This first one is an essential principle. If you can wrap your head around this one, the rest is easy (well, easier, anyway). The basic premise is simple: you cannot control what happens to you. The only thing you can ever control is YOUR reaction to it. See my post on Where Do You Locate Your Control for more on this topic. Continue reading
You need to get back to the gym. You know it. I know it. The question is, why aren’t you doing it?
You know you should workout. You know you should upgrade your nutrition. You know you should do more to support an active healthy lifestyle. You know you should hire a trainer. You know you should sign up for that yoga class. But you don’t. Why not?
You are, as Tony Robbins would say, should-ing all over yourself.
Here’s a list of 7 strategies to help you get it together and turn that should into a must! Continue reading
Daily training is absolutely essential for the warrior. It must be firmly ingrained into your routine until doing your practice becomes as natural as brushing your teeth or taking a shower. No thought or debate is required, you simply just do it every day, sometimes twice a day. It must become habitual. Continue reading
I was never what you would call a natural athlete growing up. In fact, I pretty much sucked at every sport I tried – baseball, basketball, soccer, kickball, tennis… you name it, I sucked at it. To make things worse I was also ridiculously shy and introverted as a kid, so that combination, on top of having little to no athletic skill, made things even worse! Continue reading
I have to say it. Fitness ADD is running rampant. And, no I don’t mean math skills, I mean Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)! The misinformed, and some who should know better, running from program to program looking for, but never finding, the holy grail of fitness training. They never stay with a program long enough to actualize the real results inherent within it. Exercises are changed up on a daily basis to stave off boredom or keep it interesting or to never plateau or to confuse the muscles, or whatever nonsense people tell themselves. But really it’s a problem of commitment; actually sticking to a program to reap all the promised results from it. Continue reading
I’ve got some news for you. You will never be perfect at anything. Not your strength, not your conditioning, not your martial art, not your job, not your relationships, nothing. You will never even be able to make the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Nope. Not ever.
So what does that mean?
Should you simply stop trying right now? I mean, since you’ll never be perfect at anything, what’s the point, right? Why bother? Why struggle and make the effort? Well, I think the struggle is the point. It’s the process, not the goal. It’s what struggling and reaching and trying make of you that is the important thing. The journey itself, not so much the destination. In any worthwhile pursuit, like budo (martial arts to you non-budo people) for example, there is no end to the learning. The study is so vast and so deep you could pursue it for several lifetimes and still not reach the end.
The late, great Brandon Lee once said, “With what level of imperfection will you settle?” I think this is what he was talking about.
How content are you with your current level of skill in your martial arts practice? How satisfied are you with your current level of strength and conditioning at the gym? How happy are you with your current job, status, level of wealth, or relationship(s)?
Are you willing to settle for where you are right now in one or all of those categories, or do you want more?
The question you need to ask yourself in each of those areas is Brandon’s – with what level of imperfection will you settle? Where will you stop growing, pushing, struggling, changing, expanding your capacity, living up to your potential? When will you stop?
Or will you ever stop?
Keep Going!
Being reasonable gets you mediocrity. Being reasonable gets you the status quo. Nothing great has ever been achieved by men and women who were reasonable. Every major (and most minor) human achievement has been accomplished by unreasonable people.
It was unreasonable of Thomas Edison to fail over 10,000 times before creating the incandescent electric light bulb.
It was unreasonable to think that a man could walk on the moon until Neil Armstrong stepped onto its surface in July of 1969.
It was unreasonable to think the 4 minute mile could be broken until Roger Bannister broke it on May 6, 1954.
In the world of Bujinkan Martial Arts, it was unreasonable of Stephen K. Hayes to think he would be accepted as the first American to study the mysterious art of Japanese Ninjutsu, yet today he is known all over the world.
Over and over again, unreasonable people are succeeding, accomplishing great things, and leaving their mark on the world. So tell me again, why would you want to be reasonable?
Do you ever get the feeling you were destined for greatness? It starts like a slight nagging feeling in your gut that there’s something missing. That you don’t quite fit in with the status quo. It’s a dissatisfaction with ordinary or mediocre. It’s the fleeting thought on the fringes of your consciousness that maybe, just maybe there’s something more than this for you.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus
Unfortunately for the world, the majority of people out there will ignore that feeling. They will make excuses why they can’t act on it. They will be too busy, too tired, too involved in something or someone else, too lazy, too scared. But not you. You will act. You will feel the fear just like all the rest of them, but your desire for greatness will allow you to overcome it. You will have all the same excuses and rationales, maybe more, but the restlessness inside will not let you rest.
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them” – Henry David Thoreau
To bring this from the general to the specific, how do we become unreasonable in our training?
For starters, I have never believed that any highly skilled martial arts master was special. Never will. You and I have the ability to be as great as any one of them. What one man can do, another can do. The only way to insure you never succeed is to put them up on a pedestal and tell yourself they are special. That they are geniuses. That they are a rare, unusual breed. That they are set apart. Nonsense! You want it? Train harder. Train more. Train better. Become unreasonable in your training.
You must train yourself to be so good that they won’t be able to ignore your skill, no matter who you are and no matter what your rank – or lack of!
Learn the ancient warrior’s methods of building an unbreakable body HERE.
A long time ago, Socrates said, “Learning is remembering.”
Famously, Michelangelo “saw” David trapped within a solid block of marble. According to him, he did not so much sculpt David, but rather liberated him from the prison of stone.
What if you too are already a masterpiece that is simply trapped inside your own block of stone?
The stone prison surrounding your personal mastery though is not made of marble. Rather, you are being held captive by all the unnatural patterns of movement(s) and limiting beliefs that have built up over the years of conditioning.
It is the belief systems you have created within yourself that pulls you down, away from reaching your own mastery.
It is the negative self talk that continues to chatter away in your head whenever you attempt something great that pulls you back.
It is the little voice that says – “Who are you to think you can do that? Who are you to dare to be great? Who are you to think you can be masterful? You’re nobody. You don’t deserve it. You’re not good enough. You’re not smart enough. You always fail, why do you think this time will be any different?”
The question, in reality, though is this one: WHO ARE YOU NOT TO?
Remember this – you are always the only one in control of what you think. Whether you believe you can or you believe you cannot, you are right!
Your patterns of movement, your patterns of breathing, your patterns of thought, your patterns of belief all have been conditioned over the span of your entire life to effectively create a prison of stone confining you, limiting your level of mastery. You can break free of this limiting conditioning by gradually chipping away at the outer layers, slowly revealing the true nature of the masterpiece “David” that is you.
The first step in setting free your personal mastery is to first realize that you are trapped. Without this level of conscious self-awareness, the process cannot begin.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”
Ever feel like everything is spiraling out of control? Like the only thing that actually responds to you the way you want it to is your TV remote, and lately even that is on the fritz?
How do you reign it all in?
The answer is simpler than you think…
Your locus of control determines everything. Where you source your control is what governs how you live your life. According to psychology, those people who have allow their lives to be dictated by outside forces have an external locus of control. These people are all over the map. They are blown by the wind, allowing whatever happens on the outside to move their thoughts, their moods, their actions. Because these people allow themselves to be pushed around by external forces they constantly feel as if they are out of control. And they are.
Conversely, those with an internal locus of control are much more stable and steadfast. They understand that it is not what happens to them that determines how they respond, but how they choose to feel about it. The only thing you control in this life, aside from the temperature on your thermostat, is your ability to choose how to respond to external situations. What happens on the outside, happens to pretty much everyone. We all get sick. We all have bad days. The sun set on all of us last night. What differentiates these people is their ability to choose how to feel about, and respond to (if they do at all), the bad things that happen to them. They are in control.
In Japanese budo (martial arts), we have a very similar concept called, Fudoshin. Fudoshin means “immovable spirit”. Basically it says that the warrior maintains a calm in the very heart of the storm. He is not moved by external events and situations, but is able to bring his full capabilities to bear because of this immense mental and emotional stability. He is in control.
Does this mean that warriors are heartless, unfeeling people? No, not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. They feel anger, sadness, bitterness, regret, frustration, happiness, joy, ecstasy, and yes, even depression. But, they do not allow these emotions to rule their lives running them up and down like a roller coaster at Six Flags. They stay the course.
It’s very easy to allow outside events and circumstances to push us around and dictate the course of our lives. We’ve all experienced it and allowed it to happen at some point. The key is recognizing it and moving your locus of control back to inside yourself.
People have all sorts of excuses and rationalizations for being swayed by every outside force. We even have a very philosophical, quasi-intelligent sounding way of putting it; we say – “go with the flow”. You’ve heard this, right? You’ve probably even said it to someone, I know I have. But here are 2 very important things to remember about why you should NOT go with the flow:
1) You cannot drift to the top. You’ll never achieve your goals and dreams by going with the flow.
2) Only dead bodies float downstream.
Remain steadfast, Warriors. Stay the course, my friends!!
Many people like to believe that if they don’t take the time to train themselves on a daily basis their skill levels will somehow remain stagnant, like on a plateau. That their skills and abilities will somehow remain in stasis, neither improving or regressing until the next class, the next workshop, the next seminar, or the next time they can get their Daily Personal Practice on track again. The truth of the matter is not so cut and dry.
Here’s the reality – if you are not taking the time to train on a consistent basis than you are steadily declining in skill. Each practice session you skip (not miss – skip. Skipping is a choice), your skill level decreases slightly, your abilities atrophy just a bit. There is no such thing as stagnation. Your body cannot remain motionless if you are alive and breathing. Either you are getting better through your daily commitment of consistently going deeper into your practice or you are getting worse. No middle ground. No fence sitting. One side or the other. Stop fooling yourself.
The good news is, once you accept that stagnation is a myth, you can begin to look at your practice objectively and actually begin the steady climb to create real progress. You see, real progress is not a sudden flurry of activity followed by a lull. Real progress is only achieved in consistent, incremental steps day by day. It’s the little things that count, not the big ones. It’s the little steps that build and accumulate.
Do you think your yearly pilgrimage to Japan (or your martial arts/fitness training Mecca of choice) is causing your skill level to jump? Nope. It’s not. Yes, it’s motivating. Yes, it’s inspiring. Yes, you are learning new things, getting corrections (hopefully!), and gaining new and deeper insights. BUT – how do all those new insights come to fruition? You don’t own them until they become assimilated by your nervous system. That takes time. That takes practice.
Deep, consistent practice.
That deep practice is the slow and steady grind of your consistent daily training.
That’s where the magic happens. It happens in the grind. In the regular training. In the ordinary time.
That’s where REAL skill is built. That’s how masters are made.