I always have friends who don’t do Martial Arts wonder why the hell I subject my body to this punishment. These days it’s usually chiropractors, physios and doctors when I go to them trying to “un-broken” myself.
It’s kinda funny – there’s just no point explaining unless you get them on the mats doing it.
I had a group doing some clinching a week or so ago, and they were going at it hard, and I wasn’t holding much back either. I could see they were all hurting, but they kept going, yet there were those “what the hell am I doing” looks on their faces.
I sat them down at the end, and told them they are not alone in feeling how they are feeling right now, and to be honest, I STILL feel how they are feeling right now.
I told them I put it all into three words these days. Here they are with a definition and a real life example of it from Kyl land.
Resilience:
Learning to cope and live with failure. I believe we live in a society now that has so much access to whatever we want now, when we can’t get something we feel entitled to, we crumble. We have to know what it is to fail, not get things right the first time, lower our expectations, as this translates into life. I’ve spoken about this before, but resilience is the “hardness” you develop in your mind and body to get the f%^k back up after you have been beaten down countless times.
I think people believe that when you are at a certain rank or time you don’t make mistakes anymore. You make mistakes and learn EVERYDAY. We must develop the resilience in our minds and bodies to keep getting back up and trying again and again.
The difference between a teacher and a student is that the teacher has grasped the concept of failure and developed the resilience to power on and keep embracing all the shit that goes on with it. Martial Artists have strong bodies. They have strong bodies because they use those muscles to get back up every time they are knocked down.
Tolerance:
This can sometimes get mixed up with resilience, but I believe they are two different things. Learning to tolerate pain. I say all the time to my students I’m not a thug – I don’t like pain, but I have developed a high tolerance for it. I understand that it is part of the contract.
If I can cope with the pain of being hit repeatedly then I can cope with anything. I think by having this tolerance we can translate that into mental hurdles and other physical challenges in life.
Major point here….. It’s all part of the contract. To be tough you have to learn how to tolerate pain, mentally and physically.
I once did a grading where I did just 5 rounds of sparring (if that’s what we would like to call it). Full Thai rules, with a fresh partner each time. First two rounds were my best friend, and my coach. These guys over the years had beaten me, and yep…. I was nervous.
Little did they know they had been preparing me for those rounds for the last however many years I had been training for at the time, because those constant “character sessions” had helped me develop a tolerance to being hit that as I bowed to them to start, I just thought to myself “I have taken the best you guys have ever given me, so let’s do another round”. It wasn’t me being arrogant; it was my affirmation to myself. I can do this – it’s just one more round.
If you can tolerate being hit by these guys, you can tolerate anything….
Defiance:
Defying your own and everybody else’s expectations. This doesn’t mean you are comparing yourself to anyone, you are defying YOURSELF. All the logic that can be mustered up to ascertain WHY you are actually allowing this to happen, you are defying it and showing it can be done.
How many times have you got in the car from training, or gotten out of bed the morning after a heavy workout, and almost cancelled your membership there and then? If you were not going to do it your parents or partners may have offered to do it for you. I have too many to begin counting. What made me go back? I was defying myself. I wasn’t trying to be cool, or popular, I was not going to let this beat me, and I was ready to take whatever came with that.
Have a chat to my mum sometime…. She will confirm I have had this trait for a very long time.
I saw an open act of defiance only a couple of months ago. I saw someone who was preparing for a grading, and looking the goods, only to do what would have been in professional sport a season ending injury. Instead of packing it in with only 3 weeks to go before grading day, she instead went to physios, chiropractors, and did everything they told her to do tenfold. She sacrificed an enormous amount of time to get it right, when some had written her off, she defied what was the normal response to “do it next year”. She took a deep breath, and kept chasing excellence.
So she did it, and nailed it. It’s got to be probably one of the best gradins I have EVER seen.
That’s defiance, and it’s also something else – Legendary. That’s one of the stories you will tell your Grandkids.
Sometimes, these three qualities won’t just get us through Martial Arts, they will get us through life.
Resilience, Tolerance, Defiance. Try it, or maybe you are already enacting those qualities, and if so, time to turn them up to 11.
That’s all you need to do.
#cma4life