When Cooperation Is Necessary

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Learning, Teaching

Sometimes I just want to tell people: I am disturbed by your lack of cooperation! So, let’s speak a bit about why cooperative Tai Chi techniques and applications are important – and how to practice in a good cooperative manner.

Tai Chi Chuan as a martial art is not based on individual techniques and specific applications. Instead, it is based on principles that could be expressed in many different ways. The principles could be described by words like adapting, following, blending and mirroring. “Energies” or refined skills as Peng and Lu are not techniques. So how do you practice them? Is it reasonable to practice them as “techniques”?

This is one of the reasons why many Tai Chi people completely reject the kind of practice that incorporates one person launching a punch while the other person do an exact respons. There are many reasons to agree with people who believe that this type of practice is artificial and can lead to bad habits, as well as as a wrong perception of fighting in general.

However there are also specific methods of using things as angles and leverage to break or control the opponent’s balance and structure, that need a very high degree of precision to work. If you want to develop the ability to understand and handle a more subtle use of angles and leverage, it is absolutely necessary to practice in a very precise and exact manner with a partner. This kind of practice demands a high degree of cooperation.

Many types of practice demands a high degree of cooperation. For instance, if you want to understand how to make a throw or a joint lock, you need the opportunity to practice the exact angles which will give the beast leverage and the best effect. For a throw or for a take down, you need to know how to step in and how close, and in what angle to apply pressure or pull. In a real fight, how will you ever be able to apply any technique if you don’t understand them in a precise manner? For sure, in a real situation, you might apply something in a different manner, in another way. But to be able to do anything more specific, you need to the angles and positioning where to apply force.

But here’s the problem: Many people just don’t want to cooperative. They don’t want to help others to succeed. I believe that there are many people who will never reach any respectable level in Tai Chi Chuan merely by their lack of ability to cooperate. Over the years, I have practiced with so many people, or rather tried to practice with many different people, who just don’t know how to – or even more common – don’t want to cooperate.

I remember countless of times in different martial arts classes when the partner didn’t understand what to do, or how to do something, or just didn’t want to follow a teacher’s instruction. I remember many different times like once in a Bagua class when we practiced a technique about how to handle an incoming kick. The so called “partner” would pull back the leg before I had any chance to step in. I guess that practicing how to grab, hold on to, or how to pull back a leg while kicking, could be good things to practice. But here, the task was to get a sense of how to hold a kicking leg, and step in to apply pressure in a certain manner on the opponent’s body and guide him to the floor.

Oh, I really hate this type of person who just don’t want to cooperate. And frankly, Tai Chi people are the worst of all martial arts practitioners I have met and studied with. They can handle cooperative push hands drills to a certain extent, but many people have a problem with anything beyond that. One problem is that they mostly don’t have any other kind of martial arts background, so they don’t even know how to throw a general punch.

And a part of the other problem is that many just don’t want to play a neutral “dumb” attacker. Instead they will try to use Tai chi methods to counter-counter the application and technique. This is the most obstructive a practictioner can do, both against others and against themselves, because they will never step outside of what they want to do for the moment and in that moment also close themselves to learn more.

Yes, you can see overly cooperative videos everywhere. When a teacher wants to give the impression that something overly compliant is “real”, then we might have a problem with it. It’s something disingenuous and deceptive about much what you see out there. But still, your own mind-set when you practice with others must be a cooperative mind-set.

But here is the thing: In my own experience, it’s always the people who know how to cooperative and help each other who will learn fastest, and have the best development in their overall Tai Chi journey. And they are in fact often the people who a teacher will be willing to teach more advanced things to. If you don’t want to cooperate and learn things in the specific way your teacher wants to teach, how can you ever expect your teacher to open up and be generous about what he teaches?

I would like you to know that, in fact, it is very often the students themselves who are the cause of different teacher’s reluctant attitudes and unwillingness to teach any more advanced stuff. You really need a humble approach and show that you are wiling to listen and to do what your teacher says.

I remember interacting with one of my own teachers who I have no contact with these days, and sadly in opposite roles. He would ask me things when I had been to seminars and summer camps, about what we did and asked me to show him. But soon I stopped trying to show him anything, just because of his own attitude. He always had a very dismissal attitude. More than to understand, he wanted to show how something didn’t work. He often complained that people could never show things they practiced in seminars. People were indeed reluctant to show him things. But I soon learned that it had to do with his own attitude and not with theirs.

And there are other reasons. Some people keep on to small things they have learned very hard, and treat what they know as treasures. They don’t like to show or tell others about what they have. They are afraid to test what they have learned on others, because the other person might learn something.

Their own selfish, greedy attitude is what makes them stop developing. I can see the same tendency in every aspect of interaction in the human society. Greediness, stinginess, pettiness, not being able to generous and not being able to give will always halt your progress regardless what you want to achieve in life. Regardless it’s about business, building relationships or Tai Chi, this kind of attitude will never lead to anything good.

So in Tai Chi, as well as in life in general, it is extremely important to attain a generous attitude, share and give what you have. A good way to show a good attitude and that you are willing to share is by cooperating, by cooperating with your classmates and with your teachers. And as a teacher, you need to have the same attitude to your students. Cooperate by giving good replies to their questions, showing them what they ask about and make sure that they, by your own actions, feel just as much respect from you as you want them to show you.

On How to Be a Great Tai Chi Chuan Teacher

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Learning, Teaching

Lately, I’ve been asked by a few individuals who liked my writings to not only write something more about learning and studying, but also to write something that focus more on teaching aspects. So far I have written a whole lot about learning (like this post) and how to become a good practitioner. But teaching is something that I have always been reluctant to write about. First, teaching is something very individual and I don’t like to preach about how others should do it. As students are all different and different types of students need different types of teaching, there is no real point in telling people about what is bad or about who can’t teach. But still, teaching is an interesting subject which is hard to completely disregard.

But also, before getting starting with trying to verbalize my thoughts on how to be a great teacher, I should be honest about that, as a teacher, I don’t consider myself as anywhere near great. Nowadays, I only teach in private sessions to individual students, or for small groups not larger than 3 or 4 persons. I teach in my own way, and only things that I like myself, so there are a lot of things I won’t teach, and because of this my teaching is limited and not suitable for everyone. Maybe the people who like me and the things I do might consider it fun and rewarding to learn from me. But they don’t expect me to teach “like everyone else“.

So here are my dos and don’ts regarding teaching, and what to do to be a great teacher. If you want to fill in the gaps with things I have forgotten to mention, object, or if you have ideas related to these things, please feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments.

Don’t try to earn a living on teaching

Just let’s face it, there are already very few people who get a liking for tai chi enough to consider practicing it, and even fewer who are really serious and want to dig deeper into the art. If you want to earn your living on teaching Tai Chi, the income will always be more important than the content of teaching. You can’t really get around this. Then you need to arrange your school, classes and teaching in such a way that you will make sure you can have an income that you could live on. This would mean that you would always need to deliver what people expect.

If you teach Tai Chi as a martial art, you would probably at least consider some kind of grading system, some standard types of clothing or uniforms, or maybe print your logo on T-shirts. You would need to teach using a standard curriculum which everyone has to follow. If you want to develop your school into several classes, or even more schools, you would need to build up Some sort of hierarchy, which is something maybe not every serious practitioner would find an easy thing to accept. But you would really need to do this as senior students could take over your classes and teach their own classes.

It would take time to build up a larger organization, but it’s not an impossible thing to do, not even with Tai Chi Chuan. But every step you take in this direction would have to be more about building up a brand while figuring out what people want and expect, rather than about teaching Tai Chi as it was supposed to teach or even what Tai Chi could be if presented through it’s full potential. So obviously, the quality of your teaching, and what you teach, will have to suffer in one way or another if building up a big organization to secure an income is your main goal. There’s just no way to get around this problem.

So if you are going to focus only at being as a great teacher as possible, it is likely that you would not be able to earn much on teaching. But of course, if you are a great practitioner who has developed some rare skills people are looking for to learn, you might have people paying big money to learn from you. However, this would more likely be through smaller classes and private sessions, because teaching larger classes is the second thing you should not do if you want to become a great Tai Chi teacher.

Keep the classes small

Think about it for a while, think about how different types of classes are usually taught in music, arts and handicrafts. The real good teachers who teaches the most gifted students and produce the most high quality students always teach only very small groups or in private. Of course you would want to rather hire a great private teacher for your kid‘s piano lessons than put him or her in a public class. You would get full attention every single minute of those private classes. Learning and developing would go much faster. For a gifted student, there is often no other way to continue to develop further than to find a great private teacher.

Now, think about professional magicians, how they actually teach their students or disciples who really learns the art and the methods that are always hidden away from the public. The illusionist as a teacher usually only has one or two, or maybe a handful of students. This is how the art of professional magic is transferred from teacher to student, through a close relationship. This might be the modern type of teaching that comes closest to traditional Chinese martial arts teaching.

In the older days, teachers in the Chinese martial arts would mostly teach only through their own blood line, like someone in older days who dealt with pottery for a living, who learned from his own father and passed the skills onwards to his own sons, so they in turn could make a living on it. In older China, Martial Arts were mostly either a tradition only kept within the family or to very close friends, but sometimes they could be transmitted just like how professional illusionists do today. Still, they would mostly only teach it to maybe two or three trustworthy students or disciples in order to keep the secrets from reaching the public. Sometimes a martial arts skill was a kind of trading skill, but still, those skills were mostly only taught to a few.

And this is the way a Chinese Martial Art should be taught, within closed doors and in private, or at least in small classes. This is how a student can build up real skills (if the teacher really wants his or her students to become skilled, but this is for another topic.). However, If you only want to teach Tai Chi as a lightweight health exercise, there doesn’t need to be any kind of skill involved, and you don’t need to keep the classes extremely small.

Keep the hippies and Qi-huggers together in a separate class

But still, if you want to teach Tai Chi for health only, or teach both types of students – health and Martial Arts practitioners, keeping them separated in different classes is a good idea to consider. There are people who will never understand, or just refuse to accept, that the greatest health benefits from studying Tai Chi Chuan goes through practicing it as a martial arts. There are people who hate every type of violence and would never even simulate a punch properly because they don’t want to learn correct punching.

Therefore, it’s often better to keep this type of people away from the people who are mostly interested in the Martial Arts and combat aspects. Most Tai Chi teachers will mix everyone together in the same class, but personally I don’t like this approach. One suggestion you could consider is to start a class with 45 minutes to an hour as a mixed group, teaching basic exercises, forms and qigong type of stuff to these minutes, and then after a small break where the health-only enthusiasts can leave, you can continue on with the fighting applications, Push hands and so on. Martial Arts enthusiasts often need more teaching and more time with the teacher than the health-only people. So you might also think about charging them differently. But how to charge different people? This is another question.

Don’t charge too much, but also don’t teach for free

I’ve already said this, but it’s highly unlikely that you could earn a living on teaching Tai Chi. You will Most likely to need a regular job as your main income. So there’s really no need to be greedy. You don’t need to charge a lot. In China, many traditional teachers who only have a few students and teach in the traditional way, mainly inside their own homes, won’t charge anything. It’s often even considered ugly to ask for money.

So what the students do, is that they often buy their teacher useful gifts, fruits, foods, etc. If the teacher is old, students might help out fix something that is broken, go shopping and help out with other practical things. But a teacher won’t ask about those things, as Chinese people have this tradition in their own culture so Chinese students will do this by themselves without anyone having to ask for anything. And mostly, a Chinese student will feel uncomfortable trying to get something for free, and understand that he or she must get something in return. But if they don’t do this, the teacher might become reluctant to teach the goods or will stop teaching the student.

But here in the West, it’s a bit different, we mostly live in more selfish societies, so we don’t have this culture of giving things without knowing when and what to get back. So here it’s better to charge something. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but if you won’t charge anything at all, there’s a great risk that the students will get lazy, or come and go as they like. If they don’t pay something, they won’t feel the need to get the most value from what they have payed. So mostly, just to keep people coming to the classes, they need to pay something. Then, if you want to use the money to cover classroom expenses, preparing snacks for the classes or use it to buy them a dinner at the end of the semester, is all up to you. But you should really ask for something, even if it’s just to make sure that the students understand that they should show up regularly.

Focus on individual progress

Again, take a look at how Playing different instruments are being taught. Every student is different, some people learn slower and some people faster. Teaching people the same amount of hours, or keeping a curriculum of exactly one or two years, in order to let them progress one step further, would be an absolutely ridiculous thing to consider for any music teacher. Everyone want their students to progress as fast as possible, or at least to keep to the students own pace.

In Tai Chi schools, dragging the progress by keeping people to stay at the same level is something I regard as completely ridiculous. A good teacher wants their students to progress, and will keep on pushing them to develop further. If you keep faster, gifted students in a lower level than their own potential, they will leave. They will certainly leave and find someone much better than you, someone who understands what they personally need.

Keep the teaching personal, but also focused and professional

So keeping the classes personal and focusing on the individual is the best thing you can do, which again means that you can not have more students than what you can handle to teach on a more personal and individual level. But keeping classes personal should also mean to keep them focused, and the teacher should have a professional approach.

I myself like to hear a teacher telling related stories and I love to learn more about culture and history. But when people goes to class just to socialize and speak about what they did the last weekend, a teacher should step in and not let the lazy bunch derail the classes, or spend unnecessary time on personal nonsense. So personal here as a teacher means keeping attention to the individual student’s need, and not to waste time by getting too personal.

Be honest in your marketing to attract the right type of people

My final advice is to market yourself in a way that feels comfortable, confident, natural and honest. Don’t market or brand yourself through your teacher, your great Grandmaster or through an organization. You are the teacher, so brand yourself as a teacher, and not as someone’s student. It’s you, yourself who is going to teach your students, and not your chief instructor who you haven’t met in ten years, and it’s not your Great Grandmaster who has already been dead for 57 years. What and how you teach is about you and only about you. So if you want to get the students that will like what you are teaching, let them know you and make people understand what and how you teach.

And also: Don’t give people the same type of generalized curriculums that everyone else give to presumptive students and don’t just state what someone is supposed to learn in Tai Chi. Personalization of your own personal branding will be exactly what makes you to stand out from the crowd. Everyone teach in more or less the same way, so what do you offer and what can a student expect from you? The statements on your poster, flyer and homepage need all to be personal so that the teaching, and what you offer feels specific, clear and hopefully a little bit different from the crowd.

But at the same time, keep in mind that not everything is about you. As a teacher, you want some kind of recognition, but your students want to be recognized as well. Think about this for a while. Everyone student is unique and special, so how can you let a student know if you have the ability to see the individual student and can give him or her something personal, something that just that person needs? Maybe you cannot come up with a simple answer, but I do believe that this is something good to consider, both as a teacher and as you approach others as a Tai Chi teacher. As a teacher you need to know how to see and listen to each and everyone of your students. If a potential student can feel that you can do this, even before he or she shows up in your class, you have already won a great race with competitors in an already too crowded market.

…..

And that’s all folks, …at least for now. I have a feeling that it will take some time before I write anything more on “Tai Chi Thoughts.” But as I am writing about teaching, I can give you a little tip. There’s a book called “The Martial Arts Teacher” By Jonathan Bluestein. He is a very experienced teacher and has a lot of thoughts and insights to offer. But before deciding if you want to buy it or take a closer look at it, you can read my interview with him here.

©David RL – Thoughts on Tai Chi

A Spectator Has No Chance to Master Tai Chi Chuan

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Teacher, Teaching, The Spectator

If you want to go far in Tai Chi Chuan you sincerely need to stop being a spectator and take command over your own development and progress. You cannot let any teacher dictate over how far you have come, or when and how you should progress. First you need to reach a point where you can be able to understand this by yourself.

What is a Spectator?

The Spectator is the student who attends classes more to enjoy the show than anything else. The spectator puts himself or herself in the position of being a passive listener. The Spectator is satisfied by merely enjoying the show put up by the teacher. The Spectator might listen to the instructions and practice the exercises, but do very little thinking. This passive, non-critical attitude does also have a long-term effect on the student’s progress, as the teacher can decide how fast or slow the students will progress without any kind of objections or active initiative from them.

I wrote this on a discussion board not a long time ago:

“It’s mostly commercial teachers who earn a living on teaching who use old abstract, obscure words. It’s more to attract new students than to explain. Explaining things clearly with modern, western terminology is boring. People don’t want to listen to it. They want things they don’t understand, so they can try to understand them. But they don’t want them to be explained.  Like a David Lynch movie. People love the mystery, things that cannot be explained. The simple answers? Nah, people want to keep the mystery. That’s the important thing. The same with martial arts. People … want to experience the mystery.”

Sadly, this describes the most common type of teacher as well as student. My friend who is also a teacher and a long time practitioner, Michael. cited the quote above on his blog. I am happy that he found it interesting enough to write something about, but what he didn’t know is that he is one of the reasons why I started to think more in these terms and tried to verbalise my thoughts further. In a private conversation, he made the observation that many successful teachers have some kind of background in entertainment.

When I thought more about what he wrote to me, I found what he said true and obvious. Amongst the most successful public teachers you can find musicians, actors, dancers and even people who have earned a living as a psychic and on fortunetelling. These teachers clearly know how to get people’s attention and how to keep it. They understand the value of entertainment often more than they have the ability to actually teach something. They keep their students entertained and the students keep on going to the class. Some of them are very charismatic and good manipulators. Yes, they really know how to manipulate people.

Sadly, this kind of teacher is not only the most successful type of teacher in Tai Chi and in the world of Chinese martial arts in general. They are also the most detrimental for a student’s development. Though they keep up the student’s interest and fascination of the art, they are mostly not interested in teaching their students in order to help them reach any higher level. Many teachers prefer that the students remain perpetual beginners as long as possible.

Entertainment or teaching?

This kind of teacher attracts many different kinds of students, some very serious who wants to dig deep in the art, and others who might just want to practice an exercise for health and mind. And yet others might seek out the teacher, or “master,” just to find a social group. Even if they don’t believe that they go there just to experience the mystery and to enjoy a show, this is still the situation many students put themselves in.

I believe that the relationship between student and teacher often becomes fixated already as the teacher presents something to the student that represents a new experience for the student, something that is hard to grasp and to understand. When the students enter the school of this kind of entertainer teacher, they enter a new world with strange new words and concepts and stories about old masters.

Some of these teachers have practiced for a long time and have gained some decent skill, thus they will move and use their body in a different way that a common person is used to do. These qualities are indeed hard to replicate for most of people and demand some decent amount of practice. So here, in this situation, the student depends on the teacher for guidance. But in many Tai Chi schools and in Chinese martial arts in general, the relationships are not really the same as a healthy student-teacher relationship seen in most other disciplines and in common schools.

Start thinking instead of just enjoying the show

Another problem that you can find in many of the larger martial arts schools and organisations, is the very clear hierarchy. Often, the student is not even allowed to question what the teacher says or does. Critical thinking is not allowed. The students, despite that they really do practice the art, mostly put themselves in the position of the passive spectator just to adjust to the hierarchy in the class.

I doubt that the passive and non-critical mind-set of the spectator could help anyone to master a Martial Art. Sometimes I see students who have practiced Tai Chi for 20 or 30 years who still continue as perpetual beginners. I see how they still sit in classes and in seminars listening passively while admiring their teacher more than anything else. They listen to everything the teacher say by accepting every word without any kind of critical thought. Sure, they do their practice, both in the school and at home, and do their homework they bring home. But still, they can never really make the art their own.

My advice to any Tai Chi practitioner would be to become aware of what position you put yourself in, in your school and in the class. If you go to class just because you want a master to admire, or if you have convinced yourself that what your teacher does in class is something impossible to achieve, then you have already put yourself in the position of being a spectator. Remember that every teacher is just a person like anyone else. There is no magic power and no special talent needed to become a great Tai Chi practitioner. The equation of reaching a higher level in Tai Chi chuan consists only of time plus effort, and this goes together with critical thinking and the commitment of taking responsibility for your own progress. Obviously, you need to put many hours into your practice, but you also need to have a clear goal and practice hard to achieve it.

Is The First Tai Chi Class The Most Important One?

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Learning, Teaching

Something important that I do believe that most Tai Chi teachers don’t really understand is about how important any student’s two-three first classes are. I would suggest that what a teacher teach in the first classes and how, is the most important thing to consider for any teacher. These classes, and maybe the very first one, is something a teacher should prepare very carefully with a lot of thought. You might ask why? Shouldn’t a student just start by learning the most important basics, start with the most essential exercises?

Yes and maybe no. The important thing to realize is that the very few classes, the first one especially, is something the student who continue the journey and becomes a longtime student always will remember. It will be the first serious meeting with the Art and will set the tone for his or her progress for a long time ahead.

You as a teacher has a great opportunity here. An opportunity to give your new coming Tai Chi students something to remember. As a teacher, you can tell and show your students inspiring things. Willingly or unwillingly, you will choose what they are going to remember.

My suggestion is that a teacher should not only set a student on his or her journey, but also show some of the goal far ahead. The best thing, in my own humble opinion, is to show some kind of skill that you yourself has practiced hard for a very long time to achieve. This first-hand experience of meeting true Tai Chi skill will become your gift to your new student.

Any sincere student who will continue the journey for a long time will have something to strive for, to work hard for. Maybe in ten or twenty years, your longtime Tai Chi student will remember that day just as it was yesterday and feel proud and gratefulness because he or she has achieved something that took very long time and hard work to achieve.

Complicating the Simple. Simplifying it Again.

Tags

Chan, Learning, Mind, mindset, Simplification, Tai Chi, Teaching, Zen

My own teaching style is to keep everything as simple as possible, trying to simplify and make things that look hard or complicated comprehensible in simple ways. This might sound great and maybe seems to make sense. But still, this is not always the best way to communicate Tai Chi Chuan. Many people are locked in their own complicated thinking, their own way to look at things. As they have their own preconceived ideas they constantly try to reaffirm and verify their own preconceived view on the world. To reach these people, simplifying things is not an option.

This is why Chinese Zen (or more accurate Chan) masters invented the Ko’an (originally Gongan) as one of several methods trying to force students to simplify their thinking. If they couldn’t simplify the answer on a riddle in the simple manner of a child, they wouldn’t be allowed to proceed with any teaching. In some ways, as a Tai chi teacher, I try to do the same way. But it’s not easy. You cannot force a complicated mind to change. People must be willing to change themselves and understand how to change themselves. So the ball, here the willingness to understand what it takes in order to learn, is always in the hand of the student.

We can not transform anyone’s mind if it doesn’t want to transform itself. Thus, simplifying the world does not always work. Often, to have a chance of doing this, we must speak in an intellectual language that the intellectual, complicated mind can understand. We can use math and science, we can use metaphors and images to paint pictures with words. We can use different methods that will satisfy the intellectual or logical mind. We can also engage a person’s fantasy and creativity, to activate him or her to change the way of doing and acting. All of these ways are complicated, detours to help someone to understand things that are in their nature most simple. A student who spend a long time learning, trying to understand an art as Tai Chi, and finally reaches a stage of real understanding, will inevitable be surprised, that everything he or she strived to develop, was in fact something very simple.