Do you ever feel like you’re wearing a mask or must put on an act in front of certain people? Do you feel like the world has impossible expectations for you to meet—or do you put impossible expectations on yourself? Do you feel like you can’t be honest about what you’re thinking and feeling? Do you wish you could be who you feel you are meant to be?
It’s time to get authentic.
In 2021, I was charged by a therapist to figure out what “being authentic” meant to me. Amid a long physical recovery from knee surgery, I’d had a mental breakdown and relapse into anorexia. Fun times. I had enough sense to seek professional help, and I found myself with this seemingly simple but daunting task: be my authentic self.
The year I figured out what authenticity meant to me was also the year that I was out of martial arts entirely. Taekwondo had been my safe place, my happy place, the place where I felt most alive. Perhaps I was too dependent on it to define my identity by the time I had a forced time-out due to my ACL injury. This situation was both a blessing and a curse—on one hand, I had no distractions other than my physical recovery and could focus on rebuilding my mental health. On the other, I couldn’t do the activity that in the past had improved my mental health.
The details of my mental health recovery are on my blog Little Black Belt, so I won’t belabor the details here. My focus for this article is to illustrate how our martial arts practice can help ground us and give us the courage and inspiration to be who we really are. Thankfully I was able to get back to training and accelerate my journey to authenticity. If you’re ready to take off that heavy mask, then tighten your belt, take off your shoes, and walk onto the mat.
Your martial art is a mirror that reflects both your strengths and weaknesses.
Unless you can blend into a large class doing drills and miss the sharp eagle-eye of your instructor (how do they always know?), there aren’t many places to hide when you’re practicing your martial art. You can feel proud and accomplished one day and incredibly frustrated the next. You’re good at one technique while being so-so or, gasp, even “bad” at performing another. You’re not going to learn and master everything overnight, and the faster you can accept that, the better you can adopt that maxim into your everyday life. Leverage your strengths on and off the mat and embrace rather than hide from or resent your weaknesses. That humility makes you more open to learning and growing.
Martial arts are freaking hard to do…and you do martial arts. Isn’t that cool?
Can we stop stressing about tests and tournaments and technique and teaching for a minute to appreciate that we do something that is freaking difficult? Sure, techniques become easier to do over time, but we all started as white belts, and we’re all still here. Whether you’re a hobbyist, instructor, or competitor, just appreciate for the moment that you have learned how to do something difficult, and you keep going back for more. You can adapt and solve problems. Perseverance is not just a tenet of martial arts. It’s a characteristic of committing to showing up every day as your true self.
Martial arts have transferrable skills.
Most people, whether they’ve ever trained or not, have heard that martial arts help develop discipline and respect for others. While this is true, martial arts are so much richer in character-building than people know. Ambition, tenacity, teamwork, compassion, focus, leadership—corporations spend millions trying to impart these qualities onto their employees. We martial artists develop them naturally when we train. Displaying these qualities on a regular basis requires integrity and courage. That is being authentic.
Martial arts bring balance to your mind and spirit.
No, I don’t mean that in a mystical meditating-on-the-mountain-top way, the stereotypes we see in martial arts movies…but there’s truth to that. Martial arts can help quiet and calm the mind. A quiet, calm mind is an open, agile mind that can see situations clearly and learn from them, figure out how to navigate obstacles, and manage a variety of emotions.
See where I’m going with this?
So, if you haven’t felt yourself lately, or you feel like you’re putting up a fake front to the world, revisit your foundation. See what martial arts can teach you besides physical techniques. Your devotion to learning and practicing something difficult, the mental skills you build, and the emotional maturity you gain from martial arts drives you closer to being who you really are. More importantly, you have the courage to show the world who you really are.
Melanie has worked in the healthcare industry since 2004 and lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
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