Supportive Attitude

Transcript - Supportive Attitude

We say "a rising tide lifts all boats." What that means in the dojo is that as you get better, and as you support those people around you, they get better as well. If you're in a room with people who are all better than they were yesterday, you're all going to get better. They say in tennis, or baseball, or obviously in judo or karate, that if you work with people who are a little bit better than you, they kind of pull you up.

Our job, as participants in a family, a dojo family, is to help everybody in the room rise up, so that every time we come, we're training with a better and better group of people. That's what a supportive attitude means, and here's how you do it.

You make sure to encourage those around you. You are a great training partner. You give all your energy to whatever you're working on at a given time, and you try to stay safe, because the truth is, if you get injured, or your partner gets injured, the time that they're out is time they can't be getting better at the same pace they would be if they were coming to practice.

Supportive attitude — we come in, we're trying to help one another, and we recognize that the progress of everybody in the room is the progress of ourselves, not a competition — although we do compete sometimes in a friendly way, but the idea is that we want everybody in the dojo to get better together over the long term.

In the next video we're going to talk about warm-ups. I'm not gonna really give you any cues about the physical part of the warmup. I think that's obvious when you come to class. But what we're gonna talk about is, what are you trying to accomplish mentally, internally, and for the class as a whole when you participate in the warm-ups at the beginning of class.