Learning To Be (A Little Bit) Lousy: Lessons From Martial Arts

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn lately about Media Fight Night. They've got me thinking about martial arts, and about some of the applications of martial arts learning and teaching to working life (and more generally, to engagement with the world beyond the gym/ring/dojo).

(They've also made me more than a little jealous: the event looked absolutely amazing! Huge congratulations to everyone involved).

I practised various forms of martial arts, on and off, for a lot of years - starting with Japanese jujitsu at 19 (when a breakup propelled my hungover, chain-smoking arse into the basement of the Leicester YMCA and onto the mats) and finishing (possibly, though not definitely, for good) when injuries and the time-crunch precipitated by long working hours and young kids at home made it unfeasible to commit to 2 or 3 or more training sessions a week.

(I miss it, though. God, I miss it).

You'd think, after these years of training (even taking into account dyspraxia, a long-standing aversion to healthy living and an extended hiatus in my early 20s) that I’d have been good, or even halfway competent, at hitting people and manipulating limbs and driving heels into kneecaps. But no; in fact, I was pretty crap, even towards the end (a situation explained only partially by my knackered legs and gnarled knuckles).

It turns out, though, that being crap at something - at something you really care about - has its own rewards, and its own lessons. Lessons that translate (mostly beneficially) into work and everyday life.

Broadly, these can be summed up as:

1. You try harder. Knowing that you’re demonstrably worse at high kicks or low blocks or break falls than the person next to you is pretty motivating; it forces you to keep learning, to keep going even when you’re exhausted and your body is crying out for a cup of tea and a sit down. (Knowing that the same person is likely to be punching you in the face or throwing you over their shoulder sometime soon is also a decent motivator).
2. You keep learning. Because you have to. If you don’t (and you don’t figure out how to move that bit more to the left, or duck down a little bit lower than you did before) then that face-punch or shoulder-throw is going to land even harder than you thought, and you will feel it tomorrow. 
3. You put your ego to one side - and not just because of the training. Being punched in the face, or thrown to the ground, or (memorably) breaking all the fingers on your writing hand when trying (and failing) to catch a roundhouse with an open palm is definitely one way to discover that you’re neither invincible nor infallible. But the hierarchical dimensions of a lot of traditional martial arts - the coloured belt system, the lining-up by grade order at the beginning and end of sessions, the (mostly) large (mostly) men occasionally shouting at you from the corner of the room - also do wonders for any attitude you might take into the room with you. It’s hard to feel like a conquering god of all you survey when you’ve got a white belt holding your gi together. 

All three of these, in a way, are about learning humility. About making peace with being crap at something, resolving to be a bit less crap in the future - and knowing that however not-crap you ultimately become, you’ll always be a little crapper than someone else, be they opposite you on the mat or somewhere out there in Okinawa, training eight hours a day every day on a diet of protein and sea vegetables. 

I’m biased, obviously. I’m a martial arts junkie, and probably always will be, regardless of whether I ever again set foot in dojo. But it feels like there are probably worse lessons to learn.