tcs-20 The Daily 8 - 4

The Daily 8

Here are eight daily exercises that will aid you in your mastery of TCS Combat Mode.

4.       Take control of your life

How:

Avoid mental chaos; chaos breeds uncertainty and uncertainty undermines control, either in life or in the arena.

Exercise: A simple exercise to take control of your martial arts technique quickly is to learn to practice your forms and fighting in your head (do patterns or Katta start to finish in your imagination). This exercise will help sharpen your technique quickly because your mind knows exactly how it wants you to look while performing these techniques.

The next step is to use a video camera to film yourself fighting then watch it! Do you look like you think you look? If not, adjust your thinking and your fighting stances until they match your ideal.

Why:

I mean the word “take” very literally. If you were in the middle of nowhere and saw $50 bill on the ground you would take it, correct? Life is filled with $50 bills that you fail to pick up on a daily basis. Your work, love life, hobbies, martial arts training, and many other areas present opportunities to seize more control and make your life better.

A warning: There’s a difference between taking control of your own life and being a control freak. Be careful not to over-extend yourself when it comes to other people’s “space”. If you are getting your way by trying to control other people, it will only backfire on you sooner or later.

Learn to exert positive control over life, constantly adjusting the areas of your life that are most important to you. Are there aspects of your life that need changing? One measure of this is how many times a week you say, “I wish I had…”. Stop wishing. Learn to take what is yours from life.

         

Something we touched on earlier was how lack of control can make you careless. You may allow things to get out of control in your life.

You must acknowledge the things that are out of control and bring them under control.

This is important: Life throws you curves all the time. If your life is already chaotic, this simply adds chaos to chaos. If you are able to keep the elements in your life under control, you will have more energy and focus to bear on new sources of chaos as they arise.

Consider this common scenario: You have three projects going at work. They are in relative states of chaos. You’re not sure where you are with each one or whether you’ll really get them done on time. Enter, the Boss, to hand you another project. “Can you handle it?” she asks. Do you even know? You may say, “Yes,” just to save face, but how realistic is that if you have no clear idea of where any of your other projects are at this moment?

Conversely, if your projects are under control and your boss asks if you can handle another one, the answer to her question is much more likely to be a real, honest “yes”. It may also be “no”, but at least you’ll know which it should be.