MY SAFE SPACE – Garry Smith

Well safe spaces are certainly in the news these days, social media and old fashioned media, newspapers, TV and radio, are certainly making us aware that they exist. The whole issue around safe spaces is polarising rapidly, hell I have had to retreat into my room to get this out of my head. Yes I have a room that is just my own, my own little retreat at Smith Towers.

Currently I am sat at my desk typing, I have a really nice leather sofa my wife bought me as it is really cosy for me to take a nap on. I have an exercise bike, my weights and bench and a free standing punch bag. There are lots of books and a ton of training gear and weapons, I like my weapons, although I have moved all my swords and some of my sticks higher up the house.

Its a cool space, quite big with a large bay window overlooking the street. Most of my toys are in here and it has become a bit of a sanctuary. My wife is next door in the lounge listening to some David Bowie on vinyl, it is horrible outside, cold, wet and windy, so today the heating is on an we are tucked up in the warm. We are in our safe space, our home.

In the last week I have taken a lot of bookings for self defence training for next year. Some of the organisations I work for are booking into July and August and another organisation, a very large one, is booking me from January through to March with a hell of a lot more to come in September and October. Things are looking up, a few years back I was really struggling and could have easily given up, but as you can guess it is not in my nature, so onward and upward I hope. It is also fantastic that our self defence and Ju Jitsu training are starting to fill up too, we work damn hard to make it as good as we can then look to see how we can make it better and as I said last month, I have surrounded myself with some incredible people.

And here is the rub, these are people who can disagree, we are not a bunch of sycophants crawling up each others bums. I am pretty strong minded and determined, when I get my teeth into something I tend not to let go. I really can think of nothing worse than inaction. I like to do things, to drive things, to create things. I have a very active, and I like to think, creative mind. I love debates and discussions, I enjoy having my ideas challenged. Edward De Bono, the father of lateral thinking once said, “What is the point of having a mind if you cannot change it”.

That is one of my favourite quotes, but I was not always like this. I remember a discussion in a bar with a few friends and I was listening to them argue over something, what it was is lost, but one of them asked me what I thought. My explanation straddled the two opposing camps views. After I finished he said to me that since I had been to university I could no longer give my opinion on one side or the other as I always had before. You see when I went to college I was 28 years old, not a kid. I had children, I had worked for may years in different occupations, I had, in may ways, ‘been around’.

When I went from the career of an autodidact to entering formal education I was presented with the greatest riches in the world, vast caverns of knowledge were opened up to me, I went in as someone with very strong left wing views, I still had left wing views when I left but exposure to many other viewpoints had changed me. Previously I would have closed down people who spouted ideas or opinions I disliked, the sort of stuff that still goes on, mention immigration and you are a racist, disagree with gay marriage and you are homophobic, your ideas are foul pollutants to the mind of the right thinking people.

Now remember where we started, in my safe space. Well you are welcome to come into that space and to talk, discuss, debate. Threaten me and you may meet one of my toys before I role you unconscious ass out of the door, but my safe space is a space where ideas are welcomed, controversial or not. I have some wonderful friends and family but there is not one that I agree with on every subject. There are some things that are not discussed with certain people because those involved Know they disagree and we can agree to disagree. Where is the problem with that, its how we manage to co-exist. I the last Conflict Manager Marc introduced the work of Jonathan Haidt, he got me to read ‘The Rightous Mind’ earlier this year, I did and agreed with Marc that this was a profound piece of work. It took me right back to my days as a keen as mustard sociology student.

When I discovered sociology in all its complex and contradictory beauty that is when changes started in me that are still evolving today. I was like a sponge at first eager to absorb as much knowledge as possible and I did. The difference between autodidactism, where I grazed widely and freely in the pastures of my own mind, and the formal education I enjoyed at Northern College and the University of Warwick, was that I was now exposed and forced to consider things I would not have done had simply stayed with my own choices. The most wonderful experience of developing the ability to think critically is in my opinion, what separates us from the animals. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

I remember other students criticising sociobiology, it was the whipping boy of ideas, nonsense, racist sexist, its originator Wilson was pilloried, I felt guilty because I thought there was something in it. I wanted to like it, it was my guilty secret. Advances I understanding the human genome have largely validated most of what Wilson was saying. Haidt’s book on moral psychology is a must read if you want to know what makes us tick. Read it and you will begin to understand yourself more.

Its what I like to do in my safe space. These days I do not go to university or attend many formal learning events, like most people I can now access vast, infinite amounts of information on my laptop and even my phone. However, information is not knowledge. Information has no intrinsic value just by being, it is only of used when it is digested by the brain, turned around, mulled over, looked from different angles, reconstituted and applied. The brain is like any other part of the body, if you do not use it enough it will atrophy.

So when I hear stories of people needing safe spaces so that the can be protected from ideas they do not like, my heart starts to ache. When I hear this from students at universities it makes me really sad. I listened to a really interesting debate on the radio the other day between a feminist blogger and comedienne and a student union official. The former had had a booking to do a show at a prominent UK university cancelled because some students did not like her position on the sex trade. She supports the punters being arrested not the women, so the banned her, she was effectively declared a non person. Yes the thought police have arrived. I listened to much of what was discussed with disbelieve. WTF is wrong with people.

If you are so profoundly weak that the fact that somebody has an idea or political view you do not agree with, that you hide behind rhetorical name calling and censorship, then you surely must kill yourself now before the evil idea can get you. I shudder to think of a world where people like this end up in charge of things, and guess what, if you start to look around you they very often are.

Personally I like to call a spade a spade but am smart enough to know I can do more than just dig with it, go ask Rory about affordances. So for me a safe space is where we are challenged because without challenge we cannot develop as humans, a safe space is not hiding under the bed afraid of the bogeyman, its coming out and confronting the bogeyman. I have a safe space other than the one I am sat in, its behind my two fists and behind me is a safe space for hose I protect. They are the only safe spaces I want. Man up world.

Right Here Right Now – Garry Smith

Fatboy Slim aka Norman Cook aka Quentin Leo Cook is a solo electronic performer according to Wikipedia, I like a lot of his music, in particular I like a track called right here, right now. Its where we live, we think about the past and the future but we live right here right now.

Last month I used this picture in my article ‘Going Forward to the Past’ about Lifelong Learning.

It is one I use when I work with my students, it is something I am always encouraging others to do, to go to the place where the magic happens. A couple of days ago I caught the tail end of somebody a class in a local college as I waited to do my class, and the tutor used the exact same picture to encourage her students to think about their young entrepreneurs project. I thought she was excellent in how she used the material and talked for some time after he class about actually doing it, getting up off the sofa and stepping away from the comfort zone.

Well before I go on here is an update on the motorbike riding. I went out on the road on a 650cc Suzuki the other day, we did a lot of miles at some speed too, it is very early days but I an beginning to feel comfortable but still high on the magic of the new experiences and sensations. I have now bought all the gear short of an actual bike but have been spending quite a bit of time checking out different bikes and their features on the internet, my head turns now as I drive past bike shops and I have an urge to go in and look. I never thought I would do this until a few weeks ago, all my life people told me motorbikes = death, I lost good friends young who died on them, I visited good friends in hospital who had major accidents on them, motorbikes were for looney tunes, I once went pillion a few times with a mate and it scared the crap out of me. I am not sure what that says about me now, have I lost the plot or have I overcome my fear.

We its possibly a bit of both depending on your perspective. When you do this type of thing at 55, something out of character, without warning people first they look at you funny and the words mid life crisis are used, jokingly, but it has been said by a few. That’s cool I can live with that. To be fair I do not really know myself what makes me do these things, when I went to college then university and ended up lecturing in further and higher education it was the same, I really wanted to learn and had to overcome the fear of failure to be ready to do so.

So here I lay bare my biggest fear, it is the fear of failure. It is why we get nervous when we take tests and exams, we fear being the one who fails. When I stepped onto the mat to take my black belt in Ju Jitsu I had trained hard for years, training three times a week for many months and then some. The first this we have to complete are 25 throws and every aspect of each one must be correct, your uki’s are punching full of and there is no room for error, about 10 throws in and I was convinced I had already failed, I felt like shit, I could hardly breathe and had to fight myself mentally as well as my uki’s physically in order to carry on. I passed, its history now.

Last Friday I failed the first part of my MOD 1 riding test, I repeat I failed. I made one mistake right in the middle of the test, I knew I had failed at this point. I still had three difficult tasks to complete, I took  a breath, focused and did them, including the one I was most scared of at the start of he training, the swerve manoeuvre at speed. In the debrief the examiner told me he knew I knew I had failed when I made my one mistake, he complimented me an told me he was really impressed that I completed the rest of the test, he told me it was excellent. My instructor had described my ride prior to the test as fantastic and that was because I had a clear passion for learning to ride, this applied also to my fellow student who did pass.

Later we talked about some other stuff and the subject turned to how we learn things that help us to ride better. I mentioned the above picture and we talked about comfort zones and leaving them. I had already booked a retest for next week, best to get straight back on etc, I know that I did 90% of the test spot on, I know I can do the thing I did wrong, I understand I can do it. I was disappointed but not upset that I had failed, I took the test after 5 days of training, before that I could not ride at all. I got 1 thing wrong and people the feedback was surprisingly good. Putting the failure in the context of how much I think I have achieved, especially venturing up to 60 miles an hour on something I never thought I would ride, something I previously feared I still classed the test as a success.

If you live your life in the comfort zone, you are not living your life.

Fear is horrible, fear prevents us doing things, fear is the most negative of emotions, this we all know. Few people are fearless. Fear can paralyse us and keep us from trying something new. Most peoples lives are controlled by fear and they do not even know it. When we see an opportunity to do something new, whether it is something we have always wanted to do or just something that crops up, there will appear that little policeman in your head that will tell you not to do it, the little policeman will tell you it is not for you, it might hurt, you cannot do it, people like you do not do it and if you ignore all this stuff you the inner policeman will remind you that if you try it you might fail.

The little policeman inside your head uses fear to control you. Fear is a form of social control. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories, I am not sat here with my head wrapped in tinfoil to stop the CIA reading my thoughts. We are taught fear as we are socialised into society. Learning to fear certain things, poisonous snakes, tigers, sharks etc that are dangerous helps keep us safe. The thing is we also learn to fear failure and yes this has a name, Atychiphobia.

“Atychiphobia is the abormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure a type of specific phobia. As with many phobias, atychiphobia often leads to a constricted lifestyle, and is particularly devastating for its effects on a person’s willingness to attempt certain activities. The term atychiphobia comes from the Greek Phobos meaning “fear” or “morbid fear” and atyches meaning “unfortunate”.

Persons afflicted with atychiphobia considers the possibility of failure so intense that they choose not to take the risk then these persons will subconsciously undermine their own efforts so that they no longer have to continue to try. Because effort is proportionate to the achievement of personal goals and fulfilment, this unwillingness to try, that arises from the perceived inequality between the possibilities of success and failure, holds the atychiphobic back from a life of meaning and the realization of potential.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atychiphobia

The good new is that it is abnormal, most people do not suffer this correct? I think not, this is only my opinion, I think we all suffer from it when we face a challenge, a test an exam. It is not retarding us all the time but how many of us can say we have not felt nervous before or during a test or an exam especially where we really want or need to pass and where failure would lead to us being not good enough. Fear of failure is directly related to how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us.

Most Conflict Manager readers train and/or are trainers. We all know about exam nerves, now we can name the beast that is atychiphobia. Naming things is important part of learning how to deal with challenges and learning how to help others deal with them too. Different individuals will develop different strategies, there is no one cure. Even when you have trained and trained and passed mock test after mock test the real thing wakes up the little policeman inside your head and he starts to go to work. Does this mean I am anti testing? No, the pressure created by facing a test can really focus the learner so can be a good thing. It can also be important in keeping us safe, had I made my one little mistake on my riding test out on the road I could have placed myself in danger, could not would, but I can see why it was enough to fail me.

So life long learning is a wonderful thing, I embrace I, I send out the message to try new things as often as possible, I do it too. In a couple of hours Jayne and I are off to BBC Radio Sheffield to do a thirty minute live slot talking about Ju Jitsu and doing an on air demonstration. This will be Jayne’s 3rd time this year, she was really nervous the first time but did an incredible job, this time we are both looking forward to it and will have a lot of fun, well she will as she will be throwing me around. The request for us to do this is linked to the imminent release of the film Suffragettes and their training in Ju Jitsu. Hopefully this will bring in some new students to our classes, people who simply by turning up are facing one of their fears, of exposing themselves to the possibility of failure. Our job today on air is to show how both Jayne and I did just that, we are senior instructors now but we were complete novice white belts once.

My grandson Billy is five years old and has just done his first 2 Ju Jitsu classes, his mum sat watching is a 1st dan black belt, she climbed the UK’s 3 biggest mountains when she was 7, she is a fully qualified teacher, like her I want to teach Billy, and all my other students, not to fear failure, it happens, we fail, dream of successes and go out and create them.

I told all my students that I failed my test last week, I want them to learn that if they take a test it can happen, if everyone passes the test then it is not much of a test. Our local McDojo sells guaranteed black belt courses. One of their first dan black belts in karate MMA, (don’t start me off), was in one of my sessions recently doing self defence, he had a meltdown and could not complete the class, I said and did nothing about him or his training, I think the poor kid heard and saw things that exposed the dross he will have been filled up with, I felt really sorry for him. We have had their 13 year old second dan black belts come train with us before. They were not even green belts by our standards, their tests are not tests they are purchases.

So please let your students know its ok to fail, taking the test is an achievement in itself, if you do not pass then the work starts to pass next time. Not next week, not next month, but right here, right now. The antidotes to atychiphobia are confidence and passion, inculcate these qualities in your students and you will be doing a fine job, help them to overcome the negative control of fear and you will create winners.

Going Forward to the Past – Garry Smith

A couple of weeks ago I started to learn how to ride a motorbike. I passed my full UK car driving licence 39 years ago when I was 17 years old and have driven regularly for almost all that time. I have driven a car in 16 different countries too so I am a fairly experienced driver and I once hired and rode a scooter for 3 days in the South of France many, many years ago. That 3 days on a scooter is my only riding experience apart from the fact that I do cycle quite a bit. Riding a bicycle on our roads requires a very different skill set to driving a car and here was I stepping up to a bicycle with an engine…..

So the adventure began as I started training with a company called Bikesafe, a little research led me to them and after an initial assessment and familiarisation session one Sunday morning I signed on as a learner.

Let me tell you now, stepping out of my car and onto that motorbike was stepping right out of my comfort zone, literally. No comfy seat with music playing and a metal protective shell around me and a seat belt and air bag to boot, now it was me sat up on my 125cc beast with some fairly protective clothing and a helmet, and after a couple of days on a car park, stopping, starting, slow control, weaving in and out of cones and doing the figure of eight, u-turns and how to negotiate different types of junctions safely, all great fun if quite difficult I might add, it was a 2 hour assessment out on the road.

Yes the road, full of cars, lorries and buses that would be trying to kill me…. Well it was OK I obviously survived and I passed my Compulsory Basic Test, the following Thursday I say and passed my Motorcycle Riding Theory Test, after quite a few hours working right through the official manual and practising the hazard recognition tests. So now I am ready to go out on the road with my instructor and put the hours in training.

I struggled like mad at the beginning and found the transition from car to bike very difficult, on the first day whilst most of the class went out on the road after just a morning doing the above car park stuff, I was kept back, my instructor told me she thought I was not quite ready, I told her she was damn right and I happily stayed behind to practice more on the car park, those cones would be mastered. The next training day I cracked it on the car park and really enjoyed it out on the road, after our two hours out, I had certainly put into practise everything learned to date on the training and my road experience certainly kicked in. It felt good, I love learning new things, I was on a roll.

I love learning, the phrase lifelong learner certainly applies to me, I remember applying to go to college on an access course to university, I had no formal qualifications, when I was 29 years old with a partner, daughter and our own house, I was a window cleaner, self employed but a job with low status. Filling in the application form I described myself as an autodidact, big word that for a window cleaner, but calling myself an extensive reader across many subjects was something of an understatement, I devoured books, was thirsty for knowledge and that is why many friends pushed me to go on a full time access course.

Well no need for the details, I successfully completed that course and did so well I was admitted straight onto the second year of my degree course, I got a 2:1 honours degree in 2 years. I am not bragging, I left school with nothing, worked damn hard labouring and window cleaning but self educated. The formal courses were fantastic and attending the Northern College and Warwick University gave me experiences I could not have got elsewhere.

My personal tutor at Warwick was president of the British Sociological Association and I made very good friends with the head of the International Sociological Association, we used to like to have a fag and a cuppa in her office. At both institutions I was exposed to some incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable and skilled teachers, I learned from them in so many ways, especially how to teach.

I went on to teach myself in further and higher education, including teaching post graduate students and gained post graduate qualification too, not bad for a former window cleaner. The thing is it was not easy but it was not hard either, because I had the bug, the desire to learn, my brain was spongelike in soaking up information but the formal education honed my critical ability. It was 4 years of self indulgence and I kept on cleaning windows right through my ‘education’.

I will not even try to list the range of subjects that I am interested in, I also train in Ju Jitsu as you know, and I teach Ju Jitsu to others. I just love learning and cannot see a point when I will stop short of death. Worryingly that brings me back to the motorbike. I am not in any rush to buy a motorbike, I may not buy one although I have been checking out a few, I will do the full test though and it is not a mid life crisis, I am past that in more ways than one. What drives me, excuse the pun, to learn to ride a motorbike is a desire to learn something new, about myself.

I have just read a nice book by Sebastian Faulks, ‘Human Traces’, set at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries it revolves around 2 main characters both involved in the very early developments in psychiatry. Much of the discourse revolves around discussing what it is that makes us human, as seen from the perspective of the 2 main characters and their studies and experiences, it contains some profound thoughts for their day that now are pretty much commonly known and accepted facts. We all experience reading differently even when we read the same printed text, because we all approach it from our own particular perspectives, so we will all take our own view.

What touched me most was how the novel dealt with our evolution as a species and the development of the brain, remember this was in the context of what was known at the time the novel was set. Woven into the novel is a great deal of educational information and the story is beautifully constructed. The triune brain is not referred to as such but this was when the first discussions on architecture and function were taking place with the debate around evolution vs creationism still raging in the background. What is it that makes us human? Well my take on this is very simple, that we are learners. Trace our roots back as far as the archaeological and socio-anthropological evidence can go and it is clear our early ancestors adapted to their environments and eventually not only managed them but changed the almost beyond recognition.

We are a species of learners, we are by definition, and should strive to be Homo Sapiens (Wise Man). Other hominids existed, our ancestors outlived them, may well have exterminated some of them, but certainly out-competed them. Our brain is the most oxygen thirsty organ in the body, it is also thirsty for knowledge, its capacity is huge. I remember reading ‘The Wisdom of Bones: In Search of Human Origins’ a few years ago, it was an incredible read of an incredible piece of exploration, it led me to read quite a few books on similar subjects, see how it happens.

One new discovery, to me that is, and off I go, the brain rules. Learning appears to be my addiction and it appears I inherited it through my physical and cultural evolution. In many ways I have come full circle for a while as I am enrolled on the motorcycle training course but I remain, stubbornly remain, an autodidact, I celebrate the fact that I am in charge of my own education and here is an example of why. Becoming a learner again in the role of student motorcyclist has already helped me to learn how to be a better instructor. I have gone back to school and alongside learning to balance my throttle, clutch and rear break for slow manoeuvring I am learning to learn again, and because I found the just described procedure difficult I was lucky enough to have 2 different instructors teach me how to do it. As I did before I am learning how they teach not just what they teach and reflecting on how I teach too. It is a really nice experience, sit back, listen, try, evaluate and progress, that is how I do things.

We are all learners, we just need to be conscious learners to be more effective learners. We sometimes need to step out of our comfort zone to find new ways of doing things, just like our ancestors, right back through time. Learning is part of our species being, it is what makes us human.

Pine Wave Energy by Robert Norton – Reviewed by Garry Smith

This is a short review for a short book. I read Pine Wave Energy in just a few hours as I found myself beginning to coast over lots of very familiar material, which is hardly surprising given the vast amount of reading I have done as part of my studies and personal development. Personally I finished the book having learned very little that was new to me, but not disappointingly so, this is still a really nice find.

The great thing about this book is its accessibility, it really requires no prior knowledge of the field of conflict management, it does not go into great depths  of subject specific bodies of knowledge either, it is a smooth read and sensibly organised. This is exactly the book I want o offer to my students who want an introduction to the topic, it is not a manual of how to do things, it is a guide to how things can be done. I covers most of the key points in a logically ordered format.

I teach students Ju Jitsu, I also teach students self defence, in both cases I think they should understand the dynamics of conflict situations beyond their own personal experience, often this is all they have, that and a million messages from TV, film and other media. Sometimes they need to move beyond their own perception and popular myths and take a bit of a rain check. This is what Pine Wave energy offers, a quick, easily digestible collation of benchmark information that does not require a degree to understand or a couple of weeks of your life to get through.

Most o my students are not professional conflict managers, they have businesses, jobs, families and whole lives of which their training is a part. Those in the trade may need and want more detail and depth but not everyone does, so read this book(let), find out if you agree if it is of use to your students and if so put it their way. Sometimes bite size s the right size.

Availabe for purchase at the CRGI Bookstore.

Reading the Signs, Part III – Garry Smith

No, it is not advice on washing your latest new shirt, skirt or other piece of clothing. The cry, ‘These colours do not run’, beloved of the English football hooligan abroad. ‘Colours’ are large brocade and embroidery flags which were originally carried into battle so that soldiers of a particular unit could see where the rest of their unit was located at all times and used as a rallying point during the course of the battle. The infantry units of the British army each have two Colours: the Queen’s Colour, which is a union flag and symbolises the regiment’s loyalty to the Crown, and a regimental Colour which has all the unit’s battle honours inscribed on it. (http://www.royal.gov.uk).

Loss of the colours was not acceptable, indeed it would be a disgrace to the regiment so they must be defended at all times. The colours are not carried in modern warfare and are now used for ceremonial purposes, nevertheless, brave men died protecting a piece of cloth.

The thing is they were not protecting the piece of cloth but the meaning imbued in it. Every country has its flag, separate regions, states and counties have theirs, Vexillology is the “scientific study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags, flags are popular things.

We wave them to celebrate, we burn them to protest. One persons symbol of freedom is another persons symbol of oppression. For most nations the flag represents us, it is what we rally around when we get together, in September (12th) my brother is hosting a Last Night of the Proms (http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/features/last-night) party and I expect there to be flags and bunting as we engage in this particularly British tradition. The Union Jack will be the main flag as it represents  Britain. It is so called because it combines the crosses of the three countries united under one Sovereign. The Union flag consists of three heraldic crosses, the cross of St George is a red cross on a white ground, the cross saltire of St Andrew is a diagonal white cross on a blue ground and the cross saltire of St Patrick is a diagonal red cross on a white ground.

And here comes a teaser, the Union flag is the flag of the Monarchy but has come to represent Britain, the flag of St George represents England, as I am English which is my flag? Well I prefer the flag of St George over the Union flag as I am not a monarchist. The problem is that some of us English do not see why St George should be the patron saint (if we need one at all let it be St Edmund) and why share him and his flag, why do we need a possibly Palestinian born Roman soldier as an English icon? It does not make sense. We English have our own identity and source of pride, our Anglo Saxon origins.

So for me, the flag I will be taking to the last night of the proms party will be the flag of the White Dragon of our Anglo Saxon ancestors. OK, the origins of the White Dragon as the battle flag of the nascent English, the Englisc as they first called themselves, is shrouded in mystery, mythology and numerous pieces of archaeological evidence. But for me it represents my roots, my identity as English better than some 19th century political coming together of separate nations or a foreign saint.

For me you pay your money and you make your choice. Fly your flag, I will fly mine. The flag you fly will say a lot about you, it will not say everything, but it may just reflect your core values and who you identify as. Flags are made to wave, they are made to show the world who we are, which tribe we belong to. My flag, the White Dragon, represents who I am, the tribe I identify with. That is it. I am lucky enough to have friends of many nationalities and I welcome them all and their flags.

I spent a week in a hotel in Greece a few years back whilst the European Football Championships were on, at night the place came alive with the supporters from Holland, France, Germany, Italy and England all donning their respective football shirts and colours and bringing out their flags, rallying around their colours. It was a mini celebration and the vibe was fantastic. Members of different tribes hoisting their colours in an air of mutual respect. Not as opposing camps about to go to war but as fellow travellers differing with each other but respecting the others beliefs and traditions, a healthy form of patriotism. These were not the hooligans for whom football is a vehicle for violence which is like the false patriotism referred to be Samuel Johnson when he said “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.

I do not have time for flag burners. For me it is a sign in itself when that point is reached, a sign that the burner cannot articulate and so resorts to desecrate. Flags as icons really do come to represent the sacred and the profane and polarise peoples. That star spangled banner represents freedom to many in the world but is the shadow of repression for some. Recent events in the USA over the Confederate flag and the Star and Stripes highlight the increasing political divisions in American society as highlighted in Jonathan Heidt’s excellent book ‘Righteous Minds’.  

The rainbow flag of the gay pride movement and the black flag of Islamic State both arouse passions that cross boundaries of nation, religion and morality in a multitude of ways. Both proclaim to the world the identities of those who gather under them and their allies who attach themselves, to me they are almost diametric opposites in both visual representations and values presented.

Stark contrast? You bet. Often it is the starkness of the contrast that helps us to see. So reading the signs is pretty easy with flags, they are obvious symbols who’s principle use is to express the identity of the group. Now earlier I said I was English, of Anglo Saxon descent, but I am also a Yorkshireman, hailing from gods own county itself…… So for me, alongside the  White Dragon I also will hoist the White Rose of Yorkshire. Does this mean that I must never tread foot in that hell hole that is Lancashire? Of course not, I love a good hotpot and a pint of Boddies, but I do love some of the banter and long may it last, raise your banners, if you feel the need proclaim to the world who you are, there is nothing wrong with that but do not get ants in your pants when somebody else does the same, especially somebody different, with a different flag, of different colours with a different identity, because that, as we English will tell you, is bad form.

So reading the signs is important, some are obvious like flags waving in the breeze, bright and brazen, others are less so and require a more practised eye to spot them. The thing is we humans fill our world with signs and symbols, letters and numbers being just that though they take on a life of their own when we use them so often. These are more or less universal symbols but every tribe has its own symbols with which it interacts and identifies itself and sets its boundaries. Know them, learn to read them, respect them and you will stay that much safer.

 

‘The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do and how to change’ by Charles Duhigg – Reviewed by Garry Smith

This is an incredibly interesting book. It combines scientific research into human behaviour and psychology with great story telling to unravel how we for habits and how they run our lives. I was particularly fascinated with the incredible amount of research done by marketing companies and the big corporations and not that surprised to find that they often know more about us than we do.

If you train yourself and more importantly if you train others in anything at all, no matter how much you already know, this book will deepen your understanding on how we develop skills by building complex neural networks. Not only that, but what is involved when we try to rewire the brain, how it can go wrong and how to do it successfully.

This is as good an introduction to the architecture and functioning of the brain as most people  will need in an incredibly easy to access format. Whilst focusing in p[art one on the individual, part two looks in depth at organisations and part three at societies.

The scope of this book is enormous but it is so well written you are both informed and entertained throughout, and every now and then up pops a dinky little diagram to reward the reader (oops, is that me revealing something). You will learn about camouflaging kidneys, placing sticky tunes on radio playlists and how the shops know a woman is pregnant before she does. In fact this is the kind of book that will have you annoying your significant other as you keep reading bits out to them.

It is also full of really useful anecdotes that will help you understand your training and your teaching better and I have used a few of them times over to explain otherwise technical concepts to students. People love stories more than jargon.

Treat yourself, by it, read it, read it more than once and keep it handy as a reference, I do.

Available for purchase at the CRGI Bookstore.

Reading the Signs, Part II – Garry Smith

Welcome back dear reader, remember how in the June issue I asked you to pretend you were a visitor from another planet, with no experience of human behaviour of any kind. I asked you to suspend ALL your values and beliefs for a few minutes and take a look around you and at you. To reflect upon what you saw. The idea was to adopt the position of anthropological strangeness,  so that you could try to see how you look to others you look, how others look, how they interact, what appears to govern those interactions, I hope you tried it.

It is a kind of out of body experience and if we try it we can begin to see our day to day behaviour, the vast majority of which we go through on a form of autopilot, from a whole new perspective. Let us go back to our Goths, either type, the symbolism in their dress, jewellery and artefacts tell us who they are, what tribe they belong to, we do not need to ask them, the symbols they display scream out the message loud and clear. Spike Milligan’s ‘Cockanees’ in his spoof anthropological expedition had their own artefacts and culture too, I share their love for the fish and chips.

We all belong to tribes, we all display our membership. The rituals of tribes are important for their identities too as are their belief system. Our intertwining biological and cultural evolution are the two key forces that have shaped our identities and the identities of the tribes we belong to. Our very languages separate us, within the same language groups regional differences and dialects do the same. In the UK, one small island, there are people who all speak English but who’s dialects make them uterley incomprehensible to one another. Received pronunciation, (the posh BBC voice), is uncommon, dialects are not. I love them, I like the different sounds, the different things they tell me about a person.

In the same way I love the different uniforms different tribes adopt, their badges, hairstyles, preferred music etc. It helps me read them like I read books. People very often do wear their heart on their sleeves so to speak. The express their personality, beliefs and even their sexualities through what they wear and how they wear it. Graffiti marks out a gangs turf,  a tattoo can mark out many things, piercings, flags and all manner of iconography blast out the message, here we are, this place is our place, I have a tribe, I belong, I am in the group and you are outside the group.

I am not sure what this says about me but I love a bit of crazy and Jayne, formerly, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs do it for me, musical break.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_ZzPSjdQhI

Yes I went punk in the late 70’s and that hit the anarchic spirit in me that added to the skinhead defiance already in me helped shape the me I am now. Throughout life we leave behind old tribes and join new ones, we migrate alone and sometimes with friends, its a complex life and we do it largely without effort. Of course there are those who are raised to a kind of cultural certainty for religious/ideological reasons who’s tribes erect such effective barriers that it is possible to remain insulated from outside influences from cradle to grave. I will return to a discussion on the sacred and the profane later. For now it is enough that we begin to recognise that we do live in the time of the tribes, The diversification of most societies that we see reflected most in the western world has brought with it a conservative fundamentalist backlash from societies far away and from sections of our own societies (I refer here principally to the USA and UK).

I read Left of Bang a while ago, iconography was rightly recognised as a key source of information. We process vast amounts of information daily, hourly, we are quite expert at sifting that information for the key pieces.  If we buy products they often come complete with universally understandable warning signs and symbols often accompanied by explanatory texts. When Mo Teague writes about the cowboy code we all understand the symbolism that was imbued in the white hat black hat movies of old. Now we will have different visual clues as to who is good and who is bad, politically correct clues probably, but clues nonetheless.

Last month I mentioned the symbolic importance of the black belt to many martial arts. Last Saturday one of my students pointed out I had the wrong belt on as I had a plain black belt, no red tabs to represent my dan grades (lets not go there yet), I pointed out that it was a nice new one and not faded like my old one. In the last week or so we have graded a number of students who have all now got new coloured belts as they edge towards the desired black one. We all know, whether we have trained in a martial art or not, that there is a mystique attached to the coveted black belt, a kudos that many aspire to and few achieve…….. Or am I just believing my own bullshit?

Well that debate aside the point of this article is to explore the central importance of the use of symbols to all of us, that and the fact that we all belong to multiple tribes, hold multiple identities and ranks and nearly always we actually know this, we just do not think about it consciously in the hurly burly noise of everyday life. Conscious reflection often gets drowned out in the increasing pace we live our lives, I think that is why I like to walk and cycle, to escape into the green that surrounds the city I live on the edge of. To find a space where the brain can switch off from doing all those things and in the pleasant tempo of exercise let it wander where it will. As this issue goes to publication I will be in Austria, up in the clean air of the Tyrol, recharging my batteries for a whole week. No martial arts, no self defence classes, no Gi and no black belt, no bag full of equipment and other props. I will be wearing the uniform of the walking class, the shorts, the boots and strolling around with my knapsack firmly on my back. I will meet others of this tribe and share pleasantries, we may not speak each others languages but we will recognise one another easily enough, the signs are all there if you care to read them.

Next month I will conclude this piece by examining the use of symbols in conflict, nothing raises passions like a good flag waving parade or a flag burning protest. Flags are pieces of coloured material imbued with incredible amounts of meaning, they go beyond expressing our membership of nation or state and deep into the personal identity of individuals, love them or hate them, flags are the most used and abused of our symbols, so until next month, Auf Wiedersehen.

Symbolic Interactions – Garry Smith

Today I saw this picture of some Goths, the ones with the pale faces dressed all in black, it was juxtaposed with a picture of another type of Goth, a version of either a Visigoths and the Ostrogoths who were two branches of East Germanic people who, along with the Vandals, were associated with the downfall of Rome way back, remember that? The original Goths were fierce warriors who dominated vast parts of Europe by the 4th Century. If you messed with the Goths you generally got your fingers burned, and your village.

The picture I cut from a meme on FB it asked what the hell happened? The question implies all sorts of things and the main message is that we have gone from Warrior to Weirdo in not that many generations. I had one of those, I get this moments when I saw this pic, and it was to do with the nose to mouth jewellery of our black clad Goths of today. You see it is made of Jet, Unlike most gemstones, Whitby Jet is actually fossilised wood, similar to our present day Monkey Puzzle or Araucaria Tree. which has been compressed over millions of years. The colour of Whitby Jet is unique; its blackness is so intense that the expression ‘as black as jet’ has been a commonly used phrase for hundreds of years. Whitby is a seaside port in North Yorkshire commonly associated with Captain Cook and Dracula.

The Abbey ruin on the South Cliff inspired Bram Stokers epic novel, that and a few white lines of a certain powder, and that is what drew the first modern day Goths who now hold two festivals here a year, My wife and I love Whitby and travel there several times a year, we just spent a week there, I always get asked if I am off for the Goth weekend, and there are always a few Goths wandering the streets, last time we saw a family of three generations of Goths crossing the bridge over the Esk. The modern Goths descend on Whitby not to burn and pillage but to drink, dance and shop (no doubt boosting the trade in Whitby Jet no end that was a bit of a wash out after the boom in Victorian times).

Apparently the Goths, who have been coming here for years now do not gather and party alone, they are now joined by Punks, Steampunks, Emos, Bikers, Metallers and all genres of the alternative lifestyle. It sounds like I may be off there in October, especially as Spear of Destiny are performing. http://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohN0KIyP8m0

Anyway, get to the point Garry. Well often it is the more dramatic sub-culture that allow us to see ourselves better. Not that we must all be Goths or Emos, Bikers or Skinheads, Mods or Rockers but there are subcultures in virtually every culture, they are mostly associated with youth but youth is no longer a determining factor of membership. Indeed our fascination with the different, the spectacular and the weird is largely associated with youth culture and its emergence alongside, and stimulated by the explosion in popular music in the latter half of the 20th century.

However, the old Goth, the warrior Goth as represented above is also key to this article. Just look at the pic for a few seconds. Look at the clothes, the weapons, the hair, the adornments, jewellery. If we look closely the amazing thing is not how different the two representation of Goth are but how strikingly similar. Centuries apart and as one in their expression of their identity. Each culture and sub-culture has at its core its own idea of its identity, identity is central to culture, shared identity as expressed in how we are, how we speak, how we eat and how we look.

Clothes, music, dress, jewellery, hairstyle are all part of the rich cornucopia of artifacts we use to express our identity and by extension interact with others.

Think just for a moment about how you dress. What do you wear, what influenced your choices and what are you saying to others in the wearing? What you wear and what you do may be different for different occasions, think about that too?

We cover ourselves with symbols, we badge ourselves up from cradle to grave, we put on our patches to tell the world who we are, and, which tribe we belong to. Everyone is in a tribe. Please do not try to deny it, the thing is we may not recognise it, we may not wear the spectacular clothing of the Goth, Emo or Punk, we may not wear the leathers or the 1%er patches of the biker gangs, we may wear the grey suit of the corporate tribe, the colours of a sports fan or the mom and dad suitable clothing sold in the department store but even that identifies us as who we are or who we like people to think we are.

We interact using symbols, it is called symbolic interaction. We humans, unlike other animals, attach meaning to things and social actions. Sometimes a simple symbol can get everyone all fired up. Like this one.

Well no points for guessing why the symbol used by the Nazis upsets many people, because of their evil actions the symbol has become, for many imbued with evil as its meaning. If you want to shut down a political opponent then calling them a nazi generally does the job, that and painting Swastika on their door. I used to be a window cleaner and one home I worked on had two of these painted on their doorstep. If you knocked on the door to get paid you were not greeted by your stereotypical (yes you have a picture in your head don’t you) white power supporter as in American History X but a lovely old Indian lady (as in Indian sub-continent).

You see the swastika is considered a sacred and auspicious symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, it appears as a Chinese character and has been in use since Neolithic times. A bit earlier than the rise of Adolf Hitler. However, the catastrophic events of World War II and the Holocaust have left the negative association of the swastika (also called  a Gammadion Cross, Cross Cramponnee or Manji) remains dominant in most minds.

It is impossible to live without belonging to a tribe, whether you identify as part of a sub-culture or part of the ‘mainstream’ culture, you have an identity. Every aspect of your behaviour is related to that identity including the central characteristic of all groups, language in all its wonderful complexity. Much of that complexity is handled by our use of symbols. The very colour black is symbolic for the modern Goth, so for those involved or in contact with those involved in martial arts, self defence or related fields, you will have come up against the powerful symbolic meaning connected to the revered black belt. But symbols do not only convey messages to others, the act back on the user too, so what happens with this whole black belt thing?

This article is not a tease, there is more to come next month, for now I want you to do some homework. I want you to do an experiment, come on it will be fun. I want you to adopt the position of anthropological strangeness. Anthropologists study human beings, usually in their natural environment. I want you to study yourselves in your environment for a short period. To do so you need to have a kind of conscious out of body experience.

Pretend you are a visitor from another planet, you have no experience of human behaviour of any kind. Suspend ALL your values and beliefs for a few minutes and take a look around you and at you. Reflect upon what you see. Look at how you look, how others look, at how they interact, what appears to govern those interactions, free the mind to see what is actually happening in your day to day life and how we use symbols to interact (like the letters and words on this page), it is far more interesting than you think.

Here is a little clip from a comedian I really love doing a little ‘anthropology’. It should give you a few clues how to do the experiment. See you in July.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyPOb-cRv1I

 

Charting the Principles – Garry Smith

For the record I really find Erik’s 12 Principles of Conflict Management an excellent piece. Equally Rory’s exploration of the deeper reaches of each principle certainly moves us forward as we develop our understanding. It is really important that we do this as CRGI was never established so we could all pat each other on the back and tell each other how wonderful we are, how clever. The search for the truth often leads us up blind alleys and sometimes we end up travelling the long way round to get there when there was a quicker more direct route all along, we just did not see it. The thing is sometimes what we see on the journey is as important as arriving at the destination.

When I read Rory’s article I thought it resembled a trip to the opticians for an eye test, where you wear or look through some contraption that they drop different lenses into whilst you read off a chart. So looking through different lenses allows Rory to tease out the pros and cons of each of the 12 principles Erik rightly identifies, it works well. However, as we debated this prior to finishing our articles something did not click for me. I felt a slight intellectual discomfort with how, rather than what, Rory was presenting. When critiquing a list it makes sense to follow the list, I get it, it works. However, I felt that there was the need for a simpler more abstract presentation to sit alongside both Erik and Rory’s articles, splendid though they are.

When I first read Rory’s response to Erik I got a strange picture in my head, (not an unusual experience).  This is it.

Neville Chamberlain returning from meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich bearing aloft the piece of paper that guaranteed ‘peace in our time’, the rest, of course, is history.

My problem was why was this picture in my head, well the term appeasement jumped out at me from Rory’s article along with the use of force as kind of polar opposites of managing conflicts. I began to see a continuum for conflict management with two polar ends, one being unmitigated enforcement of a settlement at one end and abject appeasement at the other,  this leaves every possible variation on the line in-between, neat. Well let us see.

Once you take each of the 12 principle and observe and explain its deeper context, lets extend the eye test metaphor here and looking now through a microscope, we begin to see in each the multiplicity of variables that may or may not be present in a conflict what happens when we overlay one principle with another, and another and it was this thought that gave me a feeling of information overload. Each one is explored and explained clearly enough, each one is massively open ended.   What Rory does is open up each principle so that we can see more, but the deeper we probe the more we reveal and, this is the big one for us all, how can we use this list to assess the effectiveness of conflict management or the ineffectiveness of conflict mismanagement?

Well the obvious answer is lists can be checked against events to see if what they described was present or absent, we can then evaluate how this may have contributed to the outcome, then we can judge whether this was intended or not and how effective. That seems like a logical process to me but we all know that variables interact and the complexity involved in any given situation or conflict will produce, even using this logical sequence of analysis, a best guess result based on interpretation and perspective, nobody is claiming any different as far as I can see. Nobody has attempted to claim the mantle of expert, indeed we all reject it for obvious reasons.

The thing is we do need to develop useful tools to measure conflict management techniques, responses and strategies, call them what you may, as well as the flip side of conflict mismanagement as it is often here that most productive learning takes place.

Now I love the list and I love the critique but as I began to suffer from a little conceptual overload. I did what I normally do, I shut it down and went for a walk with the dog, let the subconscious work on this whilst I had a little fun.  

A day or so later I decided it was time to let my thoughts pop out of my head and I drew myself a diagram, here is my diagram.

Garry image
OK it is not a replacement for either of the afore mentioned articles, rather it is an aid to understanding. A framework that allowed me to get to grips with some of the complexity, a simple(ish) model, let me explain.

Underlying most of what Rory looks at is the fair assessment that successful conflict management is achieved by many strategies and tactics and is never simple or straightforward, however, I am pretty sure that if we can use a continuum that ranges from enforcement at one end to appeasement at the other we capture everything in between, (that’s the neat thing about continua). Apply the right strategy/tactics with the right balance between enforcement and appeasement and everything is cool, we hope.

The flip side is true of conflict mis-management, choosing the wrong approach strategy and tactics to manage a conflict and you are quickly in trouble.  

Each situation will have its own dynamic, each situation will have multiple variables. It is the possibly infinite ways these variables combine that make the subject of conflict management so interesting and so challenging if not downright confusing.

The degree of negotiation provides us with a scale to help contextualise the continuum, if you can simply impose enforcement then no negotiation is really necessary, the alternative at the other extreme is what Rory calls begging, I think this is where I got the Neville Chamberlain thought, with no power or will to back up your intention you simply cave in, you are dictated to, you will have to negotiate like hell because that is all you have. It is a crude method of measurement and is a work in progress not a solution.

In fact the whole model is crude, I am not trying to be sophisticated, I am keeping it simple (stupid), remember that. The model is simple and you can use it as a backdrop to your thinking, like this if I take one of Rory’s points at almost random. ” Negotiation only works, negotiation doesn’t even exist, except for the threat of what will happen if negotiation fails. You never do hostage negotiations without a tactical response on standby and a country without an army may make themselves feel important by mediating a treaty… but negotiation without an alternative is begging”

The problem for me is not just the range of variables, legal, cultural, linguistics, environmental etc, the things we can see/hear/smell even, the empirical evidence, that may be present in a conflict management situation, but the things we cannot see and often can only guess at, motivations, morals, feelings and emotions, these are powerful drivers for all the actors engaged in a conflict. The list can never be expanded to encompass all possible components of any given conflict. We would need a much more powerful analytical tool or toolbox to help us to achieve that, this is what fires the agency of the actors involved.

So we can place conflict management strategies and tactics on the continuum as they are applied and then watch them move around the diagram as variables and agency collide and produce a unique recipe for each conflict we see, no two dishes will be exactly the same even if we try to use the same recipe.

My simplistic diagram is not an answer, for me it is a starting point in conceptualising a grand theory of conflict management if that is not too ambitious and outrageous thing to aim for. Can I do this on my own, I sincerely doubt it, can I add to a debate with informed and insightful others, Erik, Rory, YOU, to perhaps help us shuffle along towards such a thing together? I hope so. Maybe these three articles are the first tiny steps that start a big, big journey.

 

 

Who Are You? – Garry Smith

No, it is not a rhetorical question. Who actually are you? Do you actually know who you are?

Are you a conflicted individual who does not know their I from their me? And that’s before we start on The Who, geddit? So those of you who have read any of my blogs know I like a bit of a musical reference and 1978 produced the above classic. I was 19 in ’78 and really liked this track before punk led me astray. You see music is, for most of us pretty central to our identity. The explosion of youth culture in the 1950’s and 60’s changed the western world. Youth cultures were spawned and youth cultures clashed with Teds and Rockers fighting the Mods and the Skins with poor naive plod caught hopping around on his poor old size elevens at the seaside.

Well I for one experimented with all kinds of music, and the accompanying intoxicants and crap fashons, and still have diverse tastes but I think the old Two Tone stuff is my all time favourite, it’s a working class football orientated skinhead thing. Alas time and tide wait for no man and whilst I can reminisce with the best I see a very different chap when I look in the mirror these days. Somehow, somewhere along the journey of my life to date I lost the youthful me, I also lost all those certainties I once held dear, I lost those aliegences to football teams and political parties that I once held dear. Gone, long gone, are many once good friends, the steamroller of life keeps moving on crushing the past that is left in its wake. I cannot complain, I have a wonderful family, healthy and happy and growing as grandchildren appear in our lives and lately a cute new puppy dog.

As the saying goes the only constant is change. Life is good. I am happy. But is the me? And there is the rub. The i and the me are both part of who I am so when anyone asks me ‘who are you’ I get confused, because I am conflicted. There I said it, I am out and openly a conflicted person. The thing is we all are, it is natural. Here is why in a nutshell. We are born unfinished, unlike other creatures we need a great deal of looking after as babies, we are pretty useless.

BUT we are fast learners, as soon as our little eyes can focus we are watching, watching, recording, learning and ready to copy as soon as our limbs can support us. Socialisation is the lengthy process of becoming human and we learn many complex skills as the brain grows exponentially through the early months in particular. We imbibe our culture, language and learn to move, to walk to speak and to make decisions. Our little selves learn through imitation and experimentation and through the two most effective of learning processes, operrant conditioning and play. We soak up knowledge and skills like little sponges and we experiment like mad. Importantly we learn to distinguish between the ‘I’ and the ‘ME’ as we get to develop our self……

Hold on, lets just watch this great clip for a few minutes. Rory Miller and I just delivered the first CRGI Instructor Development Course in Sheffield, there was a great emphasis on how we learn and how we train and how, very often these two are mismatched to the detriment of all. So lets just apply the three stages, preparatory, play and game, to our training, be it martial arts, self defence, survival or fitness, it does not matter. The stages identified by Mead, in my opinion should guide how we organise our training, as students and as instructors and here is the rub, this is not a one off process but rather a never ending cycle as we advance through life.

Lets face it the process of socialisation is ongoing throughout life as we try out and learn new roles, I had no formal training for the role of grandad, but I had grandads, my own dad was a grandad as were lots of other people I knew. I learned from these significant others, some more significant than others, and adopted what I thought were the best ways to play grandad. I absorbed these into the introspective ‘I ‘ and I express them as the extroverted ‘me’. That is my take on how I became a grandad, there were loads of other factors too of course but lets keep it simple. So how did I/you become a martial artist (insert other role here…………….)? I bet if you cast your mind back you will recognise many of the stages you went through.

So if you, can see your development from baby martial artist and recognise the three stages does that help you picture how you train now, how you became your martial arts self? The thing is as in martial arts as in life sometimes an individuals development is affected by whether or not they are allowed to play, to copy, to experiment as well as by whether or not they are allowed to develop as team members and not just subordinates. The worst kind of training is run by the authoritarian ‘Master’ who forbids their students from training with anyone who will contaminate their ‘one true way’, anybody recognise this?

Whilst the best kind positively encourages experimentation and lets their students play, regardless of age to find ‘their’ best way, the students not the instructors, of doing things. Whatever facilitated your development, and never underestimate the role of significant others, how has this affected how you facilitate the training for others? If you can recognise the need to prepare, to experiment and then to find ones place in a group and you can provide a safe and secure environment in which this most natural of learning processes flourishes, then in my opinion, you are doing your job well. Student centred learning inevitable moves the centre of attention to the individual and away from the system. The system is not necessarily impoverished by this shift of emphasis but enriched if we allow students to develop as holistically as possible.

Entering into training inevitably means exposure to new roles and new ideas, it is what people seek as they develop their wider sense of self. They will become changed individuals to different degrees after exposure to your training whatever it is they learn. The very identity they possess on entry will be altered never again to become what it was before and that is a awesome responsibility. In order to empower our students it is the responsibility of the instructors to keep on pushing the boundaries of our knowledge in order to continually improve ourselves. That is the open world we humans inhabit, as opposed to the closed world of all other animals. But that is another article. For now let us remember the importance of play and the development of games as tools for learning, go back to your dojo and, well, learn to play.