“What is the vitally important factor
that can't be ignored in training?”

How is your relationship with your teacher and fellow practitioners?  In martial arts and qi gong, it’s quite common to ignore that we are dealing most of all with human arts.  In both, you are dealing with a situation where you have been placed under stress by another human and are trying to counteract that stressor.  It’s also another human that is teaching you ways of addressing the stressor.

Any time you have human on human interaction, whether it’s a coach and student, practice partners, or a predator and a victim, you’re dealing with a human relationship.  It’s the common thread, and the one that can not be ignored.  In fact, the quality of a coach can be assessed by how much of the human factor is addressed in his coaching.  A poor coach will almost always focus on technique and ignore the fact that it is a human doing the technique.

A coach can cultivate two high performance relationships: trust or hate.

Any spot in between those two positions results in less effective performance.  In a hate relationship, usually the student despises the coach and the other practitioners.  Martial arts are arts of destruction.  That destruction can be like the destruction of a surgeon removing a tumor or can be like the destruction of a suicide bomber, but it is destruction.  The nature of destructive power is such that it can be turned to hatred very easily.  It doesn’t need to be turned toward hate.  It simply can be done.

Hatred has certain advantages, and we need to take a look at those advantages, if you are going to avoid the path of hatred.

1. Hatred is highly motivating.  It doesn’t actually matter what the student hates, whether it’s the fellow students, the coach, or an outside force.  Hate is strong enough that once it is active, it becomes useful.  A person filled with hate is willing to overcome pain, discomfort, and discouragement.
2. Hatred is easy to build.  It takes less work, and it’s easier for the training team to develop a mutual hatred for one another.
3. Hatred overcomes timidity.
4. Hatred overcomes fear.  This is probably the most useful aspect of hatred.  Some people represent fear as a training pathway, but it’s not.  Fear can create initial motivation but it isn’t capable of long term drive.  It will dampen performance when used for a long time.  Hate overcomes the dampening and paralyzing effect of fear.  It is the reason that we likely have the ability to hate anyway—so that we can act against external stressors.
5. Hatred, once it is learned in the training relationship, can be directed by will against any outside force easily.  It doesn’t stay focused on the training group or the coach.

The problem with hatred is that it is self-destructive.  You become a hate-filled person.  Happiness will tend to be always out of your reach.

Qi gong, Chinese health and healing systems, lend themselves to trust relationships.  So building trust is easier in qi gong than it is in martial arts.  There is no restriction in the ability to build trust relationships in martial arts.  Schools that have difficulty building trust school-wide do so because of issues with design.  For example, trust will always be difficult to build in drop in classes, or with short term commitment.    Now coaches that have difficulty building trust, when the rest of a school staff can do so, are having problems because of personal issues or a lack of training.  Let’s take a look at trust from the problem side:

1. Many people entering martial arts do not expect that behavior and trust building will be a large focus.  In trust-based systems, it must be a conscious and spoken focus.
2. Trust built incorrectly can easily become dependence or create wishy-washy results.  The boundaries of the relationship between coach and participants have to be developed and maintained.
3. Trust does not provide a tool that can automatically overcome outside stressors.  Hate can.  One can simply use hate to offset the emotional impact of the stressor and keep going.  Trust is simply a framework in which to learn other skills rather than the skill itself!
4. Trust building is slow.
5. Trust building often attracts unmotivated people.  When a potential client of Water Mountain talks to me about wanting to train in an atmosphere of trust, usually what happens is that the word “Trust” is a code word for not wanting to do any work, and wanting to be let off the hook.  It is in other words a person searching for an opportunity to make excuses, and have those excuses accepted.

Wow!  Trust doesn’t look like such a good training device from this comparison.  Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of trust. 

1. Trust provides the greatest opportunity for behavioral change.  Behavior is the source from which performance and success flows.  Without the ability to change behavior, a person is going to be crippled in his or her ability to succeed.
2. Trust reduces the rate of physical injury in martial arts.
3. Trust allows a person to expose weakness, and examine it.  This willingness to be weak allows the person to correct the weakness.
4. Trust allows a person to risk error.  Risk taking permits rapid learning and development.
5. Trust builds loyalty.  All humans are improved by the existence of loyalty.
6. Trust allows a person to build positive relationships outside of training.
7. Having trust in training gives you a reference point to see those relationships that are clearly not trust-based, and remove them from your life, or at least be wary of them.

Suddenly trust seems much more appealing.  Of course, Water Mountain is built around trust methods, and the instructors and coaches are trained in trust systems.  When people come in with hate expectations, they must adapt to our approaches and learn the power of a trust framework or avoid membership with us.

Warm Regards,

Master Mikel Steenrod

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