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AFFILIATIONS Terry Barnett's British Combat
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PREPARATION |
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This week, as with most, I have been doing a lot of preparation. I’ve been busy making plans and preparing for lots of events that I have scheduled, some that I am expecting to happen and some that I am hoping will happen in the future months. In fact, we are all preparing for things, almost all of the time. Whether it be something mundane such as preparing our meals or preparing our clothes for the next day, to preparing ourselves physically for the demanding lives we lead, right through to preparing ourselves mentally, psychologically and intellectually so that we may progress and be capable to manage the challenges we intend to face throughout our lives. This thought got me looking at the power of “preparation” and how important this process is for our future growth. If there is anything that we want to do well, then we first have to make good preparation. PRACTICE For me, this is obviously in the form of practicing martial arts techniques in order to become better at them, more skilled, more experienced and more knowledgeable about them. So seeking out great instruction, finding the best resources, and investing in the absolute best information to allow you to practice perfectly from the very outset, is a real key to rapid success and high level mastery of anything you want to do. I discovered this to my cost many years ago, when as Geoff’s main training partner and Uke, I spent a lot of my time demonstrating and teaching alongside him. This was something that I then had to train out of my muscle memory, which took quite some time, but it just went to show how you get what you train for and if you are to practice anything, you need to be practicing it correctly and practicing it in the way you want it to work for you when you need it to. In simplistic terms, my practicing of martial arts, is not only preparing me to become a more knowledgeable and skilled exponent but also to become a better teacher who has more and more to offer his students. The beauty is that without much thought, I am also making good preparation and taking the right precautions for events that I intend never to happen, such as a physical attack on the street. You could say, this is the art of being prepared, or some may argue, this is actually planning for failure – as a confrontational situation could be seen as a failure on my own personal security measures. For example, my pre-emptive strike is not just a form of preparation for when things go wrong for me on the street. It should also be preparation for me mentally and physically, teaching me how to apply focus, commitment and dedication to learning a single technique or skill in order to eventually gain some mastery over it. This lesson then prepares psychologically to know how to approach other challenges or difficulties that I need to overcome in the future. However, what I have found, both in my own life and in that of others is that we often get more focused on the “planning for failure” mode and forget to plan for success. Which brings me nicely on to Planning, another form of preparation. PLANNING It is said that Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss Poor Performance, so just as practicing what we want to do is vital to our success, so is making the necessary and correct plans. We all plan. We all make decisions and think ahead in order to help run our lives more efficiently. We are certainly in an age where, our high paced lives simply won’t function without good advanced planning skills and strategies. |
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I am reminded of a documentary I watched many years ago. It was of a team of soldiers performing winter survival training. One of their tasks over the week long period was to demonstrate that they could make fire from the simplest of methods, of rubbing two sticks together. Each soldier would spend a couple of hours on this task and then, if no progress was made, would crack on with some other duties and drills and return to it again later. |
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The simplest of tasks of planning ahead and preparing for the success of making fire by gather a few sticks would have made all his efforts worthwhile, but for whatever reason, he’d failed to make this preparation. So we need to shift our thoughts in order to plan for success and focus less on the planning for failure. Thinking as much, if not more, about what we are going to do and what we intend to happen rather than solely focusing on our contingencies for if things go wrong. Unfortunately, what happens to all of us from time to time is we plan for the wrong things or we simply fail to plan at all. |
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Now the lottery is a bad example as I don’t think you should ever place your future wealth or success into the hands of lady luck, as that means it’s totally out of your control, but you get my point. Whatever it is you do, make sure you plan ahead, and then make sure your planning; your practice and your preparation is the best you can afford and is focused on the success. A Final Word of Caution With this lesson in mind, we can all see the need to plan ahead and prepare well before we embark on anything, however, a final word of caution. While we’re going about the business of planning and practicing and preparing, we can find ourselves actually never leaving the preparation stage; never putting it all into real practice. It’s a bit like the student who studies for a degree in the comfort of a campus university, and finding he enjoys the study, continues on to another degree followed by yet another and another, never actually leaving the campus and applying the skills he’s been busy gathering and practicing. So like the soldier who failed to plan for success by gathering some firewood ready for when he made flame, we conversely need to be careful we don’t just end up gathering lots and lots of logs and never actually get around to lighting the fire. |
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If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first hour sharpening the axe. But remember, he did leave time to actually start chopping the tree as well. |
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Todays preparation determines tomorrow's achievement. Thank you for reading
Al x |
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| More articles to be uploaded soon | |||
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