How Discipline Can Give You a Mental Edge

Posted on December 12, 2020 by Bennie Fowler, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

The following is adapted from Silver Spoon: The Imperfect Guide to Success.

There are a lot of talented people in the world. That’s true in your field of expertise; it’s especially true in the highly competitive world of professional sports, where the potential rewards are huge. Who doesn’t want to play in the NFL or the NBA?

Talent is relatively common. Discipline is far more unusual. The NFL and NBA don’t turn away players because they’re too talented. But talented players who lack discipline? That’s another story. People who don’t have enough self-control and persistence fall short of their dreams and goals.

What exactly is discipline? How can it give you an edge over your competitors?

Any eight-year-old soccer player or Pee Wee football player can rattle off an answer to that question. It’s a concept instilled by coaches and teachers from an early age.

But what is discipline in practice? What does it look like every day? And what is the effect of discipline on your life as a whole?

Brain over Butt

Here’s a simple way to think about discipline: it’s the moment when the gravity of your butt is outweighed by the gravity of your brain.

Discipline isn’t a one-and-done phenomenon. Long-term success is accomplished over thousands of small moments when your mind forces you to keep going, no matter how much you may not want to. The disciplined mind stays in control and forces the body to take that next step, study that next chapter, or show up to that early practice.

The practice of discipline is the practice of believing you can surmount any obstacle. It is the mental awareness and presence of space that when your brain says, “Be early,” your body can only comply. No matter how lazy or tired your body might feel, your butt will never weigh more than the gravity of your brain pushing you forward. In a phrase, “It’s mind over matter when it matters most.”

The NFL Combine is a weeklong evaluation held each February at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, where college players hoping to be chosen during the draft two months later are put through a standardized set of physical tests. When I was getting ready for the Combine, I lived like a monk.

I knew that how I performed on those tests would determine not only whether I got drafted but also how high in the draft I was selected. The higher I was taken, the bigger the contract I could expect to be offered. I understood that the Combine had a real-world financial impact on my life. The stakes were high.

To prepare, a few of my friends and fellow competitors went to Tampa to train for several weeks. At night, some of them would go out on the town. Nothing crazy, but they stayed out late sometimes, ate things that definitely were not on the training table, and didn’t get the sleep they needed.

I was determined to do things differently. I stayed in my room between sessions. I ate only the food provided by the training site. I never went out drinking, and I made sure I got all the massages and post-training medical treatments recommended to me.

We spent three months in Tampa, and my monastic life paid off. I performed well at the Combine. I controlled what was within my control.

Your Discipline Will Be Tested

There’s no shortage of temptations in this world, especially for successful people.

When you set your mind to accomplishing something, you will be tested. Friends will call inviting you out. You’ll have opportunities to stay out late or otherwise deviate from your schedule. How will you respond?

My detailed approach to training and preparation continues to be tested every day. It would be easy to relax and stop doing the million little things that give me a chance to compete at the highest level of the sport, but those kinds of lapses have hurt me in the past, so I avoid them.

Money, of course, can be a distraction. My first year in the league was the first time I’d regularly gotten a whole bunch of money. Lump sums of it, every week. Factor in the loose schedule and wide swaths of free time, and I could have found myself on a slippery slope, discipline-wise. Money, football, freedom. School was over and I got to play football every day.

But money and freedom come with heavy responsibility. To play at the highest level, I have to do everything right. There’s no room for a lapse in discipline.

The same is true for you. Whatever your line of work, you’ve got to come ready every day. If you find a way to be at your best every moment of every day, you’ll discover that discipline is at the core of it all.

For more advice on discipline, you can find Silver Spoon: The Imperfect Guide to Success on Amazon.

Bennie Fowler is a six-year veteran of the NFL. He began his career as an undrafted free agent signed by the Broncos in 2014. He spent four years with the Broncos and was a member of the Super Bowl 50 championship team in 2016. Bennie played college football at Michigan State University, where he was a member of the 2014 Rose Bowl championship team. Bennie holds the annual Bennie Fowler youth football camp in Detroit, Michigan, is an in-demand speaker trained through the NFL Speakers Bureau, and lives in Denver during the offseason.