HONESTY in MA!

[T'ai Ji Monkey]

Are YOU honest with yourself??

Easy question difficult answer.

Are you truly honest to yourself about your MA skills, or are you still deceived by your ego & pride?

Humans got a great skill in self-deception and telling clouding ones own actions, desires and goals.

HONESTY for me is one of the top important points in a MA, and I think TRUE honesty is rare?

Every style I have studied so far has had very similar rules of conduct for the practicioner.
The rules are often simply, but hard to fathom:
Do not compete
No arrogance
and so on.

Ask yourself are you really honest about your personality, desires, driving forces and your MA skills?
Do you REALLY follow the rules, guidelines and principles of your style?

It is my Opinion that high skill in MA cannot be attained with TRUE honesty with oneself.

TRUE honesty, IMO, is an ongoing self-evaluation processwhere you question all your actions verbal as well as physical.

No need to reply, just ranting.

[pazman]

i tend to look down on 'rules' for students. okay, there's good ones like 'don't chew gum in class' but i'm talking about things like the five tenets of taekwondo, wherein lists all sorts of nice sounding virtues. somehow, i just don't think that by imposing rules and principles will a student truely understand them.

rather, i think all these nice things should be fostered through the training method itself. rather than the teacher pontificating about being honest with yourself, hard training, sparring, and competing pretty much forces you to be honest to yourself whether you want to or not.

i know for myself and many others, getting physically tested by the teacher, or just a good thrashing, rips my ego to shreds, and an honest perspective of my training is gained.

[T'ai Ji Monkey]

pazman.

Good answer and expected. :D

My thoughts go beyond having your ego shredded to the point where you shred it yourself without any outside help.
Those rules and guidelines should extend beyond the training area into the everyday life.

Too many people leave the dojo/kwoon and at the same time leave their training behind or think that they can switch their MA skills on and off as they like.

As for students understanding the rules, isn't it up to the teacher to make sure that they do??

IMO, if the teaher can't make sure that even the basic rules are observed he has no place being a teacher.

And THAT also is HONESTY a teacher has to ask himself continously am I REALLY qualified to teach and impart knowledge.

[Goldenmane]

I try to be completely honest with myself in all things, and training helps that. Still, I do fail to be completely honest with myself often enough not to become complacent.

Anytime I get complacent, I just have to see someone (and there are plenty out there) display skills beyond my own to give me a reality check. I'd say having my azz kicked also helps, except I haven't had it happen for too long... not because I'm that good, but because I haven't made the opportunity to train hard with others for too long. Hell, it's been a year since I sparred with anyone, and longer since I was in a 'real' fight (not much of a fight, actually, but it was kinda fun).

Sometime soon I'm going to start BJJ... now *that* will be a reality check.

[Tak]

I'm honest with myself about my MA skill: I suck.


The rules are often simply, but hard to fathom:
Do not compete
No arrogance Do not compete? Do you mean, don't make every training a competition against your classmates, or don't compete in tournaments and things? As far as the no arrogance thing, we don't really have a rule about it, but there really aren't many arrogant people at my school, so I guess it's not an issue. Well, we have one 16-year old kid who thinks he's Stephen Seagal and with whom nobody likes to train, but I don't think he's going to stick it out too long.

As for teachers making students understand the rules, it depends on the rule. Something like "Don't chew gum during class" can easily be stated and enforced. Other things like "Train hard," "Don't be arrogant," "Practice wu de," are more easily transmitted by example or by putting the student in a situation where s/he'll learn it him/herself (example: (hopefully) remove arrogance by having him/her spar against someone much better)). Some students won't learn lessons like this, but then some students won't learn lessons if you repeat them over and over while stomping on their feet, either.

[SanSoo Student]

I try to be honest with myself, and realize that in most situations MA will only help to get away. The main goal of a discipline is to not fight and walk away if you can. Once in a while when I look at myself in the mirror, I have slight recurring thoughts of me being a bad ass, but then I remember all the times I got KOed in Muay Thai gym and how I'm still the silly, skrawny kid that started Kung Fu during 6th grade.

As for rules of MA, I say that the only rules worth following are the ones you believe in. I mean the things I listen to a suppose to be the "correct" way of striking and planting/shifting your stance. Those can be considered rules or not, my teacher always was pretty loose about these things. He felt that all the serious students would progress faster because they would be interested in what he has to say. All the people that take MA as a hobby would eventually stop showing up and dropout.

[apoweyn]

Tai'ji Monkey,

Can you go into how this process works for you? How your self evaluation works? That sort of thing?


It is my Opinion that high skill in MA cannot be attained with TRUE honesty with oneself.

That's a typo, right? High skill in MA cannot be attained without true honesty with oneself, yeah?

Not being picky. I can see someone honestly saying what you typed. And even making some compelling arguments for it, quite honestly.

So how do you engender honesty in your practice?


Stuart

p.s. I'm with pazman. Not big on rules for students. Not ideological ones. Experience is paramount. And often, we benefit from mucking up more than from getting things right.

[MonkeySlap Too]

Appy hits the nail on the head.

While the negatives of competitive behavior should be controlled through good sportsmanship - and ideally, does not Western sports offer these lessons, only more personified in the coach?

But training without competitive testing is like mast urbating to develop better lovemaking. You develop some skills, but it often fails you when you encounter another person.

I get my regular beatings from a group of my peers and friendly others. These days, nothing is more important to my training than using sparring models to find deficiencies. Well, except for Qigong.

[Chris_McKinley]

Tai Ji Monkey,

RE: "Are you truly honest to yourself about your MA skills, or are you still deceived by your ego & pride?". I try to be, but yes...the deception is an ongoing daily challenge that's part of being human. Those who feel they are no longer challenged by it are themselves the most deceived IMO.

RE: "Ask yourself are you really honest about your personality, desires, driving forces and your MA skills?". Yeah, more or less...and it royally sucks, too. Brutal honesty is an ugly visage.

RE: "It is my Opinion that high skill in MA cannot be attained with TRUE honesty with oneself.". I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't even know where you get this...ermm...unusual opinion from.

Monkey Slap pretty much has a bead on things, if real functional combat skill is one's ongoing top priority. I just wish others in TMA had the honesty to admit that it's NOT their main priority, and that their training ISN'T optimized to develop these skills.

[apoweyn]

I have to agree with this statement.


Humans got a great skill in self-deception and telling clouding ones own actions, desires and goals.

But, to my mind, that only strengthens the necessity of things like sparring and (based on the heightened intensity) perhaps competition.

If it's true that people are awful at self assessment (and social psychology studies seem to bear that out), then clearly we need something more than just a sincere desire to be honest with ourselves.

We need impartial feedback. Gauges that aren't subject to our skewed self perception. And, if possible, aren't subject to the perceptions of others.

If in sparring, you get whacked in the face, there's very little subjectivity to the observation that it's not a good thing.

Having the emotion maturity to want to be glaringly honest with yourself is one thing. But having the cognitive tools to actually do so is still another.

I think.



Stuart B.

[bung bo]

my school doesn't have any set rules. everybody there happen to be good people and no arrogance shows up.

i try very hard to try to stay honest with myself. a good way for me is to put myself up against someone whose abilities exceed mine. it's an eye-opener and shows you where should use more force, more speed, etc. these other people will usually bop me a few times. also they have given me some good tips.

[FatherDog]

Originally posted by apoweyn
But, to my mind, that only strengthens the necessity of things like sparring and (based on the heightened intensity) perhaps competition.

If it's true that people are awful at self assessment (and social psychology studies seem to bear that out), then clearly we need something more than just a sincere desire to be honest with ourselves.

We need impartial feedback. Gauges that aren't subject to our skewed self perception. And, if possible, aren't subject to the perceptions of others.

If in sparring, you get whacked in the face, there's very little subjectivity to the observation that it's not a good thing.

Word.

[apoweyn]

And now for my post-lunch humble pie.

I misspelled T'aiji Monkey's name in my first post. Lest he or I choke on the irony of that, lemme go ahead and apologize now.

:)

[Merryprankster]

"Are you truly honest to yourself about your MA skills, or are you still deceived by your ego & pride?"

I compete at a high level in a tough sport filled with tough competitors. I have no choice in the matter if I wish to continue.

[T'ai Ji Monkey]

AP.

Yes, it was a typo, was rather tired and in a hurry when I composed that piece.

Persoally, I think everybody has to find their own way/method.

Agreed, that sparring and competition can help, so can fellow students.

How I try to do is by continously asking myself if I did everything right and by trying to apply the principles to everything I do in Life.

In the long run it boils down to me to doing everything with 100% intent and concentration on what I am doing.
Also trying to see everything for what it truly is without being clouded by my own perceptions and similar.

[apoweyn]

TJM,

I hear ya. And try to do likewise.

I do believe that, as bad as people are at self assessment, we can get better with practice.

But a large part of that--as has been the common thread in this... er, thread--is feedback. Getting put on your backside is a really good start for reassessment. I guess the work you do in conjunction with that is preparing yourself for the ego bruising.

As people often say here, taking your failures and turning them into opportunities to improve. I, at least, have to work at taking failure constructively. When I can take failure and use it (instead of getting down about it), then I can afford to be honest with myself. (Self delusion being a sort of defensive mechanism, as far as I can tell.)


Stuart B.