The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first.
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Consider one of the more interesting and psychologically subtle card tricks
performed by highly evolved illusionists. A magician is onstage and asks an
audience member to join him. When the volunteer (a genuinely unplanted
middle-aged man who seems to be enjoying the show) approaches, the
performer holds his attention for a few moments while he handles the cards.
Then the illusionist lays the fifty-two cards (a real deck) on a table and asks the
man to think about a card. Visualize it. The magician then shuffles the cards,
lays the deck on the table, and asks the volunteer to flip the top card. It is the
envisioned card. What happened here? Did the magician really read the man’s
mind and then miraculously separate that card from the other fifty-one? Of
course not.
This particular illusion is very much in line with the controlling of
intention that a martial artist might employ. The key is the subtle
manipulation of the volunteer’s conscious and unconscious minds. It all
happens before the “magic” begins. As the two men stand before one another,
in conversation, the illusionist engages the volunteer. This interaction is
dictated by the magician. The volunteer is answering questions, following,
trying to look good onstage. In the midst of all this, and in a blur that no one
in the audience notices, the illusionist flashes a card. This is the sleight of hand.
The critical point is that the volunteer must unconsciously notice the card
without the observation registering in his conscious mind. He is engaged in
the banter of the illusionist, and then suddenly has a seed planted in his mind.
When asked to envision a card, that choice has already been made for him.
Manipulating the card throughout the shuffle so it remains at the top of the
deck is child’s play for a halfway-decent sleight of hand artist. The subtlety of
this deception is that if the performer fails to fully engage the man’s conscious
mind, then the clever volunteer will realize he’s being programmed and decide
to choose another card—the trick won’t work.
* * *
If a pattern of interaction is recognizable to the adversary, then mental
conditioning will not be terribly effective. In the Push Hands scene I described
above, had my opponent recognized that his ego was being manipulated, he
could have thwarted my plan. My feigned unhappiness and backing up made
him feel powerful, confident, so he was not on the lookout for being set up.

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This allowed a series of subtle conditioning exchanges, which finally erupted
into a throw. If I had really shoved the guy, he surely would have recognized
what I was doing. I had to operate beneath his radar.
This is where Making Smaller Circles and Slowing Down Time come into play.
When working with highly skilled and mentally tough opponents, the
psychological game gets increasingly subtle. The battle becomes about reading
breath patterns and blinks of the eye, playing in frames the opponent is
unaware of, invisible technical manipulation that slowly creates response
patterns. If I understand a series of movements more deeply, in more frames,
with more detail, then I can manipulate my opponent’s intention without him
realizing what happened.
Here is an example of how this might be done. Stand up with your feet
shoulder-width apart. Put your weight in your left leg. Now, imagine
somebody is standing on your left side and pushes into your body and up
through your left arm with a lot of force. How are you going to keep your
balance? Well, you have to lift up your right leg, go with the momentum, and
then replant your right foot a couple feet away and land—as if you jumped
sideways—no problem. Now put all your weight in your right leg, again, feet
shoulder-width apart. If someone were to push you from your left shoulder, you
would have a much bigger problem because your right leg is stuck to the
ground. A fundamental principle of maintaining balance while moving fast (for
example while neutralizing a martial artist’s throw or explosive push) is that
your feet should never cross. Now when you go airborne, your left foot has to
make the long journey past your right if you are going to have any chance of
staying up. You’ll be all crossed up and probably crash into the ground. This is
a simple idea with huge implications.
Much of the Push Hands game takes place with the two players connected
up top. Hands and arms are subtly probing for tension. If I push into an
opponent, he will either resist my force or empty out the attacked part of his
body, dodge the blow, and let the aggression pass by. In either case, there will
be a subtle shift in weight. This is a critical moment. In that blur during
which someone switches weight from one foot to another, the receiving leg is
momentarily stuck. It cannot move. At a high level, athletes have developed
very powerful throws. If someone is slightly off balance or unable to move
freely with incoming force, he will not be able to catch up before he is hurtling
toward the ground. If I trigger a throw toward someone’s right foot at the

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precise moment that his right foot is settling onto the ground, then my
opponent will not be able to correct himself. His footwork will get all twisted
up. This idea is far from unique to the martial arts. If a tennis player has
someone leaning left and hits the ball just out of reach to the right, the
opponent will appear flat footed and paralyzed. If an NFL running back, NBA
ball handler, or World Cup soccer player can get the defender to put weight in
the wrong place at the wrong time, then he can blow on by and leave the guy
tripping over himself. In virtually every competitive physical discipline, if you
are a master of reading and manipulating footwork, then you are a force to be
reckoned with.
So let’s build a game around the simple principle of weight redistribution.
There are two intertwined components to this process. The first is condensed
technique. The second is enhanced perception. Our goal is to take advantage of
the moment our opponent is switching his weight from one foot to another.
There are many weaknesses or tells that may be used to approach this goal—
breath patterns, physical tension, inferior technical understanding,
complacency, emotion, distraction, and an array of other unconscious,
predictable habits can all be homed in on or combined for the desired effect.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s focus on the eyes. Specifically the blink.
First of all, most people blink without knowing it, so they probably won’t
consider it a weakness that may be exploited in competition. Even for top
competitors, there is not much of a sense of danger associated with the blink—
it happens so quickly, everything feels safe. But it isn’t. There is a small change
in awareness that accompanies the flash of eyes, and a highly skilled player can
train himself to exploit it. This is where the methodology of Slowing Down Time
comes into play. If, through incremental training as described earlier in the
book, your unconscious understanding of your discipline of choice has become
sufficiently advanced, and you have learned how to trust your physical and
intuitive intelligence to handle the technical components of your moment,
then your conscious mind can zoom in on very small amounts of data—in this
case, the eyes. Because our minds are so complex, if you give us a small amount
of material to work with, and we do it with great intensity, then we can break
it down into microscopic detail. If our conscious mind is purely focused on the
eyes, they will seem to take a while to blink. We see them beginning to close,
closed, starting to open, and then open again. That’s all we need.

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So let’s say I am doing Push Hands with a very skilled opponent. I’m in the
zone, feeling his weight, his patterns of movement, his eyes. He has certain
tells. Before a blink, maybe his cheek twitches. Maybe a touch of moisture
forms around his pupil. Or maybe his eyes close a tiny bit, then reopen, then
blink. All this is subtle, but I am tapped in. Both of our right legs are forward
and we are moving around the ring. In Push Hands you need to hold your
ground to stay in the ring. Sometimes you have to root off the rear leg but you
don’t want to spend too much time with your weight shifted back since that
gives you nowhere to go: there’s not much give in your structure. Skilled
players have internalized this reality, but their training can be used against
them. We are flowing. Then, on his blink, or just before it begins, I pulse into
a one-two combination, left, right, into his body. My movements are very
small; I don’t put much force into them. Very little seems to be happening.
But my right puts him into his back leg, just barely taking the weight off his
front leg. When I release the pressure from my right hand, in the middle of his
blink, when his presence is slightly altered, his body instinctively settles back
toward his forward leg. In that instant, I trigger into a throw which combines
the fact that he is moving forward, providing momentum, and for a
microsecond anchoring his forward leg to the floor. If I am good, all this can
happen before he has finished blinking. He goes flying onto the ground and
comes up confused.
Time and again I have used this type of strategy in competition, and
afterward opponents have come over to me and implied that I did something
mystical. They were standing and then on the ground, and they didn’t feel or
see anything occur in-between. Of course there is nothing mystical happening,
just the interplay of some interesting psychological, technical, and learning
principles. I read his intention to blink and then controlled his intention by
determining when he would unconsciously place his weight into his forward
leg. If I did this well, my movements—the one-two combination—should
barely have been visible. They served the lone purpose of manipulating weight
distribution. I should point out that the specific example of using a blink is
just one of many options, and it can be neutralized.
When preparing for the 2004 World Championships, my main training