Year of the Horse In Review

It's less than two weeks away from the end of the year of the horse. This year has held many ups and downs for me but overall it's impossible to see it as anything other than a resounding success. When I look back at my old blog posts I can follow the progression that I've made and it wasn't a straight line up. For the most part it consisted of two steps forward followed by a step back. These are some of the main things I've learned this past year:

1) Don't Compare Myself with Others - I listed this first because it's the most important to me and also the most difficult for me. My journey is my own and comparing myself to the person beside me serves no constructive purpose. My aim is only to be better each day than I was the day previous. When I really started to focus on doing this, I was able to get out of my own way and I started making real progress.

2) I Can Change - For years I'd always tried to make positive changes in my life and I would, for a little while, but then I'd revert back to my old habits. When you repeatedly let yourself down it becomes a cycle of self-defeat. You put less and less energy into trying to change because deep down you "know" you're going to fail. This year has taught me to take a small positive change and focus on that success to build on. 

3) Winners Keep Score - I have no idea what I did from February to June. I know I did pushups and situps and form reps and even some acts of kindness; but I can't prove it and I can't add those reps onto my total for the year? Why not? I didn't record them.  Initially, I told myself that it didn't matter because I was still completing reps. It took me a few months to admit to myself that what I was doing wasn't working and I realized that I had nothing to show for my effort. I noticed that Sifu Playter always had his notebook in the kwoon and was constantly recording his numbers in it. I decided to forgo spreadsheets and iPhone apps and kick it old school with a small notebook and pen of my own. Once I did this I never looked back. 

4) Being Kind Takes A Lot of Effort - This is the area that I experienced the most ups and downs. I would have a week where I would be really aware of opportunities to be kind and as a result, I would get in a lot of acts of kindness. Then I would follow that up with a week where I was grumpy or upset and I wouldn't look for those opportunities and I would end up with very few kindnesses. I learned that, like anything else, being kind and showing empathy toward others is a learned skill. It takes mindfulness and repetition to become automatic. I have good days and bad days but overall, I'm much better than I was a year ago at taking advantage of opportunities to be kind to others. 

Now that my first year of the I Ho Chuan is almost behind me, I need to focus on improving again this year. In many ways, I feel like the first year will be the easiest. By virtue of never having done this before, there was huge room to make improvement. It will be that much more difficult for me to make the same amount of progress this year. That being said, I have the advantage of knowing what to expect and I also have a lot of skills that I've developed that I only need to continue to hone as opposed to developing them from scratch. That should help me to have another amazing year.

Fitness

I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to my training, I haven't placed enough emphasis on fitness. There are many reasons for this but the biggest one is laziness. The type of training that makes you fitter is not enjoyable for me and there is no instant payoff. Weight training, which is very enjoyable for me, gives you that instant feedback in the form of muscle pump. You feel tired but you also have that pump to let you know that you've done a good job. 

A few weeks back, Sifu Brinker asked everyone if we were in the best shape of our lives, and if not, why not? I thought about it and there was no good reason for me not to be. My 40th birthday is tomorrow but I still feel much younger than that. I don't have any physical limitations that prevent me from being in better shape.


I've decided to set a standard for myself where I will keep at least one belt ahead as far as the fitness test goes. So, if I'm a yellow belt, I will challenge myself to be at an orange belt fitness level. This will be one small step for me and maybe just that little bit will make me feel good enough to take it further. If I take a page from the rest of my training, I know that just by taking action, I will increase my engagement and eventually, motivation will follow.

Gut Check Time

The last few months have been tough for me. As I've found out, my shoulder injuries were not themselves the problem, but a symptom of other underlying issues. I'm not very good at explaining it but suffice it to say that I have issues with my skeletal alignment and, over time, this has caused several problems for me, including the stress on my shoulders, tendonitis on my left side, and severe migraines, the latter of which has severely affected my sleep to the point where there have been a few instances where I didn't sleep for a few days straight and the only relief I got was from drinking half a bottle of Nyquil and essentially knocking myself out. 

I've had limited success with my physiotherapy but the limited part is because my work schedule hadn't allowed me to go to physio even semi-regularly and so I would start from scratch every time. 

This has changed now as my employer is allowing me to stay at home for several weeks to get treated. To be honest, between my shoulder injuries, tendonitis, insomnia, and migraines, I'm tired (no pun intended) of thinking about all of this. I'm also tired of writing about all of this and I'm sure everyone is tired of reading about it. I hate to admit it, but when you never feel 100% physically, it weighs on your self-esteem and motivation. Negativity creeps in. My attendance in class has become even worse, not just from work but because I just didn't want to attend, and my training has suffered too. There's also a bit of guilt from perceiving myself as a bad teammate, which I posted about earlier. My physiotherapist is quite confident that regular treatment for several weeks combined with homework will take care of things. I'm really hoping that's the case. 

I guess these are the kind of situations that build character in a person. I was recently watching an episode of "Chopped" on the Food Network and one of the contestants was very confident, stating that she knew she would win because she had never failed at anything before. I laughed when I heard that, knowing from personal experience that failure is what makes a person stronger. This is something that I need to remember. It doesn't matter if you get knocked down, as long as you get back up again.

Natural Talent

People throw around the term "natural talent" all the time and it often refers to an athlete with extraordinary ability. But does that athlete actually have natural talent? Are people born with certain athletic abilities that give them an advantage over the average person? Traits such as a person's height can play a part but I now believe that what most people refer to as talent is actually the result of hard work. If you want to excel at something you have to practice.

Take any professional athlete and you can trace their success back to 1000's and 1000's of repetitions of whatever they do. Throwing a football, hitting a tennis ball, shooting a puck; it's all the same. This is a comforting thought because I definitely don't have "natural talent". When I started at SRKF, my flexibility was terrible, my balance was worse, and I couldn't do a set of 10 situps. Fast forward 16 months and all of those things have vastly improved. Was it natural talent at work? Nope. It was practice.

 So what does this mean? It means that it doesn't matter if I'm short or old or anything else. If I work hard enough, I will get better and better. The only limitations I have are the ones that I set for myself.

Pondering

I've been thinking a lot lately about my contribution to the team or the lack thereof. I'm starting to wonder if it's unfair of me to continue as a part of the team when I know from the get go that I can't fully participate due to my work schedule. If there weren't a limited number of spots on the team, maybe it wouldn't be an issue since at that point, any contribution would be worthwhile. But there are times when I feel like I'm taking up a spot that could be taken by someone who could attend all classes and practices. I feel like I take more than I give. 

At the end of the day, if everyone on the team could only contribute as much as I have, we'd have no lion dance and no demo. I'm not writing this to garner sympathy or feel sorry for myself; I'm truly trying to figure out the balance of teamwork and selfishness that the pursuit of mastery seems to require.

Changing Things Up

Today I felt like I needed to change things up. I had been feeling like things were lacking for me physically. My diet hasn't been very good over the last three weeks or so and I've been feeling lethargic with my training, as well as with gym workouts.

My past experience at the gym has taught me that breaking out of a rut can usually be done with something as simple as trying new exercises or changing the music on your iPod (for those of us that use technologically superior Apple products). I applied a similar approach today and had good results.

Doing my forms with footwork only really helped me feel my stances. Dropping down into a bow stance really made me aware that my flexibility has improved and my bow stance felt lower and stronger. I was also more aware of how poor footwork messed up my power vector.

When I was doing crunches I tried to slow down and feel them more than usual and I found that it was a lot harder to do them this way. It's easy for me to let quality slip sometimes when I focus on quantity so this was a good reminder for a lesson that I had already learned.

Post Holiday Update

The Christmas break was great for me. I caught up with friends and family and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I also pretty much completely neglected Kung Fu. The great thing is that I don't feel guilty about it but instead I feel refreshed and ready to go. On second thought, maybe it's not correct to say that I neglected Kung Fu because, while it's true that I didn't do much in the way of training, I still continued with acts of kindness. I also pushed myself out of my comfort zone a couple of times over the holidays and kept up with my stretching routine. These things helped me keep a certain level of engagement while getting a break at the same time.