Discipline your mind

The great Buddha had said, "Rule your mind or it will rule you" Discipline comes with understanding your mind. Read on to find out how.

We all know that knowledge of something alone does not make us disciplined enough to follow it regularly. Even motivation helps us get a good start, but with time even motivation dries up and the same habit which was driven by motivation in the beginning, after few days becomes a daunting task. In our last blog we discussed "hacks" we can use to exercise regularly. Let us take the same example forward to understand discipline as without discipline, we can forget about persisting anything for a long time. 

Watch my video on this topic by going to the link below-

How the mind plays us?

Let us first see what is common in all individuals. We all get loud inner mind chatter when we are about to begin our workouts. Let me give an example of myself. As a club level player and a coach, I always strive to improve my squash. I design my workouts to keep myself court fit. One of them is court sprints. For squash players who play competitive tournaments, doing court sprints is very common. They have to run inside the squash court from one end to the other for 1 minute. This workout involves change of direction which makes it more challenging than running straight. 20 rounds is the minimum accepted, but we try for maximum. It truly is a challenging workout for any athlete if giving his best speed burst. After 1minute, we break for 1minute and then go again. We can do 5, 7, 10 sets of court sprints. The night before the court sprints, I used to get signals from my mind. Thoughts like, "I better run less tomorrow as I have a hectic day" or "if my friend comes, I will run less so that I have energy to play with him" or "let me run day after instead of tomorrow" The next morning, the chatter becomes even louder. Getting out of the bed is difficult and once I reach the squash courts, even warm ups become a task. I also have to visit the bathroom more often. Sometimes I feel little pain in my ankles or knees or soul. I tend to untie and tie my shoe laces very often. Basically I am trying to delay the sprints as much as I can. My mind is continuously playing games on me to avoid doing the sprints. After going through this mental ordeal, I go to the glass end of the court, set my stopwatch and finally take my first step to run. That’s it!!! The chatter stops. Everything else is easy as I have done it many times before. From the night before to the first step of the sprint, I was continuously distracted and lured with excuses for not doing my workout.

This above mind chatter is common for everyone. All players go through this chatter at some point of their training, at various levels. Even the best players of the world go through it. Sometimes it’s very strong, sometimes the noise is something we can ignore. The difference between the disciplined and the non-disciplined athlete is that the disciplined athlete catches his mind playing games with him and knows how to go beyond. He knows these are all tricks his mind is playing. He has gone through this feeling many times before and knows not to give in. He also knows how satisfying completing the task is, despite the mental blocks created by the mind.

 How to catch the mind?

Recognizing the mind games, is 90% battle won. But most of the times we are so driven by the smart mind that we do not even realize that it’s trying to play games on us. So the main question, ‘How do we catch our mind playing these games?’ Being mindful plays a huge role in this. Whenever there is an excuse coming up, ask yourself as if you are asking a third person, “Is this really a reason for YOU not doing today’s workout?” You can close your eyes, halt for a few seconds and ask this question in your mind. Little focus on the breath before asking this question would help in quietening the noise in the mind. Many disciplined athletes know their mind and body so well (probably after years of training), they do it unconsciously. After many sessions of training, the mind now knows that it’s not easy to fool you. It will try less often and less hard with its tricks. Also trained athletes always listen to their body and not their minds, whenever they feel pain in their body, they know they have to skip their work out and take rest.

If we are just ‘present’ to the games our mind plays with us, we can deal with it better. We just need to understand our mind better. Try it next time and let me know if it worked!!

Amit Gajria 

World Squash Federation Certified Coach,

Mumbai, India.