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.

<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"></figure>

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 yo