PD can be understood as developing the self and / or developing others. Its mainstream techniques include setting goals, developing plans useful in achieving those goals and then taking action in pursuit of those same goals. Typically goals are set in areas such as health and fitness, personal finances, relationships, careers, spiritual beliefs and overall life satisfaction.
Why is Personal Development Important?
Broadly I identify two approaches to personal development: curative and preventative. From a wide reading of personal development literature I would say that much of the PD field is curative; that is, the techniques and philosophies seek to cure a pre-existing problem. For example, perhaps someone is already over-weight, in which case a plan is presented detailing various actions to be taken in pursuit of the realization of the goal of weight loss. Another example might be with someone who is in credit card debt. Here a step-by-step plan on paying back that debt will be laid out and the borrower will take action based on that plan, aiming to remove all debt from his life. In both these cases the techniques presented are curative; they are reactions to an established problem that they seek to ‘cure’.
While such approaches may be useful and even necessary for some, by far the method of personal development that I prefer is what I label preventative. Preventative personal development means that you pursue a life course that minimizes and even removes the risk of getting yourself into an undesirable situation in the first place. For example, rather than gain weight and then set about losing it, preventative personal development teaches skills and knowledge designed to ensure you never become over-weight in the first place. Similarly with credit card debt: by disciplining yourself and your spending at the outset, you intend to never find yourself in a situation where you owe money on a credit card, as an example, looking at 15-20% interest repayments.
In terms more immediately understandable to martial artists, it is the difference between avoiding going to high risk areas where a fight is more likely to break out (the preventative approach) as compared to getting into combat and having to use your art to fight your way out (the curative approach).
Two outstanding examples of mentors that I identify as teaching the preventative approach to personal development are the late Jim Rohn and Denis Waitley. Jim Rohn’s (paraphrased) exhortation to ‘build on rock, not sand’ should never be forgotten. Similarly, Denis Waitley talks about (among other things) taking a proactive approach to your health, rather than waiting until your bodily systems are beginning to fail before taking action. This of course is a central point to Asian medicine which tends emphasize prevention rather than curing.
Preventative personal development then is important in ensuring your quality of life from the outset by pre-empting and pre-solving problems and issues that would otherwise be detrimental to you and your lifestyle.
How Does Personal Development Relate to Martial Arts?
At first the link between martial arts and personal development may seem tenuous at best. Martial arts appear to be about fighting and preparing for a fight, whereas personal development focuses on, among other things, the creation of wealth, happiness and contentment. My own understanding of martial arts, and the method by which I practice and teach, runs deeper than this however. Sure, martial arts appear to be about fighting but, I would argue, if that is all they are about then you are most likely wasting your time studying them. How many fights have you been in since you left Junior High? How many fights have you even seen since you left Junior High? I’m not saying violence can’t rear its ugly head at unexpected moments, and we should certainly be prepared for such an eventuality, but to spend hours of your week preparing for a fight that in all likelihood is never going to happen is not an efficient use of your time and energy. What I am interested in, and what my life philosophy of The Way of the Enlightened Zen Warrior is about, is applying knowledge and concepts that you learn in the pursuit of your art to the wider context of your life. Karate do is, afterall, a way of life. An obvious example of this is related to your health and fitness. Martial arts of all styles provide an excellent method of keeping fit and setting high personal standards, as long as you don’t overdo it and over train and / or pick up an injury. What is more useful to you on a daily basis: your health and fitness or your ability to fight? A further question for you to ponder: would you consider extreme, ‘realistic’ training that leaves you injured in preparation for a possible street fight worthwhile?
I want to emphasize that I am not advocating that the fighting aspect of the arts be disregarded. Far from it. I sincerely believe that it is the combative dimension of the warrior arts that keeps us realistic. Funakoshi sensei asked us to part the clouds, not live with our heads in the clouds. But being realistic means being realistic. So again, I would ask you to consider: realistically, what has more value to you: your health and fitness or your fighting ability?
I can provide some more concrete examples to demonstrate my point with, to take two, time management and making money. Martial arts techniques, or at least those inherited from the battlefield, are efficient. They had to be and they still have to be. Any inefficiency could lead to a violent death. Efficiency then is a concept that can be applied to other aspects of our lives, one such being time management. A lot of people have problems with time management, but what is effective time management if not the efficient use of time?
Turning to making money: anyone who has ever invested money or traded on the stock market or the Forex market will know how important timing is to turning a profit. With proper timing your earnings can accelerate exponentially; but with poor timing you can quickly find your capital wiped out. Timing too is a vital component of every martial arts technique when thrown with the intention of connecting with an opponent. Timing is as important to throwing a punch and knocking someone out as it is to making a million. So again, ask yourself what is more useful to promoting a successful life: effective time management skills and the ability to make money or your prowess as a fighter?
This fundamental observation on what skills and concepts grant us the highest return for the energy and effort we put into their investigation and development is also supported by my research into spiritualism and ‘enlightenment’. I define satori (‘enlightenment’) as being a moment of complete right hemisphere brain dominance, following my reading of two people in particular: Dr Julian Jaynes and Tony Wright.
While I an open to the suggestion both men make that the human species is caught up in a dynamic shift in brain dominance from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere, I also recognize that we all live in a world that has been created by and for people who are left hemisphere dominant. It doesn’t matter how ‘enlightened’ you are, you still need to get up every morning and live your life...and living that life includes interacting with other people, looking after yourself, and making money as well as understanding some overriding spiritual meaning to it all.
It is here that personal development really becomes a useful tool to us: it helps us improve the quality of our lives and that of those around us. It is firmly rooted in the conceptual world and recognizes that that world is complicated and that we must satisfy different needs to experience our own individual sense of happiness in contrast to the conditions our right hemisphere wants met to realize its own (different) form of bliss. For example, our right hemisphere enjoys artistic stimulation (among other things) and being able to sit quietly and listen to some good music is one way of satisfying this desire. At the same time, in order for us to be able to buy a CD player or download a song we need to be able to engage our left hemisphere. The process through which we achieve this purchase is a long and complicated one; much more complicated in fact than you might first think when you take your time to consider in detail all the multitude of different things that have to happen for you to be able to go shopping or go online for a download. To be able to comfortably afford a CD we need to have a job that provides us with an excess of income…to get that job the usual route is to get good grades at school leading to professional qualifications…and so on. In these activities the left hemisphere is primarily engaged and for many of us we feel happy through a sense of achievement (getting good grades, a good job and earning good money) while interacting in a meaningful way with the people around us. Personal development is much more geared towards this kind of satisfaction. It was created in the ‘real’ world for use in the real world. In other words, it deals with reality…and this takes me back to what I said earlier about the reality of combat.
Martial arts cannot and should not be divorced from reality. They are martial arts. I say this not only because of any over-riding need for effective fighting techniques but because a firm grasp of reality is necessary to live effectively in that reality. Martial arts teach us to view reality in a complete manner; from both the perspective of the left and right hemispheres. While our left hemisphere conceptualizes everything and our consciousness acts as a constant filter between what we perceive and how we perceive it, our right hemisphere, being non-conceptual, simply cannot conceptualize what it perceives and therefore experiences reality ‘as is’. Both perspectives are important and allow us to view reality holistically. This in turn takes us back to the underlying spiritual philosophy of many of our arts: Buddhism. Those of you familiar with the Noble Eightfold Path will know that it rests fundamentally on ‘Right View’; or seeing reality. Certainly in my teaching of The Way of the Enlightened Zen Warrior, this ability to view reality from both the left (the normal view of reality) and right (a supra-normal view of reality) hemispheres is of vital and fundamental importance.
So, to sum up: Personal development is relevant to the martial artist because it enhances his or her ability to deal with the conceptual world, or, to put it another way, to fearlessly confront and harmonize with the reality that the martial artist uncovers through the crucible of combat. Understanding the reality of combat is too limited; we need to understand reality in the broader sense. Martial arts provide us with a vehicle to access this broader reality by first confronting us with the reality of a fight and then encouraging us to apply that same conceptual understanding to different areas of life, away from combat.
