I encourage my students to train mentally with little imagination exercises they can do when they’re out and about. When you go to a place that isn’t your home look for the exits, look for improvised weapons. When in the presence of other people, gauge their distance and imagine how you might react if they [...]
You’re lazy. The truth is, we’re all lazy. But some of us earn black belts while others don’t. Most people who try out a martial art quit after the first week or two. Why is that? Link to this post!
I have a working theory (and feel free to disagree vigorously) that every social ill, every war, crime, genocide, etc. can be, in some way, linked back to a single root cause and that is poor self esteem. Fundamentally, human beings are hard wired to be social creatures. We survived, while Neanderthals died out, in [...]
Here’s my recipe for developing mental toughness. And no I haven’t been able to complete this myself … yet. 1. Walk into a quiet, unoccupied room and turn the lights off. 2. Sit down and close your eyes. 3. Do not move any part of your body – except for allowing the normal breathing mechanism [...]
A few years ago, a rather well known individual in the community confronted me publicly about a wrong that he thought I had done to him. He got in my face both figuratively and literally. I was taken aback at first, as I really was unaware of the situation, and definitely did not do anything [...]
Many martial arts schools today focus on belt-rank as an end goal. They have black-belt clubs, accelerated black-belt training, etc. That’s fine, and I’m sure most give good instruction. I take issue with the view that a black belt – or any rank should be an end-goal. The myth that the black belt makes you [...]
In the Western world, the practice of alchemy has a long history as predecessor to modern chemistry (it’s where we get the name), school shrouded in mystery, and practice persecuted as pseudoscience or blasphemy by the powers that be. Outwardly, alchemists main goal was to produce the philosopher’s stone, a substance rumored to be able [...]
Making a decision is a powerful mental process. In fact the word “decision” is a nominalization, the turning of a process verb into a noun. A decision is static – set in stone, unlike the process of deciding. This is an important distinction. When you decide something, you draw the proverbial line in the sand. [...]
The other day I posted a statistic to my facebook profile – that 70% of adult males carry edged tools, such as knives, on a day to day basis in the U.S. A couple of people called me on the statistic; I have no problem with that. I do have statistics and research methods training [...]
Martial Arts photos from Flickr
