In previous articles, I have discussed several reasons why someone may be attracted to training Martial Arts. There are almost as many reasons as people training! However, undoubtedly one of the biggest drivers is the motivation of learning. In my professional environment, I hear this again and again: people are motivated by learning, by challenging themselves to improve in a way they can measure and gauge, and many times when a job doesn’t offer learning opportunities any more, workers are demotivated in a way that a better title or financial compensation won’t fix. For many, learning is a fundamental drive in life. And that is a basic human experience.
Many many years ago, a realization about myself struck me. This changed the way I go about investing time on new endeavors. While others were content with having many ‘hobbies’ and practicing many things: sports, Martial Arts, music, etc. I realized that I wasn’t ‘happy’ having many endeavors in which I could stretch myself thin, but to pick one or two things to develop deep and ‘be good at.’ Psychologies refer to this as ‘mastery’ even though it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘mastery’ the way the average Martial Artist would understand it. What it means is that we get motivated by getting increasingly better at something. Instead of – at least for those of us with that trait – knowing a little bit of many things. Of course, there are those rare exceptions that can practice MANY things, AND be good at them. I assure everyone here, I am not one of those! 🙂
I remember that moment in my life in which it dawned on me I did not have, in a physical and in a practical sense, the actual time to do everything I wanted and be great at all of it. While the thought was sobering, it didn’t make me sad at all. It made me feel real and mature. I was sacrificing something (“getting better at guitar playing”) in the name of something else, a greater passion (“getting better and better at Martial Arts”). Now, don’t get me wrong – many Martial Artists I know play guitar and are good at it. What I mean to say is for FOR ME and given my life, the amount of time I spend working, it did not make sense to pursue multiple passions because it would not make me happy, period. And I am proud I made my choice and have used that energy to train relentlessly and consistently over the years. It makes me feel real and happy. In the future, if my professional life is less demanding and there is more ‘time,’ there would be nothing wrong with picking up guitar again, by the way 🙂
Now, to me, this phenomenon, that we derive vast amounts of satisfaction from the act of learning, has another even bigger implication. Let’s think for a minute about the role of the Martial Arts Teacher.
I described in this article that a Martial Arts Teacher is not an infallible ‘Master’ but rather someone with the experience and knowledge of how to help us get better. In other words, help us learn.
Martial Arts do not behave like an object we can pass on. Not a ‘key’ or something we can simply give someone else. Nobody can truly teach you Martial Arts because Martial Arts is a very complex process of integration of your Body and Mind with a set of principles that help you acquire a new set of skills. Subtle and nuanced, more often than not when looked at with honesty, but real and measurable, nevertheless. If Martial Arts cannot be given, what do Martial Arts Teachers do?
Imagine the Martial Arts as a process of integration. I like to say there are two factors in learning a Martial Art, and it’s very very similar to what happens when we learn a new language (albeit with body mechanics ‘as a whole’ instead of the fine and tremendously complex motor skills involved in vocal chords and sound generation – but the integration of thought process and body movement is not that dissimilar). Learning a Martial Art requires repetition and feedback. And I mean a LOT of repetition. As stated in this vlog, the archetype of training hard to get better that is so often use in Martial Arts fiction – like the Karate Kid training – is actually very real, except in its scale. It takes years and years of dedicated practice to see progress, assuming we have the right level of feedback as well as an honest way to gauge the progress (vs. living in a bubble of fantasy).
And so now I come to the core of this issue. For more of us in modern life, and in fact for most people during history, the amount of practice you can put in by meeting up with your teacher twice or three times a week and training a couple of hours each time at best, is simply not enough to accomplish even a slight fraction of the ‘transformation’ we imagine this practice will lead us to. In the best of cases, say you train 1×1 with your teacher three times a week, 2 hours each time. That’s 6 hours of 1×1 tactile and vocal feedback from your teacher a week. That’s 312 hours a year. Even assuming we don’t subscribe to Malcom Gladwell‘s rule of the 10,000 hours literally (though there is no doubt the principle underlying his Outliers book is at play in learning and getting good at something), 312 hours is short of the many thousands of hours we will need to be truly good at Martial Arts. And let’s face it, I doubt most people reading this are actually training, with direct teacher’s feedback, for 312 hours a year. Most people put in two hours a week, with only a portion of that with the teacher or with truly valuable tactile and vocal feedback, and with some breaks during the year. Way way less than 312 hours a year.
But there is good news here. In fact, I have great news for all Martial Arts enthusiasts. IT DOES NOT matter. The scale needed to truly learn is such that this fact I just outlined isn’t really what is going to determine whether you get truly and measurably good at something. Training with your Teacher is just not enough. Anyone who has gotten truly good at Martial Arts did so because they have a fire in their heart to train and train, and a passion for it. So what does a person like that do? Train constantly, train solo, train with friends, train with friends within your System and outside your System. Train, exchange, experiment, play! Like a child, true learning comes by play.
Rory Miller is an author and well known thought leader in the world of Martial Arts and Self-Defense. However, even though it is undeniable, he’s an extremely interesting author when it comes to the actual Martial Arts content, what is to me his most amazing trait, by far, is his deep understanding of how humans learn. Learn ANYTHING, not just Martial Arts. We learn through play when we are children. That basically translates to our adult life repetition and experimentation and feedback.
In Martial Arts you need that passion to train and play and experiment. But the issue is that when we are learning and developing, we need feedback to ‘correct’ and not learn bad habits and do things in a way that truly work and truly help us develop ourselves towards our goals. That need to combine feedback and experience is what is tricky here. And here comes the Teacher, the Sifu, the Sensei, the Sabom. A true teacher is teaching you only one thing, to learn. Or rather, to learn how to learn.
Of all the gifts I got from my teacher, George Lee, the greatest one by far is this sense of ‘feedback’ that I have learned to give myself. It doesn’t mean it’s infallible, of course, and it will always be a ‘work in progress’, but it is there. Knowing that for me to truly learn, I have to train with others, experiment with friends and ‘students’ and the like. The solution is to develop the art of giving myself feedback. The teacher’s gift is greater in fact than the actual learning of Martial Arts. Learning to learn allows us to own our journey and continue to develop ourselves, no matter what, throughout our whole lives!
This system that my teacher taught me changed my life. It’s alive in me. I am not a ‘master’ but an enthusiast who loves learning and is always training to get better. But in that process, this gift of ‘sensing’ when something ‘is right’ in our system according to our principles is what guides me. I can train hours ‘solo’ and I can train hours and hours with a friend, because in a way, my teacher now lives within me, giving me the sense of what is right and what needs correction because of how it ‘feels’ when something is done well according to our principles. Then, of course, I come back to him and bring up questions and he keeps fine tuning this sense.
My teacher told me once that all he can pass on is ‘a blueprint’ that I then in turn have to use to learn and get better. At first this was an intellectual concept for me. But then, little by little and very slowly and gradually, it became a living thing inside me. A voice of comparing something I can do, or someone can do, against countless hours of baselining that ‘feeling of it’ with my teacher. And knowing how to keep tweaking it to keep improving.
It’s like having a math teacher when you are younger that helps you ‘click’ with learning Math, making it real to you. You will move on and learn from other instructors, books, online classes, seminars, etc. But you will always refer back to that one teacher who gave you that blueprint – and the lack of that is why so many people don’t develop a love for math, they never had a teacher who helped make the understanding of math real in the tangible world!
So the teacher’s greatest gift, I submit in my humble opinion, a gift that will last us for the rest of our lives, the art of self-feedback, honest and raw. Or, in other words, the art of learning to learn.
And it is a precious gift that we can use to keep growing and learning and developing ourselves. And as I said at the beginning of this article, for many of us, that learning is what makes all this worth it.
To know more about this and other Martial Arts and Life topics, you can view my Vlog and Podcast as well as these Martial Journal-related articles: Five Ways to Maximize Your Martial Art Potential by Andrea Harkins and What Taekwondo In My 40s Taught Me About The Age Excuse by Kristy Hitchens!
Francis can be contacted at francis.cordon@gmail.com, he is also an active Martial Arts YouTube Vlogger as well as the co-host of the Martial Arts Podcast ‘A Thousand Exits.’
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