Fight for a Happy Life with Sensei Ando: Martial Arts for Everyday Life

Welcome to Episode #128 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “The Nuts and Bolts of Martial Arts.” Will your martial arts techniques hold up under pressure… or will your skills break apart and leave you lying in a pool of tears? Here’s the thing—it’s easy to get the BIG things right in the martial arts, but what about the SMALL things? You know…those little details that actually make or break your success? (Is it possible that you don’t even know some of those small things exist?) The devil is in the details, my friend. If you want to be effective on offense or defense, you have to look deeper and deeper into the mechanics of your art. Figuring out how all the nuts and bolts are put together takes time. It also requires asking questions, observing others, practicing, and experimenting. The good news is that if you keep an open mind and stay curious, you will slowly collect the subtleties and nuances that will lead you to your best chance at success. Join me for a discussion on how to solidify your martial arts training. To LISTEN to “The Nuts and Bolts of Martial Arts,” just hit play below. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! The Nuts and Bolts of Martial Arts Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to comment (or complain!), feel free to leave a message here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Today on Fight for a Happy Life, The Nuts and Bolts of Martial Arts. Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode number 128 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. It’s been a little while, it’s great to see you again. Today, I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of martial arts, the nuts and bolts of self-defense. And, no, I’m not talking about kicking someone in the nuts and bolts. I’m talking about your training, your techniques, your habits. Are the components of your training, the assembly of what you do, strong and solid, will they hold up under pressure, offensively, defensively, or will it all break apart? The reason I want to talk about this is because of an incident that occurred to me a few years ago now. You might notice that in the background of some of my older videos, there’s a big red wall and four black heavy bags hanging up. Now I will tell you that that project made me very proud of myself. I’m not a mechanical guy, but I figured out how to get those bags put up on that wall, so it was a big deal. With the help of another Sensei, we drilled those boards into the brick wall. I found some wall mounts. We installed those. I had custom bags made, black leather, specific weight, and they came out great. They looked wonderful. And we hung them up. Kids of all ages loved hitting them. I loved hitting them. Other teachers loved hitting them. Adult students loved hitting them. It was a big success. That is until a couple of weeks went by. In the middle of a class, I’ve got some kids running a relay race, and a precious little girl went running down one of the rows, and she kicked the bag, she turns around, she starts leaving, and to my horror, the bag detached and just fell. BOOM! Thankfully, she was not hit, but I was in shock. Shut down the drill, got the kids away from the bags, finished the class, and then afterward, had to come over and face my failure, grabbed a step stool, and got up and took a look at the mechanism. Just like most heavy bags, the bag had a carabiner on it, the carabiner attached to a metal ring, the ring was attached to the wall mount with a bolt and a nut. Somehow, the nut had worked its way to the end of the threading and fallen off and let the whole bag go. So I figured, being not a super mechanical guy, Oh, I just didn’t tighten them enough when I first installed them. So cranked, cranked, cranked as much as I could, made them as tight as I possibly could, and thought, there, done deal, we’re okay now. Nope, nope. Couple weeks later, the same thing happened. A bag fell off. Again, thankfully, no one got hurt. But this time, I was really upset because I couldn’t figure out the problem. I hate that. So this time, I figured, well, it’s taken about two weeks for this to happen. This just needs to be a regular maintenance task. When you come in for the day, check the bags and see where the nuts are and tighten them up every day. I guess it’s just a design flaw in the wall mounts. That’s what I thought. But of course, this was always a stress. If I’m sick or if I was working at a different location, I didn’t want to depend on everybody trying to always check for those things because there’s always something that falls through the cracks. And I didn’t want that to fall on someone and crack their head. So I happened to mention this problem to my brother, who is more mechanical minded and has some background in construction. And he didn’t think twice. He just said, Oh, you need a spring washer. What? A spring washer or a split lock washer. Different names. So all it is, it’s just like a regular washer, right? A little flat circle, but it’s got a cut in it and it’s got a little twist. So it looks like the first coil of a spring. Now, when you put that spring washer next to a nut, it pushes the nut and tilts it a little bit. So it creates some friction on the bolt. So now, when the bag is shaking and the mount is shaking, the nut doesn’t start spinning and moving down the threads. What? It’s that simple? A tiny little piece of metal? It didn’t even cost me a dollar to get four of them. Super cheap, super easy to install. And would you believe it? We never had that problem again. That simple. But what a lesson. You hear about how the devil is in the details. And boy, if this wasn’t a great example of that. All the money and time that I spent putting those bags up on that wall, all of the drilling and pounding and all to be undone by just this little omission of a spring washer. Of course, now I know. Engines and washers and dryers and blenders, all these things that vibrate and shake, have some type of anti-vibration technology in them. So, in case you didn’t know, now you know. But this brings the question back to my martial arts training. Because I realize how little it takes for your techniques to transform into something very successful or to fail completely. On the offensive side, you may have a really strong punch, but if the pressure’s a little off, your alignment’s a little off, you can break your wrist when you hit something, right? If you’re actually fighting with someone, these small adjustments in your footwork or your distance can make your punch completely miss. And of course, it works on the defensive side too. If somebody grabs you and you can shimmy or wiggle just so, you can get away. If you don’t, you’re getting caught. So these little tiny details, these nuances, the subtlety is really what makes or breaks your technique. So what about your technique? This is what we’re talking about. How would you judge your technique? I can tell you that when I work with kids, for instance, they get cocky really fast. They don’t seem to understand nuance in any way. And of course, how could they? The other day, I was working with a student and he’s been a little behind on earning his next belt. He just hasn’t been putting in the work and it shows. So after class, he was whining a little bit like, why can’t I be signed off? And I started a couple of little things I needed him to fix. Amongst them, very simple, when he makes a fist, his thumb is sticking out. And I said, look, you know, you’ve been here almost two years and this is not a secret that, you know, I want you to make a strong fist. I don’t want your thumb sticking out. And right in front of me, he fixed it. Okay. I said, good. I said, now open your hand, show me another fist. He made a fist. I said, good. Now that’s what I want to see. And he replied, Can I get my belt now? No appreciation for the time to build a habit. Of course, I said, Well, no. Now you have to come back and show me you can do that on your own, that you’ve done the work to make it automatic. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. So from a kid’s standpoint, there’s probably a large gap between hearing information, copying the information and actually embodying it, making it part of you. Of course, I hope that’s not part of my training. I presume there are some blind spots, things that I think I’ve got down, when actually there are some details that I’m probably missing.That’s the addiction to constantly seeking out new teachers and new videos and new practice, because there’s always some new little angle that I haven’t considered before. I presume the same is true for you. I think most students were all pretty good at the big stuff. You see a teacher throw a punch, a kick, do a takedown, do a submission, and you think, oh, I see what you just did there. And it’s only over time of years of going back to that technique, and it fails, and it fails if you’re honest with yourself, if you have honest training, where you’re forced to finally figure this out and say, how are you making this work, but I can’t? And I think that’s a wonderful process of these tiny little nuances. Just today, I was working with my own teacher. It was a private lesson. And we spent an hour and a half on the subtleties of

Welcome to Episode #127 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Survival with Stephan Kesting.” You might know Stephan Kesting from his impressive work as an online BJJ instructor. You may also remember him from our first interview together back in episode #62. But he’s far more than just an internet hotshot. Stephan is also a professional firefighter, founder of Grapplearts.com, host of the Strenuous Life podcast, outdoor adventurer, and now—with the publication of Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic—an author. In this interview, I talk to Stephan about his grueling experience taking a 1,000 mile canoe trip through the great white north… ALONE! Our conversation touches on crucial topics for living a happy life, such as: Setting priorities Grit Organization Time Management Solitude Meditation Oh—and did I mention that Stephan’s survival tips have also been challenged by family tragedies, a kidney transplant, and a hip replacement? Believe me, the tips shared in this episode are the key components for survival on the mats, online, on a river, or in a fire. If you’d like to read the full account of Stephan’s solo adventure in the wild, here’s my Amazon affiliate link to buy the book: Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic. Of course, supporting your local bookstores is cool, too! To LISTEN to “Survival with Stephan Kesting,” just hit play below. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify. To WATCH the video version, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Survival with Stephan Kesting Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to comment (or complain!), feel free to leave a message here or through my Contact Page. The post #127: Survival with Stephan Kesting [Video Podcast] appeared first on Sensei Ando.

Welcome to Episode #126 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Blind Spots.” In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been wearing glasses for several years… but not anymore! I recently underwent eye surgery and am happy to report that I can now see better than ever! However, even with perfect vision, the fact is we can all have blind spots. We often see only what we WANT to see or only what we already know. Or maybe that’s just me? In this episode, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about vision and blind spots—both physical and psychological—and how they affect our success and happiness on the mats and off. To LISTEN to “Blind Spots,” just hit play below. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Blind Spots in Martial Arts Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to comment (or complain!), feel free to leave a message here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Today, if you’re watching the video, you might notice—no more glasses! That’s right, for the first show in maybe six years, I am not wearing glasses. That’s because I am one month out from having a vision correction surgery. I’d like to tell you what I did and more importantly, what I’ve learned about vision and blind spots. So, backing up, I was born and raised with perfect vision, 20/20. In fact, most of my life, I’ve had perfect vision. But then somewhere around the age of 47 or 48, I noticed, as is natural, that I was having trouble reading. And then a couple years later, I was having some trouble driving. I even failed the DMV test, which was really embarrassing for me. I’d never had something in print, on the license, saying, “restricted license, must wear eyeglasses”. That hurt. So, at first, of course, I accepted it. I realized this is normal, right? The eyes start to go as you get older. But it didn’t take long before I hated it. Absolutely hated it. If you wear glasses, I’m sure you’re aware of this. My glasses were always lost or I was breaking them. Had to buy new ones all the time. I was walking around with two pairs of glasses, one for reading and one for distance. And I was always switching in between the two. And if I’m trying to just duck down, do little fix-it projects, they’re always falling off my head. It just got to be a nightmare. I hated it. Now, of course, if you’ve been wearing glasses your whole life, you’re probably more patient and more accustomed to it. But I was weak. I admit I was weak. It really got to me. So, a couple years ago, I started looking into LASIK because I had some friends and they got tired of hearing me whine about my eyes. And they said, “Well, why don’t you just get LASIK?” At first, that actually frightened me. Lasers in the eyes—I’m old school, that seemed crazy. But then, three months ago, I finally got the guts to go see a doctor for LASIK. He sat me down and he said, “Hey man, listen—I could give you the LASIK, but at your age, what you should get is cataract surgery.” Do I have cataracts? No, I don’t have cataracts. But if you get this surgery, you never will. So it’s something called RLE, refractive lens exchange. And that was the promise: If you get this surgery, within 24 hours, you’ll be able to drive back for your first follow-up appointment, and you won’t need glasses again. You’ll have close vision, intermediate vision, and far vision. Sounded too good to be true. But I did it. So a month ago, had the surgery, and sure enough, 24 hours later, drove myself to the follow-up appointment. I don’t like necessarily using the word miracle, but it’s a miracle. I have not worn glasses now in a month, for reading or for driving. So, if you’re interested in this kind of procedure, hit me up on email or in the comments, I’m more than happy to share some information on it. If you’re living in Los Angeles, I’m happy to refer you to the doctor who took care of me. It was definitely worth it. What lessons have I taken from this experience? Well, number one, don’t take anything for granted. I absolutely took my eyes for granted. I took my vision for granted for many, many years. And that was a crutch because I relied on them too much. I think it’s natural that we’re wired as human beings to be very hands and eyes focused, especially nowadays when you have a device in your hands, and you’re texting all the time, and you’re driving, and you’re sitting at a computer, watching TV. It’s a lot of your eyes and your hands. Then you lose touch with the rest of your body. So, I feel that that is its own blind spot of a sort. Because you’re living in this tunnel. You’re so reliant on your eyes that you don’t feel around you, you don’t widen out your awareness, you just focus on what’s in your hands and what’s right in front of you. In short, if I can’t see it, it’s not there. That’s, to me, a blind spot. Now, you can talk about physical blind spots, which is what I’ve been doing, but worse were the psychological blind spots. Not only couldn’t I literally see the horizon physically, psychologically, I could not see the future. I couldn’t set clear goals for myself. I was asking myself, where are you going? Where do you think you’re going? And I couldn’t get a clear vision of it. It was as if my entire imagination was tied to my eyes. That might sound crazy, and that’s okay. That frustration at first, feeling boxed in and somewhat limited, eventually got depressing. And then I just tied it into just getting old in general. I thought, well, you’ve been dealing with arthritis for several years. My shoulders, my feet, I’ve talked about these things. I lose my voice very easily nowadays. Lower energy. In short, I’m dying. I’ve peaked and now I’m down that shady side of the hill, the cold side of that hill. And here we go. Now your eyes are going. You’re going blind. So it’s hard to wake up and be enthusiastic when you can’t see the future. Okay. It got worse. Am I being dramatic? Maybe. I’ll tell you when it got really bad. The lockdowns, the COVID lockdowns, were five years ago now. Almost exactly five years ago. And of course, during the lockdown—I live in a very small apartment— couldn’t go outside. Couldn’t go to work, right? At one point, couldn’t go to the parks. We had fires here in Los Angeles. Couldn’t go anywhere. So I was locked into a physical space, and then locked within the rims of my glasses or just blurred vision. And that was really suffocating. But it gets worse because during the lockdowns, since I lost my business, I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. Now listen, there are nice people in Raleigh, a lot of positives about Raleigh, so I’m not bashing Raleigh. However, I live in Los Angeles, had been living in Los Angeles for decades, and it’s not Los Angeles. I’m used to sunshine. I’m used to mountains, vistas, ocean, wide expanses. There’s a freedom that comes with a large view. And in LA, that’s something else I just took for granted. When I got to Raleigh—have you been there? It’s quite the opposite. There are no mountains. It’s flat. It’s not sunny all the time. Clouds, rain, overcast. Trees. So many trees. I joked at some point, half-kiddingly, that it felt when you’re driving down these straight streets that—you couldn’t see the horizon, because they’re all curving around, flat land, just surrounded by trees. All you have are tree trunks, tree trunks, tree trunks, all around you. Which then felt like bars of a jail cell. So, I felt like I was in a jail cell with a ceiling of clouds inside the frames of my glasses and with humidity in Raleigh, also your glasses fog up often. So, talk about suffocating. I really felt like I was just being crammed into my coffin when I lived there. Couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. My freedom was just crushed. So, two years it took for my wife and I to decide, let’s go back to Los Angeles. I can’t breathe, I can’t move. And we did. And that brought some relief. Absolutely. Nurtured my soul. But I still felt limited. I still was right back to the original restrictions of I can’t see. So, that brings us to getting the surgery. I signed up. I showed up on time early, in fact. Got the surgery. And what’s funny is, the day after the surgery, my wife says to me, “It seems like you have more energy.” What? She said, “You know, it seems like you’re in a better mood.” She even said, “You know, you look a little bigger.” All of that was a shock. She was saying, “Hey, it’s the old Ando, the one from seven or eight years ago. Old Ando is back.” I was stunned, shocked, mostly because I thought I had learned this lesson. Not once, but many times. Several years ago, a doctor told me I was probably going to need a hip replacement. That was a downer, but I found a way to work around it, kept moving forward. With the arthritis, found a way around it. Herniated discs in my back, found a way around it. So I’ve always been optimistic and found ways to adapt. And these are the messages that I usually share with you. Because I’ve done these things. But for some reason, this one, I couldn’t get past. It was as if it was the first challenge in my life. The lesson there is that these things add up if you let them. We can all slide down that shady,

Welcome to Episode #125 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Killer Instinct.” Speed, power, and flexibility are all important, yes… but here’s the truth– They’re not enough! When it comes to surviving a real-life attack (or even just winning a tournament), you need killer instinct! You need to release your full fighting spirit! But here’s the problem… Most of us are “too nice”. Even though the essence of martial arts is a study of death, most of us would rather not train in such an extreme mindset. Unfortunately, that is exactly what makes good people vulnerable! So, let’s take a stroll back into the jungle and see if we can rekindle some of our primal power… before we get eaten alive! To LISTEN to “Killer Instinct,” just hit play below. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! How to Train Your Killer Instinct Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy! Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #125 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Yes, I’m back. After a six-month hiatus–I didn’t plan it, it just happened– I’m back. But I’m even more thrilled that you stopped by to say hello. So welcome back to you too. Let’s go! What’s that? Oh, the sweater. Do you like that? I’ll explain that in a minute. But let’s start off today’s show talking about frustration. My frustration. Years and years of frustration. Why? Because I kept getting beat. No matter how hard I trained, no matter how much I studied, I feel that I was losing to people who trained far less than I did. People who took it far less seriously than I did. And I would go to my teachers after class in the dark shadows. And I would confess this. I would say, Listen, I’m working really hard here, but I’m getting beat. Everybody’s beating me. New people are beating me. Something’s wrong. And they were always very supportive. They’d say, No, no, you’re doing great. You’re a good student. But maybe you’re just being too nice. Too nice. I would argue with them. I would say, No, no, you don’t understand. In my head, I’m not being nice at all. Of course, I’m a nice person, so I’m training with safety and respect. But I really am trying to win a lot of the time. I have an ego. I have a temper. I have a competitive spirit. So I’m not giving anybody anything once the action starts. So, I would come back to the conclusion that I just need to practice harder. And practicing harder meant focusing on technical attributes. And it still wouldn’t be enough. Another six months would go by. Another year would go by. I would come back to my teacher and say, I’m still getting beat. Something’s wrong. And again, they would say, Maybe you’re just being too nice. I would say, No, I’m not being nice. And the cycle would continue over and over, for lo, these many years. So what really is the issue? What has been the problem for me, personally, which perhaps you can relate to? I believe it all came down to one thing. Killer instinct. I have figured out– maybe it took way too long– that developing a killer instinct is a skill of its own. You can focus all you want on speed and power, flexibility and mobility, pain tolerance, sensitivity. You can study as many books as you want, talk to as many teachers as you want to. Flow like water. None of it matters if you don’t have killer instinct to back it up. If you can’t finish a fight, then you’re finished. This is what I figured out. Now, that brings us to the sweater. Check out this sweater. This is getting me in the spirit of killer instinct. What do we got here? It’s a big cat, a panther, a predator, a meat eater. In the wild, clearly, you must have a killer instinct. Either you eat or you die. And that’s whether you eat a plant, kill a plant, or kill a fellow animal. It’s eat or be eaten. Now, in the last podcast, #124, the topic was to stop pulling your punches. And I argued six months ago that we need to push ourselves in training, to go to 100%. And I’m saying that wasn’t even deep enough. The language there wasn’t deep enough. In the last six months, I’ve only come to a doubling down on this theme. We must release our fighting spirit in its most primal execution, most primal expression. To be clear, the martial arts are all about death. You’re either training to stop someone from taking your life or you’re developing the capability to take someone else’s life to survive. You may not think of every self-defense scenario as a life or death situation, but the point of training is to take it that far. The bad news is, most of us are nice people, and we can’t, won’t, or don’t want to imagine these extremes. To think about the death aspect of martial arts. And that has revealed to me that the killer instinct is not actually in everyone. Maybe you were born with a killer instinct, but then you were raised out of it. You were taught to be polite, and patient, and civilized. To play by the rules, to not cause a fuss. And now, even if you were born with it, that instinct is gone. Or I think more likely, you weren’t even born with an instinct to kill. Some are, but I think many aren’t. I don’t think I was. Yes, we have a primal drive to survive, but that doesn’t mean we have a primal drive to kill to survive. As a result, violence is shocking. Either violence perpetrated against us or seeing violence come out of us when necessary. A secondary effect of not having a killer instinct is that you may actually judge violence as barbaric. Something beneath you. Something you would never resort to. Even when it’s the only tool left. So that’s the disadvantage here. Bad guys will do whatever they want. They’ve released their fighting spirit. They still have a killer instinct, or have developed their killer instinct, to take what they want from you, including your life. And if a bad guy is willing to use 100% of the tools available to them, but you’re not, then you’re at a disadvantage. You’ll be too slow to react, or you won’t react when you need to. That’s a problem. Let’s recognize that having a killer instinct allows you 100% of the tools available to you as a human being. And as a self-defense student, a martial arts student, you should have 100% of all the tools necessary. Now the good news… The good news is the killer instinct– and let’s just stop even using that word. Because like I said, either it can be trained out of you, so it’s no longer an instinct, or maybe you weren’t born with it at all. So, perhaps we should talk about this more as a killer mindset. A killer mindset as a separate skill can be trained. It’s an odd thing, but the toughest guys I know, and I’ve talked to a couple of them on this podcast, they insist that they were not born with a killer instinct. They’ve said, no, quite the contrary. They had to develop it because they had to, they needed to. Because of the way they were raised, their neighborhood, their family dynamics, they felt they had to develop a killer mindset to survive. And I would say, so should you. So should I. And even if right now, you’re not 100% comfortable with it, and even if you never achieve a 100% expression of a killer mindset, I believe every percentage point you can add to your personality will be of benefit to you. So what’s the big problem here? Not just civilization, not just your past and how you were raised, not just the fact that you weren’t born with a killer instinct. You were smart enough to seek out martial arts training. But the problem is many martial arts schools– I would never say all of them, I hesitate to say most of them, but let’s just safely say many of them– presume you do have a killer instinct. So, most of the class time and the curriculum is spent teaching techniques, teaching you drills, teaching you all of the other attributes that are important, but aren’t necessarily the deal breaker, the scales-tipper. So you will get faster and stronger, you will get tougher, but if you still don’t have the fuel of a killer instinct, a killer mindset, all that’s going to fall apart. I would say it’s almost worthless. That’s been my experience. You can train for years and be a very sincere student, and hide the fact that you don’t have a killer mindset. You can excel at your drills, be the best student in the class, and still lack a killer mindset. And it would be tragic if you didn’t reveal that to yourself until a real-life situation that calls for you to be a killer comes up and you fail. That would be tragic. And by the way, we’re talking about a martial arts class where you are presumably safe. Even if you’re in a hardcore school, and you’re practicing MMA, or boxing, or Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, there are still rules to protect you. It’s still supposed to be a safe training environment. And even in tournaments, they’re supposed to be safe with rules and referees. So, if you can’t play the part of a killer, even in a safe context, even with rules and supervision, then what makes you think you’re going to have a killer mindset when it’s for real and there are no rules and there are no referees? The martial arts class is our first chance to really exercise the killer minds

Welcome to Episode #124 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Stop Pulling Your Punches.” It might sound harsh, but most people are holding back… not just on the mats, but in every aspect of life. They’re NOT maximizing their efforts and, therefore, NOT maximizing their successes. (Yes, including me!) The question is WHY? Or is it? Maybe before asking why, I should ask if you even agree? Perhaps you believe you ARE giving 100%… even if you’re not. It’s a common misimpression. How does this happen? In this episode, let’s dig deep to figure out if we’re truly working towards our dreams or just going through the motions. Along the way, I hope you’ll discover there’s more power in you just waiting to be unleashed! Oh—two videos are mentioned in this episode. If you’d like to check them out, here are the links… One Tip for Powerful Punches Self-Defense Tip: Finish the Fight Okay—check out the show, then let’s get out there and start throwing some full power punches! To LISTEN to “Stop Pulling Your Punches,” just hit play below. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Stop Pulling Your Punches Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hello, and welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. I’m so glad you could stop by. Today, Stop Pulling Your Punches. The reason this topic is on my mind… The other day, I was working with a student, a young man, and we were throwing sidekicks on a bag. And he’s a hardworking student. He was sweating. He was giving it his all. He was pivoting well. He was kicking hard. But overall, I had to give him like a B+. This is not an A performance. Why? Well, the fact is that he wasn’t extending his leg all the way. The pivot wasn’t 100%. Sticking out that heel wasn’t 100%. And therefore, it wasn’t a complete kick. It wasn’t his full potential for a strong side kick. Now, this is not the first time that I’ve addressed this type of issue on the physical front. I have a video, I believe it’s called, One Tip for More Powerful Punches. In that video, I comment on the same phenomenon. When you see people set up in front of a heavy bag very often, they “short arm” their punches. They just kind of stand there and their hands are very active, but their torso is not. And so the tip very simply was to give yourself a little more space and try to extend that shoulder for a full punch. Now, of course, I’m not innocent. I am guilty of short arming my punches and kicks over the years. And in particular, when I started grappling, so 15 years ago, I remember I was rolling with my coach, and I was just happy to get good positions, get to a mount, get to his back. But if I got my arm around his neck to set up a choke, I’d let that go. If I got near an arm bar, I wouldn’t fight for it. When the round was over, I remember my coach being very frustrated. He looked at me and he said, What is this? A nice guy contest? Guilty again. Yes. I absolutely admit that physically, I was not finishing techniques. I was not in the hunt for the tap, for the win. Psychologically, of course, that’s the problem. I didn’t want to be a jerk. I was new to grappling. I certainly didn’t want to hurt him, because I didn’t know what I was doing necessarily. So I don’t want to hurt somebody. I’m out of control. I didn’t want to come off as too aggressive, or like I’m trying to win. I’d like to think that my ego is in check and I was just enjoying the learning experience. But at the same time, that doesn’t make me the best of sparring partners, because I am allowing falsity into the workout. The worst thing you can do for your partners is to give them a false sense of confidence, a false sense of skill, letting them think they earned an escape, when really you just gave up on the attack. So, yeah, I needed to make some adjustments to make sure I was being a good sparring partner, and to ensure that they would be good sparring partners back to me. I don’t want people short arming their punches or shortening their kicks, just to make me feel good. I need that honest feedback of for what’s working and what’s not. So overall, in a nutshell, if you have to leave early, the big advice today is stop pulling your punches, because the magic of martial arts is in the finish. The magic is in that last 10%, 5% of effort, where you do fight to win, where you fight for the success. Of course, that’s the magic in everything in life, going for the finish, not holding back, giving something your full effort and attention. I think I can prove this, because most of us are very excited when we see something, see a person working at full capacity. As opposed to what we normally see– I think it’s just part of human nature– where people hold back a bit. I think most people are working short of their potential on the mats and off– half-hearted, half-assed. People seem to have this natural tendency, including me, to do the minimum to get by. Whatever your goal is, they seek the minimum– what do I have to do to get that goal?– and not necessarily looking to do more than that. My proof for this is that when people go the extra mile– well, let me back up, when people give 100%, you notice. If people give 100% and then do more than that, like extra credit, you really notice. And that can be in any walk of life. That could be getting a waiter or a waitress who greets you well, gets the order correct, is timely, checks up on you during the meal, makes sure you have everything you have, brings you the check on time. When they tick every box of a professional waiter or waitress, you notice. Why do you notice? Because you’ve had so many lousy waiters and waitresses. So I’ve had that experience, whether it’s at the dentist’s office or at a car mechanic. You get used to this mediocre level of service, attention, competence, and you just kind of think, well, that’s the way it is. Until you meet that person who’s really good at what they do, and they tick every box of professionalism, and you realize, like, wow, I’m inspired by this. I notice this. I want to be like that. My other proof that most people aren’t working at full capacity, I think, would be in the sports world. Playoffs. I’m not much of a sports guy for regular season sports, because I’m not always convinced they’re going at 100%. They’re nursing injuries or whatever. The big crowds aren’t as big. They know they have a long season. They can make it up later. But during playoffs, I know that they’re trying hard. During the Olympics, I know it’s now or never, these people have to put up their best performance right now. We pay money to see people working at 100%. That’s maybe how rare it is to find people not pulling their punches. So, when you find people, if you went and paid for a ticket at a professional basketball game or at the Olympics, and people weren’t working at 100%, I think that’s when the crowd starts to boo, throw stuff, because you feel cheated. I paid to see you work at 100%. I want that inspiration in my life. And if you don’t get it, boo. So, that’s number two. My third proof that most people aren’t working at full capacity, I think, is animal attacks. Whether it’s on Instagram or wherever, when you catch these little “caught on tape” type clips of a bear tearing up a campsite, running after somebody, or a shark attack, or any animal– it could be a spider– animal attacks are incredibly gripping entertainment. Why? Why can’t you look away? I think it’s because of the commitment level. The animal is not in the off season. That animal is either protecting their young or they’re hungry, and they’re fighting for their life. So what you’re seeing there is a primal example of 100% effort. Biting down, holding on, trying to kill somebody. And man, that’s exciting. And perhaps inspiring. So, overall, I think the rule is simple. If you give a minimal level of effort, you’re going to get minimal results. If you give more, you’re going to get more. And if you can make a habit of giving your best and going all the way with what you’ve got, then you will figure out what your best really is. You will fulfill your potential. Doesn’t mean you’re always going to be the champ. Doesn’t mean you’re always going to win or survive or get what you want. But your results will be maximized. Okay, now, this can get tricky because you may feel that you are already doing that. That you’re giving all you’ve got… You’re exhausted after class. You’ve saved as much money as you can, etc., etc. You may feel like you are already a hard worker. And the reason this is tricky is that’s true! You may be a hard worker. You may know lots about your subject of expertise. You may have the courage to show up and try new things. You may practice a lot. You may be brave enough to ask questions and seek mentors and coaches. But all of those measurements don’t necessarily equate to success. The problem here is when you reflect on what you’re doing, you’re measuring the wrong qualities. Gee, I’m sweating. So does that mean I worked my best? Maybe not. Did you try new things? Did you ask the right questions? Did you put yourself in uncomfortable situatio

Welcome to Episode #123 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Build Courage in Martial Arts.” Many people worry that they won’t have the courage to fight back against a real-life attacker… and that includes martial arts students! It makes sense, really. You can build strong muscles and practice cool moves all day long, but when fear strikes, you might still find yourself curled up in a ball and frozen solid. Don’t let that happen to you! In this episode, I’ll share some tips to help you face your fears and build your courage… no matter what threats come your way. (Believe me—you’re not alone. I need these tips, too!) If you’d like even more advice on overcoming fear—particularly when sparring—check out this video: How to Reduce Fear in Sparring and Fighting. The good news is that you’re already brave… you’re already a fighter. Believe it! The big trick is simply not allowing anyone or anything to make you forget it. Okay—let’s get started! Let me know what you think! To LISTEN to “How to Build Courage in Martial Arts,” here’s the link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! How to Build Courage in Martial Arts Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hello, again! Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #123 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Great to be back on video, I’ve missed you. I’ve been busy training, been busy teaching, but I’m here now. And, if I’m going to be honest, feeling a little old. Let me tell you why. In the mail, I got this lovely note. Yes, and what does it say? It says, Andrew, because they really know me. Andrew, make a plan that celebrates your life. And who is this from? Why, it’s a cremation service. Yes, I’ve finally reached the age where there are officially people waiting for me to die. They can’t wait to burn my corpse. So now I’m walking outside every day, looking up, seeing if today’s the day. Are there any vultures? How bad do I look? Have I lost weight? Anyway, I keep this on my desk. I didn’t throw it out because it reminds me that life is short and life is crazy. Live while you can, my friend. If you have to leave the episode right now, that’s what you needed to know. So live. What I’d like to talk about, if you’re still going to hang around though, is courage. It takes courage to live in this world, doesn’t it? It takes courage to go after your goals. And it will certainly take courage to defend your life or to defend your goals if someone tries to stop you. I bring this up because I get this comment either through video reactions or through email quite often. Someone will write, Dear Sensei Ando, I am afraid that I won’t be brave enough to fight back if I’m ever attacked. I’m afraid that I don’t have the courage to stand up for myself. Whoa. All right. Let me make this simple, okay? And then maybe if you want to cut the episode short and you want to take off, okay. To me, this question is just missing one thing, context. There are incidents every day where people with no martial arts training defend themselves successfully. Could be multiple attackers, could be a weapon involved, but people who did not see trouble coming finding a way to survive, finding a way to win. And it’s not just in the world of self-defense. There are people who have been wiped out one way or the other and rebuilt their lives. Whether it was addiction and drugs, whether it was bankruptcy and financial ruin, whether it’s disease, the pandemic, whether their town was bombed in a war or invaded. Throughout history, human beings find ways to pull themselves back together and move forward. And if they can do it, I believe I can do it. And if I can do it, I believe you can do it. So the context here is situations that put us in emergency mode. Code red. When necessity is strong enough, you will fight. When desperation is high enough, you will find a way to fight back. That’s what I believe. In those moments of extreme crisis, your strengths will be revealed. And I believe you will overcome fear. I think fear is something we can just imagine when there is no crisis. So of course, it seems like we’re going to be overwhelmed. But you’re not giving yourself enough credit, my friend. If you were attacked by a shark, I have no training for that. You probably have no training for that. But I’ll bet you’d fight. I’ll bet you’d fight hard. So tap into that. Believe in that. You have an emergency mode that, if things are truly, truly bad, you have resilience, you have toughness, you will fight your fight. I’m not guaranteeing you survive. I’m not guaranteeing you win. But I guarantee you’ll fight. So, moving on again, episode number three within one episode. The fact is most life is not emergency mode. This is where the problem comes in. So, if we’re not put in extreme crisis, how do I have the courage to go after what I want in life? How do I do it? There are so many things that we want to do, but we don’t have to do. And therefore, we end up floating, just floating in indecision and inaction. And we don’t get what we want. And we just float. And over time, that starts to build, I think, resentment and bitterness, self-loathing. I don’t think it’s a healthy path. So the question here today is, how do we build courage to take action in our normal life? Again, presuming that emergencies got that covered. But what about normal life? Let me give you my theory about courage. I think courage is rooted in safety, a feeling of safety. So, for example, this is a sliding scale, your courage and feelings of safety. Let’s say I say, hey, I knock on your door, come out here quick, you got to fight this guy. And you look over, and the guy is a hundred pounds less than you. No weapon. Imagine that feeling. Now, I knock on your door, pull you outside, say, hey, you got to go fight this guy. And this time, the guy is a hundred pounds bigger than you. Two hundred pounds bigger than you. And he’s got a knife. You probably don’t feel the same. The feeling of courage is going to be different because your feeling of safety in that situation is different. Same thing if you’re on the street, and you hear a call, like, I’m going to get you. I’m going to kill you. And you look over, and it’s just one thin guy by himself. Versus, we’re going to get you. And you look across the street, and there’s a gang of people with bats and guns. Now, what’s interesting here to me is that in any of these situations, you are always the same person, same history, same skills, same smarts, same everything. And yet, in a moment, you can be led to feel completely differently. You project your performance in what’s about to occur. And your prediction of failure or success immediately affects your entire organism and sets off different hormonal responses. So, as we move through our normal life, we’re assessing threats, we’re assessing possibilities, then we assess our capability to survive that situation or to succeed in that situation, and that immediately provides us a level of courage. So, I think that’s how this mechanism works. It’s all about the odds. If you think you’ve got great odds, then you’re going to be pretty courageous and take actions. If you think the odds are totally against you, you might freeze up and do nothing. And that’s why we have to be careful, since my main topic is usually self-defense. This type of dynamic will get you killed. Fear and doubt are never going to help your performance be its best. If you allow yourself to believe that you have no chance, if you believe you’re going to die, then you shrink, right? You shrink physically. I think you want to start curling up and hiding. You shrink psychologically. You start thinking, I can’t do this. I can’t figure it out. I can’t solve this problem. You add more tension. You get tunnel vision. You’re less aware. You don’t move as well. And you hesitate. All of those things are going to get you killed. So, the bottom line is, if, as you’re moving through life, normal life, if you believe you’re going to lose, if you believe you’re going to die, then you’ve just increased the odds that you’re going to lose or you’re going to die. But, if you believe you have a chance to win, a good chance, if you believe you have a chance, a good chance to live, then you’ve just increased the odds that you’re going to win or live. I think it’s that simple. I didn’t say easy, but simple. These things go together. Your courage and your projection of how safe you are in any given context. Now, let me immediately throw in a flag here on the topic of delusion. That is a common criticism that you’re going to find in the world of martial arts, right? Including myself. People put up videos sharing technical tips or ideas for self-defense. Different styles showing off their training methodologies. And immediately, you’re going to see comments under those videos saying, these guys are crazy. This is a cult. They’re engaging in fantasy. None of this stuff is going to work. Okay, fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But I have a question for you. Is it better to believe that you have

Welcome to Episode #122 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Yin or Yang: A Tale of Two Black Belts.” There are many paths to choose from in the martial arts… but how do you know if you’re on the right one? Wait—there’s actually an even bigger question to think about— Should you be following in someone’s else’s path at all? Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been blessed to train under several amazing teachers over the years, but the fact is they all believed in different things! One says do this, one says do that. As a student, it’s been confusing (and frustrating!) to seek advice from teachers I respect, only to receive concepts and tactics that completely contradict one another. I’ll bet that’s happened to you, too! So, in this episode, let’s see if there’s a greater wisdom hiding behind all of that well-meaning, but conflicting advice. Is it possible we’re not supposed to choose between Yin or Yang? Is it possible to walk a path that reconciles both? Check it out and let me know what you think! To LISTEN to “Yin or Yang: A Tale of Two Black Belts,” here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Yin or Yang: A Tale of Two Black Belts Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #122 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Now, last time, episode number 121, the theme was confidence. Self-defense is rooted in self-confidence, that was my claim. But where does confidence come from? The answer, I say, it should come from you. It shouldn’t come from a teacher. It shouldn’t come from a panel who votes for you. It shouldn’t come from a certificate. It should come from within. So today, I want to stick to that theme and give you another example of how I’ve come to this way of thinking. A Tale of Two Black Belts. Let me introduce you to two teachers that I have worked with. They don’t know each other. And I’m not going to share their names because, well, they didn’t ask to be dragged into this. So let me tell you about these two teachers. I think you’ll be amazed at how many similarities they share. I’m always amazed by it. First of all, both of these teachers are male. Okay, they’re both smaller gentlemen. They would never be the biggest person in the class. So let’s say they’re both around five foot six. Let’s say they’re always around 130, 135 pounds. No more. They’re also both about my age, so over 50. So right off the bat, that’s a lot of similarities. They’re also both good guys. They’re also both intelligent people. They are also both blessed with a good sense of humor. They’re also lifers. They’ve been training in the martial arts of one kind or another their entire lives. They’re also both grinders. They’re not lazy about it. They’re in great shape. They work at it. They’re compulsive about it. They also are teachers of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but that’s not all. They also have instructor level status in multiple arts. They know how to hit and they know how to submit. Now, they’re also both professionals. I should say that they’re full timers. This isn’t something they used to do in their 20s or 30s. They’re still at it. So that’s a huge list of similarities. For two guys who have never met, never crossed paths, every time I work with either one of them, I’m always reminded of the other. The biggest difference between them, yes, there’s a difference, which always strikes me as odd, is that they don’t fight the same at all. And that always blows my mind. Because I keep thinking, man, you’re just like this other teacher I know, in every way except the reason that I seek you out. The way you fight. How can that be? They face the same problems, how to fight and defend themselves against people who are bigger and stronger. They have about the same tools. They have the same experiences. They’ve been on the mats about the same number of hours, let’s say. And yet, they’ve come to completely different solutions. And that blows my mind. So at the risk of oversimplifying, let me sum up how they fight in this way. One is Yin and one is Yang. Yin and Yang. One of them believes in attacking first, taking charge. They believe in getting in your face, coming in hard, creating impact. And I can tell you, when you roll or you spar with them, you know you’re in a fight. Right from the beginning, you know it, you can feel it. The other one, no. The other one believes in counterattacking. They believe in yielding and flowing. They believe in turning things around. When you spar or you roll with them, you don’t really know you’re in trouble until it’s too late. They’ve been setting a trap for you the whole time. Completely different. Now, don’t get me wrong, they’re both well-rounded martial artists, but for sure, if you spar to work with either one of them, I think you’d come to the same conclusions that I have. Now, I find that really frustrating because if I seek them out as teachers, they’re giving opposite advice, right? I seek smaller teachers. I like working with smaller teachers because to me, that means they must by trial by fire, they have figured out how to deal with larger, stronger attackers, which is the dream, I think, of every martial artist. You want to be outgunned, but still figure out how to survive. So when I go to either one of them looking for the tricks, the secrets of the martial arts, and to find out that they have different sets of answers, it bothers me. Because that means the answers have to come back from me. I can’t just take one of their bag of tricks and use it for myself. Because there’s another teacher that I respect that has the complete opposite opinion. Frustrating. And of course, I’m reducing my entire martial arts career into just these two teachers, but this is true for every teacher I’ve worked with pretty much. Sure there’s things that they have in common, there are some principles that overlap, but overall, my teachers all disagree with one another. They don’t know each other. They’re all great at what they do, but they give me different advice. One teacher absolutely believes in forms, in kata. That is the lifeblood of their practice. Other teachers that I respect have zero use for kata, think it’s a waste of time. Why would you ever do that? Some of the teachers that I respect, not into sparring, don’t like it. Other teachers I respect, absolutely, there’s going to be sparring every time you get with them. One might be into weights, other teachers not so much, body conditioning. One’s into meditation, visualization, a lot of mental work. Others, no, waste of time, keep moving, use it or lose it. Some teachers believe in teaching techniques first, and over time you decode the principles behind them. Other teachers say, no, I don’t teach techniques, I will only teach you principles and you’ll have to create your own techniques out of that. What is going on? How can this be? How can you have such completely opposite opinions and yet still all be really good at what you do? This reminded me of my experience taking philosophy in college. When I took philosophy in college, I may have talked about this before, at first I was thrilled because the first generation of lessons that I got, the first philosophers that I read, it sounded like they had figured out all the answers to life. So I thought, yay, this is fantastic, I’ve got the answers. Now I know how to live a good life. Until you read the rebuttals, the next generation of philosophers who came around and said, don’t listen to those guys, here’s an opposite opinion, here’s something completely different. And I thought, oh yeah, you’re right, they were wrong, you guys are right. And then the next generation of philosophers, and they say, whoa, no, no, don’t listen to either one of those guys, here’s a hybrid of both information sets. I’m like, what? So at some point, it was the same frustration. One teacher that I respected, being trumped by another teacher I respect, being trumped by another teacher that I respect, until once again, it was put back on me. This is what I ultimately learned way back in college, and now over and over again in the martial arts. The frustration that you feel when you’re not sure who to listen to should ultimately lead you to freedom. Frustration should lead to freedom, because you realize you’re free to find your own path. Since no one agrees on the one right way to do something, that means your way is just as good as theirs. Your experience is just as valid as theirs, as long as you came by it honestly. So again, all of these great teachers have some things in common. They are all dedicated. They all have a strong work ethic. They all believe in testing what they’re doing. So I trust all of their information, and each of those teachers, more often than not, now that I’m just reviewing that in my head, they found confidence in themselves in their own way to the point where they don’t really go out looking anymore. They just do what they do, and they do it well, which is its own skill. That was the point really of not just the last episode, but many episodes of this show,

Welcome to Episode #121 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Hero Worship in the Martial Arts.” We all need teachers and role models in the martial arts… but can following a leader become harmful at some point? Is it possible to show a teacher too much respect? YES! If we’re not careful, our humility as a student can be transformed into hero worship. Once that happens, it becomes impossible to maximize our skills and build true confidence. And without true confidence, your ability to defend yourself is greatly diminished. Be careful! It’s happened to me… don’t let it happen to you! In this episode, I’ll share a couple of stories that not only showed me the dangers of constantly seeking a teacher’s approval, but also helped me figure out how to train with a balance of humility and confidence. As a result, as you may know, I created and awarded myself my own black and white belt! 🙂 Here’s to healthy training habits and learning to become your own hero! To LISTEN to “Hero Worship,” here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Hero Worship in the Martial Arts Here’s a video of the podcast. If the player doesn’t work, you can click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Welcome, my friend. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. This is episode #121 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Today, heroes, mentors, role models, teachers, we all have them in the martial arts and beyond. But when does following a leader become harmful? When does admiration transform into adulation? And when does adulation transform into idolization? Can you show too much respect for a teacher? When does respect transform into hero worship? Now, yes, I still have teachers. I still seek guidance. That’s what teachers are for. Teachers can inspire us to get started. Teachers can encourage us to keep going. And teachers can guide us to make sure we’re heading in the directions of our goals. That’s all good. But I find in the martial arts that oftentimes teachers are elevated into gods. They’re glorified. They’re deified. And I know this, of course, from my own personal feelings towards some teachers, particularly early on in my martial arts career. I also know this from listening and reading many interviews with martial artists, some famous, some not. And I also know it from different martial artists that I’ve spoken to in person. You’ll hear people make comments like, oh, I’ll never be as good as my teacher. Or they will describe their teacher in legendary terms. The stories that you hear are just incredible, unbelievable, often. They’ll say, oh, their skills. I still don’t understand how they could do what they did. It was almost magical. And very simply, it puts yourself, these stories, in a place of being nothing. Oh, compared to my teacher, I’m nothing. Now to all of that, I say stop it. Stop. Respect your teachers, of course. That’s not what I’m talking about. If a teacher changed your life, then of course you’re always going to have respect for them. Even a bad teacher. A bad teacher meaning maybe they cheated you in some way. Maybe you had a difference of opinion and it broke up the relationship. Maybe politics got in the way. There are lots of stories of people falling out with their teacher. But you still respect them. Because if they changed your life, you still carry that lesson with you. So, this isn’t about respect only. Respect is its own category. There’s a different topic to talk about though. And that’s just knowledge and skill. I’m asking today, can you be better than your teacher? Are you better right now than your teacher? Does that question come off as disrespectful right off the bat? I would say no. I would say no because learning is not a competition. Your teacher is on his or her own journey. They have their own stories to tell. You’re on your own journey. You have your own goals that may be different from your teacher’s goals. You certainly have different histories. You certainly have different training methodologies perhaps, or the amount of time that you can put into it. So you’re not on the same exact journey. So it’s not fair to compare them. So I ask again, are you right now better than your teacher at something? It doesn’t have to be everything. But can you find some qualities, some attribute that you have that maybe your teacher does not? Quick example just for myself, simple. When I was younger, I practiced a lot of high kicks. So I still have a lot of knowledge and some muscle memory of high kicking. And many of my teachers were in styles that didn’t practice high kicks. So right off the bat, I can tell you, I am better and know more about kicking high than several of my teachers. It wasn’t worth talking about at the time. And they certainly never pointed it out, because that’s not why I was there learning from them. It was not the appropriate topic to discuss, and it wasn’t a competition. So it didn’t matter, irrelevant. But what about you? The reason I’m asking is because in your training, if our goal is to be the best we can be and to have a happy life, to be fulfilled, to get the most out of your training and your life, we have to reveal any self-limiting beliefs. I cannot walk around always thinking that I’m not as good as someone else. Maybe, yes, of course, if there’s someone who is a professional martial artist and they’re training full-time and they’ve been doing it for decades, and maybe you’re a hobbyist and you only train for a couple of hours on a couple of things, well then sure, there will always be a long list of skills and attributes that you can say, yeah, my teacher is better than me at a lot of these things, all of these things. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room for you to still be great or to achieve a higher level of skill than your teacher at at least one thing, something. That’s of course up to you to figure out what that would be. But I just want you to have the possibility in your head that as you train, that you’re not always lesser than, you’re not always a weaker, watered down version of your teacher. And the reason for that is because self-defense is rooted in confidence. How can you possibly defend yourself if you don’t believe in what you can do, if you don’t believe that you have some skill? That’s not healthy. There is ego that we need, healthy ego that says, I can do this, I can beat that guy, I am good enough. Quick little story, I remember training with a guy and at that point we were both senior students in a style. And at one point we were doing pretty well, we had a good flow going, we felt pretty competent, you could feel good momentum coming on. And he broke it. He broke the momentum by saying, I don’t know, he was saying, man, you know, that was good, but can you imagine how this would never work against our teacher? And I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, like, what are you talking about? He said, well, you know, I mean, that’s a really good move and, you know, we did it well, but if you imagine, can you imagine trying that against our teacher? He’d kill us. And I just remember thinking, are you crazy? How ridiculous. What a crazy thing to say. So you’re telling me if you went home right now and your teacher, the teacher, was beating your wife or beating your child, you wouldn’t be able to overcome him. You can’t even imagine a reality where you would destroy him and take him down. Now maybe that sounds disrespectful to create that scenario in your head, but I don’t care. This is important. You have to believe in your head that you could take out anybody who means you harm. You have to believe that. The opposite is damaging to you. How can you walk around thinking that right off the bat, the people that you know in your own small circle, you can’t even beat them in a life and death situation? No. I don’t care if it’s my teacher. I don’t care if my teacher’s got a knife. I don’t care if my teacher’s swinging a sword. If they mean me harm or the people that I love harm, I can visualize taking them down and taking them out with respect. Now my friend, when I came back with that attitude, snorted. He didn’t accept that thought at all. He’s like, you’re crazy. And I thought, what? Call me crazy if you want to. Call me delusional. But I would rather be delusional in my training than limited, self-limiting, believing that there’s no possibility of beating someone that I know, let alone some phantom that I don’t know, some future bad guy. How do you feel about that? Who is the martial artist that you hold in the highest esteem? Whose skills do you have the most respect for? Can you visualize a scenario where you beat them? If this guy broke into your home, if this guy was hurting someone you love, could you take them out? I hope that you can imagine, yes. Yes you could. So limitations are dangerous to me if you’re training for self-defense. It opens the door to cult-like thinking. The very idea that someone is better than you and you are always going to be lesser than them, that there is no possibility ever that you will be better than they are, is the most damaging belief system I can think of as a self-defense student. We’ve got to weed that out.

Welcome to Episode #120 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Use It or Lose It.” Some people say martial arts is like riding a bike… I don’t! I say use it or lose it! The fact is that no matter how hard you train, you can’t practice everything all the time, which means some skills will always end up being neglected. But wait—the situation is worse than you think. Unfortunately, a lack of time is not the only reason you will see your hard-earned skills slipping away… not by a long shot! So, consider this your wake-up call. In this episode, I’ll break down the three major reasons (and a few minor ones) our capabilities get rusty. But I’m warning you in advance—you can’t always stop the corrosion and rot. Put simply, life is a losing game! Whoa. That sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Don’t worry—along with the bad news, I’ve also got a four-step formula to help you hold on to your skills for as long as possible. So, don’t give up yet! To LISTEN to “Use It or Lose It,” here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Use It or Lose It – A Martial Arts Warning Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #120 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Happy to be back after a little bit of a break. In case you didn’t know, this is the 10th anniversary of the podcast. I’ve been doing one episode a month for the last 10 years. So I took a little break just to feel it out and make sure I still felt like yammering on camera. As it turns out, I still love the sound of my own voice, so I’ll be keeping it going for a while. Also during my time off, I did a little work on an online course, a new course called Martial Arts Over 50. So if you’re getting older and you either took a break from your training or you feel like you’re not getting as much out of your training as you used to, take a look at this course. It might help as you get into your older years to get the most out of your training as possible. I’ll put a link below. But today, the topic, losing. I’ve got a warning for you. You are losing skills every day. But do you know which ones? You work hard, you train hard, you study hard. You may have skills at a world class level. But the fact is, you’re losing something all the time. If you’re working on this, that means you’re not working on that. No matter how much time and energy you put into one area of your training, that means you’re neglecting a different area of your training. It’s not always your fault. There are many different factors that go into what you’re gaining and what you’re losing. And that’s what I want to look at today. Let’s figure out how to maximize our capabilities moving forward and stop losing the skills that are the most important to us. Now let’s start off by breaking down what I think are the three ways that we lose skill. One, life changes. Two, your body changes. And three, your focus changes. Let’s break these down. Starting off with life. This category is mostly not your fault. Most of these factors you had no responsibility for, it’s just life. So for instance, maybe money. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you had to use your money for medical bills or to help out a family member or a friend and suddenly you just don’t have the money to go to class or to take those private lessons or to fly and take that seminar. Maybe it was time. Maybe you used to have a lot more time when you were back in college or in your 20s, but now you have a family. You have a child and another child. Maybe you have to take on a second job. Time can slip away and now you have less for training. Maybe it’s the location. Maybe you had to move for your job or to take care of a sick family member and you’re just not in the same town where your old school was. Maybe the school changed locations or the school closed down and now you’re without your training group. Maybe your teacher passed away. Maybe your favorite training partner moved away or passed away. All of these things are not your fault. Life happens and hopefully our training has equipped us to do the best we can in these circumstances. But no matter how you cut it, your training changes every time one of those factors is changed. So most recently, you could probably all relate, the lockdown. I wasn’t responsible for that. But definitely that was a major change to my training routine. Suddenly only training alone. Solo training only. No partner practice for over a year. That was unthinkable. I had never imagined something like that could happen. And yet there it was. So in the beginning, it was shocking. And then in a way, it turned into a blessing. Because it forced me to change my perspective on how I was training. It forced me to shake up my priorities and take a good look at how I was spending my time to really figure out if I was using it the best way I could. We can all fall into a routine that becomes a rut-teen. You’re in a rut. It could be a good rut, but often it’s a bad rut. If you haven’t updated it in several years, I think it’s a great idea to take a look at it. And the lockdown forced me to take a look at it. I’ve always said that martial arts is really two projects. There’s time spent on developing yourself, and then there’s the time spent developing yourself with another person. Or two or three. Self-defense is ultimately a relationship. How you manage other people, there’s two sides to that. There’s you and then there’s them and you’re together. So the lockdown took my focus off of how to control other people and brought it back to how to control myself, my body, my thoughts, my feelings, my strategies. What can I make better? I had to ask. What have I been neglecting? What skills am I not maximizing? What skills have I lost? And that led to a whole new training routine. And when it was all done, when the lockdown was over, I found I was in better shape than ever. I also found that my mechanics were better. I think I had better balance, better weight shifting, my strikes had more impact. I just felt better. And my breathing, my coordination with my breathing and my mindset, all of it I thought had been polished to a higher degree. So I was grateful for that. But there were losses. Some things I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect the timing in my sparring to be off because I was visualizing when I’m hitting stuff, I always visualize shadow boxing. But people are different and different people are different. So there’s always a slightly different space-time continuum to deal with. And so getting back in the groove of reading body language and setting myself in positions where I need to be, that took a little time to sharpen back up. I didn’t expect that as much. A big surprise was pain tolerance. I’d lost a bit of my pain tolerance. When I wasn’t getting tapped out or choked out or hit all the time. When I came back and had partners again and felt that pressure and impact, yeah, there was a little bit of an ow factor. Like, ugh, that’s uncomfortable. So I had to catch up on that again, getting back into pain tolerance. And very specifically, I remember being in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class and my backward roll for some reason, just not there for me. I had done other conditioning on the ground, but that specific, completely super small backward roll, my back had stiffened up a bit, and I just had a problem with it. Of course, I wanted it all back. When I realized I’d lost some timing and pain tolerance and a couple of different moves, I wanted them all back. I felt they were all important. And now I know if I ever have to train alone, if I’m forced to, or just in my own private routine, added a couple of hand-eye coordination drills, like with a ball, playing a little handball against a wall, hitting myself with a stick, poking myself with a stick, just a little bit of impact practice on my own so I don’t lose that. And animal movements, a little extra time on the ground with a more specific visualization of being stacked up, having all that pressure on my neck, being able to roll that out. So I benefited when I found out what I’d been losing. How about you? During the lockdown, whether you honored that for two weeks or a year or you’re still honoring that, what have you lost? Did you notice anything? Did you get it back? Even without a lockdown, even if you are not forced to just train alone, I think it would be valuable if you just took a minute and reflected on the importance of your school, your teacher, your training partners, and really be specific about what each of those offers you. What do you get out of those experiences and relationships of being in a school with a teacher, with training partners? Don’t take any of those things for granted. Whatever situation you’re in with your training right now, get as much out of that as you can while you can before life steps in and closes that school, takes away that teacher, or messes with your time and money and location and you can’t get there anymore. Just be aware of it so you can get more out of it. Next, after life changes, your body changes. This one, mostly, you can’t do anythi

Welcome to Episode #119 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Lighten Your Load – Tai Chi’s Double-Weighted Error.” The art of Tai Chi Chuan is often criticized (or even mocked) in modern martial arts circles. Of course, much of that criticism comes from people who have never researched or practiced the art whatsoever! Typically, the critics have only seen Tai Chi Chuan students being defeated in competitions and then concluded that the art’s strategies and techniques offer no value to a serious martial artist. NOT SO! To be fair, many teachers of Tai Chi Chuan prefer to practice the philosophical aspects of the art more than the practical, which can definitely lead to trouble in the realm of self-defense. However, that does not mean the art itself is lacking in profound and valuable concepts. One concept that I find extremely helpful is the “double-weighted error”. Even as a mere admirer of Tai Chi Chuan, as opposed to a formal student, my understanding of this classic piece of advice has changed my practice for the better. Right or wrong, I hope this concept will change yours, too! To LISTEN to “Lighten Your Load – Tai Chi’s Double-Weighted Error,” here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Lighten Your Load – Tai Chi’s Double-Weighted Error Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Welcome my friend. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. This is episode #119 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Let me ask you, have you ever felt stressed out, overwhelmed, like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? Well, of course, you’re human. And the fact is that life is heavy. And when it comes to self-defense, someone trying to injure you or even kill you, well, that’s about as heavy as it gets. Today I want to break down the four different ways, the four different categories of weight in this world. Why does life get so heavy? And I also want to share three tips to help you unload some of that weight or, hopefully, avoid it altogether. Now, this whole discussion was inspired from the art of Tai Chi, or Tai Chi Chuan. In the classics of Tai Chi, you will find a term, double-weighted. Now, the idea of being double-weighted is an error. It’s something you want to avoid in your practice, whether it’s alone or with a partner or in a real fight. Now, let me say right up front, I am not speaking today as a student, formal student of Tai Chi. I’ve dabbled, but I’m certainly not an expert. I wouldn’t even call myself a formal student. I am an admirer, and as someone who has read about and dabbled in practicing Tai Chi, this concept was inspiring. So, I’m just going to share my thoughts, my understanding of this concept. And if it doesn’t match up with what the experts say, well, guess what? When it comes to the Chinese martial arts, even the experts disagree. We don’t know exactly what the old masters meant when they wrote it down. And if the experts can disagree, then I feel much better about sharing my humble opinion. So, here’s what double-weighted means to me and how I’m using it in my practice. First of all, you might find some people who think that double-weighted just means even distribution of your weight in your feet, like a horse stance, 50-50. That idea makes no sense to me, so I’m just going to ignore it. To me, double-weighted starts to make sense when you think about that feeling you get, when you feel stuck, when you feel frozen. For instance, you are standing and someone comes over and puts their head on your shoulder and leans on you, let’s say. Now, when they’re leaning on you and you are now crooked, you are not just supporting your weight, you’re also holding up some of their weight. So, if I don’t accommodate that, if I don’t shift my position, I don’t adjust my posture, I am now tighter, I’m straining a little bit, and I’m not as free as I was, I’m somewhat constrained. So, in that way, I would say you are double-weighted. It’s my weight plus their weight. The state of being frozen. It could also be just on your own, if you slip and you fall, okay, you have the physical challenge of managing this fall down to the ground, but let’s say you’re also afraid. You stiffen up, your eyes go wide, your hands pop out, and when you hit the ground, because you’re stiff and because you weren’t able to soften and go with it, you break a wrist or you hit your head, you have a bad fall. So in that way, I would say you were double-weighted because you felt stuck or frozen, helpless, for that fall to the ground. So this is something, this state of being double-weighted, getting heavier than you normally are, of getting stuck, can happen on your own or it can happen because of someone else’s activities against you. So let’s break it down even further. Like I said, four different ways, more specifically, that you may add heaviness, weight to your life. And hopefully we can avoid these, but here’s the first one. The first one is your body versus gravity. This one, we can’t escape. There’s no way you can get around it. You’re living in a body, I presume. So your weight is always being pulled down by gravity. And we try to manage that with good posture, right? So one of our studies as martial artists is the study of stances and our alignment. If you are bent over in your life or you’re hunched over commonly, that means that some of your muscles are working harder than they need to. You’re burning calories, extra calories. You are adding tension into your body. And that strain is limiting your freedom of movement because you’re tighter some place. And over time, certain muscles are getting weaker while others are trying to accommodate for them. So you’re imbalanced and you’re constrained and you’re unnecessarily burdened. So we try to lighten that load by good posture. Once we start moving, it becomes even more challenging. If you can’t balance yourself and get rid of excess tension when you’re just standing, now that you’re stepping, running, kicking, fighting, it’s only more difficult. So example, a spinning hook kick to the head. Do you practice spinning hook kicks to the head? Well, that’s physically challenging. If you had a jump spin hook kick to the head, okay, now we’re getting somewhere. You really have to have a great skill to figure out your alignment, your timing, your shifting, to execute that technique and land comfortably. And this is the point of our training. As martial artists, we are in the pursuit of efficiency. I can’t stop gravity. There will always be some tugging and some effort. That’s our single weight. Let’s call that. I’m not double-weighted yet. It’s single-weighted, just that natural alignment. But anything that takes us off of that, if we’re tilting, leaning, we’re not practicing how to move in this world with coordination and ease, then we are now double-weighting ourselves. We’re making it even harder. So, if you’re training well, then in most cases you should be finding comfort in how you stand, how you sit, and how you move in the world. So that’s category number one, where you might find excess weight in your life. The second category, instead of your body versus gravity, what about your mind? Your mind versus beliefs and your mind versus emotions. What is your mental state at any given moment? Let’s say something frightens you, like when you take that fall. That immediately adds tension into your body as well. Or if you’re afraid, you hear a bump in the night, and your body gets tight, okay, now you’re double-weighted that way. In your head, if you’re afraid of something, you may also be less aware than you would have been if you were just staying calm. You start to tunnel vision. You start to add worry, like what was that? Am I going to die? Do I have what it takes to get out of this situation? So while you’re worrying, you’re not paying attention to opportunities and possibilities. You’ve lost some of your creativity. So it’s very likely that you will find yourself on a daily basis, on one level or another, stuck in your own body and stuck in your own thoughts. Stuck because of anger, tension, tunnel vision, self-doubts, worrying that you’re not competent at something. Worry about anxiety, not worry about anxiety, anxiety in general. Worry that you’re going to lose your job, worry that you’re going to get sick, worry that you won’t be there for the people who love you. Tons of reasons to carry around anxiety. Embarrassment, that you’re going to make a mistake, that you’re going to fail, that you’re not going to live up to your own expectations, let alone someone else’s expectations. All of this stuff adds up to trouble, a clouded mind, our training should lead us to clarity. Comfort in our body, clarity in our minds. We need to learn how to make peace with mistakes, how to make peace with our failures. We need to learn how to make peace with pain, physical pain. If I’m injured, that’s a physical problem, but it’s also a mental problem depending on how I react to that. If my identity has now been broken. Like I’m a really good kicker. But now my leg is broken, so who am I? I’m a loser now. We can’t l

Welcome to Episode #118 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Get More from Your Martial Arts Practice.” You train hard… but are you getting everything you can out of your martial arts practice? Probably not! Don’t worry—in this episode, I share three practice tips that will pay you back with BIG results. At least they did for me! No, they’re not magic. No, they’re not quick ‘n’ easy. But if you’ve ever felt stuck in a rut, these might just be what you need to hear… and do! Especially if you’ve ever felt like QUITTING martial arts completely, this episode is for you! Before you walk away from all that time and effort you’ve invested in training, give these three tips a try. Heck, try even one! Yes, I believe even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better, but sometimes if you give just a little bit more, you can get a LOT more in return! To LISTEN to “How to Get More from Your Martial Arts Practice, here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! How to Get More from Your Martial Arts Practice Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hello, hello. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #118 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. And I really believe that, you know, what I just said there. A little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. At least that’s how it’s worked for me so far. And that’s why I’m shocked, shocked at how many people have not gotten that message. How is it possible? Martial arts is so mainstream now. People see it everywhere. They know it’s a safe activity, relatively speaking. And they must know that it does so much to transform your life in a positive way, which is why I am shocked. Don’t tell me, well, there are millions of people participating in martial arts. Yeah, but there are billions of people on the planet. Why isn’t everyone signed up for a self-defense course or doing at least a six-month investment somewhere in some type of training? Answer me that. Anyway, you know what’s more shocking? More shocking than the number of people who don’t look into martial arts at all is the number of people who start martial arts and then quit. That blows my mind. What? You did the hardest part. You walked through the door. You signed up someplace. You started and then you stopped. Now, I’m not talking about, well, I couldn’t afford classes or I got a bad knee. Life happens. I get that. But there’s always a way to keep pushing forward a little bit to make some improvements, even if you’re just training on your own, especially in this day and age with the video. So what’s with all the quitting? If you had a business opportunity and every time you put in $1, you got $2 out, would you ever stop investing? No, either would I. So that’s where I get confused because for me, every investment I make in the martial arts definitely pays me back. Well, at least two-fold, five-fold, ten-fold. I have to make up a number there. But I feel it gives me more than I put into it. Hence, even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. So if you are in a rut right now in your training, or if you are not training at all, or if you feel bored by your training, or you are thinking about quitting your training, that’s what this episode is for. Today I want to give you three quick tips on how to get more out of your training so that hopefully you don’t quit. Because I do believe if you are training well, you should be getting a lot of benefits out of it. Okay, tip number one. Go full time. Go pro. Now I’m not talking about making this a career, being a professional fighter or a professional teacher. That’s not what I mean. I mean in your mindset. Stop thinking of yourself as a part timer and start thinking of yourself as a full timer. You’re always a martial artist. Make that part of who you are. I get it. In the beginning, martial arts may just be an activity, something that you try. And it’s interchangeable. It could be a yoga class you went to try or a swimming group or softball team. You just wanted to do something and you tried martial arts. But if you stay in that part time interchangeable, it’s just another activity, something to do mindset, well then it will get changed out. Eventually, you’ll get bored with it. Eventually, it’s not something that excites you anymore because you never really committed to the idea that I’m all in. I’m a full time professional martial artist. So we have to make that shift. Make the shift that it’s not just something you do, it’s who you are. I think of it a little bit like Superman. Bear with me, old school Superman. If you’re a part timer, at least the way I was when I started, I would have my normal life in my normal clothes and then you get to go to class. And when you go to class, you take off your clothes and then you put on your uniform. And there was a little mini transformation there. You put on that uniform and you start to transform into the person, maybe, that you want to be. I feel stronger, bolder, I’m getting tougher, I’m working. But then class is over and you put on your normal clothes, you go back to your normal life, and that class just kind of becomes a memory. You don’t necessarily take it with you. Now, old school Superman is a little different. Old school Superman always had his Superman uniform on underneath his Clark Kent clothes. Meaning he was always Superman, but he would play different roles and he would put on a different suit to cover that up sometimes. But make no mistake, he’s always Superman. He’s always on the hunt for when can I be of help? When can I be of service? When can I be a hero? So we should be the same way. A part time martial artist is someone who only feels great when they’re in class wearing their uniform and then goes back to an ordinary life where they don’t feel as wonderful. But a full time martial artist, a pro, you’re always a martial artist. And when you feel great in class, you take that outside into the world, you still feel great. When you feel like you’ve got some courage or some toughness, you bring that into the rest of your life because you’re a full time martial artist. So that would be my challenge to you. Make this mental shift. Don’t be an amateur martial artist. Just start thinking like a professional martial artist. Once you make that shift, meaning that you stop focusing on your martial arts style and start focusing on your lifestyle. Do you see that little switch there? It’s not the style of martial arts that you do. It’s your style of living that matters. Once you do that, you have that attitude, everything changes. The way you eat is going to change because there is no on day, off day, I’m going to go to class later, so I’m going to eat a little bit healthier, so I don’t feel sluggish. No, every day you feel like I want to be at my best, so I’m going to eat pretty clean here, I’m going to be healthy. The way you sleep, you’re not going to say, well, I worked out hard yesterday, so I’ll give myself a little extra sleep, but then tonight I’ll stay up late. No, I want to be at my best all the time, so I want to get to bed, recover, be ready for the next adventure the next day. And I’ll tell you, even my wardrobe changed, meaning that I used to have a separate part of my dresser that was just for workout clothes. I wasn’t going to class. I was going to go workout in the park or in the garage or whatever. I would have some old t-shirts, old pants, tattered, stained, ripped up, old, because I figured, well, I don’t want to wreck my good clothes. But then at some point, when I made that shift, that’s exactly the time, when I went from part time to full time in my mind, I said, why am I treating my practice time with so little respect? Why am I wearing clothes that I don’t want anyone to see me in? I wouldn’t wear these clothes anywhere else into the world. So now I have this separation in my head between, oh, there’s the training version of me, and then there’s my real me back out in the real world. I wanted to break down that barrier. And once I made that attitude shift, I threw out all the tattered clothes and realized that I wasn’t paying enough respect to the full time martial artist that I want to be, that I am. And yeah, so I got some workout clothes, nicer clothes to work out in. And that makes me feel a little bit prouder, might seem superficial, but it gets me into the, it keeps me in the mindset of being at my best. Caught that. It doesn’t change it, it keeps it going. So that as great as I feel out during my day, I feel just as great training, then I get boosted by my training, I slip right back into the world. So I highly recommend overall, go full time in your head, go pro and see if that has a trickle down effect on everything you do. Tip number two, assign yourself homework. This is very important. If you are a full time professional martial artist, and you are now, right? Did you already flip the switch? You can’t just rely on class time to reap benefits. That’s not the only place where you should be investing yourself, or pushing your limits, challenging yourself, because just do the math

Welcome to Episode #117 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Bad Advice in the Martial Arts.” You get a lot of advice as a martial arts student… you probably give a lot of advice, too! But is it possible that all of that good advice is actually bad advice? In this episode, I’m examining five pieces of popular advice that might not be helping anyone. In fact, these teaching clichés might be making your life harder! Here are the five suspects— Relax. Don’t use so much muscle. Leave your ego at the door. Stop doing the same technique–try something different. Don’t give up. Any of these sound familiar? 🙂 Don’t get me wrong—there are good intentions behind all of these training tips, so I’m not saying you’re a bad person for repeating them. But I am saying that there’s a right time to share these words of wisdom and a wrong time… it’s that crucial judgment that makes the difference. To LISTEN to “Bad Advice in the Martial Arts”, here’s a link. Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Bad Advice in the Martial Arts Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts, back from a bit of a hiatus. First one in ten years, I don’t feel too bad about it. Welcome to episode #117 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Yeah, since you’ve seen me last, I moved from Raleigh, North Carolina back to Los Angeles. We lived there almost two years, about a year and three quarters. And don’t get me wrong, I have no hate for the East Coast. I’m from there. All of my family is there. On this particular trip, I met some really great new people, some great new training partners. I learned a lot. I have nothing but nice things to say about the experience. But what can I say? I love LA. So we are back. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Today, I have five pieces of bad advice that you’ve probably heard in the martial arts. And now that I can tell you, I’ve trained from coast to coast. I am sure no matter what your school is or who your teacher is, you’ve heard these pieces of advice. Spoiler alert. The five pieces of advice I’m going to talk about today… Number one, relax. Number two, don’t use your muscle. Number three, leave your ego at the door. Number four, stop doing your favorite technique all the time. Do something else. And number five, don’t give up. Those are the five pieces of advice that I’m going to call bad today. Now, here’s what I mean. All advice, I think, is well-meaning, well-intended. But that doesn’t mean it’s always correct. For example, very wise words, look before you leap. Have you ever heard that? But maybe you’ve also heard, he who hesitates is lost. Now, those two pieces of advice are opposites. They have two different ideas. So which one is good and which one’s bad? It all depends on your particular situation and when you hear the advice, right? The advice that you get today may not be so good tomorrow and vice versa. So the advice that I’ve already listed here, the five pieces of advice, in some contexts is probably good advice. But not always. And I want to talk today about when that is bad advice and when you shouldn’t follow it at all. All right, makes sense. So let’s get right to it. Number one, relax. Now, I have already ranted about how I think this is a terrible piece of advice in a separate video. So I’ll put that link below if you want to go into the full, full discourse, you can find it there. But in case you haven’t seen it, I’ll sum it up very quickly. When people tell you to relax, they fail to see that your tension, if you’re tight, is a symptom of a problem. It’s not the problem itself. If you are really a concerned teacher and you see someone is tense or you feel that you are tense yourself, the question is why? Why are you tense? Why are you not relaxed? That’s what you need to figure out. I don’t think anybody walks around purposely trying to be tense. So when your teacher comes up or if you say to a student, relax, it’s like, well, no kidding, I would like to be relaxed. Why don’t you ask me why I’m not relaxed? For instance, do you like getting hit in the face? Maybe you start martial arts and you don’t want to get hit in the face. So of course you’re tense. Maybe you don’t like someone putting their arm around your neck and trying to choke you out and so you tighten up, you get tense. Those are natural reactions. So telling me to relax doesn’t help. What is good advice? Well, the solution to tension is experience. You need to get better at what you’re doing. You need to get comfortable at what is making you so tense. So as a teacher, you should be showing your students how to relax. Don’t just tell me to relax. Show me how. If that means something simple like take a breath, that’s a great first step. Take a breath that does help me relax a little bit unless I’m being choked, then no, it’s futile. Generally, it’s going to be introducing a skill, giving me a tip to show me why this isn’t so bad a situation, how to make it better, how to turn it around. And then the more you practice that, the more your tension will go away, the more comfortable you’ll feel, and suddenly, you just are relaxed. It’s not something that you pursue directly. It’s something that happens as a reward for your practice. So, get more experience, and that should solve itself. Number two, stop using your muscle. Stop using all your strength. Recently, I was in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, and there was a big guy. He’s a white belt, head taller than I am, at least 50 to 70 pounds, bigger than I am, and cut. This is a weight lifting kind of guy. And when we rolled, I was moving all over him. I was tying him up. I was able to get out from under. And after we rolled, I said, you know, it’s okay for you to fight back. It’s okay for you to use what you got there. Use your muscle. And he said, oh, well, they told me not to. I answered, who told you not to? They’re just trying to make it easier on themselves, I think. With all respect to anyone who gave him that advice, you left him with nothing. It’s like saying, hey, listen, don’t use your muscle. And you don’t use your speed. I see you’re very fast. Don’t use that. Hey, I see you’re very flexible. Please don’t use that. Don’t kick me in the head. I don’t want you to use your flexibility right now. What? Hey, you seem to have really good cardio. Could you just hold your breath sometimes so we could even this out? Because I’d prefer if you were out of breath. Hey, I noticed that your eyesight seems to be pretty good. Do you mind just closing one eye while we work out? You wouldn’t say those things, right, typically? So why does muscle get such a bad rap? I don’t think that’s fair. Particularly if you look at the heights of the sport, let’s say, of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, do you see people without muscle? No, I see people who are jacked up, people who admit to using steroids. So they have muscle, they use muscle, and oh, by the way, they also happen to have solid technique. Okay, so as a white belt, this guy came in with muscle, which is an asset. That is something we should all have, some strength. But then they told him, okay, don’t use the strength. But he had no technique to back him up. So now you have someone who doesn’t want to use their muscle because he’s being a good student, he’s doing what he’s told. But he also has no technique, so therefore, he’s a sitting duck. He’s getting trounced by an older, smaller man, simply because he doesn’t know what to do. Again, that’s a bad habit. I say if you have muscle, use it. Absolutely use it. Now, any advice I’m giving you today, I’m not saying hurt your partners, be reckless, be dangerous. No, of course not. But if you have an asset, use it. Otherwise, what’s the alternative? You’re training yourself to not use your strengths. Believe me, if you jump out at me in the middle of a parking lot with a knife, I’m with my family or alone, I’m going to use everything I have to defend myself. If I have muscle, I’m going to use every bit of it. So it doesn’t make sense for me to not use assets. That’s a terrible habit to get into. Hopefully, the goal would be like, okay, you’re brand new, you have your muscle, so of course you’re using it because that’s all you know. So maybe you’re 99% muscle and you’re 1% technique. But then a month or two goes by, maybe now you’re down to 95% muscle and 5% technique. Six months to a year, maybe you brought that down, maybe you’re 70% muscle use, and you’re relying on 30% technique. And you keep training and training until the scales tilt, and maybe you’re so good, you’re like 99% technique and you just use a very little bit of muscle just so that you can function. Well, that’s a wonderful training journey that you just went through. You figured out how to use your assets and how to succeed without a particular asset. That’s a full training experience. And again, I think if you’re in a good school, you’ll have that luxury to learn that. You will learn when to use your asset and when not to, you’ll find the limitations of your asset. Hey, I went real

Welcome to Episode #116 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “You Got This.” Confidence is a tricky commodity. If you have too much—trouble. If you have too little—trouble! Especially in the martial arts, place too much faith in your skills, you might wind up dead. But place NO faith in your skills, you might also wind up dead! With those high stakes in mind, let’s discuss the effort to find the right balance between confidence and humility. Along the way, we’ll look at the Dunning-Kruger effect, belt tests, self-defense demos, and a few tips to get more out of your training. (For all you Boy Scouts out there, there’s also a shout out for the Totin’ Chip award!) To gain a more accurate measure of your knowledge and skills, you can LISTEN to “You Got This” here: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! You Got This! Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #116 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Today, I wanna talk about confidence. We all want to say, I got this… Do you know how to do that? I got it. Can you do that? I got it. But sometimes that’s just not true! On the other hand, sometimes you might think you can’t do something. You think you don’t know enough when you actually do. Now, this problem of having either too much confidence or not enough confidence can hold you back not just in martial arts, but in every part of your life. If you can’t get an honest assessment, if you don’t have a clear picture of where you stand with your knowledge and your skills, then how can you set appropriate goals for yourself? How do you know which teachers to seek out? Which information that you need? Which questions to ask? What to practice? We have to have a clear picture of where we stand. So let’s see if we can talk about this a little bit and maybe we can help straighten out our next steps in life. Now, to start, I’d like to back up a little bit to when I was a lad. Back to when I was a Boy Scout. Yes, I was a Boy Scout. Now, in the Boy Scouts, they have an award called the Totin’ Chip Award. And it’s not so much like a ribbon. It’s a badge. But at the time, it was just a card, a card that you could either put in your pocket or into a wallet. I didn’t have a wallet back then, so I had to earn my leather working merit badge by creating a wallet. Then I had something to put my Totin’ Chip card into. Very clever. Anyway, the Totin’ Chip award is given when you can demonstrate proper safety handling of an ax, a hatchet, a saw, and a knife. So anything with a blade, you have to show that you know how to handle them. They’re not toys, they’re tools. And one of the coolest rules that I remember from that training was, and by the way, it strikes me now that having a bunch of kids in the woods with maybe one adult supervisor for a weekend running around chopping things up and setting fires was a wonderful time. I hope they still do that. But one of the rules that I remember the most was when you wanted to hand someone else a blade, let’s say an ax, if I was going to hand you an ax, one I’d make sure the blade was not facing either one of us, I would offer you the handle and I would say, got it? And you would reach out, extend and hold on to that handle and then you would say, got it. And then and only then would I let go and let you have it. So this was a process to make sure there was no gray area. I wasn’t just handing it out into space, presuming you had it and then I let it go too early. And if I’m trying to receive it, I’m not just saying, yeah, yeah, and just holding it, then I didn’t really have it. Now it falls, cuts off one of our toes or cleaves my shin. It’s a good safety guideline. I believe nowadays they’ve changed the verbal cueing. I think nowadays you offer it to someone and they say, thank you, and then you can say, you’re welcome. I believe they’ve updated the words, but the idea is the same. Trust, but verify. That is the safest course. I’m going to trust that you’re going to receive this, and I’m going to trust that you’re giving this to me. On both sides, we’re going to verify it with some verbal cueing. I think that’s a really good example of how you can take some of the vagueness out of any exchange. If I’m a student or a teacher, I want to make sure that the information going back and forth is clearly received. As a teacher, let’s say I’m in class, and I’m teaching you how to throw a punch, and I say, okay, put your chin down, set your shoulder this way, put your thumb here, turn this way, breathe that way. Got it? And as a student, you say, got it. Now, do you really? Probably not. No, I just listed off maybe, let’s say, five tips to throw a decent punch. When the student then says, yeah, I got it, what are they talking about? Can they throw the punch all of a sudden? They know how to throw the punch? No. We have to first of all realize that the transmission of knowledge is broken up into two pieces. There’s the actual information, the idea, the concept, the concept, and then there’s the actual skill, the doing, the performing, the executing of that knowledge. So right off the bat, if you are giving someone something, information-wise, say, hey, can you throw this punch? Yep, I got it. You as a teacher have to know they don’t have the skill, they’ve just got the knowledge. But really, they don’t even have that knowledge yet because most tips have to be felt and experienced to truly understand the words that they just received. There are levels to the knowledge. That’s why I think keeping a notebook is so important because when you have a notebook, you can write down things that you don’t fully understand yet. You have a surface level understanding from where you are today. But five years from now, you’ll go back, read that same information and you’ll have a deeper insight, same words, deeper experience of what those words actually meant. So the point is, your knowledge and understanding is relative to where you are in life at that moment. So when you say, you got it, on the one hand, you’re talking about the knowledge. I understand what you’re saying. But what about your skill level now? What can you execute? Because that’s a separate question. If a teacher says, you have it, you got it, and you say, yeah, I got it. Maybe the next good question would be, can you do it? Because that at least lets us know we’re talking about two different things, understanding and being able to perform it, capability. When it comes to the skill, and you’ve just learned it, of course, you don’t know how to do it. Not to the specifications that your teacher just said. It’s going to take time, repetition, it takes effort, it’s going to take attention, some more corrections, work, sweat. That’s how you build the skill. So again, it’s relative. Your skill level is relative to the amount of work you’ve been doing. And it’s endless. There’s always another level that you can get better, which is why if you say, I got it when it comes to skill, can you throw that punch? Yeah, I got it. You’re not exactly accurate, because there’s always another level you can make it better. There’s always a deeper level of understanding. When you compare martial arts, let’s say you take boxing and Choy Li Fut. Now, on paper, one art, boxing, might look very simple. There’s a small number of strikes that are allowed, small number of guards, positions, limited number of footwork drills you’ll probably do. Choy Li Fut has got hundreds of forms, weapons, the kicks. There’s just a much longer list of movements that you would have to know. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s a simple art, I would say like boxing, or it’s a more complex art like Choy Li Fut. Either way, there are levels, there are nuances. You can always make something better. I’m not slighting boxing when I say it’s simpler. It’s just as complex as any other skill, because you can go on and on forever, practicing and learning and increasing your timing and your spatial awareness and combination cleverness. It’s unlimited. And of course, the same goes whether you’re a chef. Just because you graduated culinary school doesn’t mean you don’t learn anything more about cooking, right? Whether you’re a surgeon. Hey, I don’t want a surgeon who stopped looking at other research papers or studying other techniques once they got out of medical school. I want someone who’s up to date, who’s paying attention to everything else that’s going on. Making his skills better or her skills. And certainly as a parent, as a friend, we can always be looking at how we handle people, how we deal with people to make our relationships better. Right? Right. Now, I get it. It’s a human quirk. We all want to say, I got it. So I don’t have to keep working. I don’t want to feel like I don’t know anything. So once I do know anything, something, I want to jump on that and feel fully confident and then maybe have some relief that I’m not an ignoramus anymore. A little is a lot more than nothing. Even a little. So if you had never studied martial arts, you don’t know anything about martial arts. Even

Welcome to Episode #115 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Be a Good Judge.” Are you a good judge or a bad judge? In the martial arts (and in life!), I’ve definitely been both. But as I get older, I’d like to think I’m getting better at passing judgement. Whether we’re talking about fighting styles, techniques, and training methodologies or art, food, and people, how can we be sure we’re making the right decisions? Is there a way to see the world clearly and avoid making mistakes? In this episode, I’ll share some mistakes I’ve made as well as some strategies to maximize success in your training, career, and relationships. Don’t get me wrong—I still make mistakes! But I’ve gotten better at swallowing my ego, making corrections, and moving forward towards my goals. So, if I can get closer to being a good judge, I believe you can , too! To LISTEN to “How to Be a Good Judge,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! How to Be a Good Judge in Martial Arts and Life Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to episode #115 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. My name is Ando here at Happy Life Martial Arts, and I am quite thankful to see you. Today, I want to talk about judgment. They say, don’t judge a book by its cover. But is that good advice? Hmm. In martial arts, there sure is a lot of judgment, isn’t there? That technique won’t work on the street. That style is ridiculous. That teacher is a fraud. That guy is a legend. That’s the best martial art there ever was. We hear it all the time. I think I’d like to share a few thoughts on how I’ve navigated the world of judgment over the years, so that it might help your martial arts journey. And hopefully, maybe even your life. So let’s get started. The reason I’m bringing up this topic is because over the Thanksgiving Day holiday, I had a chance to take some family to an art museum. My wife, my mother, and at the art museum, we came upon the Impressionism wing, and my mother is a fan of Impressionism. She was also a career art teacher, so I figured we’d be in there for a while. As we went into the room, one of the first exhibits we saw were three Monet paintings, right next to each other. Now, I’ve seen Monet exhibits before, and I’ve got to tell you, I thought these were not his best work. The first one was just looked like a sun and a rock, no big deal. The second one was some kind of landscape reflecting on a pond. And the third, actually, I couldn’t figure out what the heck it was. My wife thought maybe it was a horse drinking water, which would have been odd. I actually couldn’t tell what it was. So I do know that Monet went blind towards the end of his career. So I just figured, you know, these were from that period, his blind period. And of course, because his name is on that painting, museums are happy to put these paintings up, whether they’re good or not. And these were just some of the not so good ones. Okay, so I had my little judgment, and we moved on. Worked our way along the wall until we came about ten minutes later to the end of the hall opposite the three Monet paintings. And before we left that gallery, my mother said, hey, look back at the Monet. I turned around, and it was as if three new paintings had been hung up. Suddenly, all three were just illuminated, as if there was sunshine coming from within each of the frames. It was striking. The first one absolutely was like a sun setting behind a rock. The second one was like this mirrored effect of this lovely landscape on the water. And the third one now did reveal itself to be a plant in water. They were just marvelous. Now, I’m not going to say there was greatest works, but they had changed so much. Within ten minutes, just by standing at a different place in the room, my judgment changed from these are garbage to these are masterfully done. Now, that made me a little nervous, because how can you not think immediately, man… …how many times in my life have I looked at something, passed judgment, and then moved on, never looking back again? How many times was I just dead wrong about my first assessment? So the advice, in case you have to go, and you can’t make the rest of this, the big message today is take a second look. Don’t just say, I got this, and move on. It’s a fast-paced culture, or maybe just we’ve always been fast-paced creatures. We like moving forward, we like moving fast and furiously. There’s a fear of missing out. If I don’t keep up with the pack, I’m going to fall behind. So I just got to keep taking in new information and keep going, which means I have to judge quickly. But that doesn’t always mean I’m accurate. How many times have you said or do you hear people say, oh yeah, been there, done that. I’ve been to Paris, been there, done that. Oh yeah, I took Aikido, been there, done that. I know it. I got it all. I got everything I need to know. But did you? Did you really pass a fair judgment? Did you have the full experience? Did you take a second look? In martial arts, I’m just as guilty as anyone of passing judgments and then maybe not wanting to look back because I got to get on to the new thing. In my style of Kung Fu, many, many times, I was shown by a teacher a “fancy” technique. And while they’re showing this technique, oh, we’re going to start on the ground and kick up and then you’re going to roll over and grab this and strike this. And I’m thinking, there is no way, there is no conceivable scenario I would ever do this. Why would I do that technique? That’s crazy. But then we would do a multiple attacker drill or we’d introduce a weapon or some limitation, you know, broken arm, something. And suddenly I would find a similar movement or maybe the exact movement coming out of my body. Suddenly the context had changed and that move wasn’t so fancy. It became the only thing I could do. This happens all the time for me nowadays in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I’d say overall Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has changed over the years and maybe in the old school version, you didn’t have to be quite as athletic to pull off all the techniques that are going on. But I think it’s gotten a lot more athletic. If you want to do all the inversions and rolling attacks, it requires a slightly more useful and agile body, I would say. So again, when I go to class and the professor starts to show some technique, well, you grab this fancy grip and you feed it through here, then you flip over there, then you’ve got to invert and roll around to this side, and out of respect, I will practice the technique and I’ll try, but my brain is saying, no way. But then same thing, we start to roll, get tired, my tricks aren’t working, they start stacking me up, put pressure on, and my body just turns away. That’s very similar to what was shown. And I see where the technique was born. I get it. I go, oh, that’s how that happened. So I’m just fascinated as I’ve gotten older how no way can become okay. And I’m sure you have your own examples of that. Of course, I’m not just talking about martial arts here, I’m talking about judgments you’ve made in all areas of your life. Let me give you an example from my life. Do you like falafels? Growing up in Buffalo to the age of 23, I’d never had a falafel, never heard of a falafel. When I moved to Los Angeles, not only do they have falafels, I found an article when we moved there that said, the top 20 falafels in Los Angeles. It just blew my mind. Well, what is this thing? So we drove out and I found a falafel, and I hated it. My judgment was, this is fully awful. That was my little joke. Falafels are fully awful. A couple years went by, and the opportunity came up to try falafels again. And it was a different experience. A different kind of falafel. Different spices, different size, different texture. And I loved it. I thought, oh, now that’s pretty good. Nowadays, I’ve eaten falafels all over the place. Now I’m fussy. I’m a connoisseur of falafels. There’s a certain coarseness that I like. There’s a certain spice blend that I like. There’s a certain texture that I like. My judgment has changed over time. The same, of course, goes with people. How many times have you met someone that you didn’t really hit it off with at first, but over time, you start to respect their manner. You start to respect their work ethic. And you start to change your opinion of them. And, of course, on the other hand, people that make a fantastic first impression. Boy, what a friendly guy. Boy, they were so helpful. But then over time, you find that they’re very manipulative. And they’re actually kind of toxic. You need to get away from them. This happens. Our first judgments, our first impressions are often dead wrong. And, of course, from a teaching standpoint, can you think back to a time when you had a teacher who was hard on you? And over time, you realized you didn’t hate them. You actually loved them for the fact that they held you to a standard and they saw more in you than maybe you saw in yourself. They were a tough love teacher. I just think it’s amazing how many times I’ve been wrong. And the older I get, the more I

Welcome to Episode #114 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Driving Without Brakes.” I’ve done some stupid things in my life… but driving without brakes may be the stupidest! Of course, I didn’t plan on putting myself (and everybody on the road around me!) in danger, but it also wasn’t a big surprise. Nope! I’m ashamed to admit that I had ignored the warning signs for months before experiencing the terrifying consequences. I hope that by sharing this embarrassing story of bad decisions and misguided priorities, you can avoid creating unnecessary terror in your life. This incident truly scared me straight and changed my life for the better… I hope it might change you a little, too. To LISTEN to “Driving Without Brakes,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Driving Without Brakes Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #114 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. I will apologize up front, in case you hear any construction noise, we’ve got some work going on next door. They’ve got radio blasting, hammering, sawing, yelling. So, let this be the first message of the day. You can’t always wait for perfect conditions to do things. Do the best you can with what you’ve got. And this is what I’ve got today. What else do I have today? Well, not just that message. I’ve got a story for you. This is a terrible story. And by terrible, I mean full of terror. My own personal terror. You probably won’t care. But this is a story that was a real horror for me. And it’s also very embarrassing because it was completely my own fault. But it did happen over 30 years ago. So I am prepared to forgive myself, especially if sharing this horrific story can in some way help you avoid a similar mistake. So let me hit you with this story. Prepare. And then I’ve got three quick lessons that I drew from it. And maybe one of them will make sense to you, too. All right, ready? I was 16 years old. This is 16 year old Ando. Had just gotten my driver’s license. Didn’t have a car. I was holding out, saving up for some type of sporty coupe. But that plan never worked out. Instead, a kindly neighbor had an old Buick station wagon that she no longer required. And I picked it up for I think $600. That was my first car. Dark blue, red leather-ish interior. And like most older cars, there were some tricks to operating it. It had a window that you had to kind of jimmy a little bit to get to work. And yes, it was an old-fashioned window, not an electric window. There was some smoke coming out of the tailpipe and the carburetor was tricky. It had some type of the butterfly valve on top where you had to use a twist tie once the car got running in the cold weather, you have to go out and tie it open. So there were some tricks to keeping it moving, but I didn’t care. It was my car. This was freedom. This was my chariot of independence. So there I was, a young driver, and I got a couple years out of that thing, at least a year and a half, two years, but I had no money. So I wasn’t one of those kinds of people who could soup up the car or trick it out in any kind of way. I had no money and, of course, no mechanical knowledge. That’s the other big part of that. And no friends who had any mechanical knowledge. So anything that was wrong with that car stayed wrong or got worse. In most cases got worse, which brings us to this horrific story. One day, I hit the brakes and heard a squeak. And as I learned, that might be an early sign that your brakes are starting to go. You might need to replace those. But I had more important things to do and they were still working, so I didn’t think too much about it. But as time went on, and this is one of those things that you don’t really notice right away because it’s so gradual, but at some point I noticed that I was really having to press the pedal deeper than I used to. Instead of just touching the brakes, you would have to get it half an inch, maybe then to an inch, an inch and a half. You had to press more and more. Until eventually, and here we’re getting into the embarrassing part, I had to press that pedal all the way to the floor. Not only did I have to press it all the way to the floor, I found myself having to turn in my seat, jam my heel down into it and use the back of my chair to kind of add extra leverage to really depress that pedal and pin it to the floor to get any kind of breaking reaction out of it. Now again, I’m going to just claim that I was young, poor and stupid. That’s what makes this so embarrassing. I just thought I could get by. It seemed like I had more important things to do. I was able to drive. I was functioning. I actually developed a whole technique where I didn’t really use the brakes that much. Instead of speeding off to destinations, I would just take my time and if I looked up ahead and I saw that there was some braking going on, I would just start coasting. And I always gave myself a big cushion of space around the car, which is good defensive driving anyway. And I found that I could just kind of stay in this bubble and time myself to get from place to place. So it’s crazy how you can adapt to things you shouldn’t have to adapt to. I shouldn’t even have had to develop that skill. And it didn’t last that long because ultimately, here’s what happened. Heading to Taekwondo class. I think it was like a seven o’clock class across town. I’m driving myself to class because I’m a big boy. I head out and this is all happening within a block or two of my house. I head out and the first turn I need to make is a left into a two-lane road. One lane coming, one lane going. So I time it, there’s a space, I roll out into traffic, I’m heading towards an intersection. Up ahead, I see the light turn red, there’s five or six cars because it’s basically, I mean, it’s a seven o’clock class, so there’s a lot of traffic on the road. This is basically rush hour. I need to stop. I turn in my chair, I jam my heel down to the ground, I start pressing… and on this day, no reaction whatsoever from the car. No braking response. I am rolling unhindered. Calculating very quickly, I realize I’m going to smash into the back of those cars. There was not enough room to coast, there was not enough time to wait for that light to turn green. This was bad. So I swerve into the oncoming lane. First miracle. I didn’t hit anybody, didn’t run into anything. I get into the oncoming lane, but I can’t stay there for long because now there’s cars making their right hand turns up there and whatever they’re doing, left hand turns. So I get right past the residential portion and there’s a gas station on the corner. I get out of the incoming lane and I make it to the edge of the parking lot of the gas station. I roll into the gas station, still going full speed. Second miracle. There is an opening to get through the parking lot around the gas pumps to get to the far side of the gas station. So I’m thinking, great, I can just kind of let this slow down. And as I round the corner of the gas station on the far edge, I see an air pump, right? And behind it is a high curb, maybe like six inches high. Behind that, there’s a big row of like seven or eight foot high hedges, green hedges. So I just set course for that curb and figure if I can just hit the curb, boom, just get ready for that jolt. You’re going to come to a sudden stop here, but you will stop. Nope! I hit that curb, ba-boom, and roll right over the curb and right through the hedges. Miracle three. I didn’t know what was behind those hedges, but fortunately, there was no one there. Could have been kids playing, could have been… who knows, right? I mean, it’s horrible. What I end up seeing as I break through the hedges is a front lawn, a driveway, a front lawn, a driveway. There’s a whole block of houses, houses on my left, street on a right. And I just start rolling. And I make it about three or four front lawns before I start slowing down. And I realize, well, you can either stop on someone’s front lawn, which seemed like a bad choice, or you can just jam that wheel, get up one of these driveways, and at least get into a backyard on a driveway. That’s what I did. I yanked the wheel, went down a driveway, ended up in someone’s backyard, and I figured out finally, threw it into park, and the car stopped. Now, why didn’t I use the emergency brake, you might ask. Never occurred to me. Never once did that occur to me. I never used the emergency brake, so it just wasn’t in my thinking. I never used it, so I wouldn’t even know where it was. Anyway, there I was, sitting in the driveway. I realized how many miracles I had just experienced, how lucky I had just gotten, and how ridiculous my decision-making had been up to this point. What a fool I was. And as I caught my breath, I realized, okay, the next step’s here. You’re not going to make it to class tonight, my friend. I pulled out a scrap of paper out of the glove compartment, left my phone number and a note for the homeowner, walked home — talk about a walk of shame — walked home, and then contacted a salvag

Welcome to Episode #113 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “The First Technique in Martial Arts.” Do you remember the first technique you learned in the martial arts? Was it a jab? A block? Maybe a breakfall? Whatever it was, let me ask you—would you say it was also the most important technique? If not— Don’t you think it should be? Over the years, I’ve learned a wide range of both practical and somewhat “fancy” moves, but the fact is NONE of them will work on their own. That was a problem until I figured something out… There’s actually a powerful technique you can include before any move to increase its chances of succeeding! I’d say it’s not only the most important lesson in the martial arts, it may be the most important lesson in living a happy life. What is that technique? Just hit “play” and I’ll be happy to break it down for you! 🙂 To LISTEN to “The First Technique in Martial Arts,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! The First Technique in Martial Arts Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hi ho, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. In a great mood today, hope you are too. Welcome to episode #113 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Ain’t it the truth? Sitting here today in my cool Mantis Boxing Rash Guard. Maybe you can see the mantis there. This comes from my friend, Randy Brown. Sifu Randy and I, as you may know, just held a four-day in-person Kung Fu training camp up in New Hampshire. And may I say, it was a success. It was fun. I think everyone learned something and no one died. That’s the formula for a success. Fun, learning, and no deaths. We’ll probably have another event similar to that coming up. Maybe you could join us at the next one. Get your own cool rash guard. I’d really like that. But let me tell you about the best takeaway I got from the camp because that’s the topic today. When I showed up, I really didn’t know who was going to be there. I mean, yes, there’s a registration, but I hadn’t worked with almost any of them. So I didn’t know what they were going to do or certainly how they were going to do it. It’s a big mystery. And that forced me to prioritize what I was going to do. I want to be prepared for anything. So then the question becomes, well, what are the priorities? What do I need to do first so that I’m prepared to be at my best no matter what happens? In other words, what should be your first technique? What is the most important technique to start this engagement with? I’m also curious, what was your first technique? I’m curious because you would think that the first technique that you’re ever taught would be also the most important technique from your teacher’s point of view. So, if you can remember, I would love it if in the comments you would just let me know, what was the first thing you ever learned in a martial arts class? Was it a jab, a block, a breakfall, an armbar? I’m just curious, what was it? And, if you have the time, do you feel it was the most important lesson that you ever learned? Where did it fall in to what you learned later? I would suggest to you that the first technique in martial arts, the most important technique in martial arts that you should learn, is preparation. I mean specifically, preparing to face a challenge. The technique before the technique, if you will. The technique before you move. I’m talking about optimizing your state of mind and your state of body so that you will perform at your best no matter what happens. That makes sense, right? Here’s the problem. Let’s say you are sparring with someone. You put your hands up and right away, they grab your wrist. Now, in that instant, what happened to you? Who are you? When you felt that wrist grab, come on, there’s a physical reaction. You feel that pressure, a little bit of impact maybe, maybe even some pain. On the psychological side, there’s also a reaction. Maybe you are a little afraid, maybe you’re a little embarrassed, caught you off guard. Maybe you feel weak because this person really grabbed aggressively. You might even feel stuck. You could instantly feel trapped. Let’s just recognize that in that instance, in that instant, you’ve just become suboptimal. You are not at your best. Whatever moves that you’ve learned, punches or kicks or grab escapes, even specifically this type of guard grab wrist attack, whatever you’re going to do is not going to be at your best because your mental state and your physical state have now changed. A minute ago, maybe you were feeling great. You felt powerful, you felt unlimited, you felt comfortable in your body. And now all of a sudden, that one quick instant, that all changed. This could happen, maybe, let’s say sparring. Have you ever had this experience? You’re feeling great. And they’re pairing up partners for sparring. Could be at a tournament, could be in your class. And they say, okay, you are going to spar that person. And you look over… Now, that first look is what I’m talking about. Your feelings in that first look. If you look over and it’s an eight year old kid, you probably feel safe. You probably feel competent. You probably feel like you can have some fun with this. But sometimes you look over and that first look is somebody bigger than you, stronger than you. Maybe you don’t know them and they look mean. Maybe they’re a higher rank. Maybe they have a reputation for hurting people. Maybe they’ve hurt you. So how do you feel now? You might start off your match already feeling defeated. You may already feel like you don’t have much of a chance. You are automatically suboptimal. And now that was just in the context of a class. Imagine you’re walking down the street and suddenly someone shoves a knife in your face. Imagine suddenly someone puts a gun in your face. Imagine suddenly three guys grab you and drag you behind a building. I just want to be clear that whatever that first feeling that you get, whatever fills your soul, that is going to determine your capability to defend yourself, to fight. Let’s be very clear… No matter what style you study, no matter how long you’ve been training, no matter what kind of shape you’re in, your second technique will not work or certainly won’t work as well as it could unless you’ve mastered the first technique, which is managing your state of mind and your state of body as you are first confronting a situation. Now this topic I actually discussed a little bit in a recent video called, The Most Important Stance. And in that video, I was kind of being cute that the most important stance was not the horse stance or a cat stance or a front stance or any stance that we really focus on that looks cool. I suggested that the most important stance was the ready stance! In traditional martial arts, we’ve been given a gift of some type of preparatory stance before you do a form or even before you spar. You have a chance to stand at the ready. That is your time to practice putting yourself in an optimal state. To power up, to get your mind right and get your body right and, yes, your spirit right. Whatever comes after that is just an expression of the resources you just pulled together. Your ready stance pulls your power together, kiyotsuke, and then you get ready to use it, yoi, and then you move it around. You play with it. You express it. So in that moment, that preparatory stance, who are you? How great are you? How great do you feel? How ready are you really to face whatever’s coming next? Even if you’re not in a traditional martial art, you still have that moment before maybe you touch gloves or you slap and knuckle up. You have that moment to get your head together before you engage. That’s one advantage, perhaps, over self-defense, where you may not, you may get sucker punched or caught off guard. But at least in training, we have this chance to develop who we are. And you should really think about that for a second. Self-defense. Think about those words. Self-defense. Who is the self? Who are you protecting? You at your best. We are training to develop ourselves to be the best we can. Then we’re trying to defend it so that nobody can take it away from us. We train to be optimal human beings. And then we train to have the power to hold on to that. We don’t want to lose it on our own. And we certainly don’t want it to be taken away from us by someone else. If you think about it, that’s what a bad guy does. That’s what makes them a bad guy. The bad guy is trying to make you forget how powerful you are. They’re trying to minimize you. They’re trying to shrink you in your space. They’re trying to make you feel helpless. They’re trying to make you feel unworthy. They’re trying to make you feel voiceless. Like whatever you have to say doesn’t matter. They are trying to make you less than your best. And it is my opinion that the less best you go, the more danger comes into your life. The more you’re led down that path, where you’re either giving away power or letting power be taken from you, the more danger you are going to be in. Again, we’re here to train, to maximize our power and hold on to it, no matter what happens. Think abou

Welcome to Episode #112 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Lessons From Being Choked Out.” When I started training in the martial arts, I practiced a long list of moves to escape from chokes. No air, no problem… right? WRONG! It turned out that there’s a big difference between a “practice choke” and a REAL strangulation. Thankfully, I found out before someone tried to really kill me! Thanks to teachers like Carl Cestari and “Judo Gene” LeBell, I had the chance to feel how effective (and terrifying!) being choked out can be. Those experiences also taught me a few good life lessons, which I’d like to share with you. Before you listen to the podcast, you might also want to check out my video, How to Survive a Choke. It might come in handy! To LISTEN to “Lessons From Being Choked Out,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Lessons From Being Choked Out Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, my friend! Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Sad news in the martial arts world. As you’ve probably already heard, the legend, Judo Gene LeBell, has passed away at the age of 89. Now, there are so many stories about Judo Gene LeBell, and I’m going to add another one to the library today. Judo Gene was, of course, a pioneer in cross training in the martial arts. He made a name for himself in the sports world, the entertainment world, and of course, the teaching world. It seems that Judo Gene worked with everybody who’s anybody, and it’s just an incredible legacy that he has left behind, the influence that he has had on the martial arts world. But more than that, what I was probably most impressed by was the fact that he always carried himself with a sense of humor. Martial arts is a serious topic, self-defense is a serious topic, but he found a way to make it very human and to balance out that energy that can sometimes run away to being too aggressive or frightening. And he made it very human. At least that was my take on it. As it happens, I was lucky enough to meet him one time. Just once, but once might have been enough because he choked me out. I’m going to tell you that story and the lessons that I took away from it in one moment, but first let me back up and give you my quick history on chokes in general. Now, forgive me, when I say chokes, we’re really talking more properly, probably about strangulations, but common usage, I’m saying chokes, so let’s not get too technical about it at the moment. Now, my first formal schooling was in Taekwondo, and in our Taekwondo program, we did practice choke defenses. So you know, two hands on a throat, arm around your neck. But I would say even though we were practicing choke defenses, I was never really choked. So you’d get a little squeeze, you’d say, oh okay, Yeah, I get it. But to me, I didn’t have a lot of extra respect for choking as opposed to a wrist grab or a collar grab or any other kind of grab. It just seemed like, Okay, well here’s what you do for a choke, just like any other attack. I just do this, I do that. Now, of course, that’s a bit of a problem, a bit of a blind spot to not take chokes more seriously. And my attitude changed forever when I went to a seminar with Carl Cestari. Now, I don’t know if you know about Carl Cestari, but he was a highly trained martial artist. He was more of a pioneer in the combatives field. He popularized or brought back to life a lot of the teachings from World War II, the work of people like Fairbairn and Applegate, and so he came in with a really practical, tough-edged type of training. Now, I was still a young Taekwondo belt at the time and I didn’t know what I was looking at here. I just knew this guy’s tough. And at one point during the seminar, he was in a mount position on the ground and he put a choke on a guy. And to my ignorant eyes, I thought, well, the guy’s hands are both free, his legs are both free. We’ve done choke defenses. Surely that guy can get out of there. And so I asked that question. Yes, my friend, I asked that foolish question. And I, with respect, I said, Gee, you got that choke, but why can’t he just get out of that? And Sensei Carl said, Oh, come here. And I lay down on the ground. He got into the mount. He basically prepared his hands and he said, tell me when you’re ready and then you could do whatever you want. As soon as you feel the choke, you do whatever you want. And I said, okay. Go! And I kid you not, what happened was, I think I’ve told this story before, my arms not only did not click into some automatic choke defense, my body actually extended! To my horror, my arms shot out and my legs shot out because he put that choke on and it felt more like a punch to the throat than a choke. So I would say that was the first time I was ever really choked. It was terrifying. I immediately had respect for chokes and put them in a different class than a wrist grab or a collar grab. Chokes are terrifying when applied fully and properly and with bad intent. All right, so I’m a little slow on that, but I figured it out. Now, back to my Taekwondo class. Our class was held in a school. They shared the rent with a Judo program and I was friendly with a couple of the guys in the Judo program. At one point they saw us working on choke defenses and one of the black belts offered, Would you like me to choke you out? That’s right. That’s the kind of things that happen in a Judo school. It was just very normal. It was like he was getting a cup of coffee. He said, Would you like me to choke you out? And my knee-jerk response was no, because I was still living in terror from Carl Cestari’s choke. I just thought, Oh my God, I don’t want that again. But more than the terror of being choked out, I didn’t really trust this guy. Nice guy, but I’d never seen him choke anybody else out. I had not been choked out fully when Sensei Carl put that choke on me. I had tunnel vision and I saw stars and I was that close to going out, but he let it go. I presume he knows what he’s doing and he let me go just before I blacked out. I didn’t mention that detail, but that’s why it was so terrifying, because I was pretty much gone. So when this guy said, I’m gonna complete it, seal the deal, I said no– no I don’t, because I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me and I certainly don’t trust you. Now that was a decision that I regretted for years. Even though I was still learning other self-defense styles and still working through choke defenses, I always had that nagging voice in my head saying, you should have gotten choked out, you should have taken that opportunity, you should have said yes. Now you don’t know. So I don’t know the full extent of what this choking experience is like, or strangulation. So that went on for years until, ta-da, here we go… How I Was Choked Out by Gene LeBell I went to a martial arts event in Las Vegas and Judo Gene had a station at a booth at the event. I think he was selling his book, maybe he had some DVDs. I didn’t buy those, but I did get the book– here it is. Gene LeBell’s Grappling World, The Encyclopedia of Finishing Holds. The deal was, I’m a little foggy on this part, but you stood in line, and then you could buy this book, and it might have been, you get a patch if you let him choke you out. So two different deals– you can either just come up and buy the book or if you wanted the book and a patch, well, then he would choke you out to earn the patch, to say I was choked out by Gene LeBell. Now, you’ll see inside, he was a kind enough fellow to sign the book. He put, “To Ando, the best of all worlds. Your friend, Gene LeBell.” And can you see there he actually drew a picture of himself. So, sense of humor, big heart, doesn’t know me from Adam and he took the time to do that. One of my treasured possessions. Okay, so now, to get the choke, you had to get in line, and by the way, I can’t imagine how many people Judo Gene must have choked out in his lifetime, because just there at this event, there were, I don’t know, 20 or 30 people in line. It was a multiple day event, so just from that place alone, he must have choked out a hundred people, I’m guessing. So I can’t even imagine how many people he put to sleep. But I got into line. The friends that I was with wanted no part of this. Not only weren’t they going to join me, they were trying with all of their power to dissuade me from doing this. Like, what are you crazy? Don’t get choked out! That’s not healthy! It’s dangerous! You can’t do that! But I knew who Judo Gene LeBell was and I knew that if I was gonna get choked out by anybody, that’s the guy who should do it. I trusted his experience, his legend. That’s the guy I wanted to be choked out by. So I ignored my friends and we’re moving up in line and I’m standing strong. Now there’s a guy ahead of me in line. Just a little aside here– this guy, I’m wearing normal clothes, but this guy came with an image. He’s wearing an all-black gi and a black belt, okay. And he’s got his girlfriend with him. They’re a really good-looking couple. I hate them already. They’re super young, fit, good-looking couple, bu

Welcome to Episode #111 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work.” You see a move. You learn a move. You try a move… …but it doesn’t work! ARGH! So frustrating. The truth is, sooner or later, we all hit a wall in our training. We all get to the point where we have to decide whether a technique is possible or impossible. But what if we’re wrong? Before you give up on those so-called “fancy” moves, let me give you some advice—no technique works in the beginning! Heck—forget the beginning, even if you drill a technique over and over for years, you still might have a problem pulling it off for real. But don’t give up! In this episode, I will share the six stages of learning that you must pass through to truly master a technique. No, it’s not an easy path to follow, but it’s the only way to get you where you want to go. To LISTEN to “How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, and welcome to episode #111 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. My name is Ando of Happy Life Martial Arts, and I’m here today to tell you a story– a story about the very first question I ever asked in a martial arts class. I had trained on my own in my garage for a couple of years, but when I finally ventured out and signed up for a formal martial arts class, this was the first question that came to my mind. And it’s a question that I kept repeating for several years. And it’s all on the topic of– How do you make a martial arts technique really work? Perhaps you’ve had a similar question in your mind. You go to class, you see a cool technique, maybe a fancy technique. Your instructor seems to be able to do it, but you can’t and you want to. What’s up with that? Well, let me get to the story and then I think I can give you a solution, a pathway at least, to making your techniques work. So the story, and I believe this was probably the first class, literally, the first class that I was standing in the Dojang, Taekwondo school. The teacher, a nice guy, and a very skillful guy, I believe it was probably his normal routine when a new student comes in to demonstrate some of his skill, to impress upon the student, Here’s why I’m the teacher. In this case, the teacher would either take another student, or in this case me, and turn them into a puppet. He took my hand and grabbed my fingers, grabbed the palm and twisted my wrist, made me go down, flipped it over, goose neck, chicken wing, finger lock, arm lock. He just had me going up and down, up and down like a puppet. And of course, it was all very cool. It was impressive and skillful. And when he let me go, he had that look on his face like, Impressive, huh? Now, I was not trying to be a wise guy. Well, maybe 10% being a wise guy, but 90% actual interest. I just had to ask, Yeah, but how did you get my hand? I understand that if you’re grabbing my fingers and you twist them around multiple ways, I’m going to react to that. I got that. But if I’m punching you, how did you catch my hand to begin with? And he looked at me with a very straight face and he just said… That comes later. Someday I’ll show you. That was his answer. Now, in fairness, I’m a brand new student, so if there is a secret to catching someone’s hand out of mid-air in a real fight, why show me? Earn trust, pay your dues. I’m on board with that. So okay, that’ll come later, I just have to have a little bit of faith. Now as it happens, my time in the Taekwondo school came to an end before I ever learned how to catch somebody’s hand out of mid-air to then turn them into a puppet. I ended up eventually in a Kung Fu school and I ran into the same problem. Loads of difficult, dare I say, fancy moves in the Kung Fu school. All the things that people say don’t work in real fights. Wrist locks, sweeps, lockups of various kinds, hip throws. And I couldn’t get any of them to work, right? And, as a matter of fact, perhaps this was being a bit of a wise guy, but I was older. I even at some point put up a challenge to my classmates and I said, If any one of you can get a hip throw on me, a legitimate hip throw, while we’re free sparring, I’ll give you $100. I believe it’s also the case I raised that to $1000 at some point. $1000 to anyone who can drop me with a hip throw. Now, to be fair, I wasn’t hip throwing anybody either. I couldn’t do it either. But that didn’t change the fact that we were being taught hip throws and we were expected to be able to do hip throws. I’ve mentioned before that early on in my martial arts journey, I was a bit of a technique collector. I had notebooks full of techniques, cool moves, the stuff I wanted to do. But I couldn’t and it was very frustrating. I’m sure for you too, if you have a similar problem, you show up, you do what you’re supposed to do, you work hard, you practice, you ask questions, but it’s not enough. You still can’t get the moves to work. And for me, the real slap in the face came when I was working with kids. Maybe when you’re working with adults, you can get away with saying, Well, this guy’s bigger and that guy’s stronger, that guy’s a higher rank. So of course I can’t get these things to work. But when I worked out with kids, and I would kind of slip in an attempt to throw them and surprise them, maybe delight them with something a little fancier, I would also be fumbling around to try to get that hand or get to that right position. So even with kids, I couldn’t do it. And that infuriated me. At some point, that came out as anger, like I’m resenting this whole training methodology because none of this stuff you say it works, works. My Kung Fu teacher said something that I believe he said many times, but the first time I really heard it was on this one particular occasion where he told me– First you learn how to work Kung Fu, then you learn how to make Kung Fu work. Ah, this to me was the exact same advice or sentiment from my Taekwondo teacher when he said, that comes later. Which now told me that there are two separate projects when it comes to making your techniques work. Two completely different projects– One project is collecting some moves, get some techniques. The second project is how to apply them, to make them work. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Just because you keep learning techniques doesn’t mean you can do them. At some point, you have to shift your mental gears from learning what to do to learning how to do it. It’s a big shift. But if you do it, I think there are rewards. I know I’m only speaking from my own personal experience, of course, but I did change my mentality. I stopped writing techniques down. I already knew I had too many. I had thousands of techniques written down, but who cares? I couldn’t do any of them. Not really. So I dedicated myself then to the second project, to making the Kung Fu work. And how do you do that? Experimenting. You have to fail. You have to make yourself vulnerable, put yourself back into a beginner’s mindset, just like you did the first time you walked in and said, What do I do? To starting over and saying, Well, now how do I do it? So you in effect become a white belt again. But I do believe there’s a happy ending here because if you do this right work, if you follow what I’m going to prescribe here, I do believe you can make pretty much any technique work. Those fancy moves that people love to hate on, myself included at some point, I was a hater, I became a lover, a much happier person because I saw that these things were possible. These techniques were passed down for a reason. They do work if you do the right kind of work. So that’s what I want to share. I’ve got six stages of work you have to do to make your martial arts techniques work. And I’ll tell you right up front, these stages can overlap, it could be a little sloppy. You might have to go back and repeat certain steps. We’ll get into all that, but they’re all necessary. I don’t think you can be the best martial artist you can be without moving through all six of these stages. Ready? First stage to make your martial arts techniques work is the technical stage. That’s when you are a beginner, you walk into your school, and you’re really just asking, what do I do? He’s got a hand on my throat, what do I do? He’s grabbing my wrist, what do I do? He’s trying to punch me in the head, what do I do? That’s when you start learning your first moves, maybe your first combinations, your first forms. And frankly, this is the easiest of all six stages. Absolutely, especially now in the age of the internet, where you can see the greatest martial artists alive performing for you, you can learn a million different moves very quickly. Information is cheap nowadays. However, here’s the mistake… You hear that knowledge is power, but that’s a lie, and I’ve talked about that before. Knowledge is not power. Action is power. Informed action is superpower. So yes, this first stage of technical information, learning techniques is crucial. We have to know something, but i

Welcome to Episode #110 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Close Your Mind to Learn More.” We all know that a martial arts student should keep an open mind, right? But should it stay open forever? Is it possible that you can keep learning even when you close your mind to new information? Is it possible that you could learn MORE? I SAY YES! Of course, I didn’t always believe that, but a recent incident changed my mind for good. A lesson from my first Karate teacher broke a pattern of behavior that I wasn’t even aware of… and it was holding me back! If you’d like to hear some unconventional advice that might just turn you from an empty cup into a full cup, I welcome you to listen or watch below. To LISTEN to “Close Your Mind to Learn More,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Close Your Mind to Learn More Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Hi ho, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #110 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Today, let me ask you a question. As you move through the world, do you feel your mind is open or closed? Do you see yourself as an empty cup or is your cup full? I ask this because the answer seems obvious, right? I’ve preached many times that we should always be a student, always ready to learn. So I would like to answer that I am an open-minded empty cup everywhere I go, particularly in my martial arts training. However, my friend, something happened not too long ago, an incident that made me rethink that. This incident led to advice that I want to offer to you today that’s a little uncommon, a little unconventional. It’s a great reminder that advice, no matter where you get it, is contextual. In one situation, the best advice might be to stand your ground and do not back down. In another situation, the best advice might be to let it go and walk away. The right advice at the right time is your best chance for success. The wrong advice at the wrong time can get you killed. So let’s for the moment open our mind to a little bit of advice that might be unconventional. Here’s the incident. About a year ago now, I had the privilege to go train with my very first Karate teacher. He’s in his 70s now, but he’s a dedicated student and so his skills are very impressive. Always worth seeking him out. I was blessed enough to have a few hours to work with him and in that time, as always, he would show me a technique. And since I’ve been around for a while, the pattern would go, oh, that technique is kind of cool. That’s very similar to a technique I’ve seen in another art. I would tell him and he would listen. He would give me a concept and I would say, oh, you know what, in the Chinese arts, there’s a word for that. They call it– and then he stopped me. He interrupted. He actually said, “Stop. I don’t need that in my head. That’s just clutter.” That’s the incident. At first, I was shocked, right, completely taken aback because I’ve done this for years sharing notes, right? Of course, I am there as a student, so I’m there to learn. But as an older fellow who’s been around a little bit, I always feel maybe I can make their time feel better spent if I can offer something back as well. Is that arrogant? I don’t know. It just feels friendly. But in this case, after all these years, he finally just told me stop. But more importantly, he said he didn’t want the information. So my reaction was, whoa, do you mean to tell me you, one of my martial arts heroes, has a closed mind? You don’t want to learn something? And it took me, I’ll be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to actually figure this out and make peace with it. What I figured out was, it’s a false choice to say whether your mind is open or is it closed. Perhaps there’s a third choice. What about just a focused mind? He was telling me, I don’t need the information that you’re offering and it’s actually a distraction to my work. It’s hard enough to get good at something, right? You need to be focused on it and work on it and have some faith in it. And if I come in and start saying, oh, look over here, look over there, it’s like this, it’s like that, it actually slows down his work. He’s already made his commitment to what he wants to be great at. So I hadn’t really considered that before. And maybe now that I’m older, it’s the natural time to start thinking that way. As I reflected on this incident, I realized that this pattern wasn’t just with him. It basically had repeated itself with every teacher I’ve ever had. Again, I have always been of that school of thought thinking, I’m an empty cup. I have an open mind. I will learn from anyone, anytime, anywhere. That’s why I’m so cool. But then I realized that over the years, with several different teachers, all of whom I respect, all of whom were absolutely worth spending time with and listening to and learning from, they were all uninterested in what I had to offer them. That pattern always showed up. Someone would show something, I would respectfully add in, and I’m not a jerk, I’m not saying every single time, every single moment, but once in a while, I’d pick a moment like, wow, that is so similar to this other thing that I have seen. You might find this interesting, they call it this, or they do it this way. But then it hit me, after this incident, where I was told to stop, that none of those teachers over the years had ever actually asked me a follow-up question. They never said, tell me more, they never said, can you repeat that? Can you show me again? Hey, why don’t you take over the class for a moment, send me a link, what are you talking about? Never. I don’t recall any teacher ever asking me to repeat anything, they were always polite. Now that I realize that that’s been that pattern, I realized this new advice, that perhaps there is a time to close your mind, to focus it, in a different wording. Because let me be clear, all of these teachers are really good at what they do. Whether or not you agree with what they do, they are good at what they do. They are all intelligent, they were all hard workers, and none of them are delusional. Because I know right away you might think, oh well, they practice this narrow band of skills and they don’t even realize that they don’t know how to do something with that knife, or on the ground, or against multiples, or whatever they are doing, they are not doing something else and therefore they are vulnerable. They are incomplete. But they are not delusional and that’s the difference. If you say, hey, I’m a boxer, that’s all I do, and I’ll never get attacked by a knife, well that’s delusional. Or if you say, there won’t be multiple people, well that’s delusional. I’ll never get taken to the ground, that’s delusional. But all of these teachers, with the skills that they’ve chosen to develop and master, they’re not delusional. They know what they can do and they know what they can’t do. They know where they’ve spent their time and they know where they haven’t spent their time. And they’ll be the first ones to tell you that. So how can you live with that vulnerability? Isn’t it true that more is better? As a student of the martial arts or life? Isn’t it always about learning more, learning more, more? Isn’t that a good thing? No. That’s why this might be uncommon or unconventional advice. This is the old warning about being a jack of all trades and a master of none. Especially nowadays, in the age of information, the internet, you can get multiple answers to any question or problem that you have. Whatever problem you have, you go searching for an answer and you can spend days, if not weeks, finding one approach, an alternative approach, another approach. But when is it enough? When do you say, I’m good? Do you just keep searching forever on the same question, the same problem, forever? Once you find the answer, once you solve a problem, shouldn’t that be enough? Why do you have to keep looking? Why do you keep searching? For example, you want to learn martial arts, you want to learn how to kick. Your first teacher shows you how to throw a kick. Here’s your round kick and here’s how you get your power. Here’s how you keep your balance. Here’s how you protect yourself when you throw it. Great. But then you come across another teacher and they do it a different way. Oh, it’s a different style. And over here, we put our foot this way, turn our hip at this timing, throw the weight at this moment. Oh. Then you meet another teacher in that same style and they agree on some of that but not all of that and they have a little variation of that. Well, let’s say you’ve got four different ways to throw a round kick now. Which is better? Should you practice four sets of 50 reps and each set is a different style of round kick or is it better to throw one style of round kick 200 times? I’m not a math guy but I think that worked out. Four times 50 or one set of 200? Or let’s say you’re worried about fighting on the ground. You don’t have a background in wrestling or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. So you say, gosh, you know, the most fear I feel about being on the ground is if someone’s si

Welcome to Episode #109 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Panic and Pandemonium.” In self-defense, facing a single attacker is never easy. Now imagine defending yourself from 80,000 people! That sounds crazy, but that’s basically what happened to me. In this episode, I’ll share the story of a young, inexperienced security guard (that’s me!) who suddenly found himself in a panic during a football game. If you happen to be a fan of the Buffalo Bills, I’m talking about the AFC East championship game that turned into the “Fandemonium” of 1988. Yes, I was there! This historic event taught me three important self-defense lessons, which I still repeat to myself to this day. I hope you’ll join me as I repeat them for you, too! To LISTEN to “Panic and Pandemonium,” you can either: Play the audio podcast below… or download to your device. Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Podcasts or Spotify. To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below. If you’d like to support this show, share the link with a friend or leave a quick review over on iTunes. Thank you! Oh—and don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you can get new shows sent to your inbox the minute they’re released. Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life! Panic and Pandemonium Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link. As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page. TRANSCRIPT Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to episode #109 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. A lot has happened since the last time we got together. Actually, it all happened on the same day. It was my birthday. I turned 52 and I realized there are 52 cards in a playing deck. So I now believe for the first time in my life, I’m finally playing with a full deck. Second, same day, I started feeling ill. Turned out COVID had finally struck. After two years of dodging our favorite virus, I finally fell to it. And it wasn’t easy, but I certainly feel blessed that it wasn’t as horrible an experience as it was for others. And other than giving it to my wife, I’m happy to say that it went well. So a little congestion left, but dare I say I have come out of it stronger. But it did lead to the lesson, right off the bat, to do what you can while you can. I was feeling very healthy and strong and virile before I got the virus, and being knocked down that fast, in bed, unable to swallow, just feeling sorry for myself, unable to do as much as I normally do. Boy, that’s rough. Just remember, we’re always one stroke, one slip and fall, one accident away from having a completely different life. So do what you can while you can. The third thing, the same day, my birthday, COVID, I hosted a Zoom seminar on takedowns using traditional stances. It was a live seminar on Zoom. Had a great time. And if you missed it, sign up for my email list and you’ll not only know when I release new videos and podcasts, but you’ll be the first to know when I offer the next Zoom seminar. Hey, maybe you could be there live. That would be great. I’d love to see you there. All right. Onward. Today’s topic. I’m going to tell you a story, as usual. Behind the scenes, I can tell you, I usually write down two or three pages of notes–points I want to make or details I want to make sure I share. This one, this is a one-pager. I’m just going to tell you this story. It’s deeply ingrained in my head and I think it will speak for itself. So I won’t need to wax philosophical for very long about this one. I’m just going to tell you this story. Here it comes. The date of the story, I can give you the date, was November 20th, 1988. I was 18 years old at the time. Now, what happened was, I was working as a doorman at a club at that time. And not a bar, I don’t mean like that. It was a private club in Buffalo where I was born and raised. The security guard who worked there asked me if I wanted to make a little extra money. And I said, sure. He said they were looking for extra security guards for the upcoming Buffalo Bills football game, which was very exciting. I didn’t have tickets for that game and we’re talking about a championship game. This would be the game where the Buffalo Bills played the New York Jets for the AFC East Championship. Now going into that game, the Bills, who historically had not been a winning team, had an 8-0 record, if I recall. They were undefeated at least at home. And this was a championship game. So, the feeling was the Bills are going to win finally a championship right there at home. And of course, from a security standpoint, this is an 80,000 person stadium. At the time it was called Rich Stadium and the capacity was over 80,000 people. So, they were looking for a few extra bodies in case things got out of hand. Now to spoil the end of the story, let me just get to it in case you already know where this is heading. This is also the date that in Buffalo is now known as Fandemonium. Fandemonium because we won that game and 80,000 people in that stadium went nuts. But let me back up. We’re about a week out and he said, you want to work security? And I said, sure. Is there any training for this? No, not at all. All you had to do to be a body was show up at the stadium on game day. I think there was like a one page sign away your rights type of paper and they gave me a jacket. I think there was a baseball cap and I’m on the job now. Okay, first assignment at the stadium. They put you at a gate where the people enter and the rule was just really simple, no booze, no bottles. They want to make sure you’re buying their concessions inside the stadium and no one should be throwing bottles around. That’s dangerous. Now, I like rules and I don’t drink. So this was fun for me. And the first lesson I learned was power goes to your head fast. I can see where historically people get out of control once they’re given a little bit of authority. I get it. Because right away, once I had my shades on and I had my security jacket on, I’ve got a job, and now I’ve got all these people coming in and we’re patting them down. I really enjoyed that job. And I could feel though, I became self-aware, like, take it down a notch. You’re enjoying this a little too much. I will tell you, however, each of the gates had a big plastic garbage can. And those cans got full of six-packs, flasks, bottles, an occasional forgotten pocket knife. People try to play around the rules, get around the rules, which is why security jobs have a job, security people. Anyway, so that was the first lesson. Don’t let power go to your head. Still be a compassionate human being. You can still do your job in a humane way. You don’t have to be a jerk about it. Now we’re going to skip ahead because really there was nothing else to do. Get everyone into the stadium safely and now the game’s on. And nothing’s going on because everyone’s in the stadium watching the game. So basically all we had to do, this was the best part of the job, was enjoy the free ticket to the game. As long as you could find somewhere to stand, you could watch the game. And I did. Now we get all the way towards, let’s say, five minutes before the end of the fourth quarter, or the end of the game. They bring us all down to the tunnel field level and our real job is now being explained to us. Here’s the job– Again, there are 80,000 people in the stadium. How many security guards are there? Well, there sure as heck weren’t 80,000 of us. So I don’t think there are even a thousand of us. I can’t even tell you for sure if there were 100 or 200. But it couldn’t have been more than that. So the ratio is nuts, okay? This is not a fair fight. But the job is given to us as follows. Here’s what we’re going to do… We’re going to walk out on this field with a couple of minutes left and we’re going to form a perimeter around the football field. We’re going to space out every, I don’t know, five, 10 yards. And in this big perimeter, we’re going to make sure that in case someone’s had a little too much to drink, if we win the game, make sure nobody jumps over that wall and comes down onto the field. We don’t want anyone making a scene. We don’t want anyone getting hurt. We don’t want any of the players getting harassed. Just, if anybody tries to get on the field, keep them off the field. That’s the job. Great, okay. So sure enough, we march out and we form this perimeter and we’re facing up to the stands. We’re not facing the field. We’re all standing. So another lesson in human nature– generally people, in crowds for sure, if they’ve been drinking, even more sure, don’t like authority figures. So even though they don’t know me, here comes a little snowball. Some yelling and swearing, a bottle. Hey, where the heck did that bottle come from? You know, you get a little bit of attitude right away just because you’re in a position in authority. So that’s not cool. Come on, don’t be that person. We all have our jobs and we’re there technically to try to keep you safe. All right, so anyway, we’re all around this perimeter. Now the game itself at this point is highly tense. I believe it’s a tie game and the clock’s running down. The Jets get into a position to score a winning field goal. This is it. The whole season rests on this field goal attempt. The Bills block the field goal and sends the game into overtime. So this is super exciting. It looked like we were about to die, but no, we have another chance. Overtime starts. The Jets get the ball first. Uh-oh, don’t like that. The Bills strip the ball from the Jets. Okay, so this excitement, the momentum, the home crowd advantage is really working. We just stopped the victory. We’r