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:

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To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Close Your Mind to Learn More

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

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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 th