Episode 930: Four Disciplines and Money
[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining me on episode 930 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Julia
[00:00:07] Julio Murro: [00:00:07] Macaro and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the road by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your colleagues. Having the ability to develop yourself is key.
[00:00:22] And one way to be inspired to do it. Having the ability to develop yourself is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this Diane inspired stewdarship podcast with my very good friends.
[00:00:37]Scott Maderer: [00:00:37] I think about what are the specific actions that you need to take each week to achieve the goal. Do you need to put your credit cards away? Do you need to do a daily audit of what you've spent on the credit cards? Do you need. You figure out something like a debt, snowball method and begin to pay down your debt that week.
[00:00:58] And then how are you regularly [00:01:00] reviewing this in a weekly? Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time. And your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
[00:01:28]And today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about the four DX method I share what the four disciplines are and how they can help you with managing your money and achieving your money goals. As we talk about stewarding your treasures, wouldn't it be great.
[00:01:46] If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dollar. It turns out you can. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make [00:02:00] a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon.
[00:02:12] So on Tuesday, I talked a little bit about the four DX method, just to refresh your memory. This is something known as the four disciplines of execution, and it's a goal setting system that focuses on four critical components and uses though, as the filter by which you run all of your goals so that you can identify what is known as your wildly important goals, and then actually get those done.
[00:02:38] So the idea is you identify not just the list of hundreds and thousands of goals that you have, but you zero in on one or two wildly important goals. They're not necessarily massive. They're not necessarily big, but they're the ones that if you achieve them, they really move the needle for you. They make a big difference in your life.
[00:03:00] [00:03:00] And the idea is that you use these four disciplines to focus on achieving those goals. In fact, focus is the first discipline. Ignoring what you don't need to pay attention to and focusing in on the thing that you do need to pay attention to. The second is leverage. This is the idea of a combination of being flexible and finding your leading measures.
[00:03:26] Flexibility is about rolling with the punches about adjusting your plan while keeping your goal on top. Recognizing that if you have a wildly important goal, that goal stays the same, but how you get there may shift. And as part of that, you want to identify not where performance is coming from. And in terms of the past performance, these are lag measures, the results of something you do.
[00:03:52] Instead you want to find water, the things that you do that cause those lag measures to have. See, when it comes to [00:04:00] money way too often, we're looking at the lag measures we're looking at. Did we stay on budget? We're looking at tracking our expenses. We're not looking at what are the behaviors, what are the activities that we put into the front end that keep us on target?
[00:04:15] The third discipline is engagement. What are you doing to keep a scoreboard? You're at and where you're at and are you on target and on your are on goal and can you easily see that and measure it? And then the last one is accountability, both self accountability, and other focused accountability so that you can actually sell review where you're at in an honest way, and then make adjustments.
[00:04:42] And as an example, whenever you're thinking about money, You have to use these four disciplines to really achieve your goals. Let's take an example. Let's look at paying off credit card debt, a common goal that people have. They want to pay off maybe a massive amount of credit card [00:05:00] debt. They want to get rid of that consumer debt.
[00:05:02] So focus on all. Of the purchases that you have and focus only on credit card payments. Try not to pay extra on other things don't get behind on your bills, but don't pay extra, try not to do any extra spending, try not to do any activity that would generate more. Credit card payments, having to be done, track that create a sheet where it shows how much you owe, how much you're paying and how much you're paying them down.
[00:05:32] And then think about what are the specific actions that you need to take each week to achieve the goal. Do you need to put your credit cards away? Do you need to do a daily audit of what on the credit cards, do you need to figure out something like a debt, snowball method and begin to pay down your debt that week?
[00:05:52] And then how are you regularly reviewing this in a weekly system with yourself and maybe with a coach to see where you're [00:06:00] at, take another goal. Maybe you want to buy a house. What can you do to save up money for the down payment on that house? What are the milestones that you need to make and you need to achieve before you can actually buy that house and then begin to identify what are the activities that I need to do to achieve those milestones.
[00:06:21] The same framework works. Any money goal, you need to focus first on what is the goal? Now I articulated those in some rather general ways. You definitely want to get more detailed than that. If you want to buy a house, what does that house look like? How much is your, the price range for these sorts of things become important details to add to it.
[00:06:41] If you want to pay off the credit card debt, you have to think about in what order, how much is it and tailor it out and really identify the specific techniques to you. That will be most efficient for you. So there's definitely a lot more detail that's needed, but the truth is that if you are [00:07:00] overspending, if you aren't making enough money, if you've got debt that you want to pay off, if you've got freedom that you want to achieve or investing that you want to do, or purchases that you want to do, you can always use the same four disciplines to zero in on what you need to do.
[00:07:17] The single hardest part is that leading versus lagging indicator part, when it comes to money, we almost always are looking at the lagging indicators. First, how much money do I have? How much money am I making? How am I staying on target with my bills? Am I overspending on my budget? All of these are things that happen after the fact that they're tracking.
[00:07:39] They're looking backwards, not forwards. Instead, you really need to figure out. Where is it that you're overspending and what is leading to that behavior? Where is it that you're not achieving your goals and what is leading to that behavior? What are the things that are the inputs to give you the output that you want?
[00:08:00] [00:08:00] And when you really dial in and identify those, then you can achieve your wildly important goals. Thanks for that.
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