Martial arts is one of few unique activities where you have to put your complete trust in someone else to teach and evaluate you. Sure you can watch videos online of how to do strikes and techniques, researching the exact way it’s supposed to be done. But you won’t know if you’re doing something effectively unless you have someone with years of experience observe you. This can be very frustrating; it’s a terrible feeling when you’ve spent so much time practicing a skill, but then find out you’ve been doing it wrong the entire time. What’s even worse is putting in the work and believing you’re ready for the next technique, form, or rank, and then being told you’re not. Do you fight the decision of the person with more experience? Do you harbor anger about what you think you know? Do you accept and swallow your pride? There’s not necessarily a correct answer, but depending on your relationship with your ego, these types of situations where you’re corrected or evaluated can be difficult to deal with throughout your training.
A lot of people have a hard time adjusting to this aspect of martial arts, not just at first, but throughout their respective journeys to black belt and beyond. There’s always something to learn about your own ego at any point in your training. The founder of our association, Grandmaster Jae C Shin, would say, “the greatest killer of black belts, is ego”. Once you get to a higher rank, you start to become proud of the knowledge and skills you have acquired, and the level you can preform them at. It may come as a shock to hear other skilled practitioners do it differently, sometimes even in a better or more efficient way than you. You don’t necessarily have to change your way, but you should acknowledge that your way, is not the only way. Some people start to get irritated at this concept; it’s easy to become defensive, sometimes feeling the urge to argue which way is superior. It’s almost as if they want to be right more than they want to be correct.
Of course, there are still instances where you are correct; depending on your size, stature, ability, and more, certain skills will work for your body better than others. If this is the case, you can take solace in the fact that you know how you personally will continue to do it, but I urge you to still absorb the knowledge of how it works for others. Not just for teaching purposes (to pass on the technique effectively for all students), but also combatively. I’d like to know the different ways that an opponent could throw a technique, so I can train accordingly to defend all possible variances of the same attack.
It’s important to realize that even if you have found great success in a skill, technique, or training style, there will always be someone who executes it differently, and potentially more successfully. Try to take this as an opportunity to learn, instead of taking it personally.
