Sunday Story...Indomitable Spirit

This week I took 10 children to Project Discovery (www.projectdiscovery.com ). The point of our training at Project Discovery was to learn how to work as a team, how to lead, how to believe in yourself, face your fears and go ahead anyway.

Here at Relentless Martial Arts we live and practice the tenets of TaeKwon-Do as put forth by General Choi: courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self control, and indomitable spirit. The tenets or rules form the basis of what we do and how we live. They inform our decision making process.

Now you might imagine that getting your child to understand those concepts can be a little challenging. We usually distill these concepts down to one short easy to understand sentence.
Courtesy is “be nice and have good manners”
Integrity is “be honest, tell the truth, play by the rules, and keep your promises”
Perseverance is “don’t quit”
Self control is “I am in charge of what I think say and do”
Indomitable Spirit is “face your fear and go ahead anyway”
These simple sentences seem to get the idea across. But how do we teach indomitable spirit? Teaching courtesy is pretty simple. The same with integrity, perseverance, and self control. Those things come into play almost daily. Examples are everywhere and are easy to point out in each of us. But indomitable spirit? Courage in the face of adversity? Bravery with honor? Much harder to get into your being.

At project discovery we found indomitable spirit. We certainly found teamwork doing the object pass and the cable walk. Those two things required the group to work together and fashion solutions to the problem and then execute the solutions. We found leaders who could do this in a helpful cooperative way. We found teamwork and leadership and perseverance in the 10’ wall climb. You can imagine it is a little daunting for a 6 year old to climb a 10’ wall without help. With help, though, it is a piece of cake. Of course there were rules to make it more “interesting” but it got done. Indomitable spirit came up when we did the climbing towers with the requisite walk across a cable or log. One tower was set at 20’ and the other 40’ above the ground. In order to get to the platform you had to climb a tree and a ladder and get to the platform so THEN you could walk out across a cable or a log.

Needless to say this was scary. Imagine looking way up 40 feet and seeing a suspended log that you are going to walk across, then looking at the combination of the ladder and tree climb you need to climb up to get there. Just a little daunting (hardly noticeable), I would say. The interesting part of this is that in this group ranging in age from 7 to 15 no one said I am not doing this. Every one of them picked a platform to climb up to, even though a number of them professed to a fear of heights earlier in the day. Each of them started without prompting or fear.

And each of them found their fear. Some found it part way up the climb. Some found it on the platform. Some found it on the walk out on the log or cable and some found it when letting go and trusting their team to bring them back to the ground. But everyone had to face their fear; everyone had to work through the fear to a successful completion of the journey and everyone completed their task.

It was a thing of beauty to behold. Some cried (o.k. most), some froze up, some tried to “game face” it but at the end, at the return to the ground, each of them returned victorious, transformed into something new. It was simply amazing to witness. The transformation from I can’t, I’m scared, I want to turn back to I did it! The confidence and infusion of self belief was something that you can’t put a price on.

I am often asked why I do some of the things I do …things like skydiving, helicopter snowboarding, fire walking, or glass walking. And the answer is pretty simple (now that I have observed these 10 children): fear only exists in your mind. It has no basis in reality. If you want to really move forward in the face of adversity you must learn to put your fear aside and go ahead anyway. You must look out of that plane and take that first step into the unknown, trusting that you can land on your feet when the experience is over. Or looking out over a 12’ long bed of 1200 degree coals, the heat furnacing up into your face with your mind setting off klaxon horns of warning as you take that first step onto the fire. We build confidence and belief when we do things we previously thought impossible. It is a way of training ourselves into believing that we are powerful beyond measure, that we have the ability to do anything we can imagine doing.

What are you afraid of? And what are you doing about it? Are you cowering before that first step, content with being afraid? Are you sitting on the sidelines, convinced you can’t get up and even attempt the task? I am here to tell you that you can take that step, you can get in the game, you can be powerful and extraordinary if you just set aside your fear and go ahead anyway.

Fear…it’s what’s for breakfast.
Indomitable spirit…go get some today.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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