Fight for a Happy Life with Sensei Ando: Martial Arts for Everyday Life

Welcome to Episode #111 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work.”

You see a move. You learn a move. You try a move…

…but it doesn’t work! ARGH! So frustrating.

The truth is, sooner or later, we all hit a wall in our training. We all get to the point where we have to decide whether a technique is possible or impossible. But what if we’re wrong?

Before you give up on those so-called “fancy” moves, let me give you some advice—no technique works in the beginning! Heck—forget the beginning, even if you drill a technique over and over for years, you still might have a problem pulling it off for real.

But don’t give up! In this episode, I will share the six stages of learning that you must pass through to truly master a technique. No, it’s not an easy path to follow, but it’s the only way to get you where you want to go.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

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Howdy, and welcome to episode #111 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

My name is Ando of Happy Life Martial Arts, and I’m here today to tell you a story– a story about the very first question I ever asked in a martial arts class.

I had trained on my own in my garage for a couple of years, but when I finally ventured out and signed up for a formal martial arts class, this was the first question that came to my mind. And it’s a question that I kept repeating for several years. And it’s all on the topic of–

How do you make a martial arts technique really work?

Perhaps you’ve had a similar question in your mind. You go to class, you see a cool technique, maybe a fancy technique. Your instructor seems to be able to do it, but you can’t and you want to.

What’s up with that?

Well, let me get to the story and then I think I can give you a solution, a pathway at least, to making your techniques work.

So the story, and I believe this was probably the first class, literally, the first class that I was standing in the Dojang, Taekwondo school. The teacher, a nice guy, and a very skillful guy, I believe it was probably his normal routine when a new student comes in to demonstrate some of his skill, to impress upon the student, Here’s why I’m the teacher.

In this case, the teacher would either take another student, or in this case me, and turn them into a puppet. He took my hand and grabbed my fingers, grabbed the palm and twisted my wrist, made me go down, flipped it over, goose neck, chicken wing, finger lock, arm lock.

He just had me going up and down, up and down like a puppet. And of course, it was all very cool. It was impressive and skillful. And when he let me go, he had that look on his face like, Impressive, huh?

Now, I was not trying to be a wise guy. Well, maybe 10% being a wise guy, but 90% actual interest. I just had to ask, Yeah, but how did you get my hand? I understand that if you’re grabbing my fingers and you twist them around multiple ways, I’m going to react to that. I got that.

But if I’m punching you, how did you catch my hand to begin with? And he looked at me with a very straight face and he just said… That comes later. Someday I’ll show you. That was his answer.

Now, in fairness, I’m a brand new student, so if there is a secret to catching someone’s hand out of mid-air in a real fight, why show me? Earn trust, pay your dues. I’m on board with that. So okay, that’ll come later, I just have to have a little bit of faith.

Now as it happens, my time in the Taekwondo school came to an end before I ever learned how to catch somebody’s hand out of mid-air to then turn them into a puppet. I ended up eventually in a Kung Fu school and I ran into the same problem. Loads of difficult, dare I say, fancy moves in the Kung Fu school. All the things that people say don’t work in real fights.

Wrist locks, sweeps, lockups of various kinds, hip throws. And I couldn’t get any of them to work, right? And, as a matter of fact, perhaps this was being a bit of a wise guy, but I was older. I even at some point put up a challenge to my classmates and I said, If any one of you can get a hip throw on me, a legitimate hip throw, while we’re free sparring, I’ll give you $100.

I believe it’s also the case I raised that to $1000 at some point. $1000 to anyone who can drop me with a hip throw. Now, to be fair, I wasn’t hip throwing anybody either. I couldn’t do it either. But that didn’t change the fact that we were being taught hip throws and we were expected to be able to do hip throws.

I’ve mentioned before that early on in my martial arts journey, I was a bit of a technique collector. I had notebooks full of techniques, cool moves, the stuff I wanted to do. But I couldn’t and it was very frustrating.

I’m sure for you too, if you have a similar problem, you show up, you do what you’re supposed to do, you work hard, you practice, you ask questions, but it’s not enough. You still can’t get the moves to work. And for me, the real slap in the face came when I was working with kids.

Maybe when you’re working with adults, you can get away with saying, Well, this guy’s bigger and that guy’s stronger, that guy’s a higher rank. So of course I can’t get these things to work. But when I worked out with kids, and I would kind of slip in an attempt to throw them and surprise them, maybe delight them with something a little fancier, I would also be fumbling around to try to get that hand or get to that right position.

So even with kids, I couldn’t do it. And that infuriated me.

At some point, that came out as anger, like I’m resenting this whole training methodology because none of this stuff you say it works, works. My Kung Fu teacher said something that I believe he said many times, but the first time I really heard it was on this one particular occasion where he told me–

First you learn how to work Kung Fu, then you learn how to make Kung Fu work.

Ah, this to me was the exact same advice or sentiment from my Taekwondo teacher when he said, that comes later. Which now told me that there are two separate projects when it comes to making your techniques work. Two completely different projects–

One project is collecting some moves, get some techniques. The second project is how to apply them, to make them work.

One does not necessarily lead to the other. Just because you keep learning techniques doesn’t mean you can do them. At some point, you have to shift your mental gears from learning what to do to learning how to do it. It’s a big shift. But if you do it, I think there are rewards.

I know I’m only speaking from my own personal experience, of course, but I did change my mentality. I stopped writing techniques down. I already knew I had too many. I had thousands of techniques written down, but who cares? I couldn’t do any of them. Not really.

So I dedicated myself then to the second project, to making the Kung Fu work. And how do you do that? Experimenting. You have to fail. You have to make yourself vulnerable, put yourself back into a beginner’s mindset, just like you did the first time you walked in and said, What do I do? To starting over and saying, Well, now how do I do it? So you in effect become a white belt again.

But I do believe there’s a happy ending here because if you do this right work, if you follow what I’m going to prescribe here, I do believe you can make pretty much any technique work. Those fancy moves that people love to hate on, myself included at some point, I was a hater, I became a lover, a much happier person because I saw that these things were possible.

These techniques were passed down for a reason. They do work if you do the right kind of work. So that’s what I want to share.

And I’ll tell you right up front, these stages can overlap, it could be a little sloppy. You might have to go back and repeat certain steps. We’ll get into all that, but they’re all necessary. I don’t think you can be the best martial artist you can be without moving through all six of these stages.

Ready?

First stage to make your martial arts techniques work is the technical stage.

That’s when you are a beginner, you walk into your school, and you’re really just asking, what do I do? He’s got a hand on my throat, what do I do? He’s grabbing my wrist, what do I do? He’s trying to punch me in the head, what do I do?

That’s when you start learning your first moves, maybe your first combinations, your first forms. And frankly, this is the easiest of all six stages. Absolutely, especially now in the age of the internet, where you can see the greatest martial artists alive performing for you, you can learn a million different moves very quickly. Information is cheap nowadays.

However, here’s the mistake…

You hear that knowledge is power, but that’s a lie, and I’ve talked about that before. Knowledge is not power. Action is power. Informed action is superpower.

So yes, this first stage of technical information, learning techniques is crucial. We have to know something, but it’s only the first step towards the technique, technical skill that you want, to be able to pull off your fancy moves.

So information alone, no good, which pushes you to the second stage. Once somebody tells you what to do, you get that information.

The next stage is physical.

Right off the bat, your technique’s not working. So you think, wait a minute, I already know what to do. I just need to do this better, which opens the door to what I would call hard skills.

The hard skills category would include increasing your speed, increasing your strength, improving your flexibility, developing your coordination. In short, all of the conditioning that a martial artist goes through.

You sweat it out to build your body up to be faster and stronger and more capable of pulling off all of those cool moves that you’ve already seen. And the good news here is, yes, that will give you better results. I’m not here to argue against being faster and stronger and more flexible. Condition yourself, be in the best shape you possibly can. You will improve and you will have better luck landing your fancy techniques.

However, you’re going to hit a wall because if someone’s faster, stronger, more flexible, better coordinated, more experienced than you are, they won’t work anymore. So maybe you can throw around an eight-year-old, good for you, but not someone who is a superior physical specimen, which is going to push you to the next stage, right?

We go from the technical to the physical.

The next stage is the mechanical.

That’s where we start diving deep into the details, to see those little things that you missed the first time around. This is where you try to pick up as many tips and tricks as possible.

You believe that the answer to your success lies in these little tiny details, like where exactly did you grab? I saw that you grabbed, but where exactly did you grab? You start paying more attention to the precise angle of your effort.

You pay attention a little bit more to the exact distance you need. You pay a little more attention to the pressure that you need to exert. You pay a little more attention to how your body is moving.

What kind of movement? Is it efficient? This might lead you into a study of anatomy and pressure points and meridians.

However deep you want to go, you’re trying to get down to those little tiny things that make a big difference. And good news yet again. If you get to this stage, once again you will get better results. Your technical prowess will improve. But I’m afraid, my friend, it’s still not enough.

You’re better probably than the friends that you have who don’t train at all. For sure, you’re better than some of the beginners in your class, for sure. But once again, there’s always somebody better. And that’s where you’re going to start feeling frustration again. And it’s at this point– we’re three stages in now to this learning process, technical, physical, mechanical– that we’re going to cross the threshold now.

We’re going to move away from the overall physical attributes that you might have and the information that you have and we’re going to move into the mental attributes. Maybe even the spiritual attributes that you have.

Which leads us to the fourth stage, strategic.

At this point, you really are starting to question, how do you set up the movement in question? Not just what do I do, how do you set it up? That’s what opens the door to tactical tips and tricks, not just physical ones, but strategic tricks.

That’s going to lead you into distraction, faking, messing around with timing, purposely messing around with distance, creating a chain of what ifs. You are now becoming a chess player in your martial arts, not just an animal.

You’re being thoughtful and careful. You’re setting traps. If I move here, the other guy is either going to go to A or to B. If he goes to A, then I do this. If he goes to B, then I do that.

So you’re starting to become very efficient in your decision making by setting traps, recognizing positions, and knowing where to move after that. This is a huge jump in your skill level.

When you get to stage four, this will really make a big difference. Things will start falling into place because you put them there. You set the mousetrap.

Now this is where certain combative arts like boxing, wrestling, Judo, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu all have taken a big leap ahead of some so-called traditional martial arts because their methodology includes more sparring and rolling, free time to actually play around with the strategy.

That’s the number one way that you’re gonna build better strategy by experimenting with how to set the trap, which traps work, which traps don’t. What kind of analyzing, what kind of personality that you’re dealing with, so you can better choose your next moves.

It becomes very involved, but again, I don’t want you to think that it’s the art that makes the difference. At this level, it’s just your training methodology.

To prove that, let’s say you want to be a boxer, and so you get some videotape on boxing and you learn the basic punches, you learn basic footwork, you condition yourself, you get in great shape, but you never spar. You’ve never faced anybody. You’ve never taken a punch and you’ve never hit anybody.

Would you be a great boxer? Could you be a great boxer? I would argue no. No.

Just like if you’re only doing forms in Karate or Taekwondo, you also will not be very proficient at sparring. And then to the next level, real life self-defense. So it’s not the art. It’s the training methodology. And for the fourth stage, to make your martial arts techniques really work, to develop your strategy, you’re going to need to roll or spar or have that playtime to experiment, which opens up the door to failure. But that’s where we learn you have to be vulnerable to this stuff.

All right, so once again, you’re going to make a big jump at this fourth level. But you’re going to notice that there’s still another level out there. You’re still going to run into people who just move you and you don’t want to be moved and you can’t move them, which takes us to the fifth level.

The fifth stage of your development is now going to be psychological or emotional, or let’s put them together, psycho-emotional.

This would open the door to what I would call the soft skills of martial arts, not the conditioning, the hard skills, the soft skills.

That would include dealing with fear. That would include increasing your awareness, managing your ego, judging yourself too harshly, not being worried about the judgment of others who are watching your practice.

This would also involve increasing your sensitivity, how you’re feeling each moment, the development of your confidence, the sharpening of your focus, your ability to commit and follow through on something. And like I said in the last stage, your ability to make mistakes and keep flowing, moving forward to get to the lesson.

If you’re afraid of making mistakes, if you’re worried about how people are going to judge you, if you don’t want to be seen failing, then you will never pass into this stage. You will never develop to make your techniques work better against more people.

Again, looking back, you will have success over a large number of people. But if you’re trying to be the best martial artist you can be, every little topic I just mentioned there has to be faced and dealt with. So how do you do that? This involves reflection.

After you’re sparring, after you’re rolling, after you’re experimenting, all this stuff you’re working on on stage four, you need to sit down and just relive it, reflect on it. What was working, what wasn’t.

Be honest. Where did you feel great? Where did you feel awful? Be honest about it.

Where did your temper get you out of position? Where did your passivity put you in a bad position? When did you do too much? When did you do too little?

When did you not see something coming? When did you just make the wrong choice? When did a trap work? When did it not?

The key here is the taking the time to reflect and then being super honest with yourself. It’s just you. Be honest. Figure out what’s missing.

Is it my ego? Is it my fear? Is it my commitment? And then choose your tool.

Maybe meditation time is where you can work on some of these issues. Maybe a mantra, reminding yourself of how powerful you are and what you can do. Maybe visualization could be a powerful tool for you. Seeing things work better, seeing yourself perform better the way you want to, dealing with your psychological and your emotional issues.

This also involves, I think, experimenting. You have meditation, visualization, and even while you’re rolling and sparring, change your mindset to see what happens. The experimentation that you were doing in the last stage might just be very physical…

I’m going to grab here to see what they do. I’m going to move here to see what they do. But now inwardly, you say, well, what happens if I keep my breathing slow while I spar today? I’m just going to focus on any differences that come up from me altering my breathing patterns.

Maybe you’re going to keep reminding yourself it’s okay to make mistakes and you’re going to forgive yourself up front to free yourself from that inhibition, just to see how that affects your workout, to see if that changes anything.

I will tell you personally, I’m amazed how if I’m driving into a workout, if I put an idea in my head, a separate, a new concept or a different concept, a singular concept, I cannot believe what a difference it makes on everything else. You could have 20, 30 years worth of habits and moves that you’ve been working on, but you change your attitude about something, you change your outlook on how you treat yourself inwardly, and the whole workout could be completely different. It’s like you’re a different guy.

So I encourage you to experiment not just with your physical movement, but experiment with your attitudes and your opinion of yourself, because it makes a huge difference. And by the way, I’d like you to consider that perhaps it’s these soft skills, your sensitivity, your awareness, your commitment, your focus, that will ultimately be more important to you than anything physical. Because as we get older, no matter who you are or what style you do, you’re going to get a little more brittle, you’re going to have a little less energy, you won’t be quite as explosive, you’re going to lose some muscle mass. So no matter how fast and strong you were and how much that’s helped you in the past, at some point you’re going to have to shift over to the soft skills to really get what you need. Just a thought.

Now, if you’ve come through those five stages, you’re probably doing really, really well. You’re pretty much untouchable perhaps in your school. But wait, my friend, there’s still one more level. Please, don’t give up yet. One more level.

Stage six is the creative stage.

Now is the time that you truly become a martial artist. A martial artist, a pure, fully functioning, fully empowered martial artist, is not asking anymore, What do I do? You’re asking, What do I want to do?

When you ask that question, What do I want to do, the goal would be to have everything as your choice. I want to be able to do anything I want.

I want to kick you in the head. I want to take you down. I want to choke you. I want to let you go. I want to break your arm. I want to control you. Whatever you want.

I want to end you. I want to befriend you. I should have those choices if I am a true martial artist, at the highest level. I’m not saying that’s easy. I’m not saying I’m there. But that’s where I’m heading. That’s where I’m aiming.

At that point, all the information that you’ve gathered and all your experience leads you to creation. I’m not looking anymore– please tell me what to do. Hey, how did you do that?

I’m not interested really anymore in everyone else’s experience because I know that everything now is up to me. I’ve seen it all. I’ve felt it all. Now I need to figure out how to put these pieces together, how to collect the principles that make all techniques possible, and let that be my guide.

I’m no longer following a playbook. I’m no longer just following one coach’s system. I’m not following a step-by-step procedure. I’m in the moment.

I’m customizing every situation to what I want. I am making martial arts my own. I’m not a copy of anyone. I’m not a replica. I am me. And this is what I do.

At this stage, there’s really no limit. It’s going to depend on how long you live and the level of your training.

If you’re already very confident back at level 3, you mastered your technical, physical, and mechanical self, and you’re able to maintain that conditioning for most of your life, you won championships and now you got to school and you don’t really feel like sparring and rolling anymore, you want to kind of just sit back and share what you got, that may be enough for you.

If you kept going to really start playing with strategy and your emotions and the soft skills, and now you’re breaking through to this creative level, I think you’ll be able to get more enjoyment out of your martial arts forever, because you won’t hit that wall that so many of us do, where the physicality runs out, you get an injury, you get a knee implant, and then you quit. This happens all the time.

People think, Oh, that’s the end of my martial arts because I’m 20 pounds overweight. Oh, I hit the end of my martial arts because I have a hip replacement. I hit the end of my martial arts because, hey, I’m not a kid anymore.

No, martial arts is for everyone at all times. You know that.

If you can get to the sixth stage, the creative stage, if you’ve done all the work on your hard skills and your soft skills, you can still play the game. You are still a force to be reckoned with. So please make that your goal.

All right, so those are the six stages, I believe, that it takes to make your martial arts techniques, no matter how fancy they may be, to really work. To sum this up,

Number one, nothing works right out of the box. So no matter where you are, what style you’re studying, when someone shows you a move, it never just works right now for you. It can’t. You’re going to have to go through this process. And again, these stages will overlap.

That’s because, number two, we’re all different. Some people might come in and they’re already really athletically powerful. So, they rely on that all the time. And they don’t have any value for the soft skills. They don’t see the future.

They don’t see any examples of the wise old man. Their teacher is a big strong guy. They’re a big strong guy. So, they just make that stuff work to that level.

Okay, someone else comes in. They’re not athletically strong. They’re not well coordinated. So, right off the bat, they might gravitate towards the soft skills first. They already know I’m never going to be big and strong and explosive. So, I’ve got to be more sensitive. I’ve got to have more confidence in what I’m doing. I’ve got to set better traps.

So, we’re all coming in at different stages. And don’t forget, number three, we change. So, even if you are a hot shot in your 20s, then you get into a car accident, you’ve got some nerve damage, maybe now you can’t rely on your body the way you used to. So, you’ve got to switch over to some more soft skill prowess.

Plus, we all get older, as I already said. So, as your capabilities change, you’ll have to come back through these stages and rework, Gee, now that I can’t move my hip a certain way, I need new information. What other techniques can I do with one leg out?

What can I do when I lose my flexibility? What can I do if there’s multiple attackers and I never really thought about that before? What can I do if I’m on a cane?

So, you might go back and start over again and get new information and then start working on the details of that and then start working out how to set up new traps with that new tool or your different body. So, that’s okay.

Please know, we all hit walls. That’s part of the process. We will always be hitting walls. That’s the nature of this stuff. But this never ending process should also include experimentation and the openness to change, to fail, to keep learning.

That is the one constant through all of these stages. We’ve got to be open to the change.

I say again, the good news is, the happy ending here, is that, I believe, if you do the work, your techniques will work. If you’re doing the right work, as we laid it out here. And this is true for everything in your life.

You know what money is all about. And if you do the work, you’ll be more financially secure.

If you want good relationships, you know what that takes. If you put in that work, experiment, fail sometimes, but learn, observe, reflect, be honest, you’ll have better relationships.

If you want to be healthy, you know what to do. Do the work. Experiment a little. Refine it. You’ll be healthier.

That’s the good news. You will always be able to improve. The only warning I have is that the process is always very frustrating too. Because no matter how good your information is, and no matter how hard you work, you can still lose.

Lose your money, lose your friends, lose your life. We’re born to lose. We’re all losers in that sense. But what makes us winners is that we keep trying. That we don’t give up.

We don’t just accept, say, Well, gee, I’m 14 years old, but I heard I’m going to die someday. So, I’m out. I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to lay around, eating ice cream, watching the tube.

That’s a sad waste of life, right? Because I think the fun of life is to see how far we can go. For the fun of it. Not because you have to, because it’s fun. It’s fun to focus on improvement. And that’s really the closing thought.

If you focus on improvement, not perfection, you will find the secret to making your techniques work. And if you focus on improvement, instead of perfection, you will also find the secret to a happy life.

Okay, I hope that helps. Please remember, none of this is easy. Making your techniques work, or making your life work, is not an easy process. But that’s why you should be proud of yourself for each step that you take.

Until next time, smiles up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #111: How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #110 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Close Your Mind to Learn More.”

We all know that a martial arts student should keep an open mind, right? But should it stay open forever?

Is it possible that you can keep learning even when you close your mind to new information? Is it possible that you could learn MORE?

I SAY YES!

Of course, I didn’t always believe that, but a recent incident changed my mind for good. A lesson from my first Karate teacher broke a pattern of behavior that I wasn’t even aware of… and it was holding me back!

If you’d like to hear some unconventional advice that might just turn you from an empty cup into a full cup, I welcome you to listen or watch below.

To LISTEN to “Close Your Mind to Learn More,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you!

Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released.

Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Hi ho, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #110 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

Today, let me ask you a question. As you move through the world, do you feel your mind is open or closed? Do you see yourself as an empty cup or is your cup full?

I ask this because the answer seems obvious, right? I’ve preached many times that we should always be a student, always ready to learn.

So I would like to answer that I am an open-minded empty cup everywhere I go, particularly in my martial arts training. However, my friend, something happened not too long ago, an incident that made me rethink that.

This incident led to advice that I want to offer to you today that’s a little uncommon, a little unconventional. It’s a great reminder that advice, no matter where you get it, is contextual.

In one situation, the best advice might be to stand your ground and do not back down. In another situation, the best advice might be to let it go and walk away.

The right advice at the right time is your best chance for success. The wrong advice at the wrong time can get you killed.

So let’s for the moment open our mind to a little bit of advice that might be unconventional. Here’s the incident.

About a year ago now, I had the privilege to go train with my very first Karate teacher. He’s in his 70s now, but he’s a dedicated student and so his skills are very impressive. Always worth seeking him out.

I was blessed enough to have a few hours to work with him and in that time, as always, he would show me a technique. And since I’ve been around for a while, the pattern would go, oh, that technique is kind of cool. That’s very similar to a technique I’ve seen in another art. I would tell him and he would listen.

He would give me a concept and I would say, oh, you know what, in the Chinese arts, there’s a word for that. They call it– and then he stopped me. He interrupted. He actually said, “Stop. I don’t need that in my head. That’s just clutter.”

That’s the incident.

At first, I was shocked, right, completely taken aback because I’ve done this for years sharing notes, right? Of course, I am there as a student, so I’m there to learn. But as an older fellow who’s been around a little bit, I always feel maybe I can make their time feel better spent if I can offer something back as well.

Is that arrogant? I don’t know. It just feels friendly. But in this case, after all these years, he finally just told me stop. But more importantly, he said he didn’t want the information.

So my reaction was, whoa, do you mean to tell me you, one of my martial arts heroes, has a closed mind? You don’t want to learn something? And it took me, I’ll be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to actually figure this out and make peace with it.

What I figured out was, it’s a false choice to say whether your mind is open or is it closed. Perhaps there’s a third choice. What about just a focused mind?

He was telling me, I don’t need the information that you’re offering and it’s actually a distraction to my work.

It’s hard enough to get good at something, right? You need to be focused on it and work on it and have some faith in it. And if I come in and start saying, oh, look over here, look over there, it’s like this, it’s like that, it actually slows down his work. He’s already made his commitment to what he wants to be great at.

So I hadn’t really considered that before. And maybe now that I’m older, it’s the natural time to start thinking that way.

As I reflected on this incident, I realized that this pattern wasn’t just with him. It basically had repeated itself with every teacher I’ve ever had.

Again, I have always been of that school of thought thinking, I’m an empty cup. I have an open mind. I will learn from anyone, anytime, anywhere. That’s why I’m so cool.

But then I realized that over the years, with several different teachers, all of whom I respect, all of whom were absolutely worth spending time with and listening to and learning from, they were all uninterested in what I had to offer them. That pattern always showed up.

Someone would show something, I would respectfully add in, and I’m not a jerk, I’m not saying every single time, every single moment, but once in a while, I’d pick a moment like, wow, that is so similar to this other thing that I have seen. You might find this interesting, they call it this, or they do it this way.

But then it hit me, after this incident, where I was told to stop, that none of those teachers over the years had ever actually asked me a follow-up question.

They never said, tell me more, they never said, can you repeat that? Can you show me again? Hey, why don’t you take over the class for a moment, send me a link, what are you talking about? Never. I don’t recall any teacher ever asking me to repeat anything, they were always polite.

Now that I realize that that’s been that pattern, I realized this new advice, that perhaps there is a time to close your mind, to focus it, in a different wording. Because let me be clear, all of these teachers are really good at what they do.

Whether or not you agree with what they do, they are good at what they do. They are all intelligent, they were all hard workers, and none of them are delusional. Because I know right away you might think, oh well, they practice this narrow band of skills and they don’t even realize that they don’t know how to do something with that knife, or on the ground, or against multiples, or whatever they are doing, they are not doing something else and therefore they are vulnerable. They are incomplete. But they are not delusional and that’s the difference.

If you say, hey, I’m a boxer, that’s all I do, and I’ll never get attacked by a knife, well that’s delusional. Or if you say, there won’t be multiple people, well that’s delusional. I’ll never get taken to the ground, that’s delusional.

But all of these teachers, with the skills that they’ve chosen to develop and master, they’re not delusional. They know what they can do and they know what they can’t do. They know where they’ve spent their time and they know where they haven’t spent their time. And they’ll be the first ones to tell you that.

So how can you live with that vulnerability? Isn’t it true that more is better? As a student of the martial arts or life? Isn’t it always about learning more, learning more, more? Isn’t that a good thing?

No. That’s why this might be uncommon or unconventional advice. This is the old warning about being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Especially nowadays, in the age of information, the internet, you can get multiple answers to any question or problem that you have. Whatever problem you have, you go searching for an answer and you can spend days, if not weeks, finding one approach, an alternative approach, another approach.

But when is it enough? When do you say, I’m good? Do you just keep searching forever on the same question, the same problem, forever?

Once you find the answer, once you solve a problem, shouldn’t that be enough? Why do you have to keep looking? Why do you keep searching?

For example, you want to learn martial arts, you want to learn how to kick. Your first teacher shows you how to throw a kick. Here’s your round kick and here’s how you get your power. Here’s how you keep your balance. Here’s how you protect yourself when you throw it. Great.

But then you come across another teacher and they do it a different way. Oh, it’s a different style. And over here, we put our foot this way, turn our hip at this timing, throw the weight at this moment. Oh.

Then you meet another teacher in that same style and they agree on some of that but not all of that and they have a little variation of that.

Well, let’s say you’ve got four different ways to throw a round kick now. Which is better? Should you practice four sets of 50 reps and each set is a different style of round kick or is it better to throw one style of round kick 200 times?

I’m not a math guy but I think that worked out. Four times 50 or one set of 200?

Or let’s say you’re worried about fighting on the ground. You don’t have a background in wrestling or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So you say, gosh, you know, the most fear I feel about being on the ground is if someone’s sitting on top of me, a mount, I’d like to solve that problem. How can I focus on, how can I escape a mount?

Now let’s say you had the resources, the money and the time, and you looked up a hundred champions in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You listed them, a hundred champions, and then you arranged to have 100 private lessons. One lesson with each of those champions, masters.

Would that be a good idea? Does that sound appealing to you? Would you like to do a hundred private lessons with a hundred different masters to ask them each that same question? Or would the first person that you met give you the answers that you needed? Gave you something to drill, gave you some concepts to go work on.

Should that be enough for you? Do you need the other 99? Can you cancel those? Or maybe you take the first two private lessons and you talk to two different masters. Should that be enough?

Now you have choices between this technique or that technique, this concept and that concept. Now you can maybe play them off of each other and use them as a combination. Great, at what point do you simply have too much information?

Do you remember that old song by The Police? Too much information running through my brain. Too much information driving me insane. You’re welcome, I didn’t sing that, but that was the thought.

Too much information starts working against you. Too many choices will actually hinder your skill development. Because first of all, there’s simply not enough time for you to practice everything. You can’t, that’s just not possible.

And as I’ve talked about in other podcasts, where does your confidence come from? Your confidence comes from being good at something. If you’re chasing a hundred different methods, you’ll never have confidence in any of them. There will always be a doubt that there was a better way. If I had just gone to one more lesson, there might have been a better technique, a bigger concept.

There are too many unknowns to ever feel confident in what you’re doing if you don’t spend the time doing it. If you don’t commit to something, you’ll never be good at anything. And if you’re not good at anything, you won’t have the bigger value of what martial arts training is supposed to give you, the confidence.

You stand up strong and feel comfortable in your space because you know you can do something.

It doesn’t mean you always win, ever. But you want to at least have a shot to feel good about what you’re doing. You have to have faith in what you’re doing. And the only way you can have faith in what you’re doing is to go deep. You take some information, you work it and work it and see where it leads you.

Now that first information you get may not be enough for you. It may not solve the problem. You might test it and it might fail. Then you can either go back to making that better or adding some more information. Now you do need another approach.

Fair enough. You tested it. You tried. You went deep as you could. That makes sense. But let’s just not forget that you want to develop your skills to the point when you have confidence because confidence is a technique unto itself. It may be more important than any specific technique.

The spirit behind it is the engine. So whatever you are training, you’ve got to have faith in it. You have to have passion for it. You’ve got to be working it and testing it and getting to know it. That’s when it becomes effective for you.

Now that kind of leads me to this big idea or simple, simple but big. If you have a closed mind, yes, you will limit how much you learn. But it’s also true that if you have an endlessly open mind and you’re always learning something new, you are also limiting how much you can learn.

If you have a closed mind, then you will lack breadth. You will not be seeing far and wide. Maybe you’ll miss some of the big picture. But you’ll be able to go very, very deep into what you do. You’ll be able to master what you’ve chosen.

If you have an open mind, you will have the bigger picture. You will have a little bit of everything. You’ll see far and wide, but you will lack the depth. You won’t be great at any of those things. It’s just not possible.

So reflecting on your own practice, where do you fit in? How much of your mind is open? When is it closed? When do you have enough?

Part of the answer to that, if I may help, because I’m just reflecting on my own practice, is it’s going to come down to, well, how much time do you actually have to practice? How much energy do you have to practice?

What state is your body in? And what are your goals to begin with? How great did you want to become? And what did you want to be great at?

Why are you doing this?

No matter how you answer those questions, no matter what your goals are, how much time, energy, money, resources you have, if you’re a part-time student, and let’s say you’re practicing four or five hours a week, well, obviously, I think, obviously, if you’re a part-time student, you definitely have to choose only a couple of things to work on.

If you’re a searcher, if you’re keeping this open mind, and you’re always cross-training and looking for new things and new seminars, new teachers, new techniques, you’ll never be good at anything because you only have four or five hours a week to practice something. I would say it’s better for you to stick to those few things that you’ve already decided that you like and that work for you and just go as deeply as you can into those in that limited time that you have. That seems reasonable to me.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re a full-time martial artist. You can practice every day for several hours. Even then, you can never learn everything. You will never have the time to drill everything that you know, that you’ve seen, that you’ve been exposed to. Even a full-time, all-day martial artist for years and years cannot be a master of everything.

So we’re all in the same boat, whether you’re a part-time or full-time student. There’s just only so many hours in the day. Your body can only do so much. So we all must make choices. The difference just might be how many different choices you choose to put into your training.

If you’re a part-time student, you know I want to be good at my footwork, basic hand strikes, and maybe some low-level kicks. Okay.

If you’re a full-time student, hey, I’m going to also add some grappling in there, get back up to my feet, get out of chokes, that’s important to me, and some knife defense. Okay.

Hey, you’re a professional martial artist. It’s your all-day, everyday thing for your whole life. Maybe you can add a few more skills in there.

But at some point, no matter who you are, how you’re training, what your goals are, I think you’re going to have to make some choices, which then means closing your mind to other choices. At some point, the door has to close and say, I’ve got enough. And I’ll give you some examples.

Because I’m 52 now, and I have been in a cross-training mindset for all my whole life. So this is all new for me. If you’ve already hit these revelations, then good for you, you’re ahead of me.

But recently, I have been surprising myself with my attitude of closing my mind. For instance, I got three quick examples…

Number one. There’s a lovely gentleman here that I’ve met who loves Qigong, energy work, to be healthy and happy. And he has been very generous with his passion. He’s always trying to share a new Qigong set. Another variation.

Let me tell you the history of this. Let me show you how I’ve created this whole story around this Qigong set, beautiful, creative, and valuable work that he is offering me. And I have now continuously said to him, no, stop. I don’t want to know this.

Hearing those words come out of my head is shocking to me as someone who’s always preached, be an open mind, keep learning, be an empty cup. But I’m already happy. I’m already healthy. I already have practices, mind, body, energy, work practices in my training. So anything extra, I don’t have the bandwidth for.

There’s no reason for me at this point to learn another set, to learn another variation, to have more history or symbols or whatever is being offered. I simply don’t have the time in my life to explore all of those things.

I respect them. I say, okay, I see what you’re doing and that’s fitting in with your goals in your life. Beautiful. And I still feel we’re on the same path. But for me personally in my own practice, I don’t want that. I don’t need that. I’m good. I’ve got enough. Which is a blessing by the way.

So one, I’ve had to say no to him.

Number two. There are seminars all over the place, right? There are opportunities to train down south, up north, over here, over there. Lots of great people, great martial artists, highly skilled people. And I have some time. I could absolutely attend all of those seminars, if I wished. And I keep saying no.

A buddy will say, hey, you’re going to go to that seminar? No. No, I’m not. And that sounds crazy. Because when I was younger, I would go to every seminar I could. Every book, every video, show me, show me, show me.

No, not anymore. Why? Because I already have so much work to do.

Don’t forget, I feel blessed that I ever found one good teacher, let alone several good teachers. Each of them shared things with me. They’re passing things down to me.

In some cases, I’m a very, I’m one of a very small number of people that get that information. So where do I get off turning around saying, yeah, yeah, thanks for that. I’m off to find some more.

What was the point of gaining their trust? What was the point of creating a bond? What was the point if you’re just not even going to practice it or remember it? It’s an insult.

If you have these blessings of good teachings, the best way you can pay that homage is to practice them. Go deeply into them. See what you get out of them. At least you should do that before you go running off to find new stuff.

Number three. No to the Qigong, no to seminars, and no to history.

What I mean by that is when I started off in martial arts, when I was doing Taekwondo, I wanted to know everything about the history of Taekwondo. When I got into Aikido, what’s all this about? Where did this come from? How did it get like this?

When I got into Kung Fu, oh my gosh, this style is my favorite. Where does it come from? What part of China should I visit there? Down to Chinatown, looking through books, talking to old people. Give me as much information as I can get.

But time and time again, if you’ve done this, I’m sure you know, particularly in the Kung Fu, I hit a lot of dead ends. There’s a lot of fog in the history of martial arts.

But that’s true even just for my own family history. Forget about the Kung Fu for a second. Even just researching my own family history. Well, why did great grandpa come to this country?

What was their life like there? How many relatives do I have? What did they do for a living? What was his name again? Even my own personal family history is foggy and has huge blackouts in it, and I don’t know what’s going on. But at some point, the lineage doesn’t matter.

The history doesn’t matter. This is what I’ve come to realize.

What’s most important is what I’m doing today. I’m alive. I’m in the present. I need to make the most of this moment. Looking backwards is interesting at first. And just like I need to practice the information that’s been given to me by teachers, I also need to honor my ancestors, whether that’s the Kung Fu ancestors or my bloodline ancestors.

The best tribute I can pay them is to take what they’ve been passing down, what they sacrificed for, what they lived for, and run with it forward. Looking backwards is just slowing me down.

I know enough at this point. I’ve stopped looking into it. I don’t care about the research anymore. It doesn’t matter.

So all of those are just examples of how I’ve closed my mind. But again, I don’t like that false comparison between open or closed. I see it now as focused. That’s the third category. I am a more focused mind. I’m open to new experiences, but not necessarily outside what I’m focusing on.

When you focus on something, you’re going to have new experiences anyway. Going deep is going to dig up new ideas, new concepts, new techniques, new insights. There is still new in the old, if you keep tunneling deeper into it. That’s the main piece of advice I would like to offer you today.

Yeah, my mind is closed now increasingly. Not maybe on everything. It’s closed on gaining more and more and more width, but I am completely open to depth.

I’m not as interested anymore in what I can do for self-defense. What moves can I do? I’m more interested in how I’m doing things and ultimately why I’m doing things. And I don’t need to talk to anyone about that. I don’t need to read a book or see a video for that. I need to work. I need to practice on that.

So, hopefully, in that way, I will become just like my teachers, whom I respect. They all figured out the right time to make the choices on what they wanted to master and then focused on those things. And in their dedication to looking for depth now, over-breath, and in seeing their role modeling of how they’ve achieved excellence with that formula, I can only offer the same advice to you.

Now, of course, we started off by talking about empty cup, full cup. And just to be more specific, let’s revisit the old tale, historical or fable.

This whole idea of the cup, of course, comes from the old story of a Zen master. And he’s visited by a scholar, a teacher, who wants to learn more about Zen. And as they’re spending time together, the scholar is the one doing all the talking, sharing experiences, telling stories, offering advice. And the master is in the position of just listening to him.

So, the master decides to serve tea, puts down the two cups, pours the tea, and once the visitor’s cup is full, keeps pouring, keeps pouring, it’s spilling out, it’s spilling out, until the scholar says, stop, what are you doing? The cup is full.

The symbolism there, of course, the Zen master says, you are like this cup. How can I fill you with anything new if you’re already full, if you’re already running over? The utility of the cup is that it’s empty, that it can take in something new.

So that’s the story, of course. And I would offer today, if we’re going to break down that story a little deeper, that story pertains, in my mind, to beginners. The scholar in that story is the beginner. You’ve just started martial arts, you’ve just started in life, whatever your pursuit is, you’re the beginner.

As a beginner, yes, you should not be going in with a full cup, with preordained beliefs, with any kinds of prejudice at all. You should be just a blank slate, an empty cup, so that you can search and find.

The second level, then you become a practitioner. You’ve sought out information as a beginner. You found something, a teacher, a bit of information, an experience. Now you’re going to practice that information.

So, now your cup should be full. You fill your cup, in my mind, with that stuff. If your first style is Karate and you’re doing that form of these techniques, then focus your brain on that. Fill your cup with that.

It’s no time to be empty right now. You need to have faith and work and test that information. If it fails you, if that information that you’ve been working on is not answering your problem, is not meeting your need, that’s the time to then empty your cup.

Now you can spill out some of that. Because you already drank it. You filled your cup, you drank it, and now it’s upsetting your stomach. Something’s not right. You need more, something healthier.

I’m mixing up as many metaphors as I can here.

If you run into trouble, then you have to fill your cup again. But at some point, as you get older, as you practice, as you’ve worked with several people, you might find that you got enough. And I would say at that point, you don’t need a cup. Again, it’s a false choice.

Are you an empty cup? Are you a full cup? How about I don’t even have a cup? Because what I filled it with was nourishing enough that I don’t need anything else. I’m good.

In fact, I would like to change that story. I would like to have that story end differently. I would like the scholar to say, stop, you’re spilling it everywhere. What are you doing?

And the Zen master says, well, you were just like this cup. I can’t give you anything if you’re full.

And the scholar says, yes, you’re right, you’re right. And then the scholar picks up the teapot and says, let me pour you some tea. And there’s no cup there. He says, well, aren’t you going to drink any tea with me?

And the master says, no, I’m good. I think that would be a fuller story. And a little more helpful. Because the old story just put me in, I must always have an empty mind. I must always be an empty cup to be noble. And at this point, no.

I think it’s the choices that you make and the work that you’ve done to verify the value of those choices that is most noble. So this is what I’m offering to you.

Remember, advice is relative. So depending on where you are in your journey, in your development, this may be a time for you to be an empty cup, because you’re just getting started or because your needs are not being met. Okay, time to open your mind, empty your cup.

On the other hand, you might be in a place where you feel you really have enough. You know what you need to work on, you enjoy what you work on, and it’s meeting your goals. You don’t really need anything more. So for you, I would say, take that pressure off yourself that you’re missing something or doubting what you’re doing like it’s a waste of time. It’s not.

Keep going deeper into what you’re doing. Enjoy every minute of it. Get as much out of it as you can. Drink it up. Because ultimately, that’s what’s going to lead to confidence, which is more important than any technique that you’re practicing.

It’s a little tricky, but that’s the way it is, in my opinion.

So, if you can do that, if you can, come to the place in your life where you feel very good about your choices. And like my Karate teacher, you can tell yourself to stop. You don’t need to search anymore.

If you can feel that and now dedicate yourself to not being distracted by what other people are doing, and you can start to focus going deeper into that focused mind, I think you might be surprised to find out that you actually have everything you ever wanted. Not by searching far and wide, but by looking right where you are with what you have, respecting it, appreciating it, working it, until the day you die.

That, my friend, might be unconventional advice, but I think it’s the right advice.

Okay, back into the world we go. And as we go off into the world, let’s remember to choose a mindset that will work for us, not against us.

In my way of thinking, positivity is the mindset. I have closed my mind to all other options. So I hope you’ll join me when I say, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #110: Close Your Mind to Learn More [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #109 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Panic and Pandemonium.”

In self-defense, facing a single attacker is never easy. Now imagine defending yourself from 80,000 people! That sounds crazy, but that’s basically what happened to me.

In this episode, I’ll share the story of a young, inexperienced security guard (that’s me!) who suddenly found himself in a panic during a football game. If you happen to be a fan of the Buffalo Bills, I’m talking about the AFC East championship game that turned into the “Fandemonium” of 1988.

Yes, I was there!

This historic event taught me three important self-defense lessons, which I still repeat to myself to this day. I hope you’ll join me as I repeat them for you, too!

To LISTEN to “Panic and Pandemonium,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you!

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #109 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

A lot has happened since the last time we got together. Actually, it all happened on the same day. It was my birthday. I turned 52 and I realized there are 52 cards in a playing deck. So I now believe for the first time in my life, I’m finally playing with a full deck.

Second, same day, I started feeling ill. Turned out COVID had finally struck. After two years of dodging our favorite virus, I finally fell to it. And it wasn’t easy, but I certainly feel blessed that it wasn’t as horrible an experience as it was for others. And other than giving it to my wife, I’m happy to say that it went well.

So a little congestion left, but dare I say I have come out of it stronger. But it did lead to the lesson, right off the bat, to do what you can while you can. I was feeling very healthy and strong and virile before I got the virus, and being knocked down that fast, in bed, unable to swallow, just feeling sorry for myself, unable to do as much as I normally do. Boy, that’s rough.

Just remember, we’re always one stroke, one slip and fall, one accident away from having a completely different life. So do what you can while you can.

The third thing, the same day, my birthday, COVID, I hosted a Zoom seminar on takedowns using traditional stances. It was a live seminar on Zoom. Had a great time. And if you missed it, sign up for my email list and you’ll not only know when I release new videos and podcasts, but you’ll be the first to know when I offer the next Zoom seminar.

Hey, maybe you could be there live. That would be great. I’d love to see you there.

All right. Onward. Today’s topic. I’m going to tell you a story, as usual. Behind the scenes, I can tell you, I usually write down two or three pages of notes–points I want to make or details I want to make sure I share.

This one, this is a one-pager. I’m just going to tell you this story. It’s deeply ingrained in my head and I think it will speak for itself. So I won’t need to wax philosophical for very long about this one. I’m just going to tell you this story. Here it comes.

The date of the story, I can give you the date, was November 20th, 1988. I was 18 years old at the time. Now, what happened was, I was working as a doorman at a club at that time. And not a bar, I don’t mean like that. It was a private club in Buffalo where I was born and raised.

The security guard who worked there asked me if I wanted to make a little extra money. And I said, sure. He said they were looking for extra security guards for the upcoming Buffalo Bills football game, which was very exciting. I didn’t have tickets for that game and we’re talking about a championship game.

This would be the game where the Buffalo Bills played the New York Jets for the AFC East Championship. Now going into that game, the Bills, who historically had not been a winning team, had an 8-0 record, if I recall. They were undefeated at least at home. And this was a championship game.

So, the feeling was the Bills are going to win finally a championship right there at home. And of course, from a security standpoint, this is an 80,000 person stadium. At the time it was called Rich Stadium and the capacity was over 80,000 people.

So, they were looking for a few extra bodies in case things got out of hand. Now to spoil the end of the story, let me just get to it in case you already know where this is heading. This is also the date that in Buffalo is now known as Fandemonium. Fandemonium because we won that game and 80,000 people in that stadium went nuts.

But let me back up. We’re about a week out and he said, you want to work security? And I said, sure.

Is there any training for this? No, not at all. All you had to do to be a body was show up at the stadium on game day. I think there was like a one page sign away your rights type of paper and they gave me a jacket. I think there was a baseball cap and I’m on the job now.

Okay, first assignment at the stadium. They put you at a gate where the people enter and the rule was just really simple, no booze, no bottles. They want to make sure you’re buying their concessions inside the stadium and no one should be throwing bottles around. That’s dangerous.

Now, I like rules and I don’t drink. So this was fun for me. And the first lesson I learned was power goes to your head fast. I can see where historically people get out of control once they’re given a little bit of authority. I get it.

Because right away, once I had my shades on and I had my security jacket on, I’ve got a job, and now I’ve got all these people coming in and we’re patting them down. I really enjoyed that job. And I could feel though, I became self-aware, like, take it down a notch. You’re enjoying this a little too much.

I will tell you, however, each of the gates had a big plastic garbage can. And those cans got full of six-packs, flasks, bottles, an occasional forgotten pocket knife. People try to play around the rules, get around the rules, which is why security jobs have a job, security people.

Anyway, so that was the first lesson. Don’t let power go to your head.

Still be a compassionate human being. You can still do your job in a humane way. You don’t have to be a jerk about it. Now we’re going to skip ahead because really there was nothing else to do. Get everyone into the stadium safely and now the game’s on. And nothing’s going on because everyone’s in the stadium watching the game.

So basically all we had to do, this was the best part of the job, was enjoy the free ticket to the game. As long as you could find somewhere to stand, you could watch the game. And I did.

Now we get all the way towards, let’s say, five minutes before the end of the fourth quarter, or the end of the game. They bring us all down to the tunnel field level and our real job is now being explained to us. Here’s the job–

Again, there are 80,000 people in the stadium. How many security guards are there? Well, there sure as heck weren’t 80,000 of us. So I don’t think there are even a thousand of us. I can’t even tell you for sure if there were 100 or 200. But it couldn’t have been more than that.

So the ratio is nuts, okay? This is not a fair fight. But the job is given to us as follows. Here’s what we’re going to do…

We’re going to walk out on this field with a couple of minutes left and we’re going to form a perimeter around the football field. We’re going to space out every, I don’t know, five, 10 yards. And in this big perimeter, we’re going to make sure that in case someone’s had a little too much to drink, if we win the game, make sure nobody jumps over that wall and comes down onto the field.

We don’t want anyone making a scene. We don’t want anyone getting hurt. We don’t want any of the players getting harassed. Just, if anybody tries to get on the field, keep them off the field. That’s the job. Great, okay.

So sure enough, we march out and we form this perimeter and we’re facing up to the stands. We’re not facing the field. We’re all standing.

So another lesson in human nature– generally people, in crowds for sure, if they’ve been drinking, even more sure, don’t like authority figures. So even though they don’t know me, here comes a little snowball. Some yelling and swearing, a bottle. Hey, where the heck did that bottle come from?

You know, you get a little bit of attitude right away just because you’re in a position in authority. So that’s not cool. Come on, don’t be that person. We all have our jobs and we’re there technically to try to keep you safe.

All right, so anyway, we’re all around this perimeter. Now the game itself at this point is highly tense. I believe it’s a tie game and the clock’s running down. The Jets get into a position to score a winning field goal. This is it. The whole season rests on this field goal attempt.

The Bills block the field goal and sends the game into overtime. So this is super exciting. It looked like we were about to die, but no, we have another chance. Overtime starts.

The Jets get the ball first. Uh-oh, don’t like that. The Bills strip the ball from the Jets. Okay, so this excitement, the momentum, the home crowd advantage is really working. We just stopped the victory. We’re in overtime.

We stripped the ball away from them. And here it comes. We get down the field. And we– the Bills, Scott Norwood. I had nothing to do with it– Scott Norwood kicks the game-winning field goal in overtime.

Ah, the crowd, of course, goes bananas. This has been a long time coming. Buffalo is a cold town. We don’t win things. We fight. We don’t win. And here we are. We just took the AFC East Championship.

So the battle cry comes down again. Don’t let them on the field. That’s the job.

The first person makes the attempt. In front of me. I’m sure the same thing was happening everywhere. But in front of me, here comes that first drunken fella trying to get on the field. Now, here’s what I did not expect.

When I put myself in the mindset of a security guard or a bouncer or a police officer, if I’m in that mindset, I’m imagining someone who’s angry, someone who’s hostile, someone who means to do harm. Which then means on my side of things, I feel justified stiff arming that person or raising my voice or snarling back. It’s just matching that energy. I’m the protector, so I’m the good guy.

But what I did not expect was that in this case, the battle was between security guards and happy people. These fans weren’t meaning harm. They were jubilant. They were full of joy.

So this first guy comes over that wall and then a second, a third with big smiles on their face. Their arms are wide open like they’re going to give me a hug and he’s running right at me like, ahhhhh! Now I have this dissonance in my head. I got the other guy yelling down the line, don’t let him on the field and I’m getting paid to keep them off the field.

At the same time, I’m very excited that the Bills won. That was a long time coming, so I’m excited. And this guy just wants to celebrate.

But a job is a job, my friend, a job is a job. So I stiff-armed this guy. Boom! Okay, you can’t be on the field. That’s wrong.

But it’s an odd feeling. Just wanted to make that point.

Anyway, so here’s guy number one. Here comes guy number two. Uh-oh, guy number three slips between myself and my other security card brother over there. Very quickly, I can’t tell you how long because this is all happening very quickly, but we’re overwhelmed. There are too many people.

The confidence that the crowd has now gained from seeing the first few people get on the field successfully is spilling over and now everybody’s coming down. Now we’re back to our 80,000 people versus 100 or two and we are quickly overwhelmed.

So at some point, another scream comes down the line. I hear, Let them go, let them go. Well thank God for that because it was not pretty. So that just meant we finally got to turn our backs and look towards the field instead of at the stands and now there were just thousands of people streaming onto the field.

Okay, so for a moment you feel defeated like, ah, of course the dice were loaded. There was no chance we were ever going to stop the stadium from taking the field, but it’s still for a moment it felt like, oh, that’s a bummer. I didn’t do my job. I failed here.

But then another voice, and I honestly can’t tell you whether it was a voice in my own head or whether it was an actual command from the security people, but the next goal we came, don’t let them take down the goal posts!

On either end of the field, you got the big yellow goal posts and of course the people are swarming out of the field. They’re now surrounding underneath the posts, starting to shake them, people are starting to help each other, boost them up so they can climb up and get on top of the field goals, which seems dangerous.

It also seems like vandalism, seems like it’s going too far, those things could fall, hit someone on the head, seems like a bad idea. So I make my way, I start swimming through the people to carry on my job.

By the way, I’m probably getting paid minimum wage, but there’s a sense of duty here. And safety, right? You don’t want to see anyone getting hurt.

So anyway, I swim through the crowd, best as I can, get under the goalpost and they’re right there. And I’m trying to pull people off the goalpost.

I am such a killjoy, right? I recognize that. I am that guy. I’m sorry, at least at the time.

Anyway, there I am under the goalpost and I realize that’s a lost cause as well. So now let the goalposts go. We’re losing that battle too. Which is another life lesson, okay?

The life lesson here is you got to know when to cut your losses. You have to know when to just yield. When it’s overwhelming and you’re just going to get hurt in the process of trying to enforce something, you got to just let it go.

Whether it’s a grip on a collar when you’re rolling, whether it’s storming in with some combination, but you’re taking hits to the face. At some point, you have to just change your strategy. Fight another day. That is what you’re looking to do.

I’m not looking to die under that goalpost. I’d like to carry on with my life. So know when to cut your losses so you can fight another day. It’s okay if you feel that defeat. Learn from it. Move on.

Now, up till now, perhaps parts of this story are interesting to you. Maybe even a little entertaining, I hope. But if you’re still here, now I’m getting to the point of the story, the reason I’m sharing it with you. Because now I think things get important.

That’s what I would call this. Unexpected consequences.

Again, these people who are storming the field were happy. Nobody, I don’t believe, was intending to hurt anybody. However, it was chaotic. It was pandemonium. Everything was out of control. No order.

And what happened was, on TV, it all looks fun. And I’m sure the commentators were saying things like, wow, what a great celebration, boy, this city deserves it. Look at them having a blast down there. This is great. What a party.

However, all around me was panic. What I saw was panic. Those smiles that had started on the field were now just pale, stone-faced, full of terror faces because there were too many people. That was the cliched crush of humanity. There were so many people now crushed onto the field that you could not find your feet.

Myself, personally, I got squeezed in so that my arms were stuck at my sides, my feet were crushed together, and it became, if you remember the video, a smooth criminal with Michael Jackson or the Tin Man when they find him in The Wizard of Oz, where the body is swaying and swaying and round and round and they’re not really on their feet.

My, literally, the soles of my feet were off the ground, back and forth. I was off my feet. The only thing holding me up was the pressure of the people next to me. And that’s what was causing the panic. Because you couldn’t move your arms, you couldn’t move your feet. And we were just at the mercy of this swaying pressure.

At any moment, that pressure could have just opened up one way or the other, and you could easily have just slid right to the bottom. And now you’re being trampled or maybe people are falling on top of you.

So, if you have an issue with claustrophobia or just being out of control in general, this was now a nightmare, which is kind of where my head was at. And I’ll never forget, it wasn’t just me. I remember staring right into the face of a middle-aged fellow whose face was full of terror and he was just screaming, Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?

So, this wasn’t even just a bunch of able-bodied dudes bumping into each other. There were families on the field. Kids.

Unexpected consequence. Everybody’s celebrating. They’re thinking, hey, that’s where the party is. Let’s go on the field. And then, unexpectedly, it’s turning into danger zone.

That’s basically the end of the story. I mean, I survived, obviously. I don’t believe there were any deaths that day. I can’t account for if there were some first aid situations. I don’t know. I didn’t get that information. But I can tell you that eventually, when everyone was cleared out of that field, Rich Stadium, you couldn’t see basically the turf, the green of the turf there.

It was just littered with scarves, hats, gloves, flasks, eyeglasses, broken eyeglasses, shoes been kicked off. It was just looked like mayhem had taken place there, because it had. Pandemonium.

But it really put in my head the message that I still preach, the most basic self-defense lessons. I don’t care what style you do, I don’t care where you are in the world.

Here are the top three lessons of self-defense that you should never ever forget…

One protect your head. That means keeping your hands up in most cases.

Do you wear a helmet? Are you wearing a helmet right now? Most of us don’t. If you get hit in the head, the whole thing is over, right? If you get knocked out or if you get cut on the throat and you bleed out, you lose all of your chances to do anything. You have no choices left.

So number one, when there is panic and pandemonium, I would highly recommend you get your hands up and make a helmet of some kind to protect your head. Whether you’re on your feet or you end up on the ground getting trampled, protect your head.

And by the way, it’s not just because someone’s punching you in the face directly. People start throwing stuff around. People start swinging their arms around. People are falling. Structures are collapsing. You just don’t know.

But number one, I do know, is if my head gets hit, I’m out. So I need to protect my head. In any type of crisis, when you hear a scream, a gunshot, something’s going wrong, free up your hands and get ready to make a helmet around your head. Don’t let them get stuck in your pockets or by your side. That’s number one.

Number two, stay on your feet. Or thinking in a different way, stay mobile.

Because sure, maybe you hear a gunshot and the best thing to do is to get down and find cover. Okay, technically, maybe you’re not on your feet, you’re on your knees, but you should be leaving yourself in a position to move, be able to move. In most cases, that means stay on your feet.

If you think that’s being dramatic, the next time you spar with someone, tuck your hands in your pocket and tie your feet together and see how well you do. See how long you can stay on your feet. That feeling of helplessness is a horror show. You’re in your own house of horrors.

When your hands are trapped and your feet are trapped, can’t protect your head, can’t move. It’s a nightmare. So number one, protect your head. Number two, stay on your feet, stay mobile.

Number three, find exits. Know where the exits are. Know how to escape a bad situation as quickly as you can. Know where to go.

Like on an airplane when they say the emergency exits are over here and there’s also some exits up there. You should know which one you’re closer to. That cabin fills up with smoke or everything goes dark or you’re under water. You got to know where that exit is. If there’s a crush of humanity that way, then you might need to go the other way. Options are always nice.

How many times do you hear about some club packed, there’s a shooting, or there’s a fire, or something happens and everyone crushes towards the same door and it makes it worse? Not just because sometimes those doors turn out to be locked or barricaded somehow, but it’s just too many people.

It’s always nice to know, can you get out through the kitchen? Is there a back door to the alley? Is there a side door? Is there an exit over there? Fire escapes? It’s just good to know.

That’s not being paranoid. To me, this is self-defense basics.

Where do you sit in a restaurant? Where are you walking in the mall? Just what’s up?

Protect your head, stay mobile, and know where your escape hatches are, paths to get out of places. Because it can happen anywhere. I said I wasn’t going to wax philosophical and I’m going to keep my promise, but this is just practical thinking.

Whether you’re at a supermarket, at a restaurant, you’re at some kind of rally, you’re at a concert, you’re in a club, anywhere there’s a group of people, please recognize that that in itself is a threat to your safety.

And again, I’m not saying because the people themselves are looking for trouble. You might go to a rally that is looking for trouble, okay. But let’s say most, if you’re in a church, that’s a group of people and we know now that terrible things can happen inside a church. Someone walks in with a gun or a machete, bad, horrible things happen everywhere.

So recognize that the other people, even if they’re not your enemy, are still a threat because they all want to get to that exit the same as you do, or they all want to get behind that barricade the same as you do. They all want to protect their families as much as you do. It’s just a question of resources and opportunity and a fight for those things.

That’s why, just like when that guy came running down in the field, a smile on his face, he’s not my enemy, but strategically, he’s in my way. He’s opposing my goal. And it’s the same here. If you have to fight the crowd or fight the mob, it’s unfortunate. But self-defense means you have to defend yourself no matter what.

It doesn’t mean you can’t offer the life raft to someone else, or let someone get through the door before you, or help other people to safety. But if your intention is also to survive, protect your head, stay mobile, and know where the exits are. You just have to do this.

As an exercise, I’m always trying to think about, well, how could I simulate these feelings again? If I am afraid of being confined and tied up. Your closet. Maybe you have a closet with lots of jackets and boots and a crowded closet. Just throw yourself into that closet and feel what it’s like to have your arms next to you, just rolling around on the fabric, and just get used to that feeling, and say, wow, okay, that’s what that feels like. And then try to wiggle your hands up, try to get back to your feet.

You could do this in a crowded forest, right? I go for hikes sometimes. On the path, you’ve got space, you got an exit. But sometimes you come up to a nice patch of thick hedges, sticks, no path. It’s really fun just to kind of run through there or move through there. Because you know, all those sticks come swatting in the face, there’s always something caught catching your clothing.

But what a great awareness drill and what a great dexterity drill just to kind of figure out how to move differently instead of always in your form or your favorite combos. Just to have this spontaneous style of movement to get through that thorn, get out of that hedge. Just trying to give you ideas of ways to play around.

Of course, you could just go experiment when you’re in crowds. If you’re at the mall, unavoidable, you’re at the supermarket, big long line, you’re at any place where you see a group of people, move through it as an exercise. Move through the crowd, being aware of where your hands are, how you’re spacing yourself, how you turn to regard people, just to keep that awareness of where am I? Can I find the space?

I remember running through an airport. I’ve never run faster than when I’ve been late for flights and sprinting for that plane and trying to get through the crowds of people. Boy, your brain is just functioning on such a high level, physically, mentally, you’re just in that zone where I got to get through and find the space, find the space. Same thing here.

Whether you’re sparring or you’re trying to get out of a crowded, panicking crowd, that’s what you’re trying to do. Find the space, find the exit, find a way to breathe, find a way to get your hand back up, find a way to get your feet spread out, move.

Anyway, like I said, I won’t get philosophical. That’s the practical part of it.

That was an experience when I was a young man, which really, I’d already been training in martial arts at that point, right? I could kick high, I could punch fairly hard, thought I was cool. But completely unexpectedly, the greatest threat to my safety and others around me was something no one could have foreseen, nobody wanted to foresee– a happy occasion when everyone wanted to come together and celebrate, but turned into a nightmare.

Fandemonium definitely taught me to protect your head, stay on your feet, and make sure you’re always aware of how to get out. It’s one thing to throw yourself into a situation, it’s another thing to find a way out. That’s what self-defense should be.

Go after whatever you want in your life. Like I said, do what you can while you can. That’s the exciting part of life, throw yourself in there. The self-defense part of your brain should then say, and what’s the way out, just in case. Don’t burn the bridge, don’t burn the boats.

I’m going to throw myself into this, take a chance, take a risk, do something. But I should also leave a little trail of breadcrumbs for myself to make sure I can get back out in case things go badly. Not through any bad intention of anyone else, sometimes just because life turns against you. It’s just the way it is.

So that’s my advice for today. Prepare for the Panic. Prepare for Pandemonium. Prepare to Protect Your Happy Life.

There you go, that’s the story I wanted to tell you. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the world is a horrific place. The fact is, the world can bring you unexpected beauty and unexpected joy, as much as it can bring you unexpected horror. So the trick is to be ready to face both.

And what’s the best way to do that? Well, you already know the answer.

Smile’s up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #109: Panic and Pandemonium | Self-Defense in a Crowd [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #108 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “The Hardest Part of Self-Defense.”

I have some bad news–the hardest part of self-defense is something you can’t change or stop. What am I talking about?

Knowing how far to go when defending yourself.

Here’s the problem–bad guys have a plan. They know what they want and what they’re going to do to get it. But good guys are forced to wait to see what happens before figuring out what needs to be done to survive.

This dynamic gives bad guys a HUGE advantage, putting them in a position to act, while good guys are left to react. Without being able to see into the future, how can good guys gain a fair chance to defend themselves?

In this episode, I’ll share some thoughts on the “Good Guy Dilemma”, plus offer some ideas on how to deal with the unknown. Hope you can join me!

To LISTEN to “The Hardest Part of Self-Defense,” you can either:

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

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Hi-ho, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Always a pleasure when we can spend some time together. Welcome to episode #108 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. And that’s true.

Today, I’m going to tell you right up front, I’m in more of a rant mode than wise philosopher mode. But don’t worry, I will present a problem, but I also have three solutions.

That’s overstating it. Not solutions perhaps, but at least thoughts, hopefully to make the problem a little better. Let’s get into it.

What is the hardest part of self-defense?

I’m not talking about training. So this isn’t about remembering techniques or getting injured during practice time. This is actually something that you cannot train. Here it is.

The hardest part of self-defense that you cannot train is knowing how far you need to go to be safe.

So this is what I mean. A bad guy has a plan. Maybe they just want to scare you. That’s fun for them. Maybe their intent is to rob you, beat you, rape you, murder you.

The good guy has no idea what the bad guy’s plan is. Pulls the gun, says, give me your money. So now I don’t know, well, if I just give him the money, he’ll leave me alone, I live, or is he going to shoot me anyway? So it would be better to make a grab for the gun.

I don’t know the plan, so therefore my decision making is on hold. And even if the situation starts getting a little more intense, I’m never quite sure when to ramp up to the next level.

So that’s where we get caught thinking, what’s happening, right? Already the shock of some trouble is going on. Is this really happening? Most good people can’t even believe these kinds of situations are coming up, that bad guys would do these things.

Should I do something? What should I do? When should I do it? How far should I take this?

These are all problems. And I think they’re the biggest problems because they stop us from making decisions. This just goes under the heading of action and reaction. Which is faster? Action.

There is a power and advantage to taking action. Reacting is always behind. It’s always going to be a little weaker. Which leads us to what I call the “Good Guy Dilemma”.

Trouble starts. If you, as the good guy, in response to that trouble, if you do too much too early, you’ll get in trouble. Maybe you’re arrested, maybe judged by your friends, overreacted, you’re out of control.

On the other hand, if trouble appears and you do too little too late, well now you can be injured or even killed. That’s the dilemma.

Too much too early or too little too late?

Now in contrast, we have combative sports. Sports is a completely different situation, whether it’s a karate or BJJ tournament or boxing MMA, doesn’t matter. First, you agree who you’ll be fighting with. Both people know who’s going to be part of the contest.

Second, you both want to fight. You’re both willingly entering into this competition. Three, you agree when it’s going to happen. Okay, set the date, promote it even, bring my family even.

Four, more germane to what I’m talking about today, you agree on the rules. You agree on what is going to happen, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. In short, how far is this going to go? If anything goes outside those lines, then the whole thing will be stopped. We agree on the rules.

In self-defense, none of that is true. First, you don’t know who your attacker may be. They may be a friend or a family member who’s suddenly drunk or crazy or enraged and turns on you, but I didn’t plan on fighting that person. And of course, it could be a stranger. So I don’t know who it is.

Worse, the bad guy gets to pick who they want to attack. That’s part of their plan. And a bad guy usually picks someone that they feel they have an advantage over either because of size and strength or because they’re going to take them by surprise when they’re not expecting it or they have a weapon or there’s two or three of them.

No matter how you stack it, the bad guy makes sure that it’s not a fair fight. Not a fair fight. So right off the bat, that’s different than combative sports.

Second, you don’t want to fight. The bad guy, that’s his plan. I’m going to go start trouble. The good guy is walking around, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want danger in my life or near the people I love. So that’s different.

Third, I don’t know when it’s going to happen. If you’re a good guy leading your normal life, nobody says, oh, at 4 o’clock today, someone’s going to mug you and maybe kill you. You don’t get to know that.

So I don’t know who. I don’t want to fight. I don’t know when. And then, four, I don’t know how far this is going to go. What are the rules?

Are you just trying to intimidate me to make yourself feel stronger today or are you letting off steam because the rest of your life is out of control? Or are you actually going to murder me? I have no idea.

Therefore, creating a response to this trouble that I’m now sensing is very, very difficult. So, sports and self-defense, these worlds are not the same, not even close.

Now, the problem here that I’m describing, the Good Guy Dilemma, is societal, it’s cultural. Our culture says, at least the way I was raised, and I think most good people are raised, the culture tells us that it is not okay to defend yourself until it’s too late. You’re just not allowed to.

If you’re at school and someone pushes you and you punch them in the face, who gets in trouble? The puncher will get in trouble, in most cases, because it’s seen as escalating. Well, he only pushed you, and then you punched him. Which of course is dumb, because a push downstairs, in front of a car, you fall down, hit your head on a curb, a push can be just as injurious as a punch.

It’s physical contact, and anytime there’s physical contact, there is danger. You don’t get to measure that by degrees.

What about someone’s just in your face, and they’re walking at you, they’re crowding you, they’re screaming at you, and you knee him in the groin. He doubles over. Now, who gets in trouble? You. Why? Because he didn’t even touch you. He was just yelling, oh, he didn’t come that close, oh, you didn’t have to knee him.

All ridiculous. It’s ridiculous to keep ranking trouble or danger in degrees. It’s not fair that good guys have to follow the lead of the bad guy to see how this plan of theirs is going to unfold.

And the bad guy knows this, by the way. The bad guy knows that this mystery of what they actually are going to do is working against the good guy. They know that. They know you don’t know. That’s where their power comes from.

Even on a low level, maybe this has happened to you. It’s certainly happened to me. Someone starts to make you uncomfortable. Maybe they’re staring at you. Maybe they’re in your space. Maybe they even poke you a little bit or grab a wrist or something.

Seems mild. And then maybe you react to it. You say, get off me or, hey, back up. You make a stand. And then they laugh, dude, relax, I’m just messing with you.

Really? Well don’t. Don’t.

To me, if you’re messing around with somebody, you’re signaling that you’re a bad guy. Because good guys don’t do that to each other. Good guys don’t go around messing with each other.

I’m not talking about trash talk. I’m not talking about pranks or having good clean fun. I’m talking about intimidating, threatening, touching, hurting. None of that is what good guys do to other good guys.

So to me, what’s fair is, if you’re in a situation where you even have to wonder what’s happening here, how far is this going to go? Uh-oh. As soon as you’re in that mindset, that should equal the permission. That should give you the permission, green light, to stop it. To do whatever you have to do to stop that situation right there.

Now that might come off sounding a little extreme, right? The guy’s in your face, he hasn’t touched you, and you get to just knee him in the groin? Yeah.

The guy poked you in the chest and you punched him in the face? That’s fair? Yes. To me, in this moment, yes.

Am I talking about preemptive striking? Yes. I vote yes.

Now let me say right now, I am in no way a lawyer. I am not a police officer. I am also not a priest. So I can’t recommend to you anything as far as legalities or moralities. Legal issues and moral issues are on you, your personal choices, your reflection.

I’m just pointing out what would make a fair fight. It’s already unfair that a bad guy has targeted you and decided to enact his evil on you. But if I have any chance in the self-defense situation, my best chance will come if I’m allowed to recognize danger as early as possible and take whatever actions I need to to get out of that situation. That is fair.

All right? I just want to make sure that’s clear.

I’m talking about preemptive escaping as well here. So it’s not just preemptive striking. Preemptive escaping. As soon as I know there’s trouble, if I can get out of there, get out of there. Take that course of action.

Preemptive deescalating. Somebody’s looking at you like there’s going to be trouble and you can already make peace by offering to buy the beer or give up the parking space or let them get ahead of you in line, whatever that’s going to be. If you can preemptively deescalate and let people know, I’m not looking for trouble here, fantastic.

I have a video that’s on the same kind of topic. I believe it’s Self-Defense Tip: Fight Back Now. That’s the tip– to fight early. The big idea being, the sooner you take action, the safer you’ll be. The longer you let that trouble develop, the harder it gets to get out of it and the more serious the consequences usually are.

If we think about this in terms of animal attacks, I don’t think there’s any legal or moral issues here. I think we’d all be on the same page.

If you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and a shark fin pops up right there, six feet away, eight feet away, as soon as that gray shape comes near you, I’m going to punch that in the nose, hammer it in the eye, start thrashing, making noise.

I need to give a signal to the shark that I am not going to be an easy lunch. Maybe you do eat me, but it’s not going to be easy. I’m going to go down fighting.

Now, again, in fairness to the shark, I don’t know the shark’s plan. Maybe the shark just saw my shape and is just coming by curious what’s in the water. Maybe, maybe just wants to bite off one of my feet. I have two. Is that asking for too much?

But maybe it wants to grab my leg, pull me underwater, drown me and eat me completely. I don’t know the shark’s intention. I don’t know the shark’s plan.

What I do know is once I’ve identified in my environment a killer, a predator, and now it’s in my space, I know that I need to take the earliest action possible to best my chances of survival, to maximize my chances. That I know.

If you agree with that, whether that’s a bear or a shark, what about human beings? We are also animals. My friend, we are also animals. I say it should be the same with human beings.

When a person in our society, where we have rules, we have polite society, if one of those lines of polite society is crossed, to me that’s just like a shark fin popping up out of the water. Boom. And that means, uh oh, I’ve just identified a bad guy. And I don’t know what this bad guy’s plan is. All I know is bad guy.

And like any predator, I need to treat that person with that respect of, you’re a killer, could be, or a predator, or could be. I just don’t know how far this is going to go, which is the self-defense problem that I’m talking about today.

I’m just trying to be fair. Is this fair to the bad guys that you’re allowed to overreact? That you’re allowed to retaliate immediately at the first transgression?

Look, I say it’s not about being fair to the bad guy. It’s about being fair to the good guy. Isn’t life crazy enough already for you? Am I going to get that job? Can I make money starting this business? Does he like me? Does she like me? Is somebody cheating on me, betraying me? Am I getting sick? Do the people I love, are they going to have success, are they going to die?

Life is crazy. More than ever, you know that. Why do I have to add on the possibility of being murdered, attacked in any way? Why do I have to add that to my list of things to worry about on a daily basis? I shouldn’t have to.

It’s not fair that bad guys get this power to mess with good guys. And good guys are expected to just wait to find out what to do about it. That’s not fair.

So let me be clear. I’m not saying that good guys have a license to murder anyone they want. Someone calls you a name and you get to murder them. I’m not saying that. There’s a large presumption here to my argument.

The presumption is you’re a good person. If you’re a good person, then I trust your judgment to make good choices in a given situation. If someone’s staring at you, that doesn’t mean you get to take out a gun and shoot them. But it does mean you get to do something.

And I believe that that something will be a minimum action, a minimal level action to stop the situation. And if that means jumping it up a degree, if we have to measure degrees of trouble, then you should be allowed to do that.

Now, culture is not set up that way. This is the problem, at least for now. Maybe after this recording, we can start shifting momentum the other direction. Fairness for the good guy, not for the bad guy.

All right, so in that spirit, here are three thoughts to help shift that momentum, to help make fights fairer, this fight for safety in life, a little fairer for the good guy.

First thought, in your training as a martial artist, is to include exercises to help you shorten the gap, shorten that timing, that it takes you to identify trouble, label it, accept that is trouble, make a decision, and then execute on that decision.

That’s a lot of steps in there. But if you can’t speed up that whole process, that’s only going to make your life more dangerous. Even if we still don’t know how far to go in our defense, everything that leads up to finally doing something has got to be faster. That part we can train.

Let’s say you’re in a restaurant. You’re sitting at a table with your family. Someone, some dude staring at you, don’t know him, staring at you from across the restaurant. And it gets so uncomfortable, you don’t know what’s going on. He’s over there staring, gesturing towards you.

You move. You move to a different table. They follow. They change positions too. They’re still staring at you. Now they get up and they approach the table. You put your hands up right away and say, hey, hey, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t want any trouble.

You’re using your words. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do.

They make a threat. For whatever reason, they make a threat. You try to keep them calm, try to offer to buy their dinner. You try to keep them cool. You deescalate. They don’t listen.

They keep threatening. Now they get closer and they touch you. They poke you. You back up. You give them space. You say, hey, hey, hey, I said I don’t want trouble. You give them that space. It doesn’t matter.

Now they pull a knife. You grab their hand. They pull away.

You say stop. They stab you. You grab that knife again. They pull away.

You keep trying to grab the knife. They keep trying to hurt you. At no time are you thinking about hurting them. You’re just trying to stop this because you still can’t believe it’s happening.

And now you’re dead. Another good person dead, why? Because denial, you can’t believe this is happening. Refusal to label a bad guy a bad guy at the earliest moment when that shark fin popped up and this person was staring at you, which is not something good people do to one another.

So because you weren’t prepared to match or jump up a level of violence, to use your physicality to stop this person versus trying to just stop the knife or stop the whole situation, you die.

Maybe fear of getting in trouble is part of the problem here. Well, I don’t want to make a scene, get kicked out of the restaurant. I don’t want to get arrested for going too far, too soon, too much, too fast.

And of course, finally, you were waiting to see the plan. You waited too long to see how far this was going to go. What were the rules here? What was this person’s intent?

He already had this knife in his pocket when he showed up at this restaurant. He was targeting you early on. Now he’s over here stabbing you even though you’re doing everything you thought possible to prevent it. And now you see the plan is, oh, he is going to stab you no matter what I do. And now it’s too late. It’s too late to defend yourself.

All of this remediable could have been remedied by taking early action, earlier action at a higher level at any one of those stages. The staring, the approaching, the threatening, the touching, the producing of a knife, the stabbing with the knife, the repeated stabbing, at any point there was an opportunity to stop. Sometimes life just doesn’t go your way, but there was opportunities.

So that may be a clumsy example, but I’m just trying to show that how many stages there are could be in a self-defense situation, how many opportunities there could be if you’re prepared to up the level of your response to get ahead in the timing, to make the bad guy react to you instead of you waiting to find out what’s going to happen.

So my first thought, solution, perhaps, is to always train yourself to make the first sign of trouble in your environment, that first shark fin, the last sign of trouble. As soon as you know there’s an unknown that is a threat to you, don’t dabble in degrees of bad and say, well, it’s not that bad, well, no. We have to respect that it is all the way on.

Take the early action. That’s my first piece of advice.

Number two, my second thought, get involved.

Get involved. If it was a perfect world, well, maybe there wouldn’t be bad guys. All right, so slightly less perfect. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t just be you looking for the shark fins. It wouldn’t just be you looking for the first signs of trouble.

Imagine if you’re in that same restaurant and some guy is mad dogging you, he’s eyeballing you from across the room. And imagine if everyone in the restaurant noticed this bad energy from this person and the whole restaurant got up together as soon as that guy stood up off his stool to come over to your table.

The whole restaurant said, Hey, hey, where are you going? What are you doing? You’re having a bad day, whatever’s going on, but let’s just keep it cool. No one’s going to get hurt here tonight. It sounds crazy because that’s not how the culture is set up.

Imagine you’re on a bus. We’ve all seen these things happen, whether it’s in a movie theater or a bus, at the mall, whatever. And you see someone being abusive to somebody else, yelling, raising their voice, intimidating, just being a jerk, whatever. Crossing the lines of his polite society.

And what do most people do? They ignore it.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived in a world where as soon as that bully, that bad guy makes himself known, everybody says, Hey, hey, hey, stop. It just gets me excited to even think about how that would feel to the bad guys.

Like, wow, if I pop up my little shark fin here and if people see what’s going on, they’re all going to come after me. It’s not just one on one here. I’m not targeting one person. It’s everybody. Everyone’s going to be here.

Bad guys don’t like attention. Remember this.

Bad guys don’t like attention because they know what they’re doing is wrong.

They don’t want witnesses. They don’t want the crowds. So maybe instead of good guys alone being afraid of gangs, of bad guys — that’s how it usually is. Oh, there’s a gang of punks over there. I’m by myself. That’s frightening. — wouldn’t it be cool if it was reversed where a bad guy is afraid of a gang of good guys?

They know if I cross the line and anyone sees it, they’re all going to come after me. They’re all going to step in and do something.

We have to get involved. As good people, we need to get involved if we want to live in a more perfect world. But usually you hear the opposite. People say, I don’t want to get involved.

I’ve told the story on this podcast about my wife and I tackling that thief and a big crowd of people just all standing around watching us for minutes wrestle with this guy. Nobody wanted to get involved. They watched or walked away. And that’s including the owner of the car who said, Hey, stop that guy. Even he didn’t help. That’s how crazy it is.

I’ve also told the story, early podcast, The Blonde-Haired Warrior. One of my favorite examples. So many self-defense lessons in that episode. If you haven’t gone back to listen to that one, The Blonde Haired Warrior. The story of a young lady who lived down the street from us.

We woke up in the middle of the night. She was screaming, long and short of it. She had left, just left her apartment. First level apartment on the ground level. She had just walked outside and a premeditated attack. A man tried to rape her right in her carport.

Her roommate was right by the, sleeping on the couch by the door. Heard her friend screaming and yelling, never opened the door. Scared, didn’t know what to do, shock.

I mean, I have sympathy. If people are not prepared, how horrible that must feel. But that’s the point. We can train to get past that. We can train to get involved on some level.

The golden rule here is if you want people to help you when you’re in trouble, then you need to get involved to help other people.

That’s how we change the culture. That’s how we change society. Where it’s understood if good people help good people, then they’ll help you too. We all help each other.

That’s not really crazy, is it? It sounds like common sense. But in action, it’s apparently pretty difficult. Not to say there aren’t great people out there doing great things and putting their life on the line for others. Yes, of course, there are heroes all the time. I just wish it was more commonplace that we hear those stories way more than the tragedies.

So yeah, let’s even lower the bar here. Because I can give you a couple of examples of people do get involved on a minimal level so that they can still feel safe.

Have you ever seen a fight in a street? Two guys fighting or whatever, I’m sorry. Two human beings fighting. And people just start honking their horns. They’re just in their car. They don’t have to get out of the car, but you honk your horn. Just to send some energy over there to let them know, hey, we see you. We don’t like this. Stop. We’re gaining attention to what’s going on here.

That’s a great way on some level, on a minimal level, to get involved without putting yourself in danger. Because it can get awkward, I understand. I mean, getting involved can be awkward.

You say, well, that’s a domestic dispute. That’s between a husband and wife over there. Or that’s between a parent and their kid. I’m not going to get into whether they should be spanking or not. We get into these situations where that’s kind of their business.

But in my heart, I feel I’m a good person. So what I’ve done in the past and what I think can be done by anyone is, let’s say you see someone being abused. And as a good person, I have to trust my intuition, like, Whoa, that’s not okay. That woman shouldn’t be shaking that kid while the kid’s crying like that. That’s, it’s going too far.

That woman shouldn’t be slapping that guy in the face over there screaming at him. I don’t know what’s happening. However, even if I just bear witness, to move a little closer, to stand and look, to at least let them know that someone is seeing this. Because again, most bad guy behaviors are private.

Bad guys would prefer that they’re quiet because they know they’re over the line. They know they’re abusing someone. So the very fact that you’re there to witness it can be, not always, people lose their tempers or are out of their heads, I get it, but it’s better than nothing, is my argument. To at least stand and bear witness.

Yes, when this has happened, I would have someone say, what are you doing? Mind your own business. This doesn’t concern you. Move along. And then I’m thinking, dude, you’re in the mall. You’re not standing in your living room with your kid or your wife. You’re right here in front of me. You put yourself in front of me. So it is my business. You’re in public.

Just a counter thought.

Third thought, don’t be so quick to judge other people when they’re taking early actions to defend themselves.

You hear this all the time. People, especially with Instagram and all these videos that are out there, TikTok, whatever, and fights and people defending themselves and crimes caught on tape. And tons of people comment, Oh, well, that’s not what I would have done. Or someone said, Well, they didn’t have to do that.

Why didn’t he just do this? Why didn’t she just do that? Well, he could have just done this.

It’s so easy to judge after the fact, because after the fact, the plan is more clear. Now we know who’s involved, when it was involved, what the rules were, how far it was going to go. Now we know.

But where’s the sympathy for the good guy in those situations who had no idea what was going to happen? Remember the Good Guy Dilemma here…

Either you’re going to get judged for doing too much too early, or you’re going to get judged for doing too little too late.

At least if you do too much too early, you’ll have a chance of surviving. But if you wait, it may be too late.

So again, I would love to see the culture shift towards sympathy and say, Yeah, I get it. If I was in that situation and I didn’t know what was going to happen, I would do that.

Now, I expect ignorant commentary from people who don’t train in the martial arts, people who don’t study violence. Maybe they don’t study crime. They don’t really think it through. They don’t know how hard it is to restrain somebody who doesn’t want to be held. They don’t know how hard it is to stop somebody with a knife. They just don’t know.

So these are the people who say things like, Well, he was just yelling. Well, all he did was bump into you a little bit. Well, he was just close, he wasn’t doing anything yet. But martial artists should know.

Martial artists should know what danger looks like. They should have accepted that there are bad guys out there and are very quick to figure out that’s one of them right there. Don’t let his plan advance any farther. And they should know how difficult it is to actually fight somebody, so that preemptive beat, that preemptive action, how valuable that is, that you’re the one acting and not reacting.

Martial artists should know that.

So if we can somehow do these things, maybe we can change the culture to not only forgive good guys when they take early action, but applaud it. Applaud the fact that someone took the action to stand up to a bad guy right away, to try to nip that in a bud, instead of saying after the fact, Oh, that’s too bad. I guess there was nothing he could have done.

Yes, there was. Earlier. He could have done something right away, and the whole thing would have stopped.

If you’re still not sure about any of this, if any of this is making you uncomfortable, one more little add-on here. Forget about you for a second…

What if you’re with your kids or you’re babysitting someone else’s kids and that shark fin pops up? What if you’re with your elderly parent or relative? Maybe your life isn’t worth defending, but what about theirs?

How close are you going to let this shark get to the kid? To your mom or dad? How much danger are you willing to expose them to? How many unknowns?

How long are you going to keep wondering how bad this situation is going to get before you take some type of action to protect your kids or your parents or someone you love?

I bet, as a thought experiment, you would take early action for them. I only ask that you would take early action for yourself as well.

Alright, so let’s wrap this up.

Self-defense is tricky. We agree on that, right? If we can all agree that we should stop bad guys, that’s the first premise of self-defense, right? The good guys should defend themselves against bad guys. We agree on that.

We can even maybe agree if we sit down long enough over pie and coffee on how to stop them. Use this weapon, use this technique, use these words, use these escape routes. We can prepare tactically, strategically. Got it.

But can we also agree on when, when to deploy our weapons, our strategies, our tactics, our preparations? When?

For me, just to sum this up, I believe we should all be training as martial artists, as human beings, to take early action. When that shark fin pops up, it has to be just like you’re running in a race. That’s on your mark, get set, and then if it progresses, go. The earlier, the better. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

Number two, get involved. The golden rule of society. If you want people to help you, then you should help them. I don’t even know what else to say. At least bear witness to the struggle that someone else is going through and let them know that they’re not alone.

Number three, don’t judge too quickly. Don’t judge your fellow good guy too quickly. Instead of judging what somebody does, consider this. Instead of judging which technique they picked out, ask yourself why are they in that situation to begin with? Judge the why, not the what.

Why did they feel they had to do this in the first place? Oh, because there was this other person making them uncomfortable, pressuring them, intimidating them, threatening them. And that’s why. That’s why they did anything in the first place. They never would have been in that situation if the bad guy hadn’t started it.

So don’t judge so quickly. It’s just not fair. It’s not fair. And life can be unfair enough.

Again, I’m not saying that these are all solutions. Certainly not perfect solutions, but it’s not a perfect world. The best plan, the best advice I’ve got for you is to be a good guy. Do whatever you have to do to protect yourself and the ones you love.

And then remember, you’re not alone. You’re not the only good guy out there. You are part of team good guys.

So if you can protect yourself and the ones you love and your fellow good guys, help protect team good guys, then that hopefully will spur them to help you. And now we are closer to living in a perfect world.

Okay, I’m done. I hope that gave you something to think about. I also hope it inspires you to take action, early action, to stay safe, and build a happy life.

Until next time, smiles up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #108: The Hardest Part of Self-Defense [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #107 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “The Art of Moving Furniture.”

I moved twice in the last year—first from L.A. to Raleigh and now to a new place 6 miles up the road. That means I have spent a ridiculous number of hours packing, lifting boxes, and hauling furniture. You might remember how my efforts led to a case of tennis elbow in Episode #97: Little Pain, Big Trouble.

This time around, I was humbled once again, but not by pain. This time, it was the prowess of the movers that made me feel like I was a physical misfit. Watching their skill made me reconsider how I’ve been training in the martial arts.

Like I always say—everything you do is a lesson and every person is a teacher.

Of course, I believe my story will help you get more out of your training, too! As a bonus, I added a quote from Bruce Lee.

So, join me, Bruce, the movers, and some heavy pieces of furniture for an important training lesson.

To LISTEN to “The Art of Moving Furniture,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

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Hi-ho, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #107 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. I’m always honored when we can spend some time together, so let’s get to it.

The topic today, we’re not just going to talk about martial arts, we’re going to talk about the art of moving furniture. Huh?

Is there a connection between training in the martial arts and moving furniture? I say yes. It may not be clear now, but hopefully very soon, the connection will be clear.

This all comes up, this topic, because I have moved yet again. You may know about a year ago, my wife and I, after 28 years in Los Angeles, moved to North Carolina, and now we are moving again. Well, we just did.

That’s because we had signed for an apartment from Los Angeles, not knowing the area in North Carolina, and as soon as we got here, we realized, oops, that was a mistake. So we have now found a happier place to live. So yay for that.

However, in case no one has told you, moving is work, hard work. And look, I’ll just say, I’m in pretty good shape. I work out every day. I’ve been doing it a long time.

No, I’m not the strongest guy. I’m not the most flexible guy. But I still spar. I still roll. I’m still active. So that’s why I was shocked and humbled by the work that had to be done to move out of LA and now to move just five or six miles up the street. Same amount of work, in fact.

So my little experience here breaks up into two stories. First, the move from LA to North Carolina. We don’t have a lot of stuff. Even though we’ve been living in the same place for over 20 years back in LA, we didn’t really accrue that much stuff. We didn’t think. But still, it ended up being like 160 items on the movers itinerary. It really does add up.

But the main thing was that there were two pieces of furniture that were, I would say, obnoxious. One was a very tall bookcase that’s on a spinner. The bookcase can spin around. So it’s tall, it’s heavy, and it moves.

The other piece is a big double-wide dresser with a big mirror on it. Also just big, heavy, hundreds of pounds. And I know this because we were the ones prepping for the movers. We had to put everything in boxes, and we wanted to put everything by the door to make it easy and quick. And those two pieces of furniture were just awful.

So you’re trying to inch it across, you’re trying to use all your leverage, you’re trying to be smart. I’m thinking like, oh, this is like a hip throw, or, you know, I’m using my visualizations to make it more interesting. But boy, those two pieces of furniture really stood out.

So I kind of felt bad about it, because even though these professional movers are coming, I still felt bad that they would have to carry these things, especially since our new place was up on a third floor apartment. So I knew that was going to be trouble.

Anyway, I felt a lot better when the moving truck showed up in LA because there were three guys in the truck and they’re professionals. And I figured, great, they will handle this. I was trying to do this basically by myself. Of course, my wife was there trying to help, but still it was a lot.

Okay, so I’m standing back, kind of watching these guys do their thing, and the moment comes. All the boxes are cleared out and here’s this tall bookcase. And I’m curious to see how they’re going to approach it, how they’re going to handle it. Well, here comes the shock part.

It didn’t take three guys, it didn’t take two guys. One guy who was smaller than I was, about the same build but a couple inches shorter, he didn’t even break stride. He walked straight into the apartment, didn’t change a step, walked right up to it, bear hugged it, lifted it up, and walked it out of the apartment.

My first reaction was just, wow, I know how heavy that thing is. I had a hard time just getting it over towards the door, and he just yanked it up like it was nothing. And then wow turned into, wait, what? I don’t get it. I’m in really good shape, and I’m halfway tough, reasonably tough.

So my ego jumped in, started making excuses. Well, that guy’s clearly a lot younger than you, and I can’t hate myself for being older. He’s young. Well, he’s a freak. Some guys are just stronger. Their muscle fibers, blah, blah, blah. He’s just a freak.

Ego also said, you know what? Hey, Ando, take it easy. You could have. If you really had to, you could have done that. If your life was on the line, if you didn’t care about hurting your back, you probably could have done that too.

So that’s where I left it. I just put a little closure on that and said, okay, that was just a freak situation. Don’t worry about it. Okay, here we go. Fast forward to just a week or two ago. Moving from the apartment on the third floor to this place now, town home.

Again, struggle trying to box everything up and load everything by the door, move those furniture pieces as close as I can to the door. Now, this time I felt really bad because only two guys showed up. It’s a local move. So I only hired the movers to take the big stuff and then I would take care of all the medium and small stuff. That was the plan. But only two guys showed up.

Now, I knew that the tall bookcase could be taken by one guy. I’d seen that happen. But that bureau, the big double-wide dresser, I knew that was going to be hard. So as soon as they got there, I walked them up and I gave them the quick tour of what was going to be moved.

I said, OK, guys, and this piece is super heavy. I know I’m sorry in advance. This thing’s going to be hard to get down three flights and up two. But I’m here. That was my consolation for them. I’m here. I will help you. That will make three of us. And we will make this work.

So they didn’t really seem too bothered by it. They were just, OK, OK. I’m figuring, well, that’s their ego. They don’t want to make it seem like they’re intimidated. OK, great.

So I get busy and I’m going down my checklist, making some, doing some emails. And I notice all of a sudden the bureau is gone. There’s just a big space there. Wait, what? Maybe they just put it out on the porch there. No, I look over the railing. It’s already on the truck.

So I didn’t see how, but somehow those two guys got it down three flights of stairs and onto the truck already. I’m figuring, well, they have straps, those furniture straps for the shoulders, or they must have had a dolly. I wasn’t paying attention, but God bless them, they did it.

Okay, so now I follow them over. We drive over to the new place. There’s a little step up porch. And then there’s a two level staircase to get to the second floor. Up halfway, you make a turn on a landing, and then up to the top.

Okay, once again, I’m getting busy. They’re bringing some pieces in. I’m a little distracted. But again, I tell them, I’m here, I’m ready. Just give me a call. And once again, before I know it, I’m watching them walk this bureau, the dresser, off the truck.

Now, here again, I am saying, wow, because they’re not using straps. They do not have a dolly underneath it. These guys aren’t even wearing gloves. They’re not even wearing heavy shoes. It’s just two dudes, tee shirts, bare hands, sneakers.

And they’re not just carrying this thing, my friend. They’re talking. They’re taking full steps. They’re laughing. They’re making some jokes about their girlfriends. Like it’s just having coffee.

I would have, my arms would have already snapped off and I would have been buried in a hole by now. But these guys are making it, they’re not just doing it, they’re making it look easy. This is the humbling part.

So, sure enough, I’m right there saying, hey, you guys got it? Yeah, man, we got it. And sure enough, they walk it up the porch. It takes a little bit of doing just to get it through the door, because it’s a tight fit.

Now, they get to the bottom of the stairs inside, and they don’t even take a break. They don’t reset. This is right off the truck, down the ramp, up a sidewalk, up the porch, in the door, and now they’re already starting up the stairs. Nothing to get ready, they’re just going.

So, they get to the top of the first half of the staircase, where there’s the landing. The guy on the top says to the guy at the bottom, he says, you want to break? The guy on the bottom says, no, I’m good.

Okay, so I’m wow squared at this point. Like, what? What do you mean you don’t need a break? Not only doesn’t this guy need a break– I’m getting so excited here, because I still can’t believe what I saw– not only doesn’t this guy need a break– the guy on the bottom, who’s a little taller than I am, they’re both a little heavier, one’s taller, one’s shorter than I am, so again, not superheroes, just guys, younger– not only does this guy not take a break on the bottom, he just says, hang on, let me switch grips.

Because up till now, he’d been holding it underhanded, right? His fingers are pointing down. He’s holding it from underneath. As they start up the second part of the staircase, I swear to you, what he did was, he just hip bumped it up, so that he could let go for a second, and he repositioned his hands with his fingers up, and then he shoulder pressed it up to the guy on the top of the stairs.

And I saw it. I saw it. No straps, no dollies, no gloves, no boots, no break, no extra breath, no pep talk, no steroids, as far as I can tell. I didn’t ask for a urine sample. Just amazing.

So now, of course, that shocked me back into what happened in LA. Now I’m just blown away by movers, professional movers. Like, what is this witchcraft? What magic do you guys have access to? Because whatever that is, I want it for the martial arts. I need it for the martial arts.

So they put this thing in the bedroom. I’m literally, my mouth is like hanging open. I just can’t believe their prowess. So they go back downstairs, whistling a happy tune, and I follow them out. And even though it seems ridiculous, I asked the question. I had to ask. I couldn’t help it.

I says to the guy, Hey man, you guys are putting on a magic show here. How the hell did you just pick up that bureau and get it upstairs without a break? How did you do that?

And the answer came, and I think it was perfect. The guy with no ego whatsoever, picked up his hands, he wiggled his fingers, and he said, Hey, you do something for a while, you get good at it.

Isn’t that beautiful? That’s it.

That, my friend, is Kung Fu. That is work and time. If you do the work for enough time, it transforms into a skill. That is the formula for success in every part of your life. Work at something for a long time.

Now, more specifically for martial arts training, I want to recognize and understand that your body, my body, the human body, is a magic machine. The magic is, it will adapt to whatever you ask it to do.

Now, of course, there are genetic limitations, and your environment, your diets, and sleep habits, all of that will play a part in this, injuries. But in general, your brain and your body will adapt to whatever task you are asking of it.

So now, my warning to you, or my advice, however you want to take this, is to ask yourself–

Are you into martial arts for fitness? Is that you want abs? You want to look good at the beach? You just want to make your heart and lungs healthy? You want to stand up a little straighter?

Is that the specific job that you’re asking your body to accomplish? Are you interested in tournaments? So are you asking your body to get razor sharp on a small number of techniques, within a rule set, training like an athlete, peaking and having an off season? What are you doing specifically to maximize your tournament results?

Are you training for self-defense? Do you want to be ready all the time? There is no season. There are no rules. How wide a skill set do you need?

Are you training for people bigger than you? Are you training for multiple attackers? Are you training with weaponry?

Here’s the good news. Whatever your goal is, whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, again, your body is a magic machine. Your body will adapt to whatever it is you’re asking of it. That’s the good news. But that’s also the bad news.

The bad news is, your body will adapt to exactly what you’re asking of it. Exactly. Not something that kind of looks like it or is kind of close to it. It has to be exact. Your body doesn’t play around. It only will do exactly what you want it to do.

Now, what I mean by that is, from an outside perspective, if you didn’t know me and you didn’t know those movers, you’d say, yeah, all those guys are in shape. They all look like they’re in good shape. And if you saw us moving around and we weren’t getting winded, you’d say, yeah, they can all do the same stuff.

However, I’m pretty sure those guys can’t kick a bag real well or coordinate punches and kicks the way I have trained to do. And I can sure as heck tell you, I can’t lift a dresser up three flights of stairs or down three flights of stairs and up two flights of stairs the way they did.

So even though we’re all in shape, we are not the same. We have asked our bodies to do very different things.

I’ll give you another example. I was working out with a fellow the other day, solid martial artist, someone I respect. But his training methods are typically around 70 or 80 percent of optimal or maximal cardio. Doesn’t go full out sparring or rolling that often. Does mostly forms and drills and not at 100 percent.

So we pushed it. We were doing something competitive like sparring. And he got winded very quickly. And he actually said, a grown man actually said, Geez, you know, I practice breathing with these techniques over and over, a thousand times. You’d think I’d be better at it.

To which I replied, No, I wouldn’t think that. Absolutely not. If you’re not training your cardio to perform these techniques at this level, then why would your body be ready for that? That makes no sense once you understand how your body works.

I’ll give you another example. When I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, like I said, I’m in good shape. I was in great shape. Punch, kick, spar all day. Great. Run sprints. Fantastic. Well conditioned. But not for a horizontal plane.

That first period of time in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was a horror show. I was sore. I was pulling muscles. I was stressed out. I felt lost. Even though the principles of fighting are, I think, generally the same, whether you’re standing or on the ground, the execution of those principles in my body was completely different. My body wasn’t ready for that.

And there’s a bit of a frustration in your head because you’re thinking, Wait, I’m really good at martial arts. Wait, I’m in really good shape. But I wasn’t in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu shape. My body had not adapted at all to that because I hadn’t done it. It’s very important that you understand that.

You’ve got to give your muscles and your mentality time to transform, to adapt to a new goal.

So yeah, self-defense, martial arts, it’s fun to learn techniques. You can collect all kinds of escapes and cool combinations. Good for you. You’re learning your art. However, you then have to condition yourself to execute those techniques at a high level, at 100%.

Not all the time. Of course, you can’t go 100% all the time. You won’t learn much that way. You’ll condition yourself a particular way. But to learn, we slow down, we break things into pieces, we drill, all kinds of stuff, normal class activity. But make no mistake, once you’ve learned techniques, you need to condition them at the speed and power level that you want them to be there for you in real life, whether that’s a tournament or a self-defense situation. And that will lead to confidence.

When you have good techniques, and you’re well conditioned to perform those techniques at 100%, and then you have that confidence to perform them, now you have a skill. Now you’re the guy who can look at a bookcase and without even changing your stride or hesitating, you already know walking into the room, I can pick that up, I can get that on the truck. And you just walk over to it, you pick it up, and you take it on the truck.

You already know when you start rolling, I know where I’m going with this move. I know what this guy is going to do, I’m going to catch him in this move. You already know, you’ve done it.

Now, of course, no podcast would be complete without a mention of Bruce Lee, so here is my mention of Bruce Lee for the day. There’s a great quote that always stuck in my head that relates to this. He wasn’t talking about picking up couches, but back in that book series, Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method, he is quoted as saying, whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but he is quoted as saying, “I don’t know of any sprinter in the world who can break the record only by jogging around the track.”

Perfect. Exactly what I’m saying. Again, to an outsider, if you’re just driving your car down the street and you don’t run at all, and you see someone in sneakers and their arms are pumping back and forth and they’re moving faster than a walk, you’re going to say, Oh, that’s a runner.

But to a runner, there is a huge difference between running a 100 meter sprint, a 400 meter, a 5K, a half marathon, a full marathon, an ultra marathon. Running is a vast topic, just like martial arts, and there are all kinds of different ways you can call yourself a runner. And they’re all different. And you need to condition yourself for the particular type of running that you’re interested in.

Right? It’s not all the same. So physical conditioning, whether you’re running or a martial artist or anything, you’re doing yoga, you want to dance, you want to move furniture, you want to climb rocks– iIf you want to perform at 100%, you’ve got to practice at 100%. And that has to be a regular part of your practice.

The key for today is, it has to be specific practice. The more specific, the better. I’m using that word exactly. Your practice has to be exactly what you want to achieve outside of your training.

So, again, I have full respect for styles and schools that practice drills slowly. You have to do that. Nobody learns the alphabet, all the letters at once at high speed. That’s impossible. Your brain doesn’t work that way. So, of course, I’m not saying everything has to be fast and hard as you can. But, you have to open it up sometimes and get to the 100% in the context that you want it to be there for you to see if you’re on track.

If you’re not on track, you can’t be surprised. You have to go back and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I need to fix this because I’m not exactly where I want to be.

Let me give you one last example of what I’m talking about. And this one I would consider a backwards example or a reverse example of conditioning. Because in this move in particular, when we moved out of LA, we kind of misjudged how much work it was going to be.

So within a couple of days, we had to get everything together. There were a couple of all-nighters where we just worked really hard. And I talked about that in a previous podcast, where I got tennis elbow from having to tape up so many boxes so fast. I ended up actually injuring myself. This time, there was a little more lead time. So I had a couple of weeks to assemble everything.

Now, like I said, the movers only moved the big stuff, which means I was in charge of all of the medium and small stuff, which meant endless trips up and down the three flights of stairs and then up into the new place. Endless boxing, loading, unloading, carrying, unpacking.

So it’s been almost two weeks of just nonstop moving activities, which broke up my martial arts training. I have not been faithful to my Kung Fu or my BJJ in this last period of time. I always work in a little, and of course every box can be an opponent in my head, but I broke up my routine.

Now in the first couple of days, my body of course reacted by being very sore. My back, my hands, my shoulders, didn’t have very good technique.

In the next couple of days, I was kind of just numb. And then I started to notice, about a week into it, that my form was better. I could balance the boxes better. My footing was more assured when I was coming up and down the stairs, even when I couldn’t see my feet, my footing was more confident. I could feel my body already adapting to what I was asking it to do.

The magic machine that is your body, and is mine, adapted. As we finished up, and I’m putting the last boxes into place and unpacking things, it’s not so bad.

But here’s the flip side, even though my beautiful magic body adapted to moving, now I’m going back to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today. I’m going there right now. And I’m already a little like, Oh no, my body feels cranky. I already feel like, Oh no man, it’s gonna be a bad day. Because I already know that I’m not quite where I want it to be physically, to go perform at my best in the BJJ class or tomorrow’s Kung Fu class.

I’m already a little cranky, because I have not done my normal routine that would make me feel that I’m at my best. That’s how fast your body changes.

So I ask you again, before we wrap this up, what are you asking your body to do? What work are you doing? And is it exactly what you need to do to achieve the goals that you’ve set for yourself?

You know this phrase, use it or lose it. It’s absolutely true. Like I said, even in just short of two weeks, I already feel a little out of touch with my martial arts skills. But before you can lose it, you have to choose what you’re using in the first place.

Let me re-say that. First you choose an activity, you choose what you’re going to train. Then you pay your dues. You invest in that. You keep doing it. What did you choose? Now pay your dues.

That’s what you hope to use for real, whether that’s a tournament or just walking around or real life self-defense. You choose it, you pay your dues, and then you get to use it. If you don’t pay your dues, then you won’t be able to use it, and you will lose it if you had it at all.

That is what Kung Fu, those words, that formula for success is all about. Choose the work you want to do. Pay your dues in that work, and then you’ll have skills that you can use. That’s not just the secret to success in your relationships and your business and your martial arts training. That’s the formula and the secret to a happy life.

Okay, I hope that gave you something to think about. For a little challenge today, why don’t you go pick up a table and see if you can move it across the room, or get your hands onto that couch and see if you can lift it up over your head. I think we can learn a lot from moving furniture.

Until next time, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #107: The Art of Moving Furniture [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #106 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “It’s Okay to Suck at Martial Arts.”

After almost two years of hiding out from Covid, I finally stepped outside and joined a BJJ school. Well, re-joined, actually. And guess what?

I SUCK!

Yup. I may only be two years older, but I’m feeling 10 years rustier. As expected, I was under attack immediately and found myself tapping like a beginner… which is exactly what I wanted!

I wanted to tap? I wanted to lose? YES!

That’s because I know you have to suck before you can learn. Losing and failing are not experiences to avoid in training, they’re something to pursue, welcome, and embrace.

I’ve talked about the importance of failing before, like in #55: I Want You to Fail, but this time, we’re going to delve deeper into the benefits of throwing yourself into situations where the odds are hopelessly stacked against you. Hope you like it!

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

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Hi-ho, hi-ho. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #106 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

The topic today, It’s Okay to Suck. To suck at martial arts, to suck at BJJ, to suck at cooking, to suck at whatever it is you love to do. It’s okay to suck.

Now, I’m going to tell you right up front just to get this theme rolling. I suck at martial arts. No, not all aspects of martial arts, but many of them. Enough that I stay very humble. Enough that I stay in a student mindset every single day of my training.

I get hit, I tap, I get hurt, I lose, and I’m proud of all of that. I’m proud because I know that’s how you learn. The only way I got good at some aspects of martial arts is because I was willing to suck in the beginning or suck maybe for even a long time. That’s how winning is done.

Now this is not an altogether new theme for this show. Way back in episode #55, there was a show called, I Want You to Fail. That pretty much sums it up. I want you to suck. I want you to fail. I want you to go through that process. Because again, that’s how you get better.

Now in that episode, I tried to equate the idea of a white belt with freedom. The white belt symbolizes freedom. What kind of freedom? I’m glad you asked. The freedom to fail. The freedom to suck.

You have to just think about that for a second, right? A white belt has no expectations put on them. And hopefully you don’t put expectations on yourself if you’re wearing a white belt. Your job is to fail as a white belt. That’s your job.

If you knew what you were doing, why would you even sign up for the class? If you were already an expert, you wouldn’t need to be there. The whole point of being a white belt is that you get the chance to try something new, to make mistakes, to fall down and to learn.

So if you can get over that first fear of being the new person, of not knowing what you’re doing, then the rewards will come to you quickly because everything you do will fail and then you’ll quickly improve.

There’s nothing more exciting than being a white belt, really.

Ask anyone who’s accomplished something. That first phase of learning is thrilling because you make the jump from having no knowledge and no skill to having some skill right away. It happens pretty quickly. It’s at the advanced levels that maybe you don’t see progress or it’s not obvious to you for longer periods of time. But in the beginning, the freedom to fail is also the accelerant on the learning process.

So never be afraid to go start something new. I’ve talked about that before. Even more recently, episode #104, we talked about participation trophies. And in that episode, I said absolutely that effort should be rewarded.

We all can’t be winners. There’s only so many medals and trophies that can be handed out. At some point, what you recognize is that you’re trying. But I don’t think I even went deeply enough into that point.

It’s not just that you’re participating. I think you should reward yourself if you suck. If you’re the worst one in your class. If you are absolutely awful, as long as you’re showing up and trying, paying attention and working, you should still be rewarding yourself. You should still be proud of yourself, yeah, even if you suck.

At least, I do. I can tell you. I’ll always have a pie in my refrigerator ready for celebration. Got tapped 12 times today, I’m having a piece of pie.

Now, just to let you know, just to reaffirm that I practice what I preach, that I’m not afraid to suck, let me tell you something.

I just signed up at a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school. I have returned to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu after a two-year almost break due to the lockdowns from COVID. Now, I’m not new to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I started 13 years ago. For the first year, it was some buddies who I could roll with, and I went to some seminars, and got some instructional videos, and just really just wanted to feel what the art was all about. And I loved it.

But I was getting wiped out, I was getting creamed, and that was addictive, I really caught that bug. So after it took about a year, I did join a school formally and stayed there for 10 years.

Now, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was never my main art, it was always a supplement to everything else I was doing. But that emotional process of just getting my butt kicked all the time was so valuable, which is why I’m still preaching it right now and why I wanted to return.

Once COVID hit, March of 2020, so almost two years, that first year, I don’t think I touched anybody. But then slowly in the second year, pod here, partner there, I’ve been able to start working a bit, but it wasn’t enough. So I knew now that I’m feeling safer, it was time to go back, primarily because I wanted to feel that sensation of sucking even more. My training was not giving me enough opportunity to suck, and BJJ is perhaps the greatest art for allowing you to suck badly right away, every class.

So I’m here to tell you, I practice what I preach. You shouldn’t just be scared to try a new art or try a class as a white belt. You should also be able to face the fear of starting a class that you’re returning to, returning to a class. It’s not just starting that scary, it’s returning.

Frankly, to be honest, it was even scarier going back with a brown belt on as a senior student than it was a white belt. Because again, a white belt, no expectations. Brown belt? Expectations, right?

Found a friendly group of people. Everyone’s being very cool, but still, when you’re standing there with a brown belt on, people are looking at you like, okay, hot shot, what do you got? What have you been doing all these years?

So there’s the expectations I feel, and there’s also my ego, right? I’m a human being. I don’t want to come off like I suck. The sucking is for my personal journey. I don’t mind sucking, but I don’t want to come in saying, Hey, everybody, I suck. So you have this little conflict.

Ultimately, though, it’s better to get over that because you’re still free. That would be my lesson if you’re a senior student or a returning student, you want to go back after COVID, you’re an intermediate or advanced student, you’re still free.

Any student of any kind, you’re always free to suck.

Most of the expectations are in your head. Most of that is ego driven. If you can put that aside and get right back to the sucking as fast as you can, then you’ll be learning as fast as you can and you’ll start feeling better as fast as you can. At least that’s what’s happening for me currently.

It’s been a couple of weeks now and I’m not kidding, the butterflies I felt going in may be more than I’ve ever felt going into any martial arts class in my entire life. I’m going in as a brown belt, two years of rust, I teach for a living, I’ve got a website, I’ve got a YouTube channel, not that they’ve probably ever seen it, but I’m just carrying all these expectations on myself.

And sure enough, when I showed up, I was the oldest guy in the room, these guys are younger, bigger, stronger, they’re competitive, they’re technical, they didn’t take two years off. So it was a nightmare for my ego, but it was a dream come true, it was exactly what I wanted for my student mindset.

So I’m here, I survived, that’s the big message. I was able to embrace the suck, face that fear, face my own ego, and get back into it. I’ve survived.

So the advice that I have given for as long as I’ve had this website and beyond, to never be afraid to walk into a school, to give a class a try, to whether you’re going to change arts, start a new art, return to an art, whether it’s been two years, ten years, twenty years, do it.

I’m right. The advice is true, I am practicing what I preach. Get in there and do it. That’s the big message. So if you have to go, have a beautiful day, thanks for being here.

I am going to take a little added journey here, though, a special note for people who practice traditional martial arts, Kung Fu, Karate, Taekwondo, arts that are set up in that fashion. I think that makes it even more difficult to return.

White belts are white belts across the board, so I hope I’ve addressed that problem. But let’s say you’re returning to an art of a traditional nature.

Look, traditional martial arts, at this point, I have a love-hate relationship with them. On the love side, I do believe that the old masters knew what they were doing. They knew what fighting was. They lived in far more brutal times. They understood this stuff, martial arts.

A lot of what they’ve handed down, the exercises, the forms, the drills, the conditioning, a lot of that probably has been miscommunicated and misunderstood. And so therefore, some people look at it now and say, well, I don’t get this. That’s a waste of time. They didn’t know what they were doing.

I don’t believe that. I do believe it is worth digging through that dirt, brushing off that dust to reveal the gold that’s underneath. So I am a fan of traditional martial arts. At least I think it’s worth a look to respect what has been going on before we got here and see how we can help our training. If you can’t find any value in it, great, then go do your thing. But I’ve been able to find great value in most traditional martial arts training models.

That’s the love side of it. So what do I hate? Here’s what I hate. Glad you asked.

Let’s take forms, for example, okay? If you practice forms, let me ask you, have you ever performed your kata and had a teacher say, Wow, that was perfect? Not me. And I’m betting not you.

There’s something about the traditional martial arts that lends itself to corrections, corrections and more corrections. Not necessarily improvements like, Hey, I saw you rolling over there and wrestling. Don’t forget to keep that arm tight. That’s a tip to make you better.

Doing a form, someone might just come over, your teacher or senior student say, well, no, this fist has to be this way, not that way. Yeah, but the other teacher said it was this way, not that way. Why exactly? That’s tradition. I don’t have a good reason.

Well, he says that’s for this reason. He says it’s for another reason. You can start getting lost in corrections. And that’s a problem because where does your confidence come from?

Presumably, you signed up in martial arts to be tougher, stronger, maybe more fit, and ultimately, confidence. Confidence in your body, confidence in your skills. Confidence is rooted in competence. You should feel like you know what you’re doing.

But if every time you work on your exercises, you’re practicing your forms or some type of solo drilling or something, and you’re always given the message, that’s not right, that’s not proper, that’s not enough. Here’s another correction, here’s another correction. To me, that becomes dangerous because each of those corrections can chip away at your confidence if you ever had any at all.

That’s the way I would feel. I mean, I was a serious student. When I started in Taekwondo, there were lots of forms to learn. And that meant lots of corrections. That meant just a constant stream of, no, you got to fix that, no, you got to fix that.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get corrections. I’m not saying there isn’t a need for right and wrong. Many corrections could have something to do with the safety of your body. Making sure your knees are safe, your wrist is safe, that your chin is down. There are certain things that, yes, you need to be corrected on.

My problem is when the goals of your training become trying to be great at this art and not worrying about being a better person. You shifted your goals from, here’s what I’m trying to create in myself, to, hey, I hope I can pass this test and get that form right. When that happens, I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t belabor it, but that becomes a problem.

Quick example, when I moved after college from Buffalo to Los Angeles, I had just gotten my black belt in Taekwondo. I’d studied Aikido as my supplemental art for a little while. So, I had a really good idea of what I was looking for when I started at a new school.

Very quickly, I found a Karate school that seemed great. Very knowledgeable, skilled teacher, nice group of people, very hands-on group, very small group. And I was there for about three months, that’s how long I made it. And the reason I left, the main reason, was this.

They did forms, absolutely, and there was a belt test. And there was a woman there, probably college-aged. And she was a great student. She showed up, she worked hard, great attitude, not unskilled. Did the kumite, did the solo drills, did the forms, respectful person.

In my mind, she did everything well and right. Doesn’t mean perfect, but this was a belt test, not like some advanced belt even. This was like one of the second or third belts in the system. She failed the test. The teacher failed her. And the reason was one thing.

The teacher said that on a front stance, forward stance, the back foot was turned out five degrees too much for his liking. Five degrees on one foot for that stance!

Now again, if this was a matter of knee safety, and their back foot was turned all the way in the other direction, you had 180 degrees between your toes in a forward stance, that could be a major issue. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s incompetent, that’s dangerous for your body. But that’s not what this was.

This was five degrees off on a beginner level belt when everything else, the kumite, the kihon, the kata, were all really well done. To fail that student, the message to me– again, everyone’s got their own standards. That’s his dojo, his rules, I respect that– but rather than stay and complain or argue about it, I just realized, Whoa, this opens up a part of my brain and my personality that I don’t want to open up.

I had already felt that in the Taekwondo training. That it wasn’t about my priorities of what I was trying to get out of the training, it was about pleasing this art, their look to it. And that five degrees off, I mean, who knows, maybe she had a pulled groin muscle, maybe her hips are just genetically set up in a certain way where that foot out makes her feel more stable and powerful. I don’t even want to get into it.

The point was, that to me was symbolic of, Uh-oh, this training is pointed at the wrong goals, not the goals that I want to pursue at this time. So I need to find another school. And I did, which brings me to a quote from Gichin Funakoshi. I’ve seen this type of quote attributed to many different people, but I’m going to go with Gichin Funakoshi.

His quote, you’ve probably heard it before–

The ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of character.

Yeah, exactly, that’s right. Go Gichin. That’s right. The victory or defeat, all right, well, maybe that’s a tournament or war or even just getting beat up on the street. We don’t want to die, but ultimately the training process to prepare you for that fight on the street or that tournament is what’s most important.

What kind of person are you? It’s not what moves you can do, it’s who are you performing those moves?

Who are you becoming? How are you developing? It’s not about, Oh, are you perfect or do you suck? It’s who are you?

Who were you when you started? Who are you today? Who are you going to be in the next month or year if you go through this training exercise?

Which leads to the immediate question, what are your character goals? We all, it’s very common to talk about fitness goals. Maybe you want to lose a few pounds. Maybe you want to be a little more flexible. Maybe you even measure the distance between your feet when you stretch.

Maybe your goal is a belt rank. Oh, I want to get to that next belt. I have to learn this new form.

Maybe you have tournament goals. Oh, I want to be the champ. I want to win regionals.

Maybe your goal is to be a teacher, to have a certain standard for your students.

But what about your goals for just yourself when you’re not wearing the belt, you’re not wearing the uniform, you’re not in the school. What are your character goals? Who do you want to be?

I’m not sure if everyone asks that question. I think it’s more common to ask that question before you start training. Like, Ah, something’s missing from my life, whether it’s confidence, or toughness, fighting spirit, whatever, and you think, well, the martial arts is going to help me achieve that. I want to develop this.

But then again, there’s a little bit of a switcheroo. You start focusing on the exercises and not who you’re becoming doing the exercises. If it’s difficult to come up with your own character goals, because I hope you’ll think about that.

What am I trying to be better at? If it’s hard to think about that for yourself, easy exercise. What character goals do you have if you have a child, for your child, for your son or daughter? What goals do you have for them?

If you’re a teacher, what goals do you have for your students? What are the most important things that you want to see them develop as a human being under your tutelage?

Whatever those answers are, whatever you want for a child or a student, I presume you’d want those exact same things for yourself. Because your teacher would want those for you, your parents would want that for you, so of course you should want those things for yourself.

And you could probably now make up a long list of qualities that you would like to see in yourself. I’ll pick three, because three is a nice number.

Number one, I would hope for myself and for you that you could develop a character that has no fear in the face of failure. That’s the theme of this episode today, right?

It’s okay to suck. I need you to embrace that. I need to embrace that. To not be afraid to lose, to not be afraid to suck, to be the worst one in the class.

Ultimately, I think those are just symbolic of not being afraid to die. Getting killed in a fight, self-defense situation, that’s the ultimate loss. You suck. You died. That guy got the best of you today.

Okay, but I can’t be afraid to fight the fight. That doesn’t make sense. So how do you get over that? Well, you get over the fear of failure by not identifying yourself first as always being a winner.

If you create an identity for yourself where you win, you’re perfect, you’re awesome, you’re a black belt– you’ve just set yourself up to be afraid to fail. You don’t want your students to see you making mistakes. So you don’t participate with students. You just give orders from the side.

There are some teachers like that, but I don’t want that to be you. The only way you can get over that fear of failure is to make it a habit, to give yourself the opportunities to suck.

I just said I went back to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu so I could formally, routinely, on a schedule, suck in public with people who have been doing it less time than I have, because that’s good for my soul. So that I am in a habit of saying, I’m not afraid of dying, I’m not afraid of failing, I’m not afraid of sucking. It’s good for you.

So number one, I would say build the character that is not afraid to fail.

Number two, make it a character goal to focus on progress, not perfection.

You’ve probably heard that idea before. I won’t go into it for too long then. Progress not perfection. Perfection is exhausting. The pursuit of perfection, even if you can achieve perfection, it’s exhausting.

It is stressful and ultimately it’s self-defeating. Because it only, from my experience, leads to insecurity. When I have achieved in my mind the status of, Hey, I think I’m the best one in this group, the stress to maintain that title can be crippling.

When I think back to school and I was the leading student, straight A’s, I’m the number one rated in the class, that was incredibly stressful. I didn’t mind the work to achieve it, to achieve that status, but the stress to hold on to it, because now my identity was connected to it– Oh, he’s the star student. Oh, he’s the best one here.

Whoa, now I’m afraid to make mistakes, now I’m afraid to fail, because that’s going to kill my identity. That’s going to destroy my ego, but I can’t allow that to happen.

So, by focusing on progress, not perfection, that’s a totally different life, that’s a totally different lifestyle. If you’re just focused on improvement, just what can I make a little better today? Yeah, I’ll fail in the effort of it, but if I could just improve a little bit today, then class is exciting, always exciting. It’s fulfilling, and ultimately, instead of being self-defeating– I’m working against myself because I don’t want to try anymore because I’m afraid to fail– it’s actually empowering, because I don’t care who’s watching me.

I don’t care who I work out with. I don’t care if I trip, if I fall, if I tap, if I get hit, I don’t care because I’m only focused on progress, on the learning, and that’s the way we should all be.

Third, number one, be fearless in the face of failure, two, be focused on progress, not perfection, and number three, as a character trait, be a fighter.

Be a fighter. I would love to be regarded as a fighter. I would like you to be regarded as a fighter.

This goes back to the original tenets of Taekwondo as I first learned them, one of which, indomitable spirit. Nothing keeps you down.

You cannot only show the toughness to endure hardships and humiliations and failures, you persevere through them. You keep moving forward. You get knocked down, you get back up. You’re not riding the pine, riding the bench. You get back out on the field and you play, and you play hard.

And it doesn’t matter if you lose, it doesn’t matter if you’re the worst one out there, you’re out there. That goes back to the participation trophies. That is a noble character trait that you do not give up, that you keep going. Even if people are pointing and jeering and mocking.

They’re usually doing that from the stands. It’s usually not the people standing next to you on the team. So let the people who are watching from the side mock you all they want. Get out there, fight.

Even on the show, I usually end every video and podcast by saying, keep fighting for a happy life. That doesn’t mean I have a happy life. That doesn’t mean I’m always happy. No, I’m saying you’re fighting for the happy life. I’m fighting for a happy life.

Keep fighting for a happy life. Not just one day or for that month I was fighting, you got to keep fighting. But the only way that you improve your life, you get closer to happiness, is if you try. And if you try, you will fail. But if you’re afraid to fail, you won’t try, and if you don’t try, you can’t improve, and therefore you can’t have a happy life.

So the formula is very simple. If you can be a fighter, focus on progress, and not be afraid of the failure, that’s your best shot at having a happy life.

It all makes sense to me. So now, back to you.

Before you turn off this video today, what can you improve right now? What can you make better today? Just a little bit. But to do it, you’re going to have to face yourself sucking maybe, not being so good.

So, you want to kick over your head? Go try to kick over your head. Give it a couple more chances. You want to control your breath and stay cool under pressure, fighting at business, or fighting with your family or something, not going your way. You at least want to stay calm. Work on that today. Make that a little bit better.

You want to do a handstand, but you suck at it. You want to juggle, pick up a new skill, cut up a celery as fast as you can without cutting your finger. Whatever it is, go try it. Today, don’t be afraid of failing. Don’t be afraid of the sucking. That’s what makes you cool. That’s the best part.

If while you’re doing this, someone sees you and they say, you suck, I want you to say, thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, I do suck, but I’m working on it. I’m getting better at it.

When you see yourself sucking and you say to yourself, Ah, I suck at this, I suck. I just want you to smile and say, good job. Good job facing this fear. Good job for making the effort to improve. That’s what it’s all about.

So that’s my message for you today. Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to lose. Don’t be afraid to suck.

I suck. I hope you suck too. That’s the secret to success. And that’s the secret to a happy life.

So there’s your challenge. Get out there and suck. Then keep fighting to make things a little bit better. And hey, don’t let anybody stop you. Especially you.

Until next time, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #106: It’s Okay to Suck at Martial Arts [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #105 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Waiting to Die.”

My wife and I once found ourselves in a scary situation. Fortunately, we lived to tell the tale… so I’m going to tell it!

Of course, you don’t need to survive a scary situation to remind you that life is short—or at least you shouldn’t! But consider this…

From the moment we are born, we are all waiting to die. The big question is are you making the most of your life before that day comes?

In this episode, I’ll share my thoughts on how to live a healthy, productive life. We may not control everything (or much at all!), but we should definitely try to take control when we can.

To LISTEN to “Waiting to Die,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you!

Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released.

Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Howdy, friend. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. And I really do believe that.

Today, I’ve got a story for you. It’s a short story, but it’s pretty intense. Frankly, the story has a lesson in it that pretty much speaks for itself. But you know me, I will beat it into the ground, so make sure you stick around for that. Let’s get right to it.

Okay, this story occurred a few years ago now. On a sunny day in Los Angeles, my wife and I were out running errands. Turns out she needed some hair product, so we stopped into a drugstore. I realize now that many stories in my life have started with my wife needing hair product and us walking into a drugstore.

Okay, but on this particular day, we’re standing in the aisle, and she’s deliberating over every brand of hair product there is. And I’m kind of tuned out until I sensed a disturbance in the force…

Some voices were getting kind of loud towards the front of the store, and so I glanced over. And all of this happens in a split second, okay? So I’ll try to slow time down here. But as I glanced over– I’m hearing loud voices– and as I’m locating the source of the sound, in a split second, I see a scruffy guy standing at the cash register, clearly having some type of words, some type of argument, with the employee at the cash register.

And then his hand raises, the sunlight catches it, and I see that little sparkle, it’s metal. So I say, Gun! Yes, in public, out loud, I scream, Gun! And then I ran.

Okay, so wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Don’t judge me. First of all, I am willing to help in a bad situation. I’ve told other stories where I’ve gotten involved. But in this particular case, the cash register was perhaps 20, 25 feet away. Obstacles in the way.

It seemed that this situation was already gonna go the way it was gonna go. So in that split second, my instinct was run. So I’m not gonna apologize for that.

Secondly, if you saw this on a security camera, if you saw me, it probably would have looked like I was a hero of sorts. Because I say to the store at large, gun! And then I immediately turn, as if shielding my wife, and herd her towards the back of the store, away from the gunman. And then we both bolt down that aisle.

Okay, but now an honesty check. If she had been standing on my left when I had seen what I saw, I’m not convinced necessarily that I would have grabbed her and pulled her with me. It’s possible, just possible, I would have darted off on my own. But we don’t know, because that’s not the way it happened. I’m going to go with what the security camera shows, which is a heroic husband herding his wife down the aisle.

All right, so anyway, back to the story. Gun, turn, push wife, running down aisle. So we’re booking down the aisle, and there’s still voices behind us. That’s the only noise I’m hearing. And as we’re coming to the end of the aisle, towards the back of the store, an old man comes rounding the corner, and I’m about to run straight into him.

He’s on a walker. He’s got both hands on a walker. He’s coming around that corner. He doesn’t know what’s going on. Perhaps he’s not hearing well. Like I say, he’s old. Even an old man would look at this man and say, he’s old.

So he’s barely getting around the corner. I almost run straight into him. So I kind of peel off. I just glide past him. And as I pass him, I say, there’s a guy with a gun. That was my helpful citizen help at that moment. I said, there’s a guy with a gun. And slid right past him. And my wife and I headed to the back of the store.

So I’m not going to see that guy again. He’s a sitting duck. There’s no chance for that guy.

Now, as we’re booking, we run out of store. We’re already in the back. So we turn towards the corner. And there’s one of those kind of fake doors that separates the back of the store from the front of the store, kind of rubbery type of shield things. So we burst through that, right? Because this is an extraordinary circumstance.

We burst through that, looking for a door out of the building. Sure enough, there’s a door right there. A big cinder block wall. There’s the door. Big bar across the door. Push on the door. Locked. Actually chained up. There’s a big chain wrapped around it. That door is locked.

No, no, no. How can this be? Boom, boom, boom. But we can’t get out. All right.

So quickly, looking around this very small space, there’s a very narrow staircase leading to what looks like an office space up on the second floor. Perfect. So we both book up the stairs, get through the door, leave the lights off. It’s dark. Close the door.

There’s no lock or anything on it, but we just close the door and we huddle to the back of the room. And that’s it. In that moment, listening for gunshots, listening for mayhem, hearts pounding in our ears, right?

I shouldn’t speak for my wife. Heart pounding in my ears. We were basically just waiting to die. In my mind, this guy’s on a shooting spree. He’s going to come through that door any moment and he’s going to just shoot us.

Now, this didn’t last long at this point–once we got up to this office. But there was just enough time, thankfully, to learn a lesson. There was just enough time for my mindset to switch from hiding, waiting to die, and have that change into, Wait, if anyone comes through that door, we attack. It doesn’t matter what he’s got, what the gun, it doesn’t matter. We’re going down fighting.

So there was just enough time to make that switch from doing nothing and deciding to do something if that situation arose. Now, at this point, it’s been quiet. Other than some excited voices, it’s been quiet. No gunshots have been fired. And we eventually hear an employee say, he’s gone.

Okay, so it seems like the coast is clear. And now I’ll tell you why there were no shots fired. I was wrong. He did not, in fact, have a gun. That was my bad. It turned out it was a knife. More properly, it wasn’t even a knife. He had a piece of metal. Sure enough, it was metal. I got that part right. And it had been sharpened. It was like a crude machete type of thing.

There was a genuine threat. He did in fact slash the employee across the face with it. And I believe he received first aid, an ambulance came, and I believe they took him to the hospital. We didn’t have to give a statement or anything like that, so we didn’t stick around. So he was taken out.

And for what it’s worth, the scruffy guy was in fact, a homeless guy. And he was known to the employees in the store. He was actually someone who had kind of taken camp, or made camp, in the front bushes of the store. So they knew him from just kind of being in and out, or having the police come and clear him away a couple of times.

So we found out that they had known him, but he was in fact arrested anyway. Well, of course.

So there you go. So by the end of this story, my wife and I are safe. The injured employee had been taken to the hospital. The bad guy had been arrested. And we left with a hair product and a lesson. If it isn’t already obvious to you…

First of all, the big lesson. Life is all about chance. Life is just built on chance. Two kinds of chance that I’m going to break it down into.

I think there’s passive chance and active chance. Passive chance is the idea of, Hey, you know what? Sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On the other hand, you might be in the right place at the right time. So it can work either way for you.

Bad things can happen to you for no reason, and good things can happen to you for no reason.

But either way, you have nothing to do with it. It’s just what the universe has in store for you. Passive.

The other kind of chance, active. And by active, I mean you’re choosing things. You are purposely taking chances. Choice. That’s the mechanism of chance. Choice.

Your choices at any given moment are going to put you on a path for either these chances or those chances. Good chances, better chances, bad chances, whatever. But your choices are going to dictate your chances.

What do you do? What do you not do? That’s what it comes down to. Because not doing something is also a choice, right? You choose to do something or you choose to wait and not do something.

Take the old man for example. Because he’s the key character to this whole story, in my opinion. The old man took a chance by choosing to leave his house that day. He is physically vulnerable. He’s on a walker.

I don’t believe he could hear very well because he hadn’t already turned for the back door when I yelled, gun. So here’s someone who’s vulnerable, yet he left his house. He took that chance to leave. Presumably he drove. He certainly didn’t walk. He drove there and I’m sure his reflexes aren’t what they used to be.

So he took a chance getting into a vehicle. How about that? Now you could say, wow, maybe that was reckless. Maybe he shouldn’t have left the home, his house, or the home. Maybe he shouldn’t have been driving. But on the other hand, isn’t he also taking a chance staying at home?

Don’t you also take a chance not socializing with anyone and just being in your home all day alone? Doesn’t that lead to isolation and loneliness and depression? Doesn’t that take you down a different path? Yeah.

Not exercising his independence. Still feeling, no matter what his vulnerabilities are, that he’s able to get into a car, drive himself to the store, buy what he needs and come home. Just that exercise of willpower. That is worth something.

And isn’t it also true that he could be at home, choosing to not go out, fall in the shower, no one’s there to help him, and he dies alone in the bottom of a shower. So he’s taking a chance whether he leaves the home or whether he doesn’t leave his home. That’s why this is so interesting.

Let’s talk about me. Even more interesting. Number one. Well, I could take a chance at running towards this guy who I thought had a gun, or even if I knew it was a knife, you could take a chance to go over there and intervene and maybe help out. That would have been taking a chance.

What if instead of thinking about the back door, I see the front door? It’s around the bad guy. What if I just grabbed my wife and we both ran out the front door? We could have taken a chance to go closer to the action to go out that exit to escape. We chose not to.

Okay, so chosen not to engage with the bad guy, chosen not to go towards the danger, towards the door, but we’re still choosing to escape. So now we’re choosing to go towards the back of the building.

Okay, that’s our new chance. Now we take a chance, choosing to hide. If our mentality had not switched to choosing to attack, then we’re taking a chance that maybe he’s going to open the door, he sees us, but maybe I can negotiate. There’s a chance, there’s something I can offer him or talk him down or somehow relate to him in some way so we don’t get shot or spare my wife, shoot me, whatever.

It’s all taking chances. Even attacking would be taking another chance. If not in the front of the store, up in the office, it still would have been taking a chance. So either way, you’re taking chances.

So that leads us to the big question…

What type of chances are you taking?

What dictates your choices? Which path of chances are you putting yourself on in any given moment and why? I think it’s a deep, deep question, really.

Are you the kind of person, have you trained yourself to be someone, who waits or someone who does things and takes action? Are you the type of person who holds on to kind of see, let’s see what happens, let’s see what happens before I make any decisions? Or do you say, you know what, it doesn’t matter what’s happening, I’m going to start making things happen. I’m going to make some opportunities here.

Are you the type of person who is hiding away from the world and hoping good things come to you and hoping bad things stay away from you? Or are you the kind of person who is attacking life that carries its own hopes? You’re going to go on the attack and hope you get good things and avoid bad things, but it’s still hope, it’s still chances.

So what kind of person are you? Are you living your life based on passive chance or active chance?

Now, like I said, this doesn’t have to be a long episode today. I think these lessons are really clear. For me, I believe I would like to be known as someone, I would like to become a person who is not hiding. I don’t think that hiding and waiting is a very healthy or productive lifestyle, generally speaking.

Of course, there’s always going to be times where you need to gather more information, we have to let certain situations play out naturally. Yeah, it doesn’t have to always be go, go, go, do, do, do. No, there’s a balance, of course.

But what I’m talking about specifically is this idea of hiding because you’re afraid to take a chance. That’s different. And I think you know what I’m talking about. If not you, think about the people you know.

I have no doubt that you know people, people you love, people you care about, who are hiding. Maybe they have a talent they’re not using, a skill set they don’t employ, potential that is not being met. And that could be a dicey subject to judge someone and try to measure what’s your potential and what are you actually manifesting and making happen. That could be a little murky. But the point is the same.

You know people who are, let’s say, underperforming, who are purposely not engaging with life the way you would hope they would, because you know they have something good to offer.

I know certainly if you teach martial arts, as I do, you know what, even if you’re just a fellow student with other martial artists, other students that you care about and you see developing, but they’re not developing enough. You see a student giving up in sparring, or tapping out too early, or using an injury to play it safe and not push themselves in other ways that they could, but they use that injury as kind of a way to hide behind something, so they don’t have to participate 100%.

Afraid of failure, afraid of success, I talk about these themes all the time, but that’s all under this umbrella of hiding. Something is preventing you from actively making choices that put you on a path that takes more chances, the chances that you can be proud of, win or lose.

So, bottom line, I believe life is for living. It’s not for waiting. It’s certainly not for hiding. Life is about taking chances, not just waiting and hoping that the chances that are already in place are going to favor you. I just don’t think that’s healthy or productive.

There’s one detail of this story that I left out…

And again, to me, the old man is the key figure in this story, because he would be an example of someone who was just at the wrong place, the wrong time, and you would hope by that point in his life that he had made enough active choices in his life. He had taken willfully chances that he wanted to, so he could die with no regrets, so that he could die a happy death. That would be my hope for him.

But here’s this last little detail that you might find interesting. I did.

The day that this all happened was Ash Wednesday. If you’re not familiar, Ash Wednesday is a Christian holiday, a holy day. I think that’s the same word, a holy day, where you mark your forehead, a priest, marks your forehead with ash, literally ash. And it’s a reminder.

It’s a reminder that you are from ash and you will return to ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. So basically the theme is mortality. That we’re all going to die. We’re all waiting to die.

Now that might sound like a downer, a bummer. However, the flip side of it is life is short. So you want to make the most of it. You don’t want to be in hiding. You don’t want to be passive. You want to take those chances. You want to make some choices that put you on the path as close to what you want as possible.

So yes, the message that you should already know is we’re all waiting to die. From the moment you’re born, we’re waiting to die.

And passive chance might bring you disease or a stray bullet or a car jumping a curb, and it takes you out immediately. You had no chance, and that was your life. So we’re all waiting to die in that way. But there’s more than one kind of chance that we can take. It’s not all passive, it is active.

So my question to you, my friend, is are you actively taking chances? Are you on the attack in your life? Are you curled up in a dark corner? Or are you out there in the light, swinging, swinging punches?

I hope that you’re living your life as much as you can, your way, not waiting around, but making things happen. To me, that feeling of hiding, when we were up in that dark office, it was so symbolic. I told you, I’d beat this into the ground. We were sitting, I think, I believe, we actually went not only into this dark office, closed the door, but then we were sitting for a moment.

I don’t know why we grounded. Be a smaller target, perhaps. And that felt exactly like death. It felt exactly like death.

What is death? You dig a hole, let’s say, at the end when it’s all over, and you’re put in the ground in a box, and it’s dark, and you’re just there motionless. Stuck, trapped, limited, boxed in. And that’s what it felt like.

If you feel like that in any time in your life, at any time, we’ve got to break out of that. We’ve got to stand up. We’ve got to get that dirt out of our face, and get out and back into the light, get up on top. Because it’s just no way to live down there. Don’t hide.

The big message, my friend, life is short. Don’t go down waiting to die. Go down fighting for a happy life.

Okay, let’s not waste another second. Life is very short, my friend, so I’m very honored that we can spend a little time together.

Until I see you next time, smiles up! Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #105: Waiting to Die [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #104 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Participation Trophies.”

Awarding trophies for participation, as opposed to the actual winning of an event, is a controversial topic. But should it be?

Over the years, I’ve seen the good and the bad side of awarding participation trophies… and the crazy side! In the end, my vote is in favor of the practice… depending on HOW it’s executed. In fact, I’d say it’s no different from awarding belt ranks in the martial arts!

In this episode, I’ll share my thoughts on the value of recognizing effort and celebrating first steps on and off the mats. Is it possible that simply showing up to try really is more important than being the best?

Listen to my rant, then let me know what YOU think! Thanks for participating. High-five for you. 🙂

To LISTEN to “Participation Trophies,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released.

Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Howdy and welcome to episode #104 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

My name is Ando. I’ll be your host, which makes you my guest. Welcome, thanks for showing up. That’s actually what we’re going to talk about today, showing up. Let’s get right to it.

Comedy writer, filmmaker Woody Allen has a quote that’s been attributed to him, and it goes something like this–

80% of success in life is just showing up.

In other words, participate, participation. Now, I have already made a video called The One Move Workout that basically offers up this exact same sentiment. And it came in response to all the emails I get with people who say they don’t have time to work out, or they’re too old, or they’re injured, or they’re losing motivation, and they just don’t know how to set up a workout.

I would always tell them, just do one move. Even just do one move one time, because if you do that first move, you’re likely to do the second move. And if you do a couple of moves, you’ll probably do a set. And if you do one set, you’ll probably then keep going and do a second set. One thing will lead to another.

What’s the most important part? What’s the most difficult part? Getting started.

So really, even in fairness for that video or that idea, before you can do the one rep, before you pick that one exercise, you have to show up. Go to the gym, go to your martial arts class, go into that part of your home where you work out, and get there first. Just get there. Then you can move on to the first exercise and first rep.

So participation is really what it’s all about. Just showing up. Should you get an award for that? Ah, now we’re into kind of a controversial topic. Participation trophies.

If you talk about participation trophies, you’ll find a lot of people immediately roll their eyes and say, ugh, that’s the reason for the downfall of Western civilization. Every child feels like a winner or is made to feel like a winner. There’s no such thing as first, second, or third place. Everybody’s equal. Giving everybody a trophy for everything is a scourge.

All right, well, I’ve worked with kids for a long time, and I’ve handed out participation trophies. So let me offer my point of view on that subject…

Any idea is good or bad based on how it’s executed. That’s my opinion. Any idea can be good or bad depending on how you do it, how you run it.

For instance, martial arts. How do you feel about belt ranking? Right off the bat, you’ll probably get a couple of camps again. One is going to roll their eyes and the other one is going to say, no, they’re an important tool.

In the beginning, let’s say Judo, early Karate, they came up with this idea about belt ranking, right? And there was black and there was white. Sound like a good idea? Well, it’s not that bad, is it? Even if you’re against belts, at least it kind of made a gesture to say, okay, you guys are brand new. You’re the white belts. You guys have been here for a while, so why don’t you wear the black belts?

So at a glance, I at least know who I’m talking to, beginners and some advanced people. Not a bad idea. All right, we’re on board so far.

Then someone said, well, but there are people who’ve been here kind of in the middle. We don’t want them to give up. So how about a brown belt? Yeah, but then there’s some people who’ve been here a little less, but we want to encourage them. How about a green belt? And then so on and so on.

Over the decades, not just in this country, yellow, orange, blue, red, purple, purple, polka dot, camouflage, gold, silver, you name it. Now, is that still a good idea?

What about adding stripes? It’s not enough that you have all these colored belts. Most schools, many schools, put stripes on those belts. One, two, three, four, five, many. Right off the bat, you might walk into a school, maybe they have 10 different color belts, and each one has three to five stripes on it.

So now how many ranks, I’m not a math guy, but it seems like right away now you have 30 to 50 different rankings in that school. Is that still a good idea?

I’m not here to judge your school or your beliefs. I’m just pointing out that an idea can be as simple as two belts or as complex as 50 belts. Good or bad? I think it depends again on how it’s executed. Is there meaning behind each one of those rankings?

Like I said, I’ve handed out Participation Trophies. I’ve dealt with the extremes and I’ll give you those two extremes right now. Let me give you the crazy one.

Yeah, I’m going to say this mom was crazy. Here’s an example of the worst side of Participation Trophies.

In the school, we were running a tournament, so usually a limit of 12 to 15 kids, something like that. So we put up the flyers, Hey, participate in this tournament. And this is for kids 4 and 5 years old.

Three days out from the tournament date, only two kids have signed up. So what we typically do is say, Well, that’s not much of a tournament. Let’s postpone it until we can get some more sign ups. No problem. So we postpone the tournament.

Next day, get a hot call from a mom. This will be the crazy mom. Get this hot call from this mom who says, How dare you cancel that tournament! I had grandma coming in. It was going to be a big family event. We’ve already planned the whole day around that tournament.

I calmly say, Oh, I didn’t see your name on the roster. Did you already sign up for it? No, we hadn’t signed up for it yet. Oh, okay. So point for me on that one. How am I supposed to organize an event if I don’t even know if you’re coming?

But now here’s the crazy part. You ready?

She says, she demands, she yells, I still want a trophy for my kid. He’s so disappointed. He was so looking forward to participating in that tournament. I feel he should still get a trophy for it.

Now, I’m a professional and I’m kind. So I talk her through this, as opposed to just laughing and hanging up and canceling them immediately.

What are you talking about? The kid’s four years old. You’re telling me, I mean– I don’t believe for a moment this child is sitting there, anticipating the event, imagining getting a trophy and grandma’s proud of him. I don’t believe any of that for a moment. This is a mom, from her heart, wanting something for her child that she believes will make him feel great.

Again, I’m not saying bad mom, I just think in this case a little crazy not seeing the bigger picture here. The crazy part being awarding a trophy, not just for participating but for not participating. For sitting at home doing nothing.

And then can you imagine that presentation of being handed a trophy and the kid looking up like, Well, what’s this for? Oh, you know, the tournament that we were going to do? No, I don’t remember.

Anyway, that will be the one extreme of absolute nonsense, bad execution. If you give that kid a trophy, that is badly executed. Terrible idea.

Let’s go to the other extreme for a second.

Let’s say the school’s got 200 kids in it and you have this opportunity for a tournament. Is that a sell out? Not always the case. Let’s say you get 8 kids out of 200 who show up. And again, these can be young kids from 4 to 10.

And let me be clear, when you have children working with you, many of them are terrified at stepping into a tournament situation. Crying, fighting with their parents in the car won’t come out of the car. Maybe they come into the school, but now they won’t put their uniform on. Maybe now they won’t step into the dojo.

Maybe they step into the dojo and then they have a meltdown and start crying. Maybe they participate in one or two events and then have a meltdown and have to be escorted out of the building. What do you say to those kids?

They did the hardest part in my mind. If you’re a 4 year old, a 5 year old, up to 10. Whatever. It’s not easy to get out of your house, the comfort and security of your bedroom, put on a uniform, drive across town, show up to an event, be put on the spot, perform, do this, do that. There’s clocks, there’s measurements, there’s clapping, there’s all kinds of stress from competition.

Shouldn’t there be something to offer that human being to let them know, Hey, we celebrate the fact that you showed up? 190 other kids said, No way, we’re not going. Even if you excuse the ones who are playing soccer or had other family commitments, I get that, but still my point is, the vast majority choose not to participate.

So for the ones who get through that barrier, the emotional fears and the psychological insecurities to show up, stand up, get in there, try your best, win or lose, I don’t mind giving that kid a trophy and saying good for you for being here today. I think that’s a well done execution of the idea of a Participation Trophy.

Now let me be clear, that trophy doesn’t say first place on it. The way we figured it out was, hey, these are young human beings, we want to encourage them to try things, so let’s give them a trophy for being here and going through this, but then we’ll also give medals for whoever comes in first. They should get an additional award.

You were first place, so therefore you get the award on top of the trophy just for being here in the first place. Is that so wrong? Is that so bad? In my opinion, that was a healthy way to explain an award, and that’s the key here.

In the case of Participation Trophies and the subject of participation in general, you have to be clear about why you’re giving the award to someone. What is this for?

If you give a trophy to anybody, but particularly the young, and say, You’re a winner. You’re equal to everybody. We’re all the same. Well, no, that’s not true. That’s a lie. And that will blow up in someone’s face at some point. Then it does become entitlement. It does become a false sense of confidence and competence. That doesn’t make sense.

But if you say, this is because you were here. You left the comfort of your home, you stood up to your fears, and you participated today, that’s a big deal because most people didn’t. Most people did not answer the call. So we’re proud of you just for that.

And believe it or not, they will still cry if they didn’t win, and that’s fine. That’s the emotional journey now. Bcause most human beings, if one person gets something, we all want something. So when you have that extra tier of, Well, you weren’t the fastest person today, or you didn’t do the most reps of something, well, that’s why he got the medal. They still get the life lesson if you execute this well.

All right, that’s my point.

The big thing is, I believe it’s totally proper to encourage people and award people, not just for being number one, but for participating, for effort in life. That’s ultimately going to be more important than always winning, because we don’t always win. We’re not all number one. That’s a small number of people.

But if the alternative is, don’t participate, don’t even try, because you’re not great, because you won’t be a legend at this, then why would anybody do anything? If they haven’t understood the great feeling that you get just from participating, that it’s something joyful. And if in the beginning you need a little outside, extrinsic reward to make you see how cool it is and you get something for it.

I think it’s hard for some people if they go through first experience and they get nothing. They just feel like they lost and then it’s done. Maybe they don’t want to do it next time because not only did they have a hard time getting there, now they feel humiliated.

Yeah, losing is a good lesson, don’t get me wrong. But that’s a secondary lesson. The first lesson is good for you for putting yourself out there, man, because that’s not easy.

All right, so one category of participation that should also be celebrated, I think, is creation. Creation of any kind. This reminds me of a quote from another comedy writer, Steve Martin. You know him. And I don’t recall the exact wording of this, but this was the idea.

This was at the time when he had a movie come out called Bowfinger’s Big Thing. I was actually an extra on that movie. You can’t see me, but I was on the set for a day. When that movie came out, there were plenty of bad reviews for the movie. And typical, that’s normal. But what I loved was his response.

I heard him in an interview and he said, Gee, I thought the movie was pretty good considering that when I started, it was just a blank sheet of paper. Now isn’t that great? I think that’s fantastic because people just take the creative process for granted.

Once again, it’s not easy to create something, whether it’s making a video, writing a song, getting up on stage to perform a poem, to start a business, to start a family, to start a new job, starting a class in martial arts, starting anything. Creating a new career path.

It’s not easy to create and put yourself out there in that way, like a tournament. Creation is difficult. So you take for granted that, Oh well, someone had to have their own volition, sit down, face that fear, face that insecurity, put something down, and then share it and say, Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve created.

Particularly a movie which takes years to put together, right? And spends millions of dollars and employs all these people. And some jokes work, some don’t. And they put this whole thing together after years of work and thinking, and you put it out there, and then some person who just sees it for an hour and a half just goes, No, I don’t like it. It’s no good, it stinks.

Like, wow. So you just completely devalue the entire creative process that it took even just to put this in front of you. That’s not cool.

So that’s another point to think about. The encouragement of the participation, the encouragement of creation. Because we’re not here for very long, my friend. I think those things should be celebrated and encouraged.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m older now, right? I’m 51. When I was younger, I was a critic– don’t like that. That’s ridiculous. That’s stupid. And now I see, though, as I’ve gotten older, what’s really important. When I was young, I just thought, Oh, if it’s not the best, it’s no good. If you’re not number one, I’m not interested.

But as you get older, and the numbers start coming in, you realize how many things have you done that are number one, that’s the best in the world? Probably not a lot. But that doesn’t mean you’re a loser. That doesn’t mean you’re not a winner. It just means there’s only room for a few of the best. And that’s subjective, largely, unless you’re the fastest person alive or something. That’s measurable.

So as I got older, I realized that’s what I should be respecting. Someone’s initial effort and then their continuation. And the one example that always pops into my head is Barry Manilow. You know Barry Manilow, the singer/ performer? When I was a kid, it was very fashionable to make fun of Barry Manilow.

He was very successful, singer, songwriter, performer, but it was just pretty, you know, compared to the pop artists and the people who were cool on MTV, Barry Manilow or even Neil Diamond or Tony Bennett before he had his Renaissance period, these people were made fun of.

And then one day, I’ll never forget, I was late 30s and just flipping around the channels and they had a Barry Manilow concert on. And I had reached an age where I saw him with new eyes and new ears. I said, Well, look at this guy. His voice isn’t so bad. That’s a pretty darn good song he just sang. And he wrote that. And he’s still doing this and he still loves this after decades. He’s still going. Good for you, man. That’s awesome.

And then immediately, Neil Diamond, unbelievable. Look at this legacy you’ve been creating all this time. Even though you have your critics and ups and downs, but you’re still going, doing what you love. When life could be so cruel and try to stop you in so many different ways and you’re still going. Not right now.

Tony Bennett, I believe I just saw him. He’s 92, I think, with Alzheimer’s. He just performed maybe his last concert. He’s still going, still sounds great, but even if he didn’t, he’s up there on that stage and he’s doing something he loves.

At some point, that’s what you have to celebrate and you clap for it. And that’s a form of a trophy. You say, Good job, I’m going to clap for that. I’m going to tell people that I think you’re cool. I’m not afraid about that. I don’t care what anybody else is saying.

Oh, he doesn’t sound that good. Oh, he’s pretty old. Oh, how sad.

Shut up. What are you doing? And what will you be doing when you’re 92 and suffering? Will you still find joy in your life? Are you still going to be creating and doing and sharing? Hope so.

That’s the point of what I wanted to say today. Show up. Create. Do. Join. Start. Take that first step.

Don’t worry about being number one. Don’t worry about being great at it. Don’t worry about the success. The success is starting.

If you let the critics stop you, whether that’s the critic in your own head or the critics outside, they win. They win. You’ll never even come close to a success in any form, on any level, if you listen to the critics and the fears and the insecurities and the doubts. It doesn’t just doesn’t work that way.

You got to get up. You got to get out there and do it. And celebrate it.

How do you feel when you see someone in their 50s or 60s join your dojo? Starting Karate or BJJ for the first time, and they’re older.

Now honestly, like I said, when I was younger, I would think, Ugh, what a drag. I don’t have to spar with them. I don’t want to break them. Wow, they’re going to slow me down. I’m on a path to greatness here. I’m trying to be number one. This person clearly will never be number one. This is a waste of time for them. Why are they even here?

What a jerk. What an immature attitude. Now I get it, because I’m 51, and I started BJJ when I was older. I was like 40. Starting internal arts, older.

Now I have nothing but respect for those people, because I’ve lived long enough to know how hard it is to be the new person. Especially when you already know your time for being great has passed. It’s gone now. Your body won’t be able to put up those repetitions or go through those contests that everyone is watching to earn that championship belt. It’s too late for that.

So your scale is on something completely different, right? You’re being measured now on something else. Your effort, your spirit, your perseverance, your ability to make the most of what you have. And that’s the case for most of us.

Most people are not going to be the best, like I said. So we have to judge ourselves on these other qualities. Participation being number one. Because if you don’t show up to start it, you’ll never be able to prove your perseverance. You won’t be able to prove how tough you are or what a good student you are or how kind you are. You won’t even be there. You’ll be at home, hiding.

But the kid who’s crying under his bed? We cheer for that 90-year-old who’s testing for their first belt in Karate. We cheer for the little kid who was crying in the car but then came in and tried their best and worked hard and stood up to their fears. We cheer for both of them on the age extremes, young and old. But why should any age not be part of that celebration?

A teenager, you’re not going to be the best. I still celebrate that you’re on the team, that you’re trying. Didn’t make the team? I still celebrate that you came out and even tried to get on the team. Hope you come back next year.

I feel that it’s always scary to start something new. It’s always scary to sign up for that new class. It’s always scary to put yourself at the mercy of a new teacher or a new company or ask that person out on a date. All of it is scary. That’s why we should celebrate it.

Then once you get past that first hump of “I took the first step”, it’s difficult to continue to keep going. You’re a human being. You know this. You know it from your childhood. You know it from your adolescence. It never changes. If you’re young and you’re listening to me, it never changes. It only gets harder. But it shouldn’t.

You should not only make it easier on yourself to start things and try things and not care what other people think. you should be the first one to encourage other people to do the same thing. You should be the first one to clap for someone that you see signing up, getting on board, stepping into that room for the first time. Because you’ve been there. You know how hard it is.

So be the first person to cheer. Be the first person to go over to the new guy, give him a smile and a handshake and say, welcome. I hope you do well here. Be the first person to slap someone on the back and say, good job. I really like what you’re doing here. That’s really all I wanted to say.

Be fearless in your power of participation and celebrate other people participating. Because life is short. Life is short. And if you let these opportunities go by and you don’t participate, I believe that’s usually the number one sorrow, or the number one pain point, for senior citizens, for older people. They say, I don’t regret the things I did, I regret the things I didn’t do.

Don’t be one of those people. I don’t want to be one of those people. Even as I’m saying this, I’m thinking of things I always wanted to do and I haven’t done. I need to participate more. I’m guilty of it too. I let the fears get the better of me.

Martial arts helps me get past those. Because it’s never easy to get punched in the face. It’s never easy to get tackled and put on your back. It’s never easy. But getting in there and doing it, I’ve never driven home from a class. I may have gone into a class a little anxious, but I’ve never left a class feeling that way. I always go home feeling proud of myself for being there. Then I can figure out whether that black eye was worth it or not. But I never feel bad for at least I showed up. Ever.

So, my challenge to you, my friend, participate. Show up. And I don’t just mean for martial arts. Show up for every part of your life.

Participate with your family as much as that is healthy for you. Show up for them.

Show up for your friends. Participate as much as you can, as much as they can take your advice and support and help and love. Show up. Show up for them.

Show up for your career, your job. Do a good job. Care about what you’re doing. You owe that to yourself, first of all, integrity. And if people are paying you for it, you owe them that. If you don’t feel like you’re getting paid enough, well, then deal with that. But don’t blame them if you don’t feel like you’re in the wrong job, not getting paid enough, but then you’re quiet about it, well, do something about it.

Show up for your health. Show up for your happiness. Show up to make your life as happy as you can, okay, because it’s your responsibility first.

And along the way, I think you’ll find, as you participate, learning becomes your trophy. Laughing, enjoying that process, laughing at yourself, laughing at life, becomes another trophy that you can put up on your shelf. Your improvement, you’re not number one, but you’re getting better. You’re using what you’ve got. That becomes a trophy.

And who knows, along the way, no matter what age you are, if someone actually hands you a real trophy, take it, be proud of yourself, and put a picture of it up on your social media. Don’t be embarrassed to celebrate participation.

All right, that’s my rant for today. Thank you so much for showing up here. Now it’s time for you to go show up someplace else. Go participate, go create, go get something done.

Until I see you next time, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #104: Participation Trophies [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #103 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Tools Not Rules.”

Is there a difference between sticking to a routine and being stuck to one? YES, absolutely!

If you’ve ever felt like a failure for skipping a workout or been stressed out for missing a class, this episode is for you… because you shouldn’t feel that way!

When exactly did your martial arts training turn from being a joy to a job? The answer is simple—the moment you started to focus on rules instead of goals. Once that happens, you may quickly find yourself on a path towards self-destruction instead of self-improvement.

But don’t worry—I’ve got a solution!

Join me for a discussion all about control, responsibility, self-defense, and free will. Let’s make sure the tools you choose are working for you, not against you!

To LISTEN to “Tools Not Rules,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Howdy, howdy. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #103 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

Today’s topic, Tools Not Rules. What the heck does that mean? All right, I’ll tell you. Let’s start off with a question.

Who, my friend, is in charge of your training routine?

If you’re listening to this, you’re probably a martial artist. But even if you’re not, your daily life is set by some type of routine. So I want to know who’s in charge of that routine. Who is making the rules? Who is telling you who is choosing what you do, when you do it, and how you do it?

Are you following tradition? Is your routine based on rules set down for hundreds of years, from word of mouth to scrolls?

Are you listening to a teacher? Someone you admire? Someone who can do things that you cannot? And they’ve told you, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that. So that’s who set your routine.

Maybe you picked up some advice from a book or a video. Okay, fair enough.

But if you know me at all, and let’s say you do, you know that I believe you should be in charge of your routine. You’re the one who should be making the rules. Because after all, these are your goals that you’re pursuing. It’s your life.

However, no matter where the rules come from, let’s put that aside for a second, whether you’re following someone or you’re setting your own rules, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. And you’ll know that when you lose the joy of what you’re doing and everything just becomes a job, your joy becomes a job. When that happens, particularly if it feels like a job– that you don’t want to go to anymore, that you’d like to change, like you want to just run away from it– when that happens, that indicates that you’ve given up your power.

How does that happen? Well, I’m glad you asked. Did you ask? Because I’m going to tell you. But here’s how you lose your joy and you end up showing up for a job you don’t really want.

In the beginning, you have a goal. Because you’re cool, you want to improve your life somehow. So you set a goal. And it might be to lose weight. It might be to have more clarity and concentration. So let’s call that fitness of your mind, fitness of your body, fitness of your spirit, a better connection to the universe. You might just want some self-defense skills.

Whatever it is, you have a goal to improve some part of your life, which is going to require some control of your life. You have to choose exercise or diet or influencers to figure out how to improve your life. But this is a very powerful stage.

That desire to improve your life is power.

You want something. That’s a great place to start. Your actions are now starting to be taken. Great.

So the next step is you need a tool or multiple tools to achieve that goal. Okay. So for me to achieve the goals of self-improvement, martial arts. Powerful tool, I believe the most powerful tool. But maybe for you, it’s not the most powerful, but it’s one of the tools. Great. Whatever.

You choose martial arts. Powerful. Now, that’s going to lead to choosing a school, choosing a style, choosing a teacher, but it doesn’t stop there. You want to be really good at this stuff. You want more improvement. So I might have to supplement more tools.

Join a gym. I think I should lift weights or do some extra cardio on the side. Diet. I better watch what I eat to make sure I’m recovering, getting the nutrition that I need so that I’m healthier all around.

Might need to read some books. What have other people who practice martial arts found out? What’s their wisdom?

Meditation. Should I meditate? That’s another powerful tool. I’ve seen other people do that. Maybe I’ll do that.

Again, this is a very powerful stage because you’re the one choosing tools. You wanted something and now you’re figuring out how to get it. All good.

Now here’s where the dangers come in…

Here’s where you start to lose your power because up till now, you’re in charge. Number one danger, hero worship. We’ve talked about this one before.

You look at tradition or your teacher, or some sports hero, or a movie star, as knowing more than you, as having more wisdom than you, and you immediately put yourself in a subservient position that they know better for you, even if they’ve never met you.

I want to be like GSP. He doesn’t know you. I want to be Bruce Lee. That’s not going to happen.

So this is natural. Don’t get me wrong. When you start off, you have to be a follower because you don’t know. You wouldn’t have to go out seeking tools if you already knew how to do it. So that’s natural to put yourself in a subservient position in the beginning, at the start. But for how long?

How long should you play this role of just following? It can be dangerous because some people get stuck here forever– that original mentality of being a student, the original mentality of an empty cup, I don’t know what to do, please guide me– they never lose it. They never lose it.

It could be insecurity that keeps them there. It could be humility or false humility that keeps them there, but they just stay there. They just stay there and they get stuck forever. In other words, you’ve lost your power.

We’ve talked about that one a bit before, so I don’t want to go into that one too much now. What I want to switch it up to is the second danger. Instead of hero worship, it’s routine worship.

You worship rules. Whether they came from someplace else or they came from you, you’ve set some rules into your life and now that’s it. They never change. You are stuck on them.

Again, it’s natural to start with rules. Okay, every day I’m going to sit in a horse stance for five minutes. Every day I’m going to go to the gym and work out for an hour. Every day I’m going to read a chapter of a book and I’m going to meditate for 20 minutes.

Great, you set some rules. You’ve begun this process of self-improvement. Good for you. But part of the process of self-improvement is reflection, measurement. You have to assess, am I getting what I wanted when I chose these tools? When I set these rules?

Very often, you get so focused on following the rules, you get so obsessed about following the routine, that you forgot why you started the routine. And once again, you’re losing power now because now the routine has power over you. The rules have power over you.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Your experiences using the tools is supposed to lead you to reflection so that you can modify your choices. You might find out after a month or six months or a year that you need to choose a new tool because you’re not really getting what you wanted out of it. Or you might keep the same tool but set new rules for how you use the tool. That’s the wisdom of your self-discovery.

My friend Stephan Kesting, you know him over at grapplearts.com, he has a great podcast called The Strenuous Life. Definitely check that out. He talked about this recently in a video. The subject of overtraining. That might be what comes into your mind right away when I talk about this.

Overtraining– you’re following this routine and you’re not giving yourself chances to recover. You’re so obsessed with hitting the numbers every day, this many reps, this long, that you’re not paying attention, that your body’s breaking down. That you’re hurting yourself.

But I would like to propose to you that what I’m talking about isn’t just that physical danger. There’s a psychological danger. It’s not just that you’re doing the same thing over and over again. It’s you’re doing the wrong thing over and over again. That’s what I’m talking about today.

The psychological danger of rules.

So let me give you an example. In my 20s and 30s, I definitely supplemented my martial arts training with weightlifting. I definitely wanted to gain some muscle mass.

Now to do that, at the time, the science that I was aware of, the rule was if you wanted to gain muscle mass, you had to eat at least 2 grams of protein for every pound of bodyweight that you were carrying around. And you had to consume this protein– since that’s a lot of protein, if I was 170 pounds and I have to consume 2 grams of protein for every pound of bodyweight, okay, you do that math– you had to consume that every 4 hours. That was the second rule. Because if you didn’t, my understanding was that your body would start to cannibalize your muscle tissue for energy.

I think a lot of these rules have changed, these perceptions have changed, but at the time it had to be 2 grams of protein per pound of muscle mass and you had to eat every 4 hours or risk losing your gains.

So hey, I’m dedicated to self-improvement. I had a goal. I chose my tools. I set those rules. Now I’m following this routine for years.

One day, beautiful day, Southern California, sun’s outside, summer day, gorgeous. My wife innocently asks the crazy person, you want to go for a hike? And my reaction, I can only describe as panic. Inside, I could feel stressed out because I knew, well, that doesn’t fit my routine.

How long is that going to take? We got to drive there. We got to take the whole hike, get back to the car, get back. I don’t really want to carry a protein shake with me on the whole hike. I don’t want to leave it in the car. It’s going to get too hot. How can I possibly manage to get this protein shake into my– I can’t. It’s going to be four hours. I can’t.

And so I said that to my wife. I said, I can’t go hiking because I need my protein. I can’t go.

Now at that moment, I had already been in this routine for years. I heard how crazy that sounded, let alone her look of disappointment or frustration or contempt, whatever. I knew that that had gone too far. And that kind of broke the spell, that day.

I knew that the rule was causing me an unhealthy level of stress. I knew that if I was to go on that hike– which would have been a beautiful experience, right?– would have made me feel like a loser. How can that be?

How can taking a hike with your wife on a beautiful day, when you’re healthy enough to do that, you have the time to do that, you have all these blessings to do that, and all the benefits that come from taking a hike in the sun on a beautiful day, how can that possibly make me feel like a loser? Only because I was clinging to a routine and a rule that in that context made zero sense.

Of course, there’s lots of other examples of this that I hope that you’re now reflecting on in your life- rules that cause you stress.

I do a horse stance every day, five minutes, that’s the rule, been doing that for years. Try to do your forms every day, maybe you’ve set that rule for yourself. Meditate every day, read every day.

I’ve even preached this before. I love this old saying that, Hey, if whatever routine you’re on, whatever practice schedule you’re on, if you miss one day, you’ll know. If you miss two days, your teacher’s going to know. If you miss three days, everybody knows.

Man, I love that saying, I’ve shared that expression with people. However, it’s really just a formula for stress. It’s a formula for shame. Because if I go one day without training, immediately that’s what I feel. The whole day, I’m like, Oh, when am I going to train? Oh my God, I should be training.

And if I don’t meet that rule, then it’s shame. I feel like a loser when I go to bed. I feel like a loser the next day, even when I start training again, because I know I missed yesterday. Now, the quality of my life has dropped. Instead of being on a self-improvement path, I’m on a self-destruction path. That’s not acceptable. This is not how this routine stuff and rule stuff is supposed to work.

Failing the rule, failing your school, failing your teacher, failing your family, failing your friends, failing your style, however far you want to take it, this is not how you’re supposed to feel. You’re not supposed to feel weak and lazy because you’re following a routine or breaking a routine. None of that should be coming up.

When that happens, which is common, people quit their diets, making New Year’s resolutions, they can’t follow through after a couple of weeks, they quit, they give up, and that’s a mistake. When your rules become so important to you that breaking them means you feel like such a loser that you decide to give up on the whole project– I’m not even going to try to improve myself anymore, because I couldn’t stick to the routine, therefore, I’m a loser, forget it. Why even try?

What? Do you see how fast this gets crazy? You know what I’m talking about. This I think is just a universal human experience. So let’s get rid of it.

When you chose a tool, you had power. When you set the rules, originally you still had the power. When those rules started telling you how to live your life and started making you feel bad about yourself, now they’ve gotten into power. They are in power over you and that’s not okay.

So please remember, if you’re weightlifting, your goal is not actually to lift weights or to be good at lifting weights. Your goal is to get fit. That was the goal, right?

If you want to meditate, your goal is not to actually be good at meditating. That’s not what you sought when you started meditating. No, you were looking for self-knowledge or communion with the universe. You were looking for wisdom, enlightenment. You weren’t looking to be, oh, I’m really good at meditating, right?

If you’re practicing martial arts, your goal is not actually to be great at martial arts. That one might take a second to really think about, wrap your head around. If you’re taking any martial art, that’s not the goal to be great at it.

Oh, I want to master that art. That wasn’t really the goal, is it? You didn’t wake up one day and say, I want to improve my life. I want to be a master of martial arts.

No, you said, I want to improve my life. How can I do it? Maybe through martial arts. That’s my chosen tool. I just want to have a happier life, a healthier life. I want to have more peace in my life. I want to feel stronger, more confident. It’s not to be great at martial arts.

Right?

So, here’s the test. If you have a rule in your life, you’re following some routine today, if you feel stressed breaking that rule, then it has power over you, the scales have tipped in the wrong direction. If breaking your routine makes you feel like a failure, if it makes you feel like a loser, then you have to change that routine. That’s my advice for you.

Break the rule, change the routine when it has too much power over your self-worth and your self-esteem. That’s not the way it was supposed to work.

Here’s another way to think about it if it causes you stress, one, makes you feel like a failure, two. If you hear yourself saying something like, Well, if I don’t do it, if I don’t follow the rule, if I don’t meet up with my routine, I don’t even know who I would be. I would lose myself. That’s who I am. I am this routine.

That’s a problem. You’ve gone too far. It sounds cool, right? Like, I’m so committed and dedicated. That’s who I am. But no, actually, that’s crazy talk. I’ll tell you why.

I have this rule. I’m going to do my horse stance every day for five minutes. What if I was in a car accident today and I lost my legs and I wake up in the hospital? I have no legs. And I say, Well, I got to do my horse stance today. I got to do it for five minutes.

Now I can’t. Well, who am I? Is it really the case that I’m not still Ando? I’m not still me because I lost my legs? No. The routine may change, and if I don’t have legs, it will change. But I’m still the same person.

That was the point. I chose doing a horse stance every day to change myself for the better. And I don’t need the legs to keep changing myself for the better. I just need to find a different tool, a different set of rules. Right?

If you’ve chosen tools and you’re using them wisely, then you will be led to feeling more confident and more fit in your mind, in your body, in your spirit. But if your rules are abusing you, then you’re going the opposite direction. Now you’ve lost your power.

You’re becoming unfit. You’re getting unhealthier in your mind, body, and your spirit. You forgot why you started this whole project of self-improvement. That’s not cool. You will not only break yourself down physically, you will break yourself down psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and then you’re in big trouble.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying any of this to be disrespectful to a tradition that you’re part of, or a teacher that you admire and that you follow. Not at all. They all serve a purpose to present you with choices. They are solution givers to problems that you have.

You’re coming in saying, I want to improve something. They offer some tools to you, whether it’s a tradition, or a teacher, or a friend, whomever, a book. They are offering you, Well, here’s some things you can do. And here’s when you should do it. And here’s how you should do it.

They are sharing this information with you. They are offering you these tools. But these tools are like drugs. Drugs can heal you or drugs can kill you. The difference is whether you’re using those drugs or you’re abusing those drugs.

You might get a prescription today and it helps heal something. But once you’re healed, if you keep taking that drug, now it’s going to harm you. We have to approach everything we do in life with that same test.

Is this still helping me or is this hurting me?

Okay, so now let’s talk about you. Let’s take a look at your routines and the rules that you’re following on the path towards self-improvement.

Do you feel stress when you break up your routine? I hope you don’t. Because I’m thinking, there’s only two reasons that you do break your routine. And by the way, we all do it.

Because life happens. And when life doesn’t happen, you happen. Here’s what I mean.

Number one, life happens. I would just call this, you break a rule because of responsibility. Your self-improvement goals, that’s not the only thing you live for. You also have family responsibilities, community responsibilities, work responsibilities, maybe religious responsibilities.

I don’t judge you. But you’re more than just your training. Right? Your training is supposed to enhance your ability to function in all those other contexts of your life.

So, for example, let’s say today is leg day. Whether that means kicking or I’m going to go to the gym and lift weights for my legs. It’s leg day. But, oh no, someone in your family got into a car accident. I’m big on these car accidents today. They lost their legs. They’re in the hospital.

Now, when you get that call– Oh my gosh, mom’s in the hospital. She lost her legs.– you’re on your way to the gym. Your responsibility, however, now is to your mother to get to the hospital and show her support, be there for her, provide for her needs, try to improve her life.

But it is very possible that you’re going to stand there in that hospital room, not just feeling sad for your mother, but feeling stressed out because you feel like a need to be at the gym.

Today’s leg day. If I don’t get to the gym later, I’m going to lose my gains. I’m off track. My routine’s been shattered. I’m a loser. I’m failing.

That’s crazy, right? When do you give yourself the credit for answering bigger responsibilities? Leg day? Forget it. Your mom lost her legs. It’s no leg day. Isn’t that more important? Yes is the answer. In case you’re confused, yes.

So when do you give yourself the pat on the back to say, good for me for being there for her? Because my family responsibilities, the routine, the rule of respecting my mother, is more important than my leg day rule at the gym.

Give yourself credit when you’ve broken a routine because of a larger responsibility, whatever that may be.

Two, I said either life happens or YOU happen. What I mean by that is, impulse, instinct, intuition, all the ins. You just want to do something else. You just don’t feel like it today. Is that so bad?

Now, be careful. I’m not saying, I don’t feel like working out because you’re lazy. I’m not saying you should go out and trash yourself. Go out and binge on a couple pounds of bacon or a handful of barbiturates. I’m talking about when you’re grinding, when you’re in that job mode, when you don’t really want to train today because you’re aching from yesterday. You’re just bummed out. You just don’t feel excited about what you’re doing anymore.

I’m not just talking about the discipline. Yeah, part of improvement is going to be you got to keep going. Of course. But some days, you are better off choosing a different tool. This is important.

Breaking a rule doesn’t mean that you’re giving up on your goal. Some days you just need to choose a different tool to get to the same goal. Simple as that.

Okay, so you set a rule for yourself. I’m going to practice my forms every day. Great. That’s a fine rule. But one day, you just say, I just can’t. I can’t. Not today. I would rather just turn on some music and dance.

No, you’re not going to catch me ever doing that. Windows will be closed. Turn off the lights. I don’t even want to see me dance. But what about dancing? Aren’t there benefits to dancing? Yeah.

Are you still going to connect with your body? Yes. Is it still a release of tension? Yes. Is it fun? Yes. Does it still develop coordination? Yes. Isn’t that what the forms are doing too? Yes. It’s just a different context.

So you’re still on a goal of moving your body to make yourself healthier– mind, body, and spirit– it’s just you’ve chosen to use a different tool. Dance instead of martial art forms today. So for me, I’d say good for you. For you, I hope you say good for me. Good for you. Same thing.

You gotta go to the gym. This is like my wife when she asked me to go on a hike. Okay, well, I could go to the gym and be on the treadmill, do my routine there, count some reps, clock my times. Or you could just go for a hike. Go for a walk in the park. Aren’t there benefits to that too?

Yeah, we know the benefits you’re gonna get if you go to the gym, except that spiritually you’re just not into it today. So really you’re just feeling beaten down. Well, that counts for something. If you go for the hike, you’re gonna work your heart and your lungs, you’re going to expand your vision, you’re gonna see some greenery– studies show, that’s good for you– you might have a nice conversation with a loved one. There’s tons of benefits there, relaxation and breathing.

So you’re gonna get benefits either way, but I would argue, on this day that you have the impulse to not go to the gym, but go take the hike, you’re gonna get more benefit, and more important benefits. Instead of just a little bit of cardio at the gym, but feeling beat down, you’re exercising your power of free will. You’re exercising your self-determination. That’s more important than anything you were gonna get at the gym that day.

Right? Yes.

It reminds me, it’s gotta be over ten years ago, a long time ago, you might be familiar with that satirical online news site called, The Onion. They’ve been around forever. I haven’t been there lately, but they had an article a long time ago, and this was the headline. The headline was–

Karate Lessons Give Child Self-Confidence to Quit Karate.

This is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. There was a quote in that article, and here’s how it goes. The kid was talking, and he said, If it wasn’t for the focus and determination I learned in Karate, I would still be doing Karate right now.

Come on, that’s so perfect. It’s perfect because Karate was never the goal. If their parents, and this is all hypothetical, the parents signed this imaginary kid up for Karate– why? To develop confidence, to make decisions, to trust their instincts, to follow through on decisions. And they succeeded.

The child gained the confidence to say, You know what? I don’t need the Karate anymore. Perfect.

So let’s remember this as our real goal. Here’s your goal. Y

That should be the goal for everything you’re doing. You’re trying to improve your life. You’ve chosen a way to do it. You work it. And then you succeed at it, so that you don’t have to work it that way anymore.

You have the freedom to take another look and say, well, what do I want now? How do I get to another level of self-improvement? Is this still serving me or am I serving it? That should be part of it. Now you’re back in control. Now you’re freeing yourself.

Ah, you’ve achieved something, so much so that you can change it. That’s where the insecurity can come in. Maybe you don’t know, well, who am I if I’m not doing that routine? We already talked about that. That just proves that you’re stuck. That’s not what you wanted.

So please remember that your training routine, your training in general, is not just for your muscles, it’s for your mindset. Your training is not just for your cardiovascular system, it’s for your character. Those are the bigger self-improvement goals. Not just a little pump here, a little better blood pressure there. That’s small, small thinking.

Alright, now again, I’m not saying you should not have any rules in your life and have no routine. Development demands dedication. No question about it. But when you feel that that demand is attacking your self-worth, you gotta stop. You gotta break the rules, break up that routine.

You’ve gotta stop to remember who is in charge, who set up that routine in the first place, who made you follow those rules. You did. Even if you got them from someone else originally, you’re the one who chose to follow them.

So it’s all on you. You are the one in power. This is especially true if you consider yourself a perfectionist.

I’m a hard worker. I’m a little compulsive. I’m dedicated. I’m disciplined. If those words sound like you, it’s all positive. You need those qualities to achieve things. No question. I would rather fall into that camp than lazy, weak, quitter. Of course.

Be compulsive. Be disciplined. Go for perfection knowing you can’t achieve it, but strive for it. Yes.

But the trick here is to stick to your routine and not be stuck to your routine. One little letter of difference.

Stick to your program, but don’t be stuck on it.

That’s the difference. When you get stuck, when you’re headed in the wrong direction, there’s no way out. It’s just going to lead to self-destruction. If you’re just sticking to a program, then you’re able to let it go sometimes. You’re following it, but you can also get back in the front and lead it. That’s what we want.

Of course, everything that I’m saying right now about taking a breaks and breaking rules, this is occasional. If you find yourself with an impulse to break up your routine every week, every couple of weeks even, that’s definitely a clue that you need to probably find a different tool. It’s not working for you. It shouldn’t be that hard to follow your routine.

So just keep that in mind. This should be occasional.

The basic way you measure that is you should be feeling better when you break a rule. It should be a little bit of a relief like, Oh, okay, I found something else today. I feel better that I’m taking a hike than going to the gym. I actually feel empowered doing that. That should feel great.

And the crazy thing here is, when you break the rule, particularly because it’s for a greater cause, you have another responsibility to serve, even if it’s just to yourself, to your own impulses, your own instinct that day, you will gain more power from that, not less. You will feel that you’re back in charge. You’re the leader. And then everything changes for the better.

The crazier thing is that when you go back to your routine again, the next day, it’ll work more. It’ll give you more benefits. Because it’s like training a dog. It’s like now you have the dog back on the leash. You’re the alpha. I’m the one who’s training you. You’re not training me.

I just can’t say enough about the psychological and emotional importance of taking back your power to choose your tools and set your own rules. It just has to be that way.

Alright, so the first question I asked, let me repeat it: Who is in charge of your training? Is it you? If you’re not sure, remember you can always measure it with the amount of stress that you feel. With the amount of shame that you feel. When you’re not able to follow the rules and follow your routine, either because of life or because of your own impulses. If that leads to stress and shame, you’re probably not in charge. Your routine is in charge of you.

If you feel like a failure, if you feel like a loser, your tools have become rules. Gotta break it. If you feel like a follower, if you feel like a slave to your routine, you gotta break it. If you’re feeling weaker, not stronger, as you’re doing the work, no good.

We can’t let rules become more powerful than our intuition and our instincts. I hope we can agree on that. Because ultimately, when it comes to martial arts, we’re talking about self-defense skills. Whether that’s all the time in your brain or not, it’s martial arts. Martial. It’s self-defense. We’re fighting for everything. Our lives. Someone else’s life.

But if rules are in power over you, I would bet you your self-defense skills are fragile. When the pressure is on, it won’t be your technical skills that save you. It’s gonna be your character skills. It’s gonna be who you are first. Because the odds of a self-defense situation fitting perfectly into some technical routine that you’ve been following, that’s probably not gonna happen. There’s just way too many variables when it comes to self-defense. Way too many.

What you’re gonna need to rely on is who you are, what kind of person you are. Are you able to think for yourself? That’s gotta be part of your training. I’m training to think for myself.

Do you trust your decisions? That has to be part of your training. I need to trust my decisions. Because when someone’s flashing a knife around, I need to think for myself and trust myself to do what’s right. I cannot be thinking, well, what would someone else think? What’s the advice I should follow now? Ah, it’s too late.

You should be training to think for yourself and trust yourself. You should be training to listen to yourself.

When do you feel endangered? What do you feel is going to be the right move to do? When should you do it? How hard should you do it? How long should you keep going until you can get out of there? Until this danger is over?

All that’s gotta come from you. You need to train to free yourself, to make decisions and take action, and feel good about it. I’m not saying you have to feel great about taking down a bad guy, but if you’re fighting for a good cause, if you’re fighting because you’re a good person, and you’re defending other good people, I don’t see why that shouldn’t feel good. I don’t see why.

Alright, so, fitness of mind, body, and spirit. That means you’re empowered. And that power comes from control. And the control means you choose the tools, you choose the routine, you set the rules. That’s the big message.

And when it comes to martial arts as one of your tools, never forget, my friend, you’re the one who chose to do martial arts. You’re the one who chose it. And your goal was not to be great at martial arts, was it? Your goal was to improve your life. That was the goal. And as long as martial arts is serving that goal, then continue the way you’re doing it.

If it is not, if it’s causing you stress and shame and feeling like a failure, either change the art, change the school, change the teacher, or change your routine. That’s my advice.

If this idea causes you any stress even thinking about it right now, hey– break a rule just to prove to yourself that you’re in charge. Take a day off from your routine just to prove to your routine who’s in charge, who’s calling the shots.

If that idea in your head causes you a little stress, feels uncomfortable, you gotta do it. You gotta do it. Believe me, the universe, such as it is, will still love you if you break your routine. Your teacher will still love you if you break your routine. Your friends and your family, if they are worth knowing as people at all, will still love you if you break a rule.

What I want more than anything though is I want you to still love you if you break a routine or break a rule that you have set for yourself.

If that is still just a little too difficult today, if you can’t give yourself the permission the next time you feel an impulse to break your routine or the next time a bigger responsibility needs you to be there and now you’re feeling stressed about it, if you need permission, then I’ll give it to you right now. Okay, does that help?

I hereby grant to you permission when you need to, either through responsibility or through impulse, to break a rule in your training routine. If that’s for a day, it’s a day. If you need a week, take a week.

Whatever you need to do, I just ask that you find a different way to serve your goal of self-improvement. Maybe that means skipping your training, but you go and visit an old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. That’s beautiful. There’s benefits to that.

Maybe it means volunteering at a charity, at your church, whatever. Find someone else to help. You’re telling me that’s not worth doing? Of course it is.

Maybe you write a letter to someone, reach out, write an email. Maybe you just cook for yourself, cook for your family, bake some cookies and take them somewhere.

Did I say cookies? Bake a pie and send it to me. That’s what this whole podcast was about. Stop what you’re doing and make me a pie. If you get a chance.

How about a hobby? Any hobby that you love or you think you love, but you never have time for, I give you permission to go try it out. Give yourself a little time over there. Because I promise you that’s good for your soul. That’s good for the big you, not just the small you that’s trying to achieve one little thing.

That’s character. That’s big stuff. And again, I promise, if you do that and then you go back to your routine, it’ll be fresh because you broke the spell.

We all get into this grind. The joy becomes a job and you’re just hypnotized by your own routine and your own rules. But when you break it, just like that, you wake up. And now you are free again to do what you should have been doing all along, which is having experiences.

Let me measure the results. Let me modify the routine, modify these rules. Maybe I need to choose a new tool. Maybe I need to lose a tool. Maybe I just need to change a rule. How and when I do things, all good.

Just don’t forget, you, my friend, are in charge. You are the leader. And really, only you have the power to create a happy life.

You pumped up? You feel your power? Well, then let’s choose some tools, use our tools, and maybe someday lose those tools.

Until next time, smiles up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #103: Tools Not Rules [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #102 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “3 Halloween Self-Defense Lessons.”

When I was a kid, Halloween was a big deal. That’s because in our town, you were allowed to “trick or treat” for TWO nights instead of just one!

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that while life can certainly bring you treats, it can also bring some serious tricks. Hopefully, my tragic story will help you write a story of triumph!

Okay—to be fair, my story isn’t really “tragic”, but it sure felt that way at the time. 🙂

Either way, I’ve got some self-defense advice to help you bolster your personal safety as well as strengthen your pursuits of success and happiness. I hope you can join me!

To LISTEN to “3 Halloween Self-Defense Lessons,” you can either:

To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

Howdy! Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #102 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

It’s Halloween season as I record this, so I thought it would be great to tell you a ghost story. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a ghost, but don’t worry, I have something even more frightening, even scarier than a ghost story. I have a bad guy story.

Yes, even though I’ve never seen a ghost, I’ve seen bad people, and I think they’re way more frightening because they’re real. So if you’re ready, I’ve got a Halloween story, one story, that will offer up, I think, three self-defense lessons. And these lessons, I think, will help you in your pursuit of safety, success, and happiness.

You ready for that? Let’s go.

All right, here’s the story…

It was a cold, dark Halloween night in Buffalo, New York. Now at the time of this story, this is going back a ways, I was probably in seventh or eighth grade, which puts me around 13 years old.

Now you might be thinking right away, 13, you’re out trick-or-treating when you’re 13? You’re a little too old for that. And I say, mind your own business. I enjoy trick-or-treating, and we were pretty good at it. And there’s two reasons for that.

One, the older I got, the more territory we could cover. You knew where the good neighborhoods were, where they were, and who was handing out the full-size candy bars, and you had the legs to get you there. So that was one huge advantage, experience.

Secondly, where I lived, we were on a border between Buffalo and a town called Cheetowaga, and they had different nights for trick-or-treating. One of them allowed trick-or-treating or endorsed it for the 30th, Halloween Eve– mischief night for some– so that was the night you were supposed to go out.

But the other said, no, no, it’s on the 31st, that’s trick-or-treating on Halloween proper. But most people living on the border, they were just confused, so they would just give out candy on both nights, which meant double the candy, double the fun.

So because I was older and because of the two nights of trick-or-treating, we scored. We always scored.

Now, because I’m 13, however, my friends weren’t always so gung-ho about dressing up. So on this particular night, they showed up in really what I would call, to be nice, low effort costumes. At that age, you’re talking about a guy had a black sweatshirt on and a ski mask and says, I’m a ninja. And the other guy pulls up a hoodie, puts some charcoal on his face and he says, you know, I’m a demon.

So pretty low effort, but not me, friends. Not me. No, no, I’m in it to win it. So very quickly, here’s what I put together for perhaps I think it was my last year of trick-or-treating.

At school, maybe some of you participated in this, Campbell’s Soup Company, the red and white label, the soup people. They had a program called Labels for Education. So, if you had a can of soup at home, you could take that label, bring it into your school. The teachers would collect all of those labels, send it into the company, the company would give your school money or supplies or something.

I don’t think they run this anymore, but at the time, we were all bringing in soup labels. Now, where did you put the soup labels? Well, they had a container. It was a cardboard can about three and a half, four feet tall. And that’s where you would drop in your labels.

Now, I went into the library one day where they had this container and I saw that they were putting it to the side. They were going to throw it out. I think they were replacing it with a new one or a new fancy nylon version. But there was this beautiful can. And I just asked, can I have that?

Boom, Halloween, done. I stapled a little strap or little ropes inside like suspenders and I could stand inside that can. So I’m a can of soup. Okay? But that’s not all.

No, no. My friend, you know me. I want more. So I decided I would dress up like a clown in the can of soup. Clown in a can. That’s the high concept for this, okay? Clown in a can.

All right, so picture this now. It’s cold, there’s a frost on the lawn, and it’s getting late. But I’m older and there’s no real curfew so I can stay out later. And it’s dark because it’s late. And it’s cold. And I’m wearing my can.

I’ve got, yes, some big shoes. I’ve got the whatever, the wig, all this stuff. And I’ve got this can that I’m kind of working within, all right? It’s a little small. And I’ve got my bag of candy that I’m holding on top.

Okay. So we’re making our way and we’re trying to get to the good houses. And we realize that the houses are starting to turn off their porch lights. It’s getting a little too late. But we wanted to make one more score. And to get there, to get to the other neighborhood, we had to go down a long dark street.

So whatever. We’re 13. I don’t care. So we start going down this street. Okay. Crunch, crunch. Walking down frosted ground. And as we’re walking, I notice out of the corner of my eye, there’s a car rolling up.

Now, like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost. But when you’re, let’s say, five years old, what scared me more than anything, maybe you too, was the idea of the big kids, right? If I was coming home from school and I was five years old and there were eight-year-olds or nine-year-olds coming the other way, I’d cross the street because I was afraid of the big kids.

Well, now I was one of the big kids. I’m 13. I am a big kid. But then there’s another level to be afraid of. Big kids with cars. That’s a whole other level of scary, at least to me.

Anyway, there we are, like a shark out of the corner of my eye. There’s this car, I think it was a Camaro, this makes me upset. There’s this car just rolling right along, matching our speed. And right as we’re kind of noticing– Hey, what are they doing?– boom, that’s it.

Door opens. Two of the bigger kids come screeching out straight at us. And my two friends, again, they’re just wearing sneakers and sweatpants. And they’re all dressed in black on a dark street. So, they take off like bottle rockets. I don’t even know if I saw them again in my life. I don’t even remember their, I don’t even know who they are at this point. They just took off and disappeared immediately.

But what about your friend, the clown in a can with the big shoes? I couldn’t even lift up my knees inside that cardboard can. I was just taking little steps all night. But when these monsters come running at me, I try to run because fear is natural. And I start pumping my legs, I crease the can.

I go down, face plant, roll over, I’m in the frost. And the big kid comes over, pins me down, reaches inside the can, strips away my bag of candy. They run back to their car, they’re gone. I’m laying on the ground alone, cold.

It’s dark, no candy. My can is broken. My spirits are crushed.

There’s no more to that story. That’s it. There’s no justice. The cops didn’t catch them.

Cops? Who cares? It was just a candy theft. That’s it. However, if that was the trick, there was a treat. Because even if you lose something, if you learn something, you didn’t really lose. Right? That’s what we say. Although I probably would have preferred the candy.

So let’s get to these 3 lessons…

Ready? First lesson. This one goes right to the safety heading, okay? Your personal safety. Here it is.

Kids, little kids, walk into trouble without even knowing it. Grown-ups, at least they should, grown-ups know where the trouble is and they avoid it.

Now in this case, it was late. You’ve heard these types of rules like “nothing good happens past midnight” or “nothing good happens past 2 a.m.”

The signs were there. Lights were being turned off. It was late. Too late to be trick or treating. Take your candy and go home.

Didn’t listen. It’s dark. We chose to walk in a dark neighborhood, down a dark street, isolating ourselves. No good.

I was set up so that I could not run. My footwear was not okay and my legs were limited inside the cardboard can. No good.

My hands were not free to fight, to push away, to do anything. I was holding up this can, holding on my candy. No good.

Elbows inside. No good.

Now these kinds of tips seem obvious. I’ve even already made a video about this, Tips to Avoid Being Sucker Punched. And we go over the same thing. This is one of the reasons I made that video because I learned that I always want proper footwear. I don’t wear flip-flops.

I learned that I don’t want to grow a ponytail. I’m going to keep short hair so no one can grab my head.

I learned that I don’t ever wear hoodies. I don’t wear anything that’s dangling or hanging off of me. I don’t want a leash on my head or my person, so I don’t wear that.

I don’t wear tight pants or anything constrictive. I want to be able to run or kick.

So all of that, hopefully, you get. Stay in bright lights. Stay around other people. Follow the rules. Use common sense. Always be able to fight, be able to run. And here’s another lesson.

Give them the candy. They went through all that effort. Their version of trick-or-treating was to go rob a kid who’s doing all the trick-or-treating That’s pretty smart. I’m not saying they’re dumb, they’re just bad people. Give them the candy.

If I was thinking faster, and as soon as I saw that car coming up, I said, Oh, they’re going to rob us, and now they’re running at us, and oh, my friends took off. If I had just taken the bag of candy and dropped it, or thrown it over the edge of the can, maybe that would have been enough.

Now in fairness, bad people are bad people. Maybe this goes under the category of cow tipping. Maybe they also just wanted to tip over the clown in a can. So maybe I was asking for it in two different ways. Walking around in a can and I’ve got a big bag of candy.

Either way, I’m not blaming the victim here, but I sure made it easy for them to take advantage of me. So give them the candy. They want your wallet? Give them the wallet. You got a backpack? Drop the backpack. They want your computer? Hit them with the computer and run. Get your priorities straight. That’s a lesson.

But overall, the big takeaway for me on that one, the big treat from that trick, was to not look for trouble and don’t welcome trouble. When you’re a kid, like I said, a little kid, they don’t know. They don’t know where the danger is. That’s why you need a chaperone or an adult to escort you around, tell you which houses to go to, which ones to stay away from, who to talk to, who not to.

Go through the candy. Don’t eat that one. That one looks safe. Kids don’t know.

But then you get a little older, like a teen, and you’re not completely mature yet. You’re not completely mature, so you almost welcome trouble. All the rules that you learned along the way as a little kid, now you want to test them.

So you’re not supposed to stay up late. Go to bed. I want to stay up late. I’m going to sneak out. I want to go out late.

You’re not supposed to drink. I’m going to get bombed.

Don’t smoke. It’s bad for you. Well, what does it taste like? I want to know what that cigarette is all about.

Hey, you got a driver’s license. Follow the law. Stay to the right. Follow the speed limit. No, I want to see how fast this car can go.

Don’t fight with anybody. Don’t look for trouble like that. You’ll get hurt. I’m going to start a fight. What are you looking at? That’s immaturity.

It’s perhaps a natural stage of growth, but it is immature. You’re looking for trouble. You’re almost welcoming the excitement that trouble brings. It breaks you out of that box you were raised in. I get it. And frankly, some people never outgrow this stage.

Age is not what matters here. I say teens, but that’s not fair. There are some very level-headed, mature teens. And there are some really immature 50, 60, 70-year-olds and beyond. But I’m going to say that if you’re a grown up, you truly understand consequences. You can weigh risks and rewards and you can make wise choices for your life.

I’m not telling you which risks are okay and which ones are not. That’s up to you. We all play this game of picking our battles. Where do you want to take risk? Where do you not? But just evaluate that. Please evaluate it.

Are you in the bright light or are you in dark areas of your life? Are you traveling alone? Or do you have friends? Do you have good friends?

Are you prepared to run and leave something? Are you prepared to fight and stand your ground if you have to? These are the kinds of things I think that you have to think about.

So, lesson number one for self-defense. Kids walk into trouble without even knowing it. Immature people know the rules of safety, but they want to challenge them and test them to see how far they can go. Grown-ups know the rules, follow the rules, create their own rules to minimize trouble, if not completely avoid it.

Okay, lesson number two from my Halloween story. This one’s more in the success category. Here’s the lesson.

Masks are for kids. Being yourself is for grown-ups.

When you’re a little kid, you probably don’t have much say in what you’re going to be dressed up as for Halloween. Your parent thinks it’s cute, oh, you’re going to be a clown, you’re going to be Dracula, you’re going to be Pac-Man, whatever.

So little kids have no idea what they’re dressed up as. That’s it. You find a mask that your parent wants you to wear. Then you get older. And now you do have the awareness to start choosing what you want to be. You get to choose the mask you want to wear on Halloween and beyond.

You’re looking for that mask that fits your personality, that fits your desires, that fits the energy of your life at that time. Maybe you’re goody-goody, you want to walk on the dark side. Maybe you don’t feel very good and you want to dress up like a hero. So you could get into all of that.

Why did you choose that costume? What does that say about you? Or maybe it’s just fun. But I would say that the older you get, the more power you have to choose what you want to be. And that then plays over into your real life, right?

You’re not just wearing a literal mask on Halloween, but if you’re at school, if you’re at a new office, you start choosing, well, who are the cool kids here? Do I want to dress up like they do? Which clique seems to be the power clique here? Who do I want to associate with to get ahead?

Well, in my estimation, that can also get you into trouble. I was thinking about it as I was putting this podcast together, and I remember falling in with the cool kids, but they weren’t so cool. They were jerks, and that made me a jerk. I remember wanting to be part of that cool clique, but only because they were in power, not because they were good people.

So, that can be a really distorted view of what’s good in the world. Just because they’re powerful or cool doesn’t mean that’s for you, doesn’t mean it’s right, doesn’t mean it’s good. So we’ve got to think about that, and that’s where growing up comes in. Once again, here’s the maturity.

As a grown up, I don’t think you should be wearing masks anymore. I think the sign of being a grown up is you don’t wear a mask. You don’t need a mask. You can be yourself. That to me is the mark of maturity.

There is no cool kid cooler than you being yourself. There is no cool clique that is cooler than you being yourself.

So now you just have to ask yourself, are you wearing a mask? Do you wear one mask at work, another mask with your friends, another mask when you’re working out? Who are you trying to be? Who do you want to be? Who are you?

Do you think when you put on these masks, you’re fooling anybody? Are you trying to fool yourself? Maybe you come off like you’re really tough, putting on that mask, but really you’re not.

Maybe you’re coming off like you’re very intellectual, you’ve got all the politics of the world figured out, but really you’re just parroting somebody else and you don’t really know.

I just worked out with a guy, it comes to my mind, who presented himself with the mask of being a cool guy, nice guy, happy guy, friendly guy, high five guy. But then when you worked out with him, he was trying to stick it to me. He wasn’t such a nice guy.

As a matter of fact, it turned out, in my opinion, my estimation, that he was so over the top trying to be nice to hide the fact that his heart had a little bit of evil in it. He enjoyed causing pain. He wanted to get away with hitting someone and being a bit of a bully and hoping that he could hide that part of himself. Oh no, sorry buddy. I caught on.

So, you got to be careful. If you’re wearing a mask, you got to wonder, are people seeing through it? And then what are the consequences? That guy I just mentioned, who I think took advantage of me in that workout until I stopped it. How many other relationships are going to disappear and opportunities because people saw through his mask and he doesn’t know?

He’s still walking around with that mask. But behind his back, people are saying, Yeah, there’s something wrong with that guy. Yeah, he’s not what he seems to be. I don’t trust that guy. And therefore, I don’t call him. I don’t offer him anything. I don’t want to work out with him anymore. And now he’s lost. No treats for him.

So be careful if you’re wearing a mask, because it may or may not hide who you really are. That was lesson number 2. Masks are for kids. Being yourself is for grown-ups.

Lesson number 3. In the category on this one, I would just put under happiness. Just to be happy in this world. The lesson to me is this.

Begging and hoping is for kids. Planning and providing for yourself is for grown-ups.

When you’re a kid, I think you want everything. I want this. I want that. Gimme, gimme. I want more.

You want everything, which is not practical, not tenable. You can’t have everything. And if you try to give a child like that everything, they’re still going to be disappointed. It’s never enough when you want everything.

So as you grow up, as you grow older, you become more selective. You must become more selective. Instead of wanting everything, again, you pick your battles and you say, well, I want that. I want this and I want that. You learn to focus on a goal or two.

So that’s one sign of maturity. But now there’s another challenge. Now that you set your goal, you know what you want. How are you going to get it? And this is a big one. This is tricky. Are you going to go around begging for it, hoping for it? Or are you going to build it? Are you going to make it happen?

Trick or treating is really, when you think about it, a very immature activity. It is for kids. It should just be for kids. Because you are asking someone else to determine what you get. You’re saying trick or treat. And then you’re just hoping to get something you want. It’s all faith-based.

When you go up to that door, you have no idea what’s on the other side. And by the way, when you get a trick– if you live your life like that, just begging people for things, gimme, gimme, gimme, and not working for things, expecting things, feeling you’re entitled to things, being disappointed when you don’t get what you want, even though you didn’t do anything to get it, except for whine– imagine when you get the trick, imagine if you’re a little kid, five years old, you go up to the door and you say, Trick or treat, and they open the door, and he’s got a deck of cards, the guy that lives there, and he says, Oh great, I have a trick. I don’t have any treats. I have a trick tonight. It’s a magic trick. Pick a card, kid.

How many kids do you think will be delighted to participate in a card trick instead of getting a piece of candy? Really what the child wants is treat or treat. They just want to come to the door and go, give me a treat. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s a false choice from the beginning. Trick or treat.

The problem is, in life, I think there are more tricks than treats. The tricks are coming. Treats are more rare. The treats you have to actually work for. This is the lesson that you learn as you grow older.

Those kids taking away my candy taught me something really important. All of that stuff that I had amassed, all that sugar came from begging for it, hoping for it. Yeah, I was walking around, but come on. Someone else just came and took it from me. That was life giving me a trick and I didn’t like it.

I had faith that I could just get what I wanted, go home and keep it. Nope, life said, I got a trick for you. You don’t get to keep it. Now he gets it.

So this is your choice in life. Do you want to just deal in faith or do you want to deal in fact? Do you want to take a chance and knock on a door and see what comes–could be candy, could be a punch in the face– or do you want to just buy your own candy? Make your own candy. Provide your own candy.

I don’t even have to go outside the house. I don’t have to dress up. I don’t have to do a song and dance. I don’t have to look like a fool. I don’t have to put myself at risk. How about I just buy my own candy? It’s a far more sensible way to live your life. I know it’s in my bag because I put it there. I didn’t ask you to put it there.

So, what do you want? You funnel down, “I want everything” to “I want something”. So what is it that you want?

Now ask yourself, how are you going to get it? Are you running around knocking on doors, whether the lights are on or off? Are you living on faith that good stuff is going to come if you just hang out long enough and keep asking for it?

Are you hanging out with people who are going to take off when you’re in trouble? Are you hanging out with people who are going to laugh at you or help you when you need help? What kind of friends are you bringing into your life?

What kind of relationships are you allowing in your life? Are you just on good faith hoping people are going to be nice to you and not rip you off or do you have contracts? Did you lawyer up? Did you trust but verify?

Do you ask the hard questions? Do you set the boundaries? This is self-defense for financial health, personal physical health, and just happiness, I think, in general.

So that was lesson number 3. Begging and hoping is for kids. Planning and providing for yourself is for grown-ups. And I think that brings us to the end of the lessons. That’s it.

So, I hope you can learn from this humble clown in a can. I do appreciate the tricks that life provides, because I do feel that the treat at the end is that I’ve learned something. If you made it this far in the podcast, I hope you’ve learned a little something too.

My wish for you is to make it– don’t hope for– make it a safe, successful, happy Halloween for yourself, and then beyond that, make it a safe, successful, happy life. I hope you can take that tragic part of my life and turn it into a triumph in yours.

Until next time, smiles up my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.

The post #102: 3 Halloween Self-Defense Lessons [Video + Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.