NATURE OF NURTURE.

It was performance anxiety.

This is a post I have put up on YouTube, hopefully, to get new people to come and play with us.

Somethings are never fully explained during training, there is only so much we can cram in our heads, but this is a subject that we should all find space for.

Back in the day I was a Senior Grading Instructor at my Sifu’s school, I would oversee the first Senior grading, which for us was from the open grades up to level 1.

I did this for 4 years before my sifus passing.

When I first agreed to do this Sifu Jim told me to mark them honestly as he wanted to get a fair IDEA of how his school was travelling, but also that no matter what I did he was going to pass all but the truly hopeless.

As requested I did mark them honestly, and most of them failed the grading exam.

Due to this, we established a 13-week prep course that was just about passing the grading, which I also supervised.

The results were better, but not special, at least %50 still failed on paper, this was not due to them being poor at Wing Chun, most had decent skills, it was due to them being poor at being tested.

It was performance anxiety.

Because the sub-school I ran was 40 klm out of the city I was allowed to run my own gradings at the branch for the early grades, after seeing everyone struggle at the grading I ran in the city i began to pass students before the grading, and i would tell them this at least a week in advance, as a result most students were more relaxed and did reasonably well.

When these students reached the level 1 stage they also did well there, by now they had no fear of the grading experience.

I think we can all agree that being amid a “Shit Storm” that is a violent altercation is much more stressful than a grading exam, but how often do we work on this side of the coin.

Training is nothing like the real thing because we will not be the same person that did the training.

NO BATTLE PLAN SURVIVES CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY.