The Break Fall – The Fearsetting Technique You’ve Been Looking For

Break-fall /?brāk?f?l/ noun (in martial arts) a controlled fall in which most of the impact is absorbed by the arms or legs. A movement performed to prevent one from injuring themselves when landing.

Breakfalls are a necessary technique used in practicing martial arts that utilize grappling, takedowns and/or throwing techniques (such as Aikido, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or Judo) in order to prevent injury from a fall.

Recently, I was listening to an old episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where polymath, Josh Waitzkin, discussed his newest interest: foil boarding. Over the course of the show, Josh discusses taking on a beginner’s mind and going back to first-principles in order to learn a new skill rapidly.

Along the way, hidden in a short throwaway line, Josh casually mentions how one of the first things necessary for him to be able to move ahead with mastering his new sport was learning to break fall on his foil.

Basically, this entails repeatedly and intentionally falling down and crashing until he is able to fall without hurting himself, but also it means that he is desensitized to the fear of crashing and thus able to start mastering his new skill.

I’d never heard of break falls before and this got me thinking. Josh Waitzkin is one of the best people in the world for figuring out the principles of mastery (check out his book, The Art of Learning, on Amazon), if he thinks that taking the art of learning how to fall in martial arts and applying it to foil boarding is the key to success, then perhaps this same concept could be applied elsewhere in life.

Perhaps, the key to success is actually learning to fail with intention.

So what can we do with this information and how to we put it into practice?

Whenever we take on something new that we are afraid of failing at, we can first practice what it would be like if we did, indeed, fail. Think through the steps of failure and imagine what it would be like if we were in that position right this moment.

What does it feel like? What does it look like? Let yourself sit with that feeling and really internalize what it would feel like.

Now consider the ways that you could mitigate that outcome.

What resources do you have at your disposal? Friends? Family? Money? Tools? Your resourcefulness? Your health? Think about what it would take to get out of that situation and how you can use your resources to make it happen.

Once you’ve done that mental exercise, now it’s time to practice it. Determine how best to practice failure for your task – we don’t want to put ourselves in real danger here, but there is almost always a way to practice recovering from failure.

In the case of Josh Waitzkin, he used an electric foil board to practice falling on calm water over and over until he was comfortable with the sensations before putting himself into an actual dangerous situation. How can you do something similar?

Where can you create circumstances that feel like the real thing but aren’t?

The key is not to just go out and fail at something, but to find a way to practice failing in a controlled setting so that when it’s time to try the real thing, the fear of failure is no longer in the back of your mind.

Now go out and try it!