“Every good athlete can find the flow but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible.”
Steven Kostler

This website is basically devoted to exploring the mental aspects of Wing Chun. This is really what we can accomplish on a website. Most of Wing Chun teaching requires in-person contact. The instructor shows you. They watch you try it.  They correct over time. Then there is the feel of drills like Chi Sau. But Wing Chun, perhaps more than most fighting technologies, requires a firm grasp of the mental game to achieve competence, let alone excellence. While it is crucial to put in the hours doing the forms and drills, it is just as important to consistently use such mental tools as visualization and to organize and plan your training. All of these tactics taken together can bring us closer and closer to our goal, which to have a combat skill hardwired into our body. At its best, this skill expresses itself as doing the right thing at the right time in combat.

Over the years I’ve been training the significance of the mental game in sports has been gaining in appreciation. Sports psychology has gained respect and so have various other methods to study physical excellence. And it shows, on the fields and courts of our sports, and in the Olympics. Records are broken regularly.

Doing the right thing at the right time effortlessly and with the sort of lightening genius that the body can sometimes manifest (when we get out of the way with our slow, day to day mind) is described as flow, a term coined by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow, according to him, is when you are so “involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced this state in your Wing Chun training. I have here and there, if only all-too briefly. Your skills are suddenly heightened and everything seems easy. Your body seems to do everything “of itself.” Your timing is perfect and effortless. Your body feels relaxed and you have endless reservoirs of energy. But the next time you train, it’s gone!

How do we learn to enter this state and stay there, at will? This is the subject of The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

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By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain

1) Learn One Thing at a Time.

It is better to learn one thing well than to half-learn two things. For teachers, the reverse is, teach one thing at a time. I never do this – sorry students! I’m way too talkative. Pick one problem area or new skill and train it diligently before moving on to the next thing. This is what the pro athletes do.  Focus and plan.  Pick out one weakness or new skill and work on it.  Then pick another one.  Repeat.

2) Quantity Before Quality 

Everyone is awkward at first. No one does a new skill perfectly right out of the gate. In fact, if you already know how to fight, when you train a new approach, you will start by becoming worse. This is because fighting is all about developing reflexes. If you start putting in new reflex actions, at first, your body will be confused how to react – the old way or the new way. Press on until the new reflex is ingrained.

You’ll continue to have revelations about movements and techniques and principles throughout your martial arts career.  I’ve been training Wing Chun since 2000, and I still have new realizations about the system all the time, even about basic concepts like the stance or turning, which you learn the first day.  Learning happens not all at once but by a slow process of accumulation and removal, as with sculpture.  A little goes on and a little comes off and it slowly looks more and more like the ideal form (but its never completely there).

3) Watch and Visualize

This is an under-rated aspect of learning outside of professional sports.  You must watch your teacher closely.  Learn by watching.  Then imagine yourself moving as your teacher moves.  Go through the motion in your mind as you execute the move perfectly.  Visualization is the secret Sports Psychology “sauce” that separates the good from the great.

4) Find a Training Partner 

This is key in Wing Chun.  Its a two person fighting style.  No one ever became great just playing the wooden man and the pole.  It sucks, if you are not that social, but you will never really advance to the higher levels of skill until you find someone to work with who can sign on to a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship of training.  You need to help one another.  If your partner always catches you with a certain technique, they should be willing to help teach you how to beat that technique.  It must be a win-win relationship.  If you are really lucky, you are in a school where you have multiple training partners who follow this philosophy.

This post is loosely based on a section from SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham.