Community Concepts (Jun 2022)
06/06/2022
Dojo Philosophy for Everyday Life
In Cuong Nhu we look at progression through life and through skill development as a series of concentric spirals. The spirals follow a philosophy called:
The 10 Stages of Growth
To successfully begin learning a skill we have to let go of our ego and admit we are a novice, or Nobody. Embracing this lets us release judgment and move on to start Learning. The Learner stage is great fun! There are lots of new discoveries both about the new path and about ourselves. In any pursuit that leads to actual change, the honeymoon phase will end when we know what we’re trying to do, but we have to repeat it over and over in order to improve. This is the Worker stage, which we call in the dojo, “putting in the rep’s.” Just getting something right is a long way from the development of a skill, and hundreds or thousands of repetitions stand between knowledge and real ability. Even harder is the Fighter stage, when we must confront those parts of the goal and ourselves that won’t line up with each other through repetition. Change is needed. To keep moving forward we’ll need to sacrifice time, pride, and resources. These obstacles require creativity, grit, and planning to overcome.
With obstacles overcome, we see real change happening. The Achiever stage is when our work begins to show in our growing ability. If we keep up the work and the fight, we’ll eventually be at the top of our group and enter the Winner stage. This stage is when we get to revel in our accomplishments. It ends when we decide to start helping those behind us and we enter the stage of the Teacher. This isn’t necessarily a professional change. It means that others seek our help in their own journeys.
The Teacher stage often lasts a long time. Through teaching we continue to grow and learn as we answer questions and solve problems that never confronted us on our own journey. When we start to teach teachers and connect larger groups outside of our immediate domain, we enter the stage of the Leader. This stage requires us to step back from the minutia and work on the process as a whole. We need to delegate, manage, and motivate. Eventually, to allow others to grow as leaders and to continue our own growth, we move on to the Thinker stage. Handing over the responsibility of leadership lets us relax and use our hard won skill and knowledge to think outside the box and make new discoveries. The Philosopher stage is when we test and formalize those new ideas into improved knowledge for the development of all. At this level of thinking we also inevitably discover that our great accomplishment is just a drop in the ocean of all there is to learn, and to move forward in our journey, must shed our ego again and become Nobody. It is important to see the cycle not as a circle, but as a spiral. Each trip around moves us forward.
As a black belt trains for years and years, the belt becomes tattered. The black fades, the fabric frays, and the belt becomes white again. They can rejoin the beginner class in the next cycle of the spiral, belt new and old and blessed to release the ego once again as an enlightened beginner.