This post is the fourth in a series  interviewing 3rd degree black belt Aikido practitioner Dwight Sora of Chicago Aikido club. While I’m interested in martial arts for their own sake, Aikido strikes me as having some unusual philosophical lessons about acceptance, change, and growth.

Previous posts in this series are Aikido Interviews, #1: Trying to Discover Truths, Aikido Interviews, #2: “Lift Your Head and Say ‘Isn’t Today a Great Day?’”, and Aikido Interviews, #3: Like Learning How to Play Music.

Luc: What’s the most dramatic thing that comes to mind that has happened to you outside of Aikido but because of Aikido–or to ask the question a different way, has the practice of Aikido changed your experience of the rest of your life?

Dwight: As to whether Aikido has brought about a change in my life: my answer is a definite yes.  On the most basic level, it completely changed my relation and attitude towards my physical self.  When I started Aikido as an exchange student in Japan in 1993 I was somewhat overweight, out of shape and generally disliked any kind of athletic activity.  It’s bizarre in retrospect that I even tried Aikido.  Since I was a young child, I was essentially a bookworm, was physically awkward and utterly hated gym class.  I never found much success or fun in any sport I attempted to play, which has basically lead to a general uninterest in even being a sports spectator. (To this day, I fully admit, I really have no knowledge of the ins and outs of professional sports whatsoever, a big social disadvantage in the United States of America.)

My early days of training were fairly brutal.  Despite Aikido’s peaceful reputation, college Aikido students in Japan are an ultra-dedicated, ultra-serious, borderline militaristic group.  We spent as much time doing basic physical training as we did rolling and falling drills and learning techniques.  There were days where it took all I could do just to keep up with them, and I always got the impression that they were particularly hard on me because I looked like I should have known better with regard to both training and etiquette. (To clarify, two other exchange students joined the Aikido club with me, and they were both Caucasian-looking.)

But here’s something funny: I refused to quit.  Which was also strange, because I had a bad habit of giving into defeatism through most of my childhood and adolescence.  Every time I tried something new, I was easily discouraged when I didn’t feel I was getting it right.

But for some reason, with Aikido, I absolutely refused to stop.  Something had been activated.

I remember when I returned to the U.S., several people would remark that I looked taller.  But I wasn’t at all.  My posture had improved.  I was walking upright and maintaining eye contact much better than I use to.

Also, as I continued my Aikido training, I simply got better about things like exercise and diet, and even learned to appreciate it a lot more.  Being the nerdy guy I was, I was one of those who tended to disparage sports and physical activities (partially sour grapes, I realize now).  Aikido didn’t just make me better appreciate taking care of myself, but gave me a greater appreciation of all physical activity, whether sports, dance, acrobatics, etc.  (However, to be fair, I’m still totally lost during any conversation about pro football, baseball, etc.)

Advancing in Aikido has definitely helped my confidence over the years.  It’s as if climbing over the personal hurdles of training really made me feel like other hurdles were surmountable as well.  When it has come to acting, standing up for myself, starting my own business (my main work is as a freelance Japanese document translator), my Aikido experience has certainly contributed to a sense that things can be accomplished.

Readers interested in finding physical activity that transforms you may also want to read “Finding Exercise You Love: The Taekwondo Example”

Photo by Maggie Mui

Some people give the following advice about willpower:

“You have to care about what you want to achieve, a lot. If you care a lot, it’s in the bag. If you don’t, you might as well give up.”

Since I think this is lousy advice, I’m not going to mention where it came from, but I do want to say why it’s lousy advice.

Why caring alone isn’t enough
First of all, a person can care desperately about something and still not be able to make it happen. For example, Melissa might feel completely oppressed by her messy and cluttered house every day and want nothing more than to clean it up. However, she won’t be able to do that if she doesn’t believe she’s capable of making the change, if she doesn’t know how to start, if she can’t organize her efforts, if she strongly wants something else that’s in conflict with the clean-up effort, or if every time she thinks about cleaning up she gets distracted, blocked, or hung up on emotional issues.

Why not caring doesn’t necessarily prevent self-motivation
Similarly, if she has systematically forced herself to ignore her house for years and doesn’t really care very much, but she still knows on some level how good for her it would be to have a clean, happy home–for instance, if she’s in love with someone who wouldn’t be able to overlook the mess–then she can still create the self-motivation to clean up, and even to come up with organizational ideas, deflect distractions, overcome obstacles, and get past emotional issues.

Caring as a source of motivation
Of course, caring deeply about something is nonetheless a powerful source of motivation, and if there aren’t other things in your way, it can sometimes be plenty by itself. For example, one summer when I was in college, I met a French exchange student who spoke hardly any English. She was very pretty, and I immediately decided I wanted to be able to speak to her in French. I probably learned more French in those two weeks than I have in all the rest of my life put together. I knew I could do it, having already become conversant in Spanish; I didn’t feel any emotional conflicts with learning French; I knew how to go about studying the language; I had the books … in other words, caring pushed me forward, and there didn’t happen to be anything major in the way. Under these kinds of circumstances, caring makes a real difference.

How to become motivated even when you have mixed feelings
Let’s say I’m in a situation where I recognize that something is very important–starting an exercise regime, for instance, or completing some difficult repairs on my house–but I don’t really care about it on a gut level. How can I motivate myself?

First of all, it helps for me to connect to the benefits. If possible, I’ll want to visualize and spend time thinking about the results I’m seeking–the increased value of my house when I sell it and what I could do with that money or the boost in energy I would get from exercising, for instance. These kinds of exercises help me care more, which as we’ve established isn’t strictly necessary, but which will help make things easier.

Second, I have to be willing to prioritize the thing I’m trying to achieve above every other kind of self-motivation. We are really only capable of working on one major life change at a time: this is one of the reasons people so often fail at changing their habits, because they try to fix everything at once, which means changing many kinds of habits. But changing habits requires a lot of focus and attention–too much to allow attention to be divided among a lot of different goals. So while changing in more than one major way at once is possible, it’s extremely difficult and usually fails. So if Melissa wants to declutter her house, she’s better off not trying to start a weight loss regime or a novel at the same time.

Motivation creating caring
The flip side of this is that our attention, our consciousness and awareness and focus, is so useful and valuable that if we direct it energetically at any one thing, we have a very good chance of achieving that thing if it can be achieved at all. If Melissa spends a lot of time thinking about how she’ll clean up her house, and reads books on decluttering, and talks with friends about the problem, and learns some of the strategies on this site to deal with the difficult emotions that can come up in that kind of process, then even if cleaning up her house starts out as something that doesn’t really mean much to her, it becomes something that she gets better and better at and cares more and more about.

Because it’s really the other way around: caring doesn’t cause us to make changes in our lives as reliably as making changes in our lives causes us to care. The more thought and effort I put into accomplishing a goal, the more I begin to identify with that goal, most of the time. As much as what we care about makes us who we are, in fact who we are changes throughout our lives, and caring about different things, shifting our own priorities, is a lot of what makes that change happen.

Photo by Storm Crypt