Are you an open minded person about others ways of training?

[Alan Armstrong]

Do you tend to undervalue facts that contradicts your beliefs?

 

Or overvalue evidence that confirms your beliefs without question?

 

Do you consider yourself to be open minded?

 

Is being open minded over rated?

 

Do you have a belief system that you live by?

 

How open minded are you compared to the people you are close to?

 

Is being open minded important to you?

 

Is being asked, are you an open minded person, a difficult question for you to answer?

 

Perhaps you are wondering by now, why all the questions on open mindedness.

 

A situation arose where I was teaching in a martial art gym where many different systems were practiced.

 

I was teaching Wing Chun, anyhow, there was a student hanging out, waiting for his Kajukenbo class, he looked interested in what I was showing one of my student's so I offered to show him what it was about.

 

To my surprise, he backed off, as if I was going to contaminate his mind.

 

Then he explained that he didn't want to know anything else about any other martial art, other than the one he was presently in.

 

His words did not match his actions, as he would constantly be sitting in on my class.

 

Then he started asking me questions while I was teaching my students.

 

He being a lot bigger than myself and being a disrupting influence also disrespectful, I asked him if he wouldn't mind helping me out with a self defence demonstration.

 

He agreed, as being confident that he wasn't going to be so easily taken down to the ground by a smaller person than himself.

 

First I showed why self defence scenarios don't usually work on bigger people; then switching to how it should be done.

 

I had him grab my left wrist with his left hand, then immediately circling my left hand under the grab and reversing the grip on him, with my right hand I grabbed the skin under his right tricep and dragged him down to the floor.

 

To everyone's amazement including his.

 

Going on to explain, that this Is how you take down a bigger opponent (using pain compliance) by grabbing their skin.

 

The next week he showed me the bruising under his tricep, that the skin grabbing made, he was very proud of it, as it looked like a tattoo of a Yin/Yang symbol; how profound it looked.

 

He never interrupted my class from that day forward.

 

Hopefully he has changed to be a little more open minded than he was in the beginning.

 

As martial artists there is too much to know, doesn't mean that to accept it all but at least be open enough to know that other ways of doing things including training exist.