“There are two types of people, those who like to be super prepared and make sure they know everything for the test, and those like me who just throw themselves in and see where they’re at.”
I quickly admitted that I was the first type.
It’s no big secret that I’m a bit of a control freak, but I got to thinking about what “control freak” really means. In this case, the controlling part was trying to control the outcome. Maybe I was (am) a control freak because I didn’t want to fail. Fear of failure = control freak.
And as I took that in, perhaps the very moment I responded to the two types proposition, I realized I was going to see how the other half lives. I was going to throw myself in without a net.
So, with only a week to prepare, I agreed to test for my next belt.
This was the first belt I ever went for where I wasn’t really sure if I’d actually get it. And it was interesting because I felt myself sort of giving myself permission to fail. Not that I wanted to, and not that I didn’t train hard, but I mentally eased up on myself.
I already kinda knew that this was a life lesson sort of thing, which is at least part of the reason I did it. I mean, how many times do we stop ourselves from going after something we want because we don’t feel that we’re ready, that we need more time, more experience, more… something?
Even though I knew the philosophy was right – the whole just throwing yourself in and see where you’re at – I wanted to go through it and, well, see where I was at.
Cutting to the chase… it was still very, very difficult, and I knew I wasn’t where I would have liked to have been, but I powered through it and I passed.
I think the test itself is designed to show you that you are capable of a lot more than you think, a lot more than you could have imagined, and the only way to really know that, is to really do that. If you run 20mph, they have you run 21mph; if you run 100mph, they have you run 101mph. And while I would have liked to have run 100mph, I maybe ran 10. But they made me run 11, and it kind of sucked, but in the end, I didn’t think about the running, I thought about the new belt in my hand.
And then I vomited.
No, not really. I did take a jow-bath and a very long nap. And I woke up with an addition to my former self - the addition was that I had faced a fear of failure without protection and without a safety net, but I didn’t fail… I knew then what I know now, which is that I will be able to do it again and again. And sometimes I will fail, but that seems to matter a lot less.
