Suck It, Naruto
Part 3 of the Eight Mental Aims Series: Belief
belief /bɪˈliːf/: the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true. “I believe in you and your ability to finish that bottle of Polish vodka.”
Part 1 of this series was difficult to start. How do you tell violent people to calm the hell down? Part 2 was easier. Everyone loves a good 80s training montage*.
“Belief” is somewhere in the middle because self-confidence is easy to talk about, but it’s difficult to do without sounding like a yuppy cult-leader trying to get you to buy his self-help books and fund his cocaine addiction.
So, off to the fight world first.
Imagine the following two specific character types, types that are polar opposites and that you’re sure to see among new students at the dojo: The first one perfects their technique first, allowing them to build up proper muscle memory (discussed here). Then they work to incorporate the technique into live sparring/fighting.
The second type has terrible form but aims to knock their sparring partner’s head off at the sound of the bell.
Martial artists love to say the first of those two types is the superior one, because that’s the type of person who’ll take their time and perfect their technique. They also keep the instructor’s insurance premiums down.
This calm, thoughtful student fits the hopes of the patient, wise master. But as Hoch Hochheim said, real-life fighting is less like Chess and more like two angry gorillas trying to play Checkers.
That second type of fighter, the aggressive one, often has an important trait missing in the first type of beginner: belief. Belief in their ability, belief in their power. It may become overconfidence; they may get injured, they may walk right into an expert’s chokehold, and they may look dumb…but they swing for the fence and take out the unprepared. Many a straight-backed, noble martial artist has had their own ego taken down a few pegs by an aggressive, untrained fighter who just had real “oomph” behind their haymaker.
Some students will come to your school already with a healthy dose of self confidence. Some will be overconfident. Others will come to your school with no self confidence. It’s your job as a coach to help all three balance it right as they learn and train. Getting people to say “yeah, I think I can hit the guy” is one thing. Getting nice, scared, or just laid-back people to really strike with belief in their guts that they will succeed is a whole ’nother challenge, and mitt work and forms aren’t enough to solve that.
Because it’s not just confidence. To use a skill, it’s not enough to have the knowledge you can do it. You have to believe you can make it happen. And the more you learn to believe in yourself, the more you can believe in yourself.
So how do you get a student with no self-confidence to believe in themself? By tricking them into doing it, one baby step at a time. They won’t see the progress, but they’ll see the change in themself after months or years of training when they start feeling better about their sparring.
I once had a new student in her 50s who was really short. She stood shy of five feet tall, and was not the picture of sound health. She also had past trauma from physical abuse and all of the above showed in her character: extremely polite, extremely soft-spoken, and funny as hell with a great sense of humor (which is often considered a coping mechanism for those who suffer from depression or self-hate).
She never became an MMA champion or a sparring badass, but she once broke a board with a palm strike. As her teacher, that was one of my proudest moments.
It was a thin board, the kind peewees can break, but she didn’t think she could do it. It took me six months to gain enough of her trust that she would even try breaking the board after I told her to do it.
She broke it in one try, and screamed, and jumped, and cried literal tears when she saw she could do it. She was ecstatic.
Suddenly, her sparring improved. Her confidence started to blossom. She accidentally staggered her husband to the floor with a chop to the neck when the two were joking and playfighting.
And it all reflected in the way she held herself from that day forward. Suddenly, she believed that she could change things.
Like perseverance, belief gets you through your roughest times. You might be “faking it until you make it”, but what matters is that you get where you’re going. Sometimes that just means believing you’ll succeed despite what your senses tell you. And as teachers, sometimes that’s the biggest lesson you can give to a student.
Stay tuned for more writing on the other Mental Aims of Gaylord Method Kajukenbo.