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!)

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You Got This!

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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 art