So, would you like your child to have better social skills?

If you answered yes, then one answer comes from an unlikely place, according to an article published yesterday in the New York Times.

I just love this:  Read Fiction (and for younger children, read to them)

Yes, sitting there reading a fiction book has been shown by psychologists at York University in Canada to hone our social skills.

The reason?

Fiction readers could better understand people, empathize with them and see things from their point of view.

Fiction also gives children a better theory of mind and the ability to understand and predict other peoples’ intentions.

NOTE: researchers did not see a benefit from watching TV or video, only reading.

“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

So promote reading as much as I do and make sure your child spends more time in front of a page than in front of a screen (unless it’s an e-reader)

Remember: All Leaders are Readers

Here’s the link to the original article:

Your Brain on Fiction

If April is the cruelest month then March is the luckiest, thanks to the Irish.  People extol the virtues of luck, and being lucky, as if it is some magical quality that you have no control over.  But let’s take a closer look at luck.

• Are you the lucky type that always gets the parking space right next to the store?
• Are you “lucky in love?”
• Do you produce lucky streaks at the craps table in Vegas because you are on a roll?
• Do things always seem to go your way?

If so, or if you know someone like this, we need to talk.

There is another way to describe this type of luck, its called random chance.

I’ll bet that if you add up all the times you were looking for that perfect parking space but had to settle for one a little farther back you’d see that, statistically speaking, you are probably about average in getting the prime spot.  Plus, the higher and faster the turnover rate, the more likely you are to find an open spot up front.

And no previous roll of the dice affects the probabilities on the current roll; it doesn’t change them or make “7’s” more likely than they already are.  That streak is just a statistical hiccup that eventually averages out in the long run.

Sorry to burst your “lucky bubble.” However….I do have Good News!

You CAN affect how lucky you are.

“The harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Once you see the connection between luck and probability, you now have the key to being as lucky as you want. Let’s define luck as a good event, lucky meaning having GOOD LUCK.  Let’s also say that a “lucky outcome” definitely happens once every ten times, so 10% of the time:

Try 1 time, you have a 10% chance of a lucky event.

(people would see you as not very lucky)

Try 10 times, you are guaranteed a lucky event.

(people would say you got lucky)

Try 100 times, you are guaranteed 10 lucky events.

(people would say you are a Lucky Person!)

So how do you control your luck?

Luck Secret #1: Try More

By the one thing you can directly control — how many times you attempt something.  The more you attempt, the greater the likelihood of a lucky event popping up.  This is called “The Law of Large Numbers.” Babe Ruth hit lots of home runs…but he also struck out more than any other hitter of his day.  What do we remember, the home runs or the strike outs?

Luck Secret #2: Try Longer

We have a saying, “Black Belts are just White Belts Who Didn’t Quit” but no one would consider Black Belts lucky.  We all know earning a Black Belt takes hard work, but take note of this luck secret:  the longer you are in the game the better chance you have of being in a position to win. Good events sometimes need time to find you.

Luck Secret #3: Be Somewhere

I know people whose lives consist of the same routine.  They wake up, go to work, come home and watch TV.  And repeat daily.  The narrow scope of their routine only allows for a limited possibility of experience.  There’s little chance of a Lucky Event happening without changing their routine and getting out in the world, doing different things, meeting new people and going to different places.

Luck Secret #4: Be Prepared

“Luck is when Opportunity Meets Preparation”

Be prepared to take advantage of lucky opportunities as they arise.  I’m sure you have many opportunities knock on your door but you are not in a position to profit from them.   If you are looking for a great deal on a new home, NOW is the time because people are walking away from their homes and everything is “on sale.”  If you are prepared, you can tell everyone you found a lucky deal.

If you want to increase your luck remember that L.U.C.K. stands for Laboring Under Correct Knowledge.

One final story about luck:

A man asks God to win the lottery.  (now there’s a truly lucky event).

Each week when he doesn’t win he asks, “God, why won’t you help me?”

To which God replies,”At least you have to buy a lottery ticket.”

Click the link for the full story:

http://newsteamboulder.org/news/scornavacco-martial-arts-exercises-mind-and-body

I witnessed such a game-changer this weekend as the host of “The Martial Arts First Aid Kit Workshop” with Bill Parravano, The Knee Pain Guru.

I’ve known Bill as a martial artist for years and knew that “healing” was his real job, but as we are all wont to do I never really gave much thought about it.  I never saw first-hand what exactly his healing work consisted of until last year.

I was so jazzed about the little taste of it I got that I set up last weekend’s workshop.

Fixing a shoulder injury I had for years was great, but watching a room full of students with various aches, pains and not-completely-healed injuries walk out of the workshop feeling better than they had in years blew me away…and he just scratched the surface.

Bill’s healing work is based on putting your body in a position of comfort so your nervous system sends out the relaxation signal and allows your body to attend to and heal past trauma by itself…

And the best part is that it is Painless.

What Bill does is far removed from painful manipulations and pressing into your body.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those too but Bill’s program is much more sustainable and many of the exercises can be done BY YOURSELF.

It’s funny because several people in the workshop immediately wanted to share what they learned with family and friends.

I’m no different.

I will be integrating his teaching into my own with my adult students and I’m going to help Bill reach as many people as we can.   Like I said, as far as health and healing goes, The Martial Arts First Aid Kit is a game-changer.

You can check out more about Bill at:   TheKneePainGuru.com

And check back in a few days if you want to receive updates, like when the Video Program of the workshop will be available, at:   TheMartialArtsFirstAidKit.com (it won’t be live for a few days)

Ask an Expert about Bullying

Kojak’s line is really an assurance that he loves ya, a rhetorical question but I’m going to answer it anyway.

Here’s my quick answer: Don’t worry about it.  Well, don’t worry about it directly.

Instead, ask yourself this alternate question: “Who, and what, do ya love?”

Worrying about who loves you is akin to worrying about being happy or worrying about your self-esteem. You cannot directly make people love you, be happy or feel great about yourself for no good reason (well, maybe this one but it’s not a good idea). Each of these is a fool’s errand.

Each of the above values follows The Law of Indirect Effort, that they are results of other actions and lack a simple 1-to-1 correspondence.

It brings me to a third, related question people love to ask each other, “is it more important to be loved or to love?“

To love of course, because that is the best way to assure that you will be loved in return–hey, you get both this way.  Loving is attractive, literally, by doing what you love, or loving what you are doing and expressing it to those you love it is inevitable that this same love with come back to you.

On the flip side, longing and neediness are repellent, they push everyone away.  You might get a bit of sympathy for awhile but people will begin to shun you if it keeps up (ask me, I know firsthand).

Who loves you, how happy you are presently and how you feel about yourself are SCORECARDS about how you’ve been doing lately. You can’t erase these scores, nor can you plead with a teacher to raise them undeservedly.

Valentine’s Day at its heart is a perennial reminder to express your love to those who are important in your life (hint, hint) in case you’ve forgotten lately, and haven’t we all to some degree?

“The hole you give through is the hole you receive through.”

Of course I learned to tie my shoes the same way, and when he explained it to me I knew I was in the same boat.  Aside from pure curiosity, I had a vested interest in testing this whole shoe-tying thing out.

I have a pair of LL Bean slippers that are among my favorite things, especially on cold winter days like today.  My aggravation has been that, as comfortable as they are they have leather laces that constantly come untied.  As a result I’m regularly tripping on them and I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with these shoes.  I’ve even been looking at a different kind of slipper to replace them with.

So home I went to try this “new way to tie my shoes.”

How’d it go?

With the correct way, i.e. a stronger knot, my leather laces stayed tied for about a week and I haven’t tripped over them once.  It turns out it wasn’t the slippers’ fault.

Success!  Thanks for the tip Bruce.

Here are three BIG points to take from learning how to tie your shoes:

1.  Never take for certain how you’ve been taught something.

You might not have been shown the best way to do things, and you might not have learned correctly and completely.  Kenpo Grandmaster Ed Parker said that tradition should be bound by knowledge, that tradition should change as we learn more about our world.  There are many ways to perform the same task, some are equally correct while some are objectively superior.  If you’ve learned something incorrectly or inefficiently don’t hold on to it because of habit.

2.   Always be prepared to change and adapt your beliefs and behavior based on new evidence.

This is not waffling, flip-flopping or being wish-washy as politicians are apt to accuse each other of, it’s being an intelligent person.  I’m not talking about changing because of an opinion, but because of new, proven information.  Prior beliefs may no longer serve you and need to go for you to progress.

I’ll never consciously tie my shoes the old way again, based on this new information.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “a mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimension.”

3.  Little Tweaks Make Big Differences.

Sure these two knots are similar and when it comes to tying your shoes it might not matter to you much, but what if that knot was responsible for saving your life?  A little difference like looping the knot in the other direction has major consequences.

Whether it is god or the devil in the details, details matter.  Martial arts students know that the small details are the difference between a technique working and failing utterly, which is why the expert eye of a master instructor is necessary.

I’ve posted a link to the video so you can see for yourself and try it out:

Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes

First, an image immediately popped to my mind: a rough and tough kid bullying the skinny smart kid in class. That image took me back to my own days in school when I began self-defense training because I wasn’t the biggest, toughest kid in class (but I was an honor student). This bumper sticker and its attendant philosophy seemed a distortion of everything I’ve learned martial arts.  Instead of humility and only using martial arts in self-defense, now someone is using his martial arts training to lord it over the smart kids, the successful kids. It seemed very low-class to me, as if this child has nothing else going for him other than the fact that he can beat up other kids.

That mentality is really sad especially to me, a martial arts instructor.

The US has gone from a place where we were proud to show off our children’s accomplishments in school by letting people know that he or she is an Honors Student — it’s an honor — to a place where others might feel bad because someone else is doing better in school than they are so everyone is honored.  Now, parents can just teach their children to beat up other kids who out-perform them in school.  For a time, it seemed that the US was moving away from being a barbaric society but signs such as these make me wonder.

This whole “my kid can choke out your honor student” mentality reminds me of a proposed sequel of sorts to the movie Revenge of the Nerds.  In the original the nerds were tired of being picked on by the jocks and got their revenge in increasingly humorous ways.  The sequel idea was that the nerds are all grown up and control everything because of the rise of technology & the internet and their mastery of both. The former jocks are left out in the cold so these washed up athletes plot their revenge.

Let’s leave aside clique warfare for a second and turn our eyes to the martial arts technique in question: choking or strangling another person until he passes out. Learning to close off the airways and/or blood flow to the brain of another child is serious business. There are 2 factors to consider here: one is the child learning the technique at all/whether or not a child can display correct judgment in its application and, two, is the judgment of the adult teaching this technique to a child.

Consider teaching children how to wrestle. Of course they do so naturally and boys often enjoy wrestling with each other. The goal in wrestling is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mat. Of course there are takedowns and throws but there are no chokes or manipulations of an opponent’s neck. After all wrestling is a sport and no one wants to be injured while playing. Sport is on the other end of the spectrum from self-defense.  Martial arts are exactly that, for war and combat, hence the “martial.” The martial arts contains thousands of techniques and ways to injure an attacker including choking, not all of which should be taught to children.

There are many things the children cannot do because they lack maturity and responsibility. We do not allow our children to drink alcohol, they must be a certain age to be able to drive a car, they cannot enter into binding contracts, they cannot be prosecuted as adults for crimes, etc. Society and our legal system make distinctions between the privileges of adults versus the restrictions placed on minors.

The question is, it ethical and necessary to teach children how to literally choke the life out of each other? What purpose does it serve? Is there some pressing need for children to have the knowledge take the life of a child? Or is this something that should be, like handguns, reserved for use only by adults? Are there other alternative martial art techniques that children could learn to keep themselves equally safe? Would they be equally served by learning every technique just shy of the killing techniques?

When I was a child learning martial arts myself I learned a technique that contain a full-power strike to the opponent’s throat. My teacher told me to be very careful because the strike had the ability to kill the person if enough damage was done to his larynx. Now, when I teach this technique to children I change the target to make it non-lethal; that is my responsibility as their teacher.

I remember thinking to myself that I now had the power to take someone’s life with one strike. Far from being exhilarating, it was scary. Perhaps I had the insight to realize the power I was given and the responsibility not to use it unless absolutely necessary, however, that realization stuck with me for a long time, holding the power of life and death in my hands, literally. Even so, I was a teenager at the time and older than most children who are learning how to choke others out, honor student or not.

Years ago, I heard a story from Small Circle Ju-Jitsu Grandmaster Wally Jay about a martial arts instructor who was teaching a class how to choke each other out. To make sure they were performing the technique correctly he had them all choke him out. Due to being choked over and over by the students in a short time-span he eventually blacked out.  A tragic thing occurred next. No one knew how to help him because he failed to teach any students how to revive someone who had been choked out. The result? He died.

Professor Jay said that if you learn how to hurt someone you must also know how to heal him or her. I cannot begin to count the number of adults I’ve come across who have learned how to choke someone out and do not know how to revive him or her. They all sing the same refrain, “it just never occurred to me (that I needed to know that).”

Jiu-Jitsu, like most martial arts, contains enough techniques to keep children busy and learning self-defense until they grow up to the point when they are emotionally and mentally ready to learn choking or lethal techniques.

When I teach my students ground-fighting I teach them the underlying structure and framework of fighting on the ground.  Later they can build their choking techniques upon that framework and add it to their existing skills when they are older and more mature.

There is absolutely no need for a child to learn how to choke another child into unconsciousness. I’ve heard the arguments for teaching kids chokes and not one has convinced me otherwise.  And bringing out exceptions to the rule (the son of a martial arts teacher usually), children learning chokes and just never being put into a position to hurt someone, or children just being lucky enough not to inflict permanent injury on someone are not valid arguments that we should teach kids how to choke others to unconsciousness or death.

A martial arts instructor who teaches minors how to potentially kill another person retains personal responsibility and culpability for that child’s actions. Teaching martial arts is like giving a child a loaded gun, only this deadly knowledge cannot be taken away as easily as a gun can be.  A child who learns how to shoot can be disarmed by denying him access to guns, but a child cannot “unlearn” how to choke another child out if he abuses his skill.

We have laws to prosecute bartenders who over-serve overtly drunk people who then drink-and-drive and injure other people.  The same is true of adults teaching children how to choke each other out.  If your student chokes another child to death, the authorities will be knocking on your door.

Your judgment of an adult who would teach a child how to choke another child to death must be suspect.  If you heard an adult say to you, “I’m going to teach your child how to potentially kill another child and, by the way, here’s a bumper sticker to slap on your car to brag about his ability,” how would you react?  I doubt the word “trust” would ever come to mind.

I guess it’s time to teach all my honor students how to escape being choked out by some Jiu-Jitsu bully…