Sparring

A lot of people that I know now aren't aware of this, but up until about 7 years ago I was a fairly serious student of the martial arts. I began training in traditional Tae Kwon Do at 12, and in university studied Wing Chun Kung Fu. After I moved to Vancouver, I further supplemented this training with 2 years in jujitsu.

Why, might you ask, am I telling you this?

Simple. So you don't mess with me.

Okay, seriously though - it's actually because last night I was having a conversation, and an experience that I had through the martial arts suddenly became a metaphor for things nowadays.

You see, at around 17, I had one friend who also studied the martial arts - and we constantly went back and forth about which of us studied a better one. Finally, we decided it was time to find out the only definitive way - we'd "spar". So we went into the basement, moved all the furniture out of the way, strapped on the "protective gear" (foot pads, mitts and mouth guards) and proceeded to beat the living hell out of each other for 90 minutes. In the end, it's hard to say who came out better off, what was important was the fact that it didn't matter how hard we hit each other there was a mutual respect. Instead of getting angry when we were hit, we realized that the only reason that the punch or kick got through was because of an inherent weakness in our style... it forced us to get better.

Do you see where this is going yet?

While there are times where feedback can seem a little pointed, we have to realize that when we're having that weakness highlighted we should not be upset with the "messenger"... all they are doing is pointing out something that we clearly need to work on.

In the end, regardless of their motive or delivery style - if we can just take the feedback and learn from it, then we can only be better than we were before.

~Guy