Spreading the word, again
Published: Fri, 08/31/12
I am off to the Mercian Gathering today until Sunday. I have been
every year since Anna Franklin asked me to teach Stav at the first
one, which must be nearly ten years ago now. Weather looks good on
the BBC forecast which is good since I will be camping. I will be
teaching a Stav session on Saturday and on Sunday morning which in
the past has always gone down well and has led to people actually
taking up Stav. I will hopefully get one or two more members out
of it this year too. I will use the opportunity of the morning
training sessions to try out some of the things I intend to teach
at the class starting next week. I have done staff training in
previous years but sometimes so many people turn up that I
wouldn't have enough sticks. So tomorrow I will do stances,
exercises and unarmed applications of the lines and five
principles. The Mercian Gathering is an event when people come to
participate and get involved and there will be 1000 people on site
so it is a great opportunity.
Then on Saturday morning I am giving a talk and this year I am
going to be talking about Pareto's law, usually better known as
the 80/20 principle. The concept of a disproportionate amount of
output coming from a small proportion of input is often discussed
in business and in some kinds of engineering, especially IT. I
will be talking about seeing Pareto's law at work in our
everyday lives. It is an appropriate subject for the Mercian
Gathering because the 80/20 principle is a kind of applied magic
which is present everywhere if you can just recognise it. Of
course once you really understand a principle then it isn't
'magic' any more, just something you do in your life, often
without even thinking. But to the uninitiated it can look pretty
clever because they don't understand what you are doing. I
have realised that the 80/20 principle is particularly applicable
to martial arts training in that a tiny proportion of what you
could do in any situation is likely to bring you most of the
benefits available to you. The secret is knowing intuitively what
the right thing to do is at the right time and then when to stop.
So for example a simple weight shift can easily make the difference
between an attack knocking you to the floor or being harmlessly
deflected. That is a very large proportion of what you need to
achieve in a violent encounter, counters, take downs, locks etc may
follow from this initial move but they wouldn't have been
possible if the basic weight shift had not been appropriate. Also
the further one goes with counters the more new problems one may be
creating. So often all that is required is to move so that the
attack is ineffective and then just walk away. It may not be much
of a fight but it will achieve all that is really beneficial,
'winning' fights often brings about more problems than it
solves.
The theme of my talk will be mainly focused on three things:
That you need as much knowledge as possible about any activity you
try to engage with and you need to be willing to test out as many
options as possible.
When you find the way that is working you need to follow that line
without attachment to any other options that didn't work out
that time.
Then recognise when you have got as much as you are going to get
easily out of a particular option and begin the process of learning
and testing again.
I will be sharing the idea of 80/20 training and application at the
course on the 15th in West London. So bookings would be welcome,
it is only 2 weeks tomorrow. http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html