Tai-chi-Chuan uses a fundamentally different fighting strategy than any other martial art. When this strategy is applied to everyday life and to conducting business, it provides a more powerful and effective approach. This is just one example of that strategy.
“Yield to Yang/fill in Yin”. The aggressor concentrates his force in a particular area. If he strikes with his fist, he has a target in mind. You learn to automatically retreat from his target and to find the most empty and unguarded spot on his body to move into and strike. The retreat is not away from him but rather, towards his unguarded area.
In everyday life the defeats we constantly experience are like the strikes of an aggressor. If we focus on the defeat, we are like the fighter who blocks the incoming strike, focusing on the aggressor’s power. If we are thrown by the defeat, we are like the fighter who moves away from the strike. If we contemplate the change in our life situation caused by the defeat and re-adjust our focus to take advantage of this change, then we are like the fighter who moves around the strike and delivers his own strike.
As a fighter you know that the aggressor will not just stand there and take your punches and kicks. Most of your efforts may never reach their target and some of his efforts will reach you. If you thought of each of his strikes as your defeat, you could never psychologically muster the nerve to practice sparring. Your own emotions would destroy you more than would the opponent.
Much of the impact of a defeat is not the effect of the situation itself. It is more that it hurts your self image. It is your self image which is being beaten, more than your body or your life. Once you realize that your self image is not you, then you are on your way to victory.
True humility is not acting as if you were a lowly human being. It is the understanding that your self image is not you. Your behavior no longer is controlled by needing to maintain that image.
If, while sparring in class, someone strikes you, you can appreciate their skill and be happy for them, even though you got hit. In life you can appreciate the challenges you need to overcome and the skills you gain as you turn each defeat into an opportunity.
One of the high level achievements in Tai-chi sparring is to substitute your self image with the principles of Tai-chi, mainly yielding to Yang and filling Yin. You can only be defeated if you don’t allow your self image to grow into a wider perspective.
In business it is well known that you should not argue with a customer. Instead of arguing that your product is indeed a good one, you ask the customer how you could improve your product. You not only make him feel that you care, but you may actually get some good advice. Customer complaints are the best source of good ideas.
If you are competing with other companies producing similar products, you could throw more money into advertising or spend more hours in the day promoting the product. Or you could ask yourself, “What real needs of people are the competing products not meeting? How can I adjust my product so that it will fill those needs?” In other words you can compete in a “Yin” area, in a niche market that the other products are not reaching. It would wear you out to meet head on with large companies with big advertising budgets.
To be “nimble” in business in this way, the self image of the business has to be flexible. You think of your business as providing a product to the customer. Now you switch your viewpoint and think of your business as fulfilling a need of the customer. It’s not the same and that switch changes the way you do business.
When I began producing the “Zookinesis” exercise series of DVD’s, I approached the series as providing exercises to keep you strong, flexible and energized. I noticed a great change in my older students through the years. They looked, acted and felt much younger. In fact, these exercises are supposed to keep you young, but I never explained that in my advertising. Now I call Zookinesis “Age Reversal Exercises” and market them to seniors. I knew all along that they are supposed to reverse aging but never thought to promote that aspect.
Looking back, I realized that I thought that since most of my students were not seniors, I wanted to promote the fact that Zookinesis keeps you vigorous, athletic and toned. I didn’t think age was an issue for non-seniors. But it seems that no one wants to feel that they are getting older, whatever age they are at the moment, if by older it is meant that the body deteriorates.
So at the beginning, I thought that I was teaching exercises just to keep you strong and flexible when the need of the students (at least in their own minds) was to stay young. I didn’t change the exercises at all but just got better at explaining what they are in a way the students could appreciate.
Perhaps there was yet another factor. If I were teaching people to reverse the aging process, perhaps that means that I, myself, am getting old and that age reversal was an issue I needed to address myself. Not wanting to think of myself as getting old, I avoided using “age reversal” as an advertising point for Zookinesis. My vanity interfered with my business. Yet I, of all people, knew that age is not a matter of years but of health and attitude. This is an example of how issues of self image can interfere with business as it can interfere with everyday life.
When I first started to learn to spar with Grandmaster William C. C. Chen I couldn’t help but concentrate on his fists and feet. Which one would hit me next? After gaining some skill I found that I was more interested in the spaces between our body parts. Which space could I use to deliver my own strikes? I found that emptiness (space) was equally as important as form (the body, the strikes). I needed to know where I could move into to avoid his strikes.
I realized that sparring was not about maximizing hardness but rather maximizing balance. When you are not willing to change and when you invest all your hopes in one particular outcome, that is like hardness. When you invest in developing your attention to follow and adjust to change, when you accept change as part of life and when you learn the strategies of change to always look for opportunity, then your life is based on balance.
You maximize hardness when you try to defeat hardness by blocking rather than ducking. That brings up another related issue.
“If you think of winning and losing you are already defeated”. In Tai-chi sparring, you concentrate on the details of the aggressor’s body mechanics and the pattern of his attention. You are so connected to him that you feel that he is part of you. Your ability to remain connected to him in this way is essential to how you spar. You don’t think of defeating an “enemy” but of finding a weakness and striking that weakness. It is the weakness you discover at any one moment, that you are sparring against, not the person. The aggressor and you are one unit. The weakness are the target.
In everyday life there is a tendency to think of yourself as fighting against the world. According to Tai-chi principles, the world you experience is, to a large extent, a reflection of the world you have created inside yourself. Through the Tai-chi forms, push hands, chi-gung, Zookinesis and other practices you can examine that inner world and see exactly how the weakness there can distort your view of the world around you. You are no longer battling the world but correcting that balancing mechanism that creates your outer life from your inner dynamics. Sparring is actually the most effective practice to give you this insight and the skills to make the corrections inside of yourself.
The world around you is no longer your “enemy”. Defeats are just changes. The only real defeat is when your attention becomes rigid and you can no longer adapt to changes. You are defeated when you let yourself become old, no matter how many years you have lived. When you are no longer able to adapt to change, you are old. Flexible in body, flexible in mind – you stay young
