One of the things we say around the dojo is that Practice is the best way to get good at something. There are many quotes about practice, both positive and negative. Many people seem to be willing to come up with things they like or don’t like about quotes on practice. This weeks blog post isn’t about good practice quotes and bad ones.
What this week’s blog post is about is maximizing your benefit from practice. Here’s what I mean. I realized a little more than a year ago that I had more material than I could actually get really really good at in my lifetime. Being a master doesn’t carry with it some all knowing kind of super power. Mastering anything really is just having the insight to know how much about something you don’t know. Armed with this realization I had all the excuse I needed to stop trying. Which is the short version of why most people don’t make it to black belt. What it did was make me think of my practice time as being that much more precious. I didn’t want to squander any practice time with things that didn’t help me improve as a teacher or improve as a martial artist. So that brought me to the phrase, practice with purpose.
There are many ways to approach a martial art and many ways to improve. I won’t pretend to hold some secret key that can only be revealed when the stars align and the energy of the world is in balance. Something I have found works well for me is, to practice with an intention of getting better at something, having a purpose to the practice. Rather than simply repeating a physical motion 10,000 times with the hopes that some improvement will passively filter in and send ripples through all of my material. I have to be aware of my art, I need to examine with myself what feels comfortable and what feels awkward. By examining why something feels comfortable I can understand how to find that comfort in other moves. By deconstructing why a movement or technique feels awkward I can start to improve it, rather than just repeating over and over and hoping I luck into getting it right. The question “why” was always one of my favorites (sorry mom).
Two things I have started doing have made a huge impact on helping me connect to my body and improve my art. It leaves me wishing I had figured this out a long time ago. Interestingly, I figured this out with the question “why” but it focuses on the question “what”
1) Before practice: What do I want to improve? What do I need to work on? What doesn’t feel right?
2) After practice: What changed? What did I learn? What do I need to work on next time?
This probably looks a little bit like your standard mindfulness approach to things (it is, that’s very observant of you). Fairly often, I find that what I ended up learning isn’t the thing I was looking for. It’s like going to a yard sale hoping to find one thing and then finding something separate, but equally surprising.