Patience

I had a lot of fun today helping out at our school's in-house tournament. Everyone put on a really great performance and I was really glad to see that many were putting into practice the lessons they had learned.

The one lesson I saw best expressed was the value of patience: knowing how to wait, to let things unfold and seize the moment when appropriate is an important lesson to learn on the mat, and it is very applicable to 'regular' life.

Too often, we are rushing through our lives, always trying to get to the next thing, always trying to get to the next level, to pass the car in front of us, to get the promotion, to land the big whale...

To be patient is hard, and actually requires confidence in yourself, and sometimes trust in others. You have to know that what you are doing is going to work, or that you will be able to adapt and correct if it goes wrong. You see this on the mat with students who have developed enough experience to start believing in their abilities, and to start to see what is happening in a sparring match. Sparring can be incredibly frightening when you first start, and to the novice will often seem to go by in the blink of an eye. But the more you do it, the more experience you gain and the more hours you put into training, the slower sparring becomes. It is very cool the day that you step into a ring, and you see what your opponent is doing, where they are going, and everything seems to be moving in slow motion.

I've seen the value of patience expressed in my personal life, as well as my professional one. It is one of the great gifts of my training, and I hope others find it as well -- and maybe I'll have a role in bringing that out.

Congrats to all the competitors today, everyone did really well.