Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Neutralizing Conflict: Awareness, Will, and Skill

To successfully neutralize conflict requires 3 elements: awareness, will, and skill.

Awareness refers to one's speed of response to conflict.  This is the most important skill of the 3.  One can have great will and skill, but if they are blindsided by an opponent, they will be defeated.  Awareness requires a martial artist to assess a situation as quickly as possible to derive as much useable information as possible.  Through training, this speed of response can be improved to the point that opponents will be outmaneuvered and every move anticipated.  Ways of improving awareness include meditation, where the mind is cleared of non-immediate worries and apprehensions, and free sparring at full speed with full control.

Will refers to one's immediate likelihood to respond to conflict.  A martial artist who holds back during critical moments may lose their chance to resolve a conflict scenario in their favor.  Additionally, frequent failure to engage opponents results in a negative feedback loop where the martial artist doesn't attack fast enough and is repeatedly defeated, resulting in a slow, dispirited martial artist.  Will to engage can be improved by training with pads for power and speed, sparring with a nonresisting opponent, and meditating on the necessity of an opponent's defeat.

Skill refers to one's physical ability to perform techniques with speed, accuracy, and endurance.  This capacity, sometimes expressed as fluency in behavior analytic literature, encompasses physical strength, endurance, and flexibility.  It can be improved through practice of forms, burnout sets of techniques under a time limit, and slow, methodical practice of movements without a time limit or fatigue.

Certain arts prioritize one of the three capacities above the others.

Awareness heavy arts include Yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, and Indian meditation.  These arts directly neutralize the conflict within, which encompasses anger, sadness, loneliness, lust, and other negative internal states which prompt a person to act in ways that promote, rather than neutralize, conflict.  In theory, by neutralizing internal conflict, these arts can remove the necessity of conflict in general.  However, in practice, these arts can result in a martial artist who is a pushover in conflict with others.  They will easily yield their money, resources, sex partners, and time to opponents rather than engage in conflict which might trouble their solitary peace.  Though this response is not necessarily wrong, it is also needlessly soft.  These arts tend toward peace as a guiding principle.

Will heavy arts include Krav Maga, MMA, and other aggressive arts designed to inflict maximal damage to an opponent.  Awareness is secondary, as some of these arts assume that the opponent will act more quickly than the martial artist can anticipate, such as during sneak attacks.  As such, these martial arts seek to ingrain gross motor patterns that effectively destroy, and thereby halt, a threat.  Problems with this approach include a lack of awareness, which can result in runaway emotions in the martial artist, fear, impulsive attack, and emotional 'shell shock' following violent altercations.  Additionally, lack of fine motor control can result in sloppy movement that unintentionally aggravates conflict, even when the martial artist is not explicitly fighting with anyone, such as during accidental bumps in a crowd.  Most damning of all, will heavy approaches to training are very difficult to effectively scale.  Gentle redirection is difficult to control after long periods of time aggressively beating opponents in training.  The will heavy arts are ideal for soldiers and other institutional martial artists for whom self preservation and conflict avoidance are unimportant.  These arts tend toward aggression as a guiding principle.

Skill heavy arts include Kung Fu (Wushu in particular), Taekwondo, Japanese martial arts systems, and other traditional approaches to martial arts.  These arts lend themselves well to awareness and can develop superbly well rounded trainees with both soft and hard conflict skills.  However, these styles can also create rigidity, both in the physical and behavioral sense, when appropriate free sparring is not included regularly in training.  Additionally, in the absence of explicit awareness training, these arts can result in highly efficient, physically skilled martial artists who overlook conflict, exercise poor tactics, and ultimately are unable to implement their abilities in real combat.  These arts tend toward expression as a guiding principle.

As the reader may have surmised, no single martial art will satisfy all aspects of conflict neutralization.  The martial artist must independently seek to balance their abilities across the 3 domains so as to maximize their effectiveness at neutralizing conflict, both internally and externally.

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