Today I challenge you to persevere.

Whether a personal or professional goal, or one centered on your person, your family, or business, you must persevere to achieve it. But perseverance is a discipline, one you must cultivate regularly to one day bear fruit.

Yes, perseverance is a discipline, and it is far from a natural gift. Perseverance is never innate. No one is born disciplined. In fact, the word “discipline” comes from the Latin disciplina meaning training that corrects, molds, or perfects mental faculties or moral character. It is the practice of controling your attitude and activity. To possess discipline, we must continually practice it. Perseverance demands a willingness to focus our efforts and activity around the goal.

Leaders constantly face distractions, those would-be priorities that compete for our attention. Centering, even meditating, on our core values and repeatedly committing action to them can help us discipline ourselves to respond in such situations. Delegating tasks, deferring activities, and minimizing time-wasters are only some of the techniques available to us, so that we may focus on the real priorities.

Hey, I’ll admit it: My temptation is to watch TV, and I’m capable of watching it for hours at a time. How much progress will I make toward my goals if I’m wasting hours in front of the tube? I have to make a conscious choice to focus every moment of every day, or I may give in to my temptation. The practice of discipline, for me, begins and ends with time management.

Funny thing about discipline. The more you exercise it, the more habitual it becomes. I read somewhere that if you do something each day for 21 days, you will continue doing it out of sheer habit. And it affects everything in life, from physical fitness to building a business, to family life and child rearing. None of it is possible without discipline. Every day is my opportunity to exercise it.

Just as dreaming is necessary to visualize what is possible, so discipline is required to realize it. Some people like to dream big, but often are unwilling to follow through. As George Bernard Shaw says, in the above quotation, to achieve progress, one must be “unreasonable.” Only by shaping the world around our vision can we hope to progress toward that vision. But vision without discipline equals frustration and disappointment.

Let me encourage you to work on your inner self so that you can be better equipped to persevere. Force yourself to focus, because you weren’t born with that ability. Avoid complaining that you’re just not “wired that way”—no one ever is. Do it one day at a time. Try to tell yourself you’re to focus your efforts for just one day. The next morning, remind yourself, just one day. You might surprise yourself when, in three weeks’ time, you’re doing it by habit.

Even discipline, as good a thing as it is, can be distracting. Everyone has a need for the occasional break. I call mine a “mental health day;” it’s sort of like a sick day for the mind. When you need to take a day to rest, contemplate, and reflect, don’t waste your energy beating yourself up over it. In fact, often such a day allows you the perspective you need to re-frame a challenging obstacle and formulate a game plan. The trick is to resist the inertia to stay in that place. The only way I know is to get back in training the very next morning.