A Zen Minset

Another story

As I mentioned a few lessons ago, my opinions and advice come from my life (as flawed as it is!), not just books I’ve read or quotes I’ve googled. Copy and paste life advice is so dull!

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 & mind for fighting (i.e. pain!). It worked. When you are taught to push through pain barriers, you get more resilient. An interesting fact is that when bones fracture, they calcify and become stronger, but emotions also adapt; When one engages in sparring a few times a week, the anxiety about a real fight literally gets beaten out of you.

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 will ‘callus your mind’. Please immediately buy Goggin’s best-selling book ‘Can’t Hurt Me”, as it will change you. 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 give me a better understanding of energy flow.

Let’s take a look at Wing Chun, often called Internal Kung Fu. It’s a very close-range fighting system. The key principle here is to never fight directional force with the same directional force.

When you make contact with an opponent, you don’t aim to fight against their energy – you listen to it, connect with it, and then aim to control it. While there is often tension in one’s tendons, there is extremely little muscular tension when fighting in Wing Chun. When they pull, you push, and when they push, you pull. You FLOW with your opponent, which is totally different from boxing and other hard martial arts.

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.

Let us imagine a different way of dealing with it. Root your feet into the floor and let your upper body go soft. When I punch now, as soon as we make contact, your upper body rotates. This takes the pain down to zero and puts you in a solid position as my energy and momentum will be flying past you, and I will be off-balance while you will be calmly centred, balanced and ready to counterattack.

You get to use your understanding of energy flow to your advantage. As long as you understand your energy well and have skills, you can redirect every time an opponent uses force, thus making them tired and frustrated.

“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, and acknowledge that his struggle is real, but that he needs to push through to get his goals. And this does work. Outside of the gym, it works too. If you put in the hours, you will get more successful at any specific task or job.

I have found it is more effective and less stressful not to ‘fight’ but to ‘allow’ success to happen. LET IT HAPPEN. This may seem like an exercise in semantics, but I believe the words we choose and the conversations we have with ourselves have a profound impact on us on a subconscious level. For example, I never fight colds. If I have a sniffle, I just allow my body to get back to feeling well.

If you convince yourself that losing weight is the hardest thing ever, guess what? You’ll be right, and it will feel like a battle! How about if you see if you believe it’s easy and natural to be slimmer? Your mind won’t be in a fighting mode, cortisol will be lower, and your body will literally be in a better fat-burning state! And psychologically, it will be way more fun as you’ll be in a positive, loving and accepting emotional state.

In my experience, the best results are achieved when clients embrace this fluid energy transfer mindset. I have found the same is true 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 try and compete with other companies or coaches. I find it’s negative energy. If you do a good job, expect success, and actively let it happen in the business world, the right partnerships and clients will always appear at the right time.

In Zen Buddhism, this approach is pretty standard. It’s not so popular in the West that acceptance and intention get confused with being a lazy hippie, having no focus or being a fatalist. This is far from the case. Letting things happen isn’t a passive act; it’s an entirely active one. My example earlier of the punch ideally illustrates this. Only when you are balanced and have the skill does the punch fly past your chest. There is no wasted energy; you are essentially pulling back as he pushes, so there is no ‘effort’, but it is still very much a conscious act. You are like water – you simply flow with the strikes.

Challenge: Don’t Resist Your Emotions

The next time you feel a negative emotion (frustration, anger, stress, tiredness, even grief), don’t fight the physical feeling and just stay with it for a while. Become curious about it. Notice any tension, your thought patterns about it and the stories you tell yourself around it. Let it happen – accept the feeling and resist the urge to get rid of it. With a bit of practice, you will learn to transform your relationship with your ‘bad’ emotions. Eventually, you may learn to feel love, compassion and understanding for yourself and thus better 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 to Japanese minimalism. This has its roots in Zen. So I only have items that bring my joy in there (Mary Kondo style), I allow for ‘Ma” – which is the space between objects (difficult in a little garage but I try!) and I adhere to 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.