2025-09-03

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

We had a small rank exam for the one student who was eligible tonight, and he did well. Results will be announced at our next class, as usual.

Tonight’s interesting tangent related to training for mental toughness and how it cuts both ways. The very short version goes like this:

• When you train for mental toughness, you can take a shot to the face, shrug it off, and keep right on going. Even if you can’t shrug it off completely, you can appear to, which often serves to discourage an attacker.
• But if you don’t train for that sort of thing, getting hit often has a psychological effect that comes along with the obvious physical effect.

To be clear, I’m not saying we practice punching each other in the face on purpose, but it does happen from time to time. When it does, it’s important to take it as a learning opportunity. I remember once, years ago, I got hit in the left eye so hard that it spun me all the way around counterclockwise. It hurt, sure, but on my way around I remember consciously saying to myself, “I’m not giving him the satisfaction of going down.” To be clear again, it was an accident, and I didn’t really think the person who hit me derived any satisfaction from it, but this was self-training for some other day when someone might.