Heiho - Strategy and Tactics in War

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Heiho is a Japanese word that stands for the concept of strategy and tactics
in combat. I once heard the strategy is what you do in the war room and
tactics is what you do once the combat begins, but what ever your definition
is, as martial artists we just think differently than everyone else.

I think it is like successful people thinking of their goals and action
plans like a game of checkers where they are trying to figure out how to
jump opportunities and eventually get to say "king me". Now I guess this is
great since the average person doesn't even know that checkers are there,
what color the squares are or even the purpose of the basic strategy, but as
martial artists, I think we think more like Chess players. 5, 10 or moves in
advance.

With training we learn nonverbal communication and general behaviors and
eventually get to the point where we usually know what someone is going to
do before they do. This understanding of what to reaction to any action that
is created is the key to martial arts training, where we know exactly how
someone is going to react so when the initial action is implemented, the
decisive action has already been achieved, it just may take several moves to
get there.

This key principle of success was stated a long time ago by one of my late
black belts Michael Moffett. In his statement of "Leopards Don't Change
Their Spots", he was discussing that when someone had certain behaviors or
traits, they are unlikely to perform different than that down the road. So
if you find a man that runs around on his wife, steals or lies to people,
you can almost be assured that that behavior is eventually going to turn up
in your dealings with that person. Maybe that is why in days of old, martial
arts teachers sent their elite students to other teachers by way of a letter
of introduction, who very seldom just took someone off the street and
trained them. They knew that if they took in someone that another teacher
vouched for the chances were good they would turn out as great students
while when they took in someone that had a history of doing the wrong things
for the wrong reasons, they would probably get burned eventually. If you
want to predict future behavior, look at past behavior.

This unique ability to see the future before it happens based on natural
laws and an understanding of human nature has been handed down to senior
teachers for generations. This concept of Zanshin in Japanese means perfect
awareness and is the great predictor of success and failure. I guess moral
of the story, is to pick you teachers and who you hang out with well,
because it is in the watching of them, that you learn to predict and
understand the future.

Well I guess a good homework assignment for everyone is to look closely at
whom we are hanging out with and what their influence is doing to you. As my
good friend world champion Lloyd Irvin says, if you hang out with 9 broke
people, you are sure to be number 10.

Well for your information, tomorrow I head for Cozumel for 7 days with
members of inner circle for a "business" trip. Now we have a meeting
tomorrow night but the next one is not till Sunday, so I guess I will just
have to kill some time doing kata on the beach and enjoying the sun at the
all-inclusive 5 star resort. I am sure that all my friends out there do
indeed feel sorry for my inconvenience and discomfort, and that alone makes
me strong enough to endure. J

To You Success,

Terry Bryan, President

American Black Belt Academy