Taking the leadership role in your family means showing them what you believe and why its so important, it means giving your family a path and helping them navigate it. Being a disciplinarian means reacting to what you haven't approved and causing harm to get your way and leaving no lesson learned ad learning is not part of discipline.  A good leader doesn't harm his people.

Being a self disciplined leader is clearly optimal, it means standing up to yourself in the face of defeat, failure, and disappointment, being ok with it and driving on with changes in the game plan to get back on path. Its time we all really sat and looked at ourselves and decide what we are lacking and how we can fix it and be better families and be proud of the hard work we put into raising the next generation.