Listening, or ting jing, typically starts by building skill through listening inside of yourself. The second step is to take that skill and apply it to another person. Once you can feel yourself, you can feel someone else (a good rule of thumb for developing lots of other internal skills as well).

Try the same approach with your partner.

When you put hands on them, don’t look everywhere trying to find errors. Relax, take your time, and listen to their whole body. What is the single loudest error? What is screaming out at you to be capitalized and pushed?

Find it. Push it.

Communicate with your partner. Have them fix it.

Take another look around. What is the next loudest error?

Repeat.

This process might sound simple and intuitive. You might be asking yourself, “Aren’t I already doing this?”

Probably, but you’re taking the specific skill that you gained listening inside yourself and intentionally applying it to another person. The brain is a very complicated structure (actually… it’s the most complicated structure in the universe). There’s a lot of complex wiring that goes on in there.

Whenever you’ve built a skill in one area that you want to transfer a different area, you have to tap into the original wires for that skill by intentionally remembering/thinking about the skill you developed in the first place. Otherwise the skill doesn’t transfer as well and your brain starts to make brand new wiring.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

So take the same approach you did with your own errors. Listen to the whole body for the loudest and most obvious error. Have them fix it. Repeat.

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I’m sure you’ve realized this by now. You could be a lot better at internal martial arts than you are. But…

Something is holding you back. It’s not complicated. You know what it is:

You don’t practice enough.

Just like anything else you’re “supposed” to do, practicing is something you tell yourself you will do more of and never do.

The problem is, you really do want to see progress. You’re interested in gaining skill and going farther with your abilities. But when it comes time to choose between sitting at a computer or training hard (after a long day at work)…

So what’s the solution?

There are four steps to fixing this issue. I’ll cover the first in this post and fill you in on the rest later.

The first step is to find your “intrinsic motivation.”

Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from inside you. This is the good stuff. This is what drives you. This is what gets you off the chair and doing stuff.

What doesn’t get you off the chair and doing stuff (but helps you sit back down in the chair with some extra guilt) is called extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of you.

If you’ve ever said to yourself “I should train” or “I’m supposed to train,” that’s extrinsic motivation. It feels like someone outside of you is wagging their finger at you. If you’ve been running on extrinsic motivation, this is a great time to switch.

So how do you find your intrinsic motivation to train?

Here’s one way:

Come up with a short list (around five items) about why you want to train more. It can be things like health, the desire to be confident in defending yourself and loved ones, the satisfaction of developing yourself. Whatever you want. One important note…

They have to be your reasons.

Remember, if they aren’t your reasons for wanting to train more, you’re running on extrinsic motivation. Stay away from that stuff.

Once you’ve completed your list, put it somewhere you can see it regularly.

Remember, this is only the first step (discovering your intrinsic motivation.

Now, if you want to know what to train go join Clear Tai Chi Online for only $5.

“Why do you go so slow? How does this help you if the guy is coming at you crazy fast?”

You’ve all heard this. It’s a common critique of internal martial arts. People often hold up the slow training of internal martial arts as an example of why the arts won’t work in real life.

First off, slow is not the only speed we train at.

It’s just one speed.

Second, slow training has a host of benefits that you can’t get with any other method.

It’s interesting that so many people don’t recognize this obvious point. Other difficult skills like playing an instrument are built on a foundation of slow practice. So much so, that any guitar player I ever met would say it was the secret to great playing. Anybody who didn’t say that? They’re guitar playing sucked. Consistently.

There’s one benefit to slow training in particular that I want to highlight because it’s something that beginners often take too long to understand and is easy for intermediate and advanced practitioners to forget.

Slow training teaches you to “keep your eyes open.”

When I say this, I don’t mean to literally not close your eyes (although this is also recommended). What I mean is that when a person gets overwhelmed because of fear, they will often “close their eyes.” They stop actively perceiving what is going on and become purely reactive.

They flail a lot.

It might work now and again, but it’s not your ticket to high level skill.

High level skill is built on control and perception. It’s built on a person’s ability to intelligently respond to an event. The more a person can perceive about an attack, the easier it is to respond.

So how do you build this perception? You may have guessed where this is going.

Slow training gives you the opportunity to open your eyes, watch what is happening, and respond. It gives you the opportunity to take each moment and hold it under a microscope to see what is going on, both with your eyes and your sense of touch.

Think of it like movie film. The more frames per second in the film, the smoother everything looks. This is like what slow training is building. It helps you see in more frames per second.

If you’ve built this perception ability at the slow speed, then you build it at faster speeds. You have to be careful to “keep your eyes open” though at the faster speeds. You have to discipline yourself to stay calm and watch what is happening.

“What if the guy’s coming at you crazy fast?”

If you’ve trained this, you see everything. Going slow is precisely what builds your ability to perceive what happens at full speed.

Join Clear’s Tai Chi Online to learn the drills and exercises that turn slow training into crazy fast skill.

When you’re learning a skill, it’s important to have a great teacher and to be a great student. Both are necessary for building skill quickly and effectively. But…

You can only maximize one side of the exchange: the student side.

The problem is that, in America, learning tends to be something that “happens to you.” In school, the teacher teaches and the student plays a passive role in the process (you forget most of the information because you never engaged it in the first place).

If you’ve ever taught someone internal martial arts in any capacity, you may have run into this. People often start training internal martial arts with an expectation: you teach me, the information washes over me, I pass a test. Now I’m a skilled martial artist!

Unfortunately, no.

So how do you avoid this passive role and become a bigger part in your own learning process? There are lots of ways to learn better, but there’s a quick and easy method that is simple and effective.

Learn the art of asking good questions.

Good questions are a great way to draw out information from your instructor. Asking good questions saves you time and helps your instructor to articulate obscure concepts (ever run into an obscure concept in your training?).

So here’s a quick and simple method for asking the best questions in order to get the most out of your instructor.

• Figure out what you know.
• Figure out what you don’t know.
• Tell the instructor what you know, then ask a very specific questions about what you don’t know.

This may not be earth shattering, but the approach is powerful. When you know what you know and tell this to your instructor, you help your instructor avoid telling you things you already know. Doing this helps you and your instructor parse down exactly what you need help with at that moment.

If you’ve done the first two steps, you’ve already done a lot of thinking on your own that your instructor didn’t have to do for you. Sometimes you even answer your own questions. The point is that taking a moment to clarify what you know and what you don’t know means you shave off the fluff from your question and get right down to what you need. Your instructor (I promise you) has a much easier time answering clear questions like this compared to vague fuzzy questions that are difficult to follow.

Also, when you ask questions, you engage what’s going on and you automatically start learning faster. Your brain is engaging the material, searching through your knowledge base, and generating questions. Psychologists call this called “priming”. The gist? You will automatically start learning faster just by thinking of really good questions to ask. Even if you don’t get an answer, the process primes you for learning.

So give it a shot. Follow the three steps and see what happens next time in class. If you’re an instructor, try teaching this approach to your students and see if the questions you get back are better than before.

One of the biggest criticisms of long distance training is that you can’t ask your teacher questions.

Of course this isn’t exactly true.

Just hit reply and ask about any of our training.

Or better yet log into our online forums and ask there. Not only can you get answers and insight from a variety of skilled folks you can also see the questions others have asked and benefit from them as well.

All our online courses include access to member only forums for Q&A.

If you’re not yet a member of Clear’s Tai Chi Online go check it out.