“Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

Why risk-taking in martial arts can be beneficial to growth.

The original quote is attributed to French dramatist Jean Giraudoux. It is a particular favourite of mine.

Anyone involved in the creative sphere can take comfort and inspiration from Giraudoux’s single pithy pronouncement. But it has some interesting implications for martial artists, all wrapped up in the idea of calculated risk.

At a technical level.

Much of modern martial arts training contains an element of free-play, the opportunity to put your skills to the test against someone else trying to do the same thing; it should be of mutual benefit. Whether that is free-sparring or two proponents riffing on a theme in a semi-cooperative way; it is in these areas where risk-taking can create opportunities for self-discovery and growth.

Bear in mind I am not talking about wanton recklessness, that’s just stupid, this is about pushing your boundaries. The very edge of your comfort zone and slightly beyond. This is the area where sometimes you will succeed and at other times you will fall on your face.

Smart thinking on this tells us we need to embrace this risky domain of potential failure, not run away from it. Three examples of contemporary thinkers who have something to say on this theme come to mind:

Ido Portal.

I have written before about movement guru Ido Portal. He values this area of risk and has designed training methods that celebrate failure, practices which are wholly focussed on making mistakes rather than achieving success; in fact, to actually succeed is a sign that you ought to stop the practice and move on to something else. The tennis ball challenge is one such practice; take a tennis ball and throw it against a wall and try and repeatedly return it with your fist. It is deliberately frustrating, but Portal wants you to examine how your body teaches itself to adapt to the challenge – that is the real learning opportunity.

Jordan Peterson

Controversial Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says should be dismissed.

Relevant to this particular theme Peterson talks about Chaos and Order and the line between them. Order is the known world, everything we feel secure about. Chaos is the unknown, the untamed. In skill terms we find that growth and potential occurs at the fine point of intersection between these two worlds. It is extremely risky to step wholly into the Chaos zone, that is wanton recklessness, we need some kind of secure lifeline to drag us back before Chaos consumes us. But, treading the fine line between Order and Chaos has so much potential.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

The late American/Hungarian psychologist with the unpronounceable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, is considered the guru of ‘flow states’, in his book on the subject he describes the zone of optimum improvement.

He uses tennis as his example; he says that if a young tennis player is confronted with an opponent who has a much lower skill level, it is likely that the task of beating him will offer no real challenge, in fact he may hit the boredom threshold, become disengaged and unmotivated, there are no growth opportunities for him.

Conversely, if he encounters another tennis player whose skill level is far superior to his own and is being roundly and mercilessly thrashed in a match, his frustration will probably rise and he could well become demoralised and eventually unmotivated and again, disengaged. Any potential for growth is being cruelly denied him.

However, if given an opponent who is just a notch above our young tennis players’ current ability level then creative sparks might fly. This is a centile zone of growth. The youngster has to stretch himself, come to terms with his potential for errors and put himself into uncharted territory.

How this applies in the Dojo.

Instructors see this in sparring opportunities in the Dojo all the time.

If the instructor finds himself sparring with a lower grade, often the worst thing he can do is to unleash the full range and power of what he has got. I have seen this done and all I think is ‘face-palm’. In the worst case it is just a shameful and indulgent ego trip for the instructor.

Instead, the instructor should calibrate the pressure level to be just a notch above the lesser experienced person; teach by example with the appropriate level of respect. The instructor has total control of the pressure dial and can turn it up or turn it down according to the scenario. Also, it is here the instructor, if it’s appropriate, can take risks and try and explore the experimental edge of his own skill level.

An example of that might be that he deliberately puts himself in a weaker or disadvantageous position, to see if he can find a way out of it, or even to draw his lesser skilled opponent into recognising the error and trying to capitalise on the ‘mistake’. I have done this before many times and a switched-on kyu grade will see what’s happened and I will get hit – but, it doesn’t worry me, I took a risk and both my opponent and myself will have learned something.

I have seen Dan grades whose ego would not allow them to do that.

It is that very human character flaw that is at the heart of the quote at the top of this piece. Sometimes, those at the very top become complacent and complacency is often the bedfellow of mediocrity.

The martial arts environment is an area of almost endless growth, or it should be. It’s an unspoken truth that some martial arts, when looked at from the long view, are almost deliberately self-limiting (see my article on ‘Fast burn, Slow burn’ https://wadoryu.org.uk/2021/11/27/martial-arts-fast-burn-or-slow-burn-a-theory/ ) but this is not the way things develop and move forward.

Calculated risks and working in areas outside of your comfort zone promote growth, anything else will suffer the ignominy of stagnation.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash