Confront your ego

Ger Healy

What do you do to confront your ego when training?

I know when you are coaching in particular you are incline to stay away from areas of training that you are not good at but by doing this you rob your student and yourself of an opportunity to improve.
When you are out side your comfort zone your ego is on the line.
How do you deal with this?

mark.leonard

I find that if you make a point of confronting your ego every class, your ego becomes a non-issue, but if you only confront it now and again it can often give you a pride injury.

My best method for confronting my ego is by sparring someone better than me, handy because there are so many of them out there!

pma-ire

Ger Healy wrote:

What do you do to confront your ego when training?

I know when you are coaching in particular you are incline to stay away from areas of training that you are not good at but by doing this you rob your student and yourself of an opportunity to improve.
When you are out side your comfort zone your ego is on the line.
How do you deal with this?

Thats a very good point Ger!

I tell everyone in my club not to be blinded by my rank or anyone elses while sparring!! We often go through stuff that pushes me well outside my current performance comfort zone and I feel that if I held back something from someone training with me because I may not look cool when we pressure tested or sparred it then I am robbing them of an experience that may help them along with there training.

Also as a coach/instructor you must push yourself in the session or go to another class in the week where you get the push you need to confront and improve that area that needs work!

fianna.5u.com

Half the guys I train with smashed my ego for me. THat was a long time ago, its a non-issue for me.

An aside: I had a lecture who claimed to have no ego, id or unconscious, he said it was all psycho bable, he also said psyhcoanalysts had confirmed this of him. I thought it was gas because about 70% of the people he was addressing were psychoanalysis students.

Peace

MaeveD

Ger Healy wrote:

What do you do to confront your ego when training?

I know when you are coaching in particular you are incline to stay away from areas of training that you are not good at but by doing this you rob your student and yourself of an opportunity to improve.
When you are out side your comfort zone your ego is on the line.
How do you deal with this?

I think a good start is that when you make a booboo, you should admit to your students that you make mistakes too and that you're not perfect... along with checking your ego, you earn the respect of your students!

Clive

Ger Healy wrote:

What do you do to confront your ego when training?

Why would I do that? I'd never want to confront something so big!

john kavanagh

great topic

really gets to the heart of the 'spiritual growth' you hear thrown about in martial arts training.

for me its rolling with and getting tapped out by my students. i can always fall back on the claim they only got me with stuff that i showed them lol:D

Colm_OReilly

or me its rolling with and getting tapped out by my students. i can always fall back on the claim they only got me with stuff that i showed them lol

That, and footlocks don't count!

This would be one of my main gripes with ma training, and that's that the coach has to be some manner of spiritual leader or better than everyone there. If you were to boil a coach's role and responsibility down to one point, to me, it would be the ability to aid his/her athletes in improving. The skill level and everything else are all secondary to this, and secondary by a long way imo.

BTW, this is the truncated, ranty version of my argument, rather than a thought out, backed up, version.

Colm

Cabelo

My big issue was always that my left hand side is embarrassingly bad in comparison to my right (flexibility, strength etc.)

Sorting it out is easy enough... practice everything once on the right and twice on the left. It hurts but it does mean that there's a definite formula to help me pace myself.

dlofnep

I don't have an ego persay. I sometimes get tired of everyone being much larger than me in training, but it doesn't hold me back. I hold my own (or try to)

Mikel

dlofnep wrote:

I sometimes get tired of everyone being much larger than me in training, but it doesn't hold me back.

That is an advantage to be honest, you are competing with guys much bigger than you, so you learn about losing to stronger people. It also teaches you very early on to concentrate on skill and technique. Being a feeble pipsqeak is a good thing

Mikel

And also, where does this spiritual bull**** come from in martial arts? You never hear Gaa coaches or rugby, tennis, swimming coaches etc coming out with that crap. What works works!
On an aside, if you are any good as a coach, your students should be able to at least challenge you, and probably beat you from time to time.

Ger Healy

Some great replies guys
From your replies it quite clear that you guy have developed methods/situation in your training that help keep your egos in check probably because you know that if you don’t you will not progress.
MA is not only about fighting it’s about developing as a person
Do you think that more you keep your ego in check i.e. the way you guy do when training in ma.
That this helps you in your daily life with the way you interact with other people?
And if yes.
How?

fianna.5u.com

I agree with Colm, it's all about improving your guys games.

If my guys weren't starting to kick my ass by now I'd be a realy crappy coach and I'd have to quit. Luckily they are kicking my ass. I'm also lucky that I have guys who are stronger, heavier, fitter and more naturally gifted in balance and posture etc so that I am forced to use good technique all the time. I know I should be doing that all the time but sometimes I dont. (there I said it)

Through alive training we reveal our unconscious and in doing so we develop an "aliveness-transference-hysteria" which is constantly knocked down, in doing so we free ourselves from the social hysterias we all develop. Fighting is the cure, it is the hermeneutic circle, we reveal ourselves through "the other". haha

Peace

Mikel

MA is not only about fighting it’s about developing as a person

I'm not so sure it is, at least not anymore than football or other sports are. You could argue that realistic combat sports make you confront yourself more than other sports, but is it more spiritual than say, rugby?

Fighting is the cure, it is the hermeneutic circle, we reveal ourselves through "the other". haha

eh?

pma-ire

Ger Healy wrote:

Some great replies guys
From your replies it quite clear that you guy have developed methods/situation in your training that help keep your egos in check probably because you know that if you don’t you will not progress.
MA is not only about fighting it’s about developing as a person
Do you think that more you keep your ego in check i.e. the way you guy do when training in ma.
That this helps you in your daily life with the way you interact with other people?
And if yes.
How?

Being used to checking your ego in training helps in every other form of interaction with people in your every day life! You can remove the need to force your point down someones gob by looking for a common ground or point to agree to disagree and to move on!!