Decisive action. Are you ready to take it when necessary?
I have been a lifelong martial artist. I coach combat sports but I train martial arts. There is a difference, I don’t want to go too deep into it but it is basically a difference between sport and life. We play sport to win, we train arts to enrich our lives. One of the man points of life enrichment is learning to take action. Thru real contact based training, you will learn the value of action, the cost of the wrong action, and what a lack of action does and does not do.
Any action provides a lesson. Martial arts crosses over into many thing concerning discipline endurance, focus, etc… Something that gets overlooked at times is the combination of patience and decisive action, beyond physical contact. If you apply patience and decisive action in life as you do on the mat or in a conflict, you can see the value. No need to separate the process simply because one is more physical than the other. Sound principle is sound principle.
What I like about combative arts is the very specific outcome of engagements. You employ a technique and it works or does not, there is no halfway. We look for many ways to interpret our actions in life. We look for ways to be right or ways to not be wrong no matter the outcome. You can lose an argument and try to save face, you can lose money and blame it on other things, you can fail in many ways where you can fabricate excuses as to why it is not your fault. In combat, it is all your fault. In combat, you make a mistake, you feel it.
Patience is not simply waiting. Patience is waiting with a purpose. You wait for the opportunity to present itself. You can wait for the opportunity, or you can create it. Once the time comes to take action, you have to act decisively and correctly.
Apply this to anything. You can simply wait for things to happen and react, or you can have your purpose clearly defined while taking steps to elicit the response you have been waiting to to take action in response to. Both are employing patience. One is active and one is passive.
Martial strategy is the same as any other and can be applied in various ways, formats, and differing conditions. Don’t just train to train, find the value in what you do and see how it can translate into success beyond the mat or field of battle.
Brian Wright