The Lesson

Aikido has already had a profound effect on my life since I took it up almost 18 months ago. I have learned so much at many levels and wanted to share this with you in the hope that you might find it helpful in someway shape or form in your personal and / or professional life.

I wish I could tell you I took up Yoshinkan Aikido to achieve a specific goals such as to get fitter or to improve my mental strength. I thought that was the case at the time. However, when I look back now and join the dots, the reason can be found in the idiom 'when the student is ready, the teacher appears.'

I clearly was ready to learn more than I bargained for.

Yes, earning the coveted black belt was part of the initial motivation but as I've advanced through the initial Kyu grades the primary purpose of Aikido is no longer just to earn the black belt. I realise now that this is a lifetime's journey of discovery to find out what I didn't know about myself and to experience personal growth as I pushed and continue to push beyond my comfort zone.

The reason for this shift in outlook comes from the wider lessons learned both in the weekly classes and at the most recent, annual Summer School.

Last weekend's experience of Summer School and particularly the final 'hajime' class offered up a number of observations and insights that I was particularly struck by.

Putting this article together offers me an opportunity to get these out on to 'virtual paper' and consolidate my own understanding of the lessons I've learned and their application in the world of business and commerce.

Individual Lessons

The large majority of lessons in Aikido are often counterintuitive to what you would might expect to be the case.

There is often a moment of delight and wonder in learning something that makes you say to yourself 'no way!' (e.g. moving a 16 stone man - that's 224 lbs or 101Kgs depending on your 'currency') with two fingers in a way that they collapse on the floor unable to resist). Never has physics been such an appealing subject!

The 2019 Summer School last weekend was full of 'no way' moments that opened my eyes and allowed me to reframe some of my own past experiences as well as providing strong metaphors and lessons that renewed my belief and hope not only for my future but for everyone else too.

There are too many lessons to cram into a single article so I will offer some tasters from my own experiences. I accept everyone learns differently and trust some of the lessons will resonate. Please take what's useful and leave the rest.

Spirit

The lessons from each class are not just about learning specific techniques such as how to fall, how to blend with your opponent, how to respond to specific attacks (with or without weapons). They are also about building your own martial spirit and character which includes facing our fears (e.g. learning to disarm live weapons or learning how to fall to the mat without any stiffness, from a reasonably unnerving height and at sometimes considerable speed on your left side and your right side). It includes learning to focus on, tune in to and stay connected so as to be absolutely present with your training partner. The depth of connection fosters a level of trust that allows each partner the freedom to stretch themselves in their specific role to help each other make progress in closing each person's individual performance gap.

Business Question: How do you focus and stay connected with yourself and your immediate team? How much spirit do you display in the workplace?

Power

You learn that power has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with timing, focus and intention. Power comes primarily from the use of the lower body, the hips and legs, rather than the arms. The supplementary lesson is that if you feel any feedback in your shoulders and / or arms whilst working with your opponent then you find that your ability to blend and restore harmony in an attack is hindered.

In short, you're doing it wrong!

When applied correctly and using your opponents energy, then the amount of effort required in using power is more often than not minimal. The attacking opponent does most of your work for you.

This may be obvious to some at a cognitive level. However there is a considerable difference between saying 'obviously' and being on the mat coordinating your body with timing and precision to work with different shapes, sizes and levels of experience found in each of your training partners.

Business Question: How do you exercise your own personal power? Is it well intended and effective in helping to deliver the desired outcome?

Standards

There is often an assumption made that in learning what are inappropriately described as 'soft skills' this means that you have to sacrifice standards of performance in some way.

Poppycock! The truth is quite the opposite.

In Aikido, you learn that 'raising the bar' is a vital part of the process of personal growth and development and, it's also only one half of the performance equation.

You expect this. Dr Ceri Evans notes a culture of performance requires that a gap is created. This is the gap between your current reality and your intended outcome. The gap between a beginner's white belt and a black belt in many martial arts is a journey of between three to five years on average.

However, the other, often forgotten, half of the performance equation is the requirement to help people close the gap, to raise the bar and help them over it.

This lesson runs counter to what is very often seen and experienced in many business cultures particularly in Western culture.

Typically, the performance gap is set at the top of the organisation, cascaded down through the organisation to automatically populate individual human capital management systems, and then people are left to their own devices to perform or not.

At the end of the year, lines are drawn on spreadsheets and the bottom ten percent in various teams and business units are either fired, reassigned or put on a performance improvement plan and the top ten percent are given promotions and / or pay rises.

In the dojo, the story and performance culture is very different. Relationships are far more symbiotic with support always offered with humility and grace, irrespective of levels of experience and grade seniority.

You learn as a training partner that the experience of receiving a technique rather than delivering a technique will teach you far more about Aikido and yourself. Being a good receiver is about creating the conditions so that the attacking training partner can play full out and experiment whilst learning a technique working through learning the gross motor skills through to the endless journey of refining and mastering the micro motor skills.

As the receiver, you job is to serve your training partner with your mind and body, to drop your ego, extend your trust and to support their personal growth and development. This means both participants have a role in creating the conditions for each partner to succeed.

At Summer School in the final hajime class, the qualities of this symbiotic relationship is amplified. Such is the intensity of the training, there is a real need to look after yourself and your partner to get through a non-stop, 40 minute class where the physical and mental demands push you to the edge of your own normal limits of endurance. The performance gap - the ability for both training partners to complete the hajime class - requires mutual cooperation and support.

Despite the intensity, it's fascinating to notice that there's no need to push people to succeed because there is a deep, intrinsic, emotional investment made by each individual to close their own performance gap. A normal distribution of performance is neither relevant or required. Chest beating rally cries and metaphors using the language of war are redundant and are replaced with something much more enduring whose source is from the heart.

Business Question: Do your standards for performance meet the individual where they're at? How specifically do you invest in helping them 'over their bar'?

Back to Basics

You learn that the fundamentals govern how well you perform either a single technique or a sequence of techniques. The fundamentals are a series basics movements (known as kihon dosa) that are the building blocks of everything else in Aikido. Each movement is highly precise and has a specific purpose within the overall sequence (e.g. breaking the balance of your partner in a specific way).

The unsuccessful performance of a technique can always, without exception, be traced back to issues with how you execute the fundamentals. A precise performance depends on how you translate the fundamentals into your own practice. With Aikido, as in gymnastics and ballet, the difference between success and failure comes down to micro measurements be it posture and/or timing and precision of movement.

The lesson we come to learn as a result is that the problem is never outside of us. It is always within us and we learn to accept this fact and then take responsibility for this so we can improve.

Business Question: What are the foundations and fundamentals of your approach to leadership or to anything? How often to you practice these with intent?

Relax

You learn that relaxing the body and the mind helps to conserve energy and soften the body making it more supple both to be able to move and to fall without getting hurt. This echoes Bruce Lee's wisdom and teaching to 'be like water.'

Relaxation makes it easier to remain still for longer to anticipate and blend exactly with the movement of your opponent. This sounds easy but when you have a highly experienced, 7th Dan, Black Belt instructor bearing down on you with energy and intent or a multi-man attack from an equally determined group of two or three black belt students, remaining relaxed and calm in the moment requires tremendous practice.

In a hajime class, this intentional relaxation also helps conserve yours and your training partner's energy, an essential component of being able to last the full forty minutes of class.

Business Question: When you strive to achieve an outcome do you tense up or do you relax into the process? How does this impact your energy, performance and recovery?

Becoming Yourself

You learn that victory over others, in the sense of blending with an attack from an opponent and restoring harmony to you, your opponent and the wider world, is born from 'victory over self' first.

You learn that 'becoming yourself' is not something you can just know at a cognitive level, you must embody it too with every cell of your being.

The moment our chief instructor (Sensei) said the words 'the (Summer School) hajime class is now finished' I felt a bolt of energy rush through me from top to toe. In that moment, I learned that, at long last, I could set myself a highly demanding physical objective (one I failed to achieve 12 months ago) and work through a process of preparation and execution to succeed where previously I had failed. It was an undeniable truth and I was buzzing having that experience of embodied knowing that I had moved several steps along the path to becoming a bit more of myself.

On reflection I know that the team of Sensei had actively created the conditions for everyone to succeed by regulating the pace and intensity of the class sufficiently not only to challenge everyone but also to enable everyone that stayed focused and engaged to finish the class.

The intensity could have been ratcheted up at any point in the proceedings but this was an Aikido class not special forces training. Perhaps of all the insights that occurred to me it was this one that was the most profound. This was, for me at least, real leadership. Elusive. Rare. Silent. Present. I'm reasonably confident I had caught a glimpse of something quite special and magnificent.

Business Question: How do you create the conditions that enable everyone to succeed? What part of you has still to be conquered from within?

The Lesson

If we accept that leadership is not a thing then what exactly do we mean when we use the word 'leadership'?

Google won't help you as it is likely that it would take many lifetimes to analyse, digest and draw a useful conclusion on the petabytes of articles and resources about the concept of leadership. The issue is not that we don't have enough leadership theories or leadership development training, we do, it's something else and it's something much more practical.

Warren Bennis noted, "becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It's that simple and also that difficult." I like this quote because, IMHO, I believe leadership is an inside job that begins with the quality of the relationship you have with yourself.

The Shudokan Academy Summer School 2019 taught me important (and I like to think lesser known) lessons about leadership:

Leadership is a state of being more than it is a process and few leadership development programmes proactively teach this through experience.

Leadership is about resistance and self regulation. It is about resisting the temptation to tell, to cajole, to react, to criticise and to shame others. When and if needed, a touch is applied but it is only the lightest and deftest of touches and only applied when all other options have been explored and exhausted.

Leadership gives permission, explicitly or otherwise, for others to express a full range of emotion including all the messy, uncomfortable stuff that sometimes has to be embraced to push through to achieve the outcome.

In last weekend's 'hajime' class the raw emotion required to execute what psychologists politely call a cognitive reappraisal, was nothing short of explosive. Without it, I and many of the other participants would have given up succumbing to the pain in our exhausted bodies and the increasing confusion in our minds as the class continued.

Leadership - really good leadership - is often disguised in ways that run counter to your expectations. The soft skills of leadership appear as toughness and spirit that is as hard as any diamond and, at the same time, with a heart at its centre, that is as delicate and gentle as any feather.

Leadership dances in the moment with each individual and the whole group. It simultaneously takes in what is happening and makes micro-adjustments in the conditions for success as needed. This takes considerable energy, skill and effort to help everyone succeed.

Leadership ensures everyone leads to the same degree using these same principles. The performance of one depends on the support and performance of all.

The many help the one to rise to the level of their own potential. The consequence of this benevolent behaviour is that the individual's performance exceeds their own beliefs and expectations so as to help the group exceed their own expectations and target outcome.

The many help the one to stay in the game with silent acts of encouragement, a smile here, a look there and a steady hand to help those who seem as though they might falter in the next moment.

The result? The one responds and lifts everyone to a higher standard.

Leadership creates and tweaks the conditions for everyone to succeed in each moment - not just for the strong ones, the favourites, the high potentials - but for everyone and without exception.

So for me, the most important lesson from this experience is this:

Whilst leadership is multi-faceted it is not, as most now acknowledge, a title or a set of capabilities.

Counterintuitively, it is being before doing.

It is a highly nuanced and very subtle way of being that - like a virtuoso performance - emerges gradually, quietly and unannounced, is grounded and wrapped in being absolutely comfortable in our own skin and is an unspoken exchange of energy and information in service and partnership with and for others.

You recognise it when you see it.

You appreciate its rarity in today's sometimes difficult, fickle and dynamic world.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you revel in its magic as you glimpse a reflection of your own humanity and your potential to be that bit better tomorrow than you were today.

Thanks for reading. All comments and feedback welcomed.

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References

1. Listen to Chapter 9 of Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall for free here to understand why this is the case.
2. More details on what a 'hajime' class is can be found here.
3. 'The Art of Peace' by Morehei Ueshiba (compiled and translated by John Stevens) p.7