Am I a nag?

So, you're tired of nagging your son or daughter to go out and hit the bag. What to do?

If you're more of a light-hearted student, probably they're not going to be practicing a ton at home. But that person that's pretty focused and really trying to get after it, they're going to be working at home even if you go to class every day. You're going to have some days where you need to go home and hit the bag, or you're having some trouble with something, you got to hammer it out, or maybe you're going to be rolling with a dummy or rolling with a family member.

And so when you find that you have to nag, we're kind of robbing them of something. It's a little bit of a Bill Hicks thing. He's a comedian from like the 90s, dating myself a little bit there. One of the things that he said at the end of one of his specials, and I think it's actually very true, is that primary to most people, there's one of two motivators you're going to have at any given time, and it's very binary. It's fear or it's love.

If you're being motivated by love or fear, you can still do the same thing. If you're nagging, then what you're doing is you're motivating them to do it just to avoid pain. You're just hammering them and it's this pain in their ear and they're feeling shamed or guilty or I'm letting somebody down. Now they'll go out and practice. They'll go hit the bag. If you really hammer them and make it just truly an awful thing, they'll get off their rear end and they'll go out and smack the bag and there's not going to be a lot of joy there. They're not going to fire those kicks out like we had hoped. Not going to get a lot of hip in that punch. They're going to do the bare minimum. I feel like I'm about to quote that old movie Office Space. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled.

So we have to use a different tool. And it's tougher. We have to appeal to their need to be better, their desire to be better.

We have to be careful. Sometimes we'll say, hey, if you can do this, we'll go out and get pizza. Or go and get ice cream, or I'll buy you the thing, or an extra hour of tablet time. And I think there are times where maybe that's appropriate. They just took a big tournament. Hey, let's go out and get pizza. Just reward them for doing the tournament. Yeah, that's fine. But I think what we have to do is we have to try to build in them a love of the process, a love of learning the thing, refining it, cleaning it up, and moving forward. If they feel connected to the outcome, hey, I want to do well at this tournament, then I think that means a lot more.

If we can speak to their potential, then we say to them, look, you're talented, you're capable, but all the talent in the world's no good if you don't take and sharpen that tool and make it clean and make it really work. We have to appeal to their better characteristics and say look you're good at this. You can do this. You can achieve this. You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

And if they don't do it then there may be other problems. Maybe they don't feel freedom in their day-to-day life. Or maybe they're just having what we all have as human beings. We didn't feel like getting up that day and doing the thing. In that case, it may require not nagging, but physically pick them up under the arms if they're small enough. I'm going out with you. We're going to do this together. It may require modeling from the parent.

If they're really that dead set against it, maybe they're in the wrong thing. One of the quotes that I've often heard is, kendo is for everybody. Not everybody's for kendo. Jiu-jitsu is for everybody, but not everybody's for jiu-jitsu. Some people don't want to have another person laying on them sweaty and heavy and restricting their breathing. Taekwondo is for everybody. Not everybody's for taekwondo. Maybe they don't want to get kicked upside the head. It's not an irrational response. If it's really that bad, maybe there's a bigger disconnect between the practice and the person. And it's one of those things as parents, we have to sit down and assess, well, what's going on here.

If you're nagging, you're using the wrong tool. Even if they do it, they're not really going to do it. We have to cultivate something deeper in them. Acknowledging their own capacities, their own potential, and understanding that even if they're talented, they need to do the work.

You can go Star Wars on this one. Why did everybody like Luke Skywalker? Because he got shot in the arm by the little training droid. Why did people not like Rey? I think it's because she just showed up and could do everything immediately. Nobody can relate to that. Even Michael Jordan lost some games in high school.

Once they understand that they themselves can be motivated by fear or love, that motivation is very playful. It's very open. It'll experiment. It'll go, what if we did this? What if we did this other thing? Fear tends to be very focused, narrow, and very short term. It sprints, but it doesn't last a marathon. Fear is useful. We can get through a bad situation with it, but it won't last.

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