Category Archives: Personal Development

Stop trying to find yourself.  Create yourself.  Stop burying your head in distractions because life seems to lack meaning, find your own meaning.

We live in a culture where Anti-Depressants are the most prescribed drug after Antibiotics.  Certain demographic groups are more likely to die from suicide than literally anything else.  Many people are spending more time and effort trying to feel good about themselves and the direction of their lives than they are just living it.  Many people lack any real meaning or purpose.  For this reason, people will look for projects to distract them; projects that will be so all consuming that they won’t have the time to stop and notice the futility of their lives.  They play computer games to the point of addiction, getting themselves lost in a world of adventure and magic (the magic could be nothing more than the opportunity to rise from the dead after failure and start again).  They follow other people playing a sport to the point of total association; you hear football fans saying things like “we won” meaning that a football team, that they personally have nothing to do with other than watching, won. In one study they found that around 40% of English men said that without football their lives would be meaningless; and few of them actually play football.  These projects need not be, of themselves meaningless or without virtue in their own right, but they can still be a distraction to stop those involved from taking a moment to really look at their own lives, for fear that they will discover them to be futile.

Let me make a suggestion.  A suggestion based on an awful lot of long-term studies (one Harvard study, that I’m thinking about, has been going one for 70 years now) into what makes people happy and healthy, content and fulfilled.  It is the quality of your relationships that will make the greatest influence on your life.  Not the number of them; the quality.  It’s about feeling secure in those relationships that you have.   

Here’s the thing.  Until you are content, secure and happy with who you are, you won’t be able to sustain a secure and happy relationship.  When you like yourself, others will like you too.  When you love yourself, others will love you too.  When you respect yourself, yep you guessed, others will too.  I’m sure you’re getting the idea now.  Kung Fu Living is a mechanism for developing the skills, the power and the discipline to become the person you most wish to be, the person you can love and respect.  It is a process designed to enable you to recreate yourself into the best you possible.  It is about ‘mastering your potential.’  It will change the way you think about others and the way you think about yourself and in doing so, it will prepare the scene for better relationships, and enable you to create your own meaning in life rather than simply distract yourself from noticing the lack of meaning.

Protection from the greatest threat to your life.

People often ask about self-defence in terms of being physically attacked.  They don’t always get that Kung Fu should be a lifestyle, a process of personal development, emotional maturity and spiritual growth.  If it were just a way of fighting off a violent attack it would be a much simpler thing.  Although that alone is far more complex than most people initially presume.  Learning a few fighting skills within the context of a lesson is one thing.  Being able to use those skills within the context of a real-life attack is quite another.  That is the first distinction of a good instructor; that they train you in the emotional control necessary for real life application of the art.  But a complete Kung Fu teacher (Sifu) is also a life coach.  They help you to develop a personal philosophy that enables you to live life to the full and to grow into the person you both have the potential for and who you wish to become.  Life’s battles are hard and often the most dangerous conflicts will happen within your own mind.  Teaching you to deal with a stranger violently attacking you is actually just the structure for a vastly wider and more holistic curriculum.  For a start, you are much, much more likely to be attacked by someone you know, than by a stranger; a family member or most likely your partner or spouse.  But the person most likely to try to kill you, by a long way, is YOU.  Suicide is a far greater risk to your personal safety than violent crime or domestic abuse.  People don’t kill themselves because they want to be dead, they do it because they can no long tolerate their life.  If you want your life to a different experience, you have to first become a different person, with different thoughts, perceptions and attitudes.  You are able to be a happy and content person.  I would argue that inner peace and joy are natural to you, the you that you would be if outside influences had not barged you off course along the way.  We shall be looking at the theory, strategy and practical methods enabling you to grow into the person you wish to become, discovering the real you along the way.  That is not just the theme of many of these blogs but is also a major aspect of the whole Kung Fu Living program.

When I learned to type I practiced the sentence “the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog” because it uses every letter and if you can type it without looking you have the alphabet cracked.  When my kids learned to play musical instruments, I remember them going up and down the scales and arpeggios.  These, not only ensured that they learned how to play every note, but they got used to various sets of notes that tend to be used together according to the signature key of the tune.  The forms in Tao Te Kung Fu forms have a similar approach, particularly at the advanced level when they have the characteristics of the different elements, as if each were a in different Key.  That is where the similarity ends however.  The Forms in Tao Te Kung Fu are developed to ensure that the techniques are arranged in a way that they can actually be used.  Any combination of two, three or more moves from any of the forms could be used exactly as they are and will be effective in any real conflict.

It is vitally important that you practice your forms while visualising an opponent and perform each technique as if it were real life.  Let me give you one example of how things can go wrong.  This come from a man who trains police officers how to use their guns in the US.  Some years ago, he had been running classes on arrest procedure.  The recruits would role-play exactly what they would say and how they say it, to make sure that when they were anxious, on the street, they would get it right.  He taught them to point their finger like a gun and tell the pretend bad guy to put their hands on a wall or car bonnet, spread their legs and then inform them of their rights etc.  It was with some alarm that after one batch of new recruits had arrested their first real criminals, he heard that one officer had gone through the entire procedure with his gun still in his holster, but a stern finger pointed threateningly at the dangerous bad guy.  The fact that he had done it so convincingly that the bad guy had complied with the instructions is beside the point and the topic of a different discussion.  If the bad guy hadn’t also been so nervous that he wasn’t thinking straight either, it could have gone badly wrong.

Over years of working in nightclubs and pubs I have seen and taken part in hundreds of physical confrontations.  There are some things one can generalise about.  Most fights are over within a couple of seconds.  If they continue beyond two seconds, it’s either because the combatants don’t really want to be fighting, but feel obliged to, or because they are too drunk, or it’s because the fight is over and one is simply now beating the other up.  The guys who like fighting and do it week after week are usually not very skilled, but they tend to have a short combination that works consistently, so they use it and if they need to, repeat it.  They tend to win because past victories have given them confidence, they rarely come up against a skilled fighter and they don’t stop to think, they just fall into their practiced combination.  The combinations in all the Forms in Tao Te Kung Fu are functional, practical combinations of techniques that will work for you regardless of your size, strength, age, sex or level of fitness.

“Tao Te” means something like the virtuous way, and refers to the effectiveness or power that comes from following a natural way, a way that takes account of all aspects of human physiology, the mechanics of anatomy and the practical tactics required to win in real confrontations.  Tao Te Kung Fu as taught in the Kung Fu Living program takes advantage of the most recent developments in the neuroscience of skill acquisition, utilises techniques from a wide range of traditions and benefits from decades of real-life experience in the security industry.

Many martial art styles require such levels of conditioning, strength and fitness that only young strong men can really excel; and they will often pay the price in later years as the physical punishment of their training takes its toll.  Because Tao Te Kung Fu has been developed to enable a smaller, weaker fighter to overcome a larger and stronger opponent it is ideally suited to people of all sizes and ages.  Not being dependent on vast strength, Tao Te Kung Fu puts an emphasis on speed and precise targeting, with many fast striking combinations and close-range techniques.  While the training will help you become stronger, fitter and more supple, but your capacity to excel in Tao Te Kung Fu is not dependent on these.