Side Control
Mary
Have you ever been in a situation where you knew you needed something different than what was commonly available? Perhaps you were frustrated that conventional wisdom wasn’t working for you. Maybe trying to get what you need would rock the boat. Or you had an idea that others around you couldn’t even consider might exist because it was outside of their experience. Most of us have had a problem to solve and maybe needed more than just ourselves to solve it, but the recognized authorities had other priorities.
We hear about how a diverse group can power problem-solving. In previous articles we’ve looked at skills that bring together strong teams. Competent people compose teams using specialists and do remarkable things. Competence can manage diverse teams, bring out many kinds of strengths, fit seemingly-irreconcilable pieces into a mosaic.
This article is about something else. What do you do when you need alignment rather than difference to address a need? Or any other counter-intuitive solution.
Just a note for our (welcome!) new readers. I do recommend you go back to the beginning, this will all make more sense. This article series shows people I know, in roughly timeline-order to illustrate specific traits. Our primary goal is to describe a set of attributes and skills that I believe make up a form of meta-competence (“big-C Competence”) you find in some hyper-effective individuals. These people can do more with less, they help groups solve intractable problems, they are keystones in successful organizations.
People I’ve known have demonstrated those skills to me. Here I’m telling you about those people, in roughly the order I met them. We’re into my thirties, and I have a whole lot of martial arts friends with all sorts of these attributes. (Martial arts people can be impressive on and off the mat.)
This is the second article in a row where I’m specifically looking at senior women martial artists. It’s a rare breed, and not at all surprising they have Competence skills in abundance. But with the last article and this one I’ve chosen complicated attributes to describe. Competence itself, I believe, is made up of a set of skills. But a few are composed of other skills. If you feel like digging down to the “atomic” set, or composing a periodic table of Competence skills, go for it. I’m just calling ‘em as I see them. The one today is a composite skill.
Please keep the goal in mind here. It will be easy to get lost in today’s topic. I believe this is a skill anyone could learn. This skill took me a while to identify at all, and longer to realize is important. A nugget of gold. This example struck me looking back at how brilliantly it succeeded. So let me set the stage with a solid description of the problem. But keep in mind, it’s not about this particular problem, and they will all be different:
If you’re not a martial artist, it might not have occurred to you that most of these arts were created by men for men. Non-men have always trained one way or another, openly these days which is nice. In most schools women and even nonbinary folks are somewhere on the spectrum of “welcome.”
But when most teachers are men, it can be a different experience training if you aren’t. Unsurprisingly, skills women might do especially well will fly under the radar. Techniques may not appear in normal curricula, just “special topics.” A way of moving might be seen as a “shortcut” or a “cheat,” but it’s really just a natural way someone with a very different body structure might need to move to generate the same effect.
The way physical differences impact training is poorly understood almost everywhere. We (martial artists) pretty universally know that physical differences matter, but how they matter and how to exploit differences for effectiveness…that’s a crapshoot. Beyond introductory levels, how your body is formed, what it can do, how it can move, small individual details greatly affect what you’re able to do and what you’ll be good at.
To use myself as an example, as a young person training I had pointy hip bones that were perfectly situated to make certain throws and strikes easy. Later in life, after having a child, all of that changed. Range of motion changed. How much my feet naturally turn out, center of balance. It was like being assigned a new body. Different techniques got easier, others wouldn’t work for me the same way anymore. Every weight fluctuation in my life (which have been considerable) affected balance, strength, flexibility, timing. And that was all in one person. I’ve found myself re-learning fundamental skills time and time again. Every martial artist should do that. Bodies change. Limitations creep in, and experience and physical improvement expands our understanding of the fundamentals. Understanding grows as we revisit techniques. But for some folks it’s a more radical sort of relearning than for others as our bodies operate very differently from year to year.
If changes over age and condition matter, imagine the importance of differences in height, mass, bone and muscle configuration then between different people. You may stand in a line learning a movement, and practice it hundreds or thousands of times, but if the person next to you outweighs you by eighty pounds, is less flexible and nimble, and your head comes up to their shoulder, how that technique looks and works will be wildly different.
Martial arts may be grouped into styles and schools, but in reality there’s one martial art per person. We each have our own. But we don’t make it up, we learn it. These arts are taught from an assumption of similarity. Teachers show how things work for them. Good ones might be able to troubleshoot. If they’ve seen a lot of bodies they can suggest things that don’t apply to their own. But most teachers just teach what they know. It’s the easiest and safest ground. People are experts in their own experience. Some student’s bodies and minds are more like their teachers’ than others are.
As a student, the people you’re emulating may have extremely similar bodies, or they may be way on the other side of a bell-curve (or many bell-curves) from you. Either way, if you want to be good then you need to figure out from the models you have how to tailor what you learn to your own experience. Everyone has to do that. It’s a whole lot easier if you can buy a size of the rack and just hem it than if you need to take it apart and build something to entirely different measurements.
But there’s another level to it. Mostly you’ll be learning from people who probably learned from people who were also on the same side of most bell-curves. Teachers probably didn’t have a lot of examples of their teacher adjusting for big physical or other differences. So it’s not just “the way the technique works for me” or even “the way the technique was taught to me,” it’s “the way teaching operates.”
So let’s spare a little grace for instructors doing their utmost to teach their style as it was taught to them. None of us know what we don’t know. Most MA teachers have no internalized understanding of just how much difference exists for people the least like them. And that shows in attrition in most arts. The people least like the instructors are the ones least likely to stay.
Some arts are unforgiving, looking for precise likeness in movement style. The art I started in was never going to be a good one for me because its basic stance was pigeon-toed, and my feet turn out a bit duck-footed and don’t turn in without effort and discomfort. Practice made me better, lots of people practice arts that aren’t a good natural fit for them, there’s value in it. But looking back, I wouldn’t have recommended that art to young me. “Good fit” gives a big leg up if what you want to be is awesome. But what if every art is a little “off” because the people who designed it didn’t have you in mind?
Back to individual learning: If your teacher mostly moved and had success with the same things their teacher did, it may seem to them that your very different movement is simply “less good” rather than spotting that you’re configured differently and you need training in your own personal art. If you can’t be seen as good at the beginning skills, it’s unlikely the advantages you have (almost anyone can find skills they can rock) or altogether new ways to approach problems will ever be identified at all. You’ll always be starting from behind. You’ll be “tries hard” instead of “gifted.”
I promise, this is going somewhere.
Today I’m going to talk about Mary (not the same one I wrote about several articles ago). This Mary trains in a primarily grappling art, starting a couple of decades ago when that wasn’t so common.
Mary, who is now quite senior, was one of those few women in a local school. Mary was a dedicated, determined student. She trained every free moment she could, she watched videos, studied documentation, went to seminars, she did it all. She was good too. She picked up skills quickly. She started after I did by a fair bit in that particular art, and rapidly got much better than I was. You never want to let Mary get a hand on you because she’ll relentlessly work her way from an innocuous grip to something a boa constrictor would be impressed by.
In a way, that style on the mat is akin to the life skill I’m (getting to) here. The ability to spot a goal and patiently work yourself to it, relentlessly.
Mary used her skill to take a run at solving this “I’m different from my teacher” problem.
The culture of MA is interesting. Depending on what school you attend, you may be more or less welcome in other schools. Your teacher may be more or less encouraging of their students visiting other schools. Even when openly accepted, undercurrents of disapproval are frequent. Ego is a problem in martial arts.
The situation here locally, around fifteen years ago, was like that. Several schools of a popular intense grappling art operated in the area where I live. Each school had one or two women in it. But the teachers all had egos. Training at other schools at the time was anathema. The guys didn’t do it. The teachers didn’t like each other. It was a thing. The women though weren’t getting what they needed isolated in their schools. In grappling, perhaps more than other types of style, body configuration matters a lot.
There are weight classes in competition because weight matters. How long your limbs are, matters. How strong you are and what kind of strength it is matters. How your joints move, which way everything flexes and how far matters a lot. As people are often happy to tell us for wrong and misguided reasons, “men and women are built differently.” The Men/women bell-curves on all of those measures and many more certainly overlap, we’re all human, but the distribution is wildly different. A grappling art originated by women for women would be different than the ones we’ve inherited. (I would enjoy a discussion of that frankly, it’s just my opinion but I think a strong one.)
Mary, an avid student, rapidly improving, was getting a lot out of her training, no question. But what she was getting was still limited and she knew it (we all know, it’s not a secret to us). It’s a disquiet that affects most women who train in mostly-male schools. We know there’s more to be had. Diversity isn’t the solution, or not the whole solution. More training with people unlike us doesn’t help us learn as effectively as we could.
In the context of the time, training in one school, in an environment where intra-school visiting was actively discouraged, where it would be thought of as disloyal, might put a student on the “outs” with their own teacher, Mary still sought out those other women. She and a couple of the others carefully and thoughtfully identified that what they needed was workshop time with others who had the same problem.
This is where Mary’s patient, friendly, relentless, boa-constrictor, chess-game style of training paid off in real life. A conversation here, an opportunity there, a bit of leverage. Once Mary had a grip on an acknowledgement, or permission to use a training space, or someone like-minded, she just inched to progressively better position.
Its not unusual for women to be assigned to partner with each other in regular classes (when there are partners to be had.) Sometimes it’s for helpful reasons (it can be easier for beginners to learn technique paired with someone built similarly, weight classes exist in sports for good reason). Sometimes for stupid reasons (teachers assume guys won’t want to train with women and that it’s ok to let that attitude exist; or they think women will be intimidated or even injured by guy partners; or even more purely sexist nonsense than that.) But I’ve never heard a male teacher articulate putting women together as partners so they can figure out what they’re capable of, different from the art is as it’s being taught to everyone. The kind of humility it would take to acknowledge “I can’t teach you enough, maybe you students can figure it out together” isn’t what you see in martial arts instruction.
That’s the skill we’re discussing today. I posit that Competent people see untapped potential and how to achieve it. It takes this skill to see when more than what’s on the menu is possible. We all have blind-spots caused by “the way it’s always done.” Seeing more than exists is a rare and precious skill, and that’s part of it. You might have seen “lateral thinking” puzzles. In the world we’re not presented with tidy written scenarios where you can hypothesize about blocks of ice in a sealed room. Lateral thinking in real life means sensing that something new is possible if you don’t just follow all the same steps prescribed for you. Solving for the unknown means applying unusual solutions. For example, knowing when alignment is needed rather than more different views. Most people fail to swim upstream. Or they keep swimming rather than getting out of the water and walking upstream. The status quo is a comfortable place to be. Unless it holds you back.
I’m not trying to have a DEI discussion here, or discuss privilege, or safe space. (I’m also not not doing that, but that isn’t the point). Keep your eye on the goal. The goal is understanding this skill that allows some people to solve problems others might not even realize exist. Let’s look at how Mary went about that.
Mary trained constantly and was getting progressively better. She had some natural talent, but also she did everything a good student would. She got better, but Mary wanted to be outstanding. In her art it’s pretty easy to tell how good you are, because you constantly work out with other people. Each round one partner wins and the other doesn’t. More skillful people can win against heavier, stronger opponents. If what you like is to know exactly how good you are, it’s not a bad system to train in.
Mary wanted to be much better. She saw other women wanting the same thing. Something in Mary recognized that she wasn’t alone, and that things didn’t always have to be just as they were then. She spotted the problem of a group of people serious about being good at something, not learning at the same pace as others regardless of effort, and, objectively and subjectively, measured as less skilled at the art they were being taught.
The obvious process of “go to the people who are good at it and learn from them” only gets this group so far. Maybe their life circumstances aren’t the same, maybe a things simply work differently for them. All of the reasons organizations fail at inclusion goals might be the fire that germinates this skill. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the world has far more needs than inventions. If the ability to spot a need, find others with the same problem, and make progress implementing solutions was a common trait, I think most of those needs would go away.
Mary decided to address the problem of how to get better faster when you’re different from your teachers. In spite of overt disapproval of training between schools, they found mat time when any woman from any school could visit and practice together. The teachers weren’t part of it, so the group could deflect concerns about “poaching” of students. It wasn’t for pay, so it didn’t cut into anyone’s revenue. Without writing a novel I can’t give you enough detail to convey all of why and just how difficult it was to create a women’s open mat. Today it probably seems obvious. Women’s open mat is common in lots of places now, but it wasn’t at the time. This was a new idea at that place and time.
None of the instructors was wild about it of course. Jealous of their own students, ego overload. Conveying the need for “extra training” made it a little more ok. Women at the time weren’t highly regarded in the art. More “novelty” or “mascot” or “second-class” than anything. So the need for extra training was believable. In that style, more mat time is always respected. No one questions more practice. It’s all about “dirt time.” Men tend to dismiss gaggles of women getting together. They thought it was more socializing than training (I heard that said more than once).
But Mary recognized she had a problem to solve. That group needed to try things with people closer to them on the bell curves. People who would be open to experimentation. These women weren’t instructors at the time, we didn’t have any women instructors in the area then. So it was intensely collaborative. They taught each other and learned from each other. Anyone of any level and any school (even not the same style) was welcome. They became close-knit. Many of them still train. Some are black-belts in an art that doesn’t award a whole lot of those. Folks from that group have won in impressive tournaments over a lot of years. I suspect they would point to this early activity giving them an edge.
The skill I’m describing here is about seeing a problem others don’t see (“I’m not built like my teachers, and things don’t work for me the same way they do for most people.”) Believing there can be a solution. Then seeing a path to it that may not be obvious. Like finding others who share the problem (“none of these other women are built like their teachers either.”) And putting in the work to see if that will solve it.
As I said at the beginning, this isn’t one skill, it’s a composite of several. Seeing a problem where others miss it is the first part. Seeing a solution, and how to create a team to solve it works the same whether it’s needing a diverse team or an aligned team. You need the right people. You just need to see when one or the other sort of group is what you need.
The popular phrase “if you can see it, you can be it” works when someone has bootstrapped up to become an example. Women in these arts now have lots of mentors available. At the time, here, they didn’t. The activity of bootstrapping in a group is unusual. Every new major advance in anything requires bootstrapping. I had the opportunity to train in another art where there had already been bootstrapping. The senior women would teach newer ones, informally, out of sight of the regular structural authorities (nearly all men). But at some point, there was probably a lateral-thinking bootstrapper like Mary, a bit of grit to start the pearl.
Mary has a particular personality that makes things easy. She’s got no evidence of ego. Anyone who knows her has heard “hey friend!” She means it. People she’s known for years are “friend” and people she just met are also “friend.” She was able to overcome a lot of ego in the environment, obstacle to what she needed, by not challenging it. Ever. Mary just wanted to try things, and it was easy to let Mary do that and not feel threatened by it. So in the face of, at best, condescension, Mary created an opportunity. Lateral thinkers are more likely not to get trapped shoving against boulders. They’ll smile, and find another way around.
Observing Mary’s open mat and the people I knew there over a number of years, I saw serious effectiveness. I saw Competence skills in abundance transforming each of those individual women’s own personal martial arts in a number of ways. First, having unqualified positive support was huge. Celebrating small achievements, breaking things apart, sharing what works best and what doesn’t so others could emulate or avoid it with more success than they often found in regular class.
Mary modeled a very different sort of martial arts instructor than the standard type. One who liked to be questioned and challenged. One who would teach and seamlessly learn. One who considered the group, not herself to be “the teacher.”
At times the idea of a women’s school was floated. That idea might have had merit, but for a lot of reasons people don’t want to start their own schools, or leave the organizations they’re in. They just want to get better, to find what’s possible. They may get 80% of what they need, and where they are mostly works for them. Most of the “let’s get a group together and see what else there is” activities are just trying to supplement. To figure out what of “the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t work for some people, what would work instead, and what new things might be possible that never would be otherwise.
Seeing an opportunity and doing something about it are different. Identifying others who have the same capabilities and the same obstacles, pulling people together outside the eye of the establishment to figure out what “more” looks like. This isn’t about martial arts. Consider any business, any sport, any hobby, any group where it seems weird that only some sorts of people seem “good” at an activity or get promoted consistently. There are opportunities in that gap. Someone with the right vision can see them, and capitalize on them. Not just to help close the gap, but to make entirely new things that might benefit everyone.
Focus on the skill, not the context. We are all swimming in the environment we’re used to. We have blind spots. We do things the way it’s always been done. This martial arts context is nothing unique. It’s not surprising or unusual for authorities and experts to think within the systems that created and support them, or to be blind to experiences and opportunities alien to them. It’s usual to understand people who are like us, and have to work to see how people unlike us might be great too. Our default version of “normal” is us. If it was easy to see potential, we would all do it all the time.
We often hear the idea that bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and abilities in a team, group, or organization results in new and better things. That’s true. Sometimes within those diverse teams, bringing together pockets of people who are the same to overpower their own obstacles can generate new things for everyone. Someone with lateral thinking skill will see when possibilities exist and have a notion when an unusual approach might achieve them.