My opinions and advice come from my life (as flawed as it is!), not just books I’ve read or quotes I’ve googled, so I have another story for you…

Back in my 30s, I had a 12-month break from coaching and became a full-time Thai Boxer in Thailand. I was taught to train damn hard and to condition my body and mind for fighting — i.e. discomfort, fear and pain. It worked. When you repeatedly expose yourself to difficult things and learn that you can cope with them, you become more resilient. The body adapts to stress, and so does the mind. When you are sparring a few times a week, the anxiety around fighting doesn’t magically disappear, but you become much more familiar with it and much better at functioning while it is there.

My year-long Thailand experience, journeying from being a Thai boxing beginner to holding my own in sanctioned fights against good local fighters, was a wonderful life lesson and one I highly recommend to you — well, if you don’t mind being elbowed in the face and have a spare year to spare.

I would never ask anyone to try something I haven’t already lived. I promise you that when you live like an athlete, you become more resilient and more focused, and as the freakoid superhuman David Goggins would say, you learn to ‘callus your mind’. His book Can’t Hurt Me is worth reading if you like that kind of thing. He’s insane… in a good way… well, sort of!

Energy

Over the last few years, I’ve turned my hand to studying the ‘softer’ martial arts such as Wing Chun, Tai Chi and Aikido. These disciplines have taught me different lessons: that sometimes soft can be better than hard (Yin & Yang strike again!) and have given me a better understanding of timing, sensitivity and what martial artists often describe as energy flow.

Let’s take a look at Wing Chun, often described as an internal or close-range Chinese martial art. A key principle is not to fight directional force with the same directional force.

When you make contact with an opponent, you don’t aim to fight against their force — you listen to it, connect with it and then aim to control or redirect it. There is usually far less unnecessary muscular tension than you see in people trying to overpower everything. When they pull, you push, and when they push, you pull. You FLOW with your opponent, which is totally different from the instinct to simply brace and resist.

A great example of this is a strike to the chest. What would you do if I punched you just where your shoulder and chest join? How would you deal with it if you had no time to block the punch? The ‘hard’ way of dealing with it is by tensing up that area of your body and just accepting the punch. When I do this drill with beginners, this is the most common response.

Now imagine a different way of dealing with it. Root your feet into the floor and let your upper body stay softer. When I punch, as soon as we make contact your upper body rotates and redirects the force rather than meeting it head-on. Done properly, this can reduce the impact and leave you in a more balanced position while my momentum travels past you.

You get to use your understanding of force, timing and movement to your advantage. As long as you have the skill and awareness, you can redirect rather than resist, which is often much more efficient.

“Less is more.”

Struggle Vs Acceptance

I was discussing the concept of effort with one of my pro athlete clients last year. He was saying how hard it was to do 20 pull-ups. Now, there are two ways to deal with this as a coach. One is to be empathetic and tell him he is right, that he should do the best he can, acknowledge that his struggle is real and remind him that he still needs to keep going if he wants the result. And this does work. Outside of the gym, it works too. If you put in the hours, you generally get better at a specific task or job.

But I have also found it can be more effective, and less stressful, not to constantly ‘fight’ but to allow things to happen. LET IT HAPPEN. This may seem like an exercise in semantics, but I do think the words we choose and the conversations we have with ourselves can influence how we experience effort. For example, I never think about ‘fighting’ a cold. If I have a sniffle, I simply let my body do what it needs to do and get back to feeling well.

If you convince yourself that losing weight is the hardest thing ever, guess what? It will probably feel like a battle. How about seeing whether you can approach it with a little less drama and resistance? You still have to do the work, obviously, but psychologically there is a big difference between constantly telling yourself something is awful and simply getting on with it.

In my experience, clients often do better when they stop fighting themselves. I have found the same in business too. I train and collaborate with other trainers, and I help them whenever I can. Even though I like competition, I don’t spend much time trying to ‘beat’ other companies or coaches. I find that mindset draining. I would rather focus on doing good work, being useful and letting the right partnerships and clients emerge from that.

In Zen Buddhism, this sort of acceptance is much more familiar than it is in the West, where acceptance sometimes gets confused with laziness, passivity or having no ambition. That is not what I mean at all. Letting something happen is not the same as doing nothing. My example earlier of the punch illustrates this. Only when you are balanced and have the skill can the strike be redirected cleanly. There is no wasted effort, but it is still a conscious and active response. You are like water — you move with the force rather than stubbornly fighting it.

Challenge: Don’t Resist Your Emotions

The next time you feel a difficult emotion — frustration, anger, stress, tiredness, even grief — don’t immediately fight the physical feeling. Stay with it for a while. Become curious about it. Notice any tension, your thought patterns around it and the stories you tell yourself about what it means. Let it be there without instantly trying to get rid of it.

With practice, you may begin to change your relationship with emotions you normally label as ‘bad’. They are still uncomfortable, but they don’t necessarily have to control you. You may even become a little more compassionate and understanding towards yourself, and better able to embrace the silly, scary and beautiful experience of being human.

While I’m no monk, this zen-ish mindset helps me in many ways… it may help you too.

P.S. Talking of Zen, when building my home gym, I tried to adhere loosely to Japanese minimalism. I only keep things in there that I actually value or enjoy having around, Marie Kondo style. I also try to allow for “Ma” — the space between objects, which is difficult in a little garage, but I try! — and I like the wabi-sabi principle of appreciating imperfection. If your environment affects your mindset and mood like mine, then I highly recommend Japanese minimalism as both a design choice and a lifestyle philosophy.