The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

part of our lives. We would be fools to deny such a rich element of the human
experience. But, when our emotions overwhelm us, we can get sloppy. If fear
reduces us to tears, we might not act effectively in a genuinely dangerous
situation. If we seethe when someone crosses us, we may make decisions we
come to regret. If we get giddy when things are looking up, we will probably
make some careless mistakes that turn our good situation upside down.
Competitors have different ways of approaching their emotions in the heat
of battle. Many either feel that their natural movements are irrepressible or fail
to consider the question altogether. These are not ideal approaches—if we don’t
think the issue through, chances are we will be controlled by our passions.
There are performers who recognize the disruptive potential of emotions and
try to turn them off, become cold, detached, steely. For some personalities this
might work, although in my opinion denial tends to melt down when the
pressure becomes fierce. Then there are those elite performers who use emotion,
observing their moment and then channeling everything into a deeper focus
that generates a uniquely flavored creativity. This is an interesting, resilient
approach based on flexibility and subtle introspective awareness. Instead of
being bullied by or denying their unconscious, these players let their internal
movements flavor their fires.
Over the years, at various stages of my development, I have found myself all
over this spectrum. In time, I have come to believe that this last style, rooted

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in my notions of The Soft Zone and The Internal Solution, is a potent launching
point for a unique approach to performance. In this chapter, I’ll focus on one of
the most decisive emotions, one that can make or break a competitor: Anger.
As we enter into this discussion, please keep in mind the three steps I described
as being critical to resilient, self-sufficient performance. First, we learn to flow
with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to
use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us
off our games. Finally we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally. We
learn to make sandals.
My own experience with anger in competition began with being jerked
around by a rival of mine whom I mentioned in Part I of the book. This kid
was a hugely talented Russian player who immigrated to the U.S. when we
were fifteen years old. Immediately he and I were the top two young players in
the country. Boris knew how to push my buttons. He was unrestrained by any
notion of competitive etiquette or even by the rules. He would do everything it
took to win, and would sometimes do things so far outside the lines of normal
chess behavior that I was totally taken aback. Consider the hilarity of this
moment. We are in the U.S. Junior Championship, last round, playing for the
title. I am four or five minutes into a deep thought process. This is the critical
position. The ideas are coming together, I’m approaching a solution, and
suddenly Boris kicks me under the table, two or three times, hard. Boris
studied karate and I know he liked to kick things, but this was ridiculous.
There were many times that Boris pummeled me under the table during
critical moments of our games, but of course not all of his tactics were so over-
the-top. He would shake the board, loudly clear his throat in my face five or six
times a minute, tap pieces on the table while I tried to think, or confer about
the position in Russian with his coach. The standard reaction to such moments
is to go tell the arbiter what is happening. The problem is that when this
happened Boris would feign innocence, insist in Russian and broken English
that he had no idea what I was talking about, and the arbiter would have
nothing to go with. Even if Boris was reprimanded, he had succeeded in
getting my mind off the position. He was winning the psychological battle.
I found Boris’s disregard for sportsmanship infuriating. People like him
hurt the game that I loved. I mentioned in Part I that we both traveled to a
world championship in India to represent the United States, and several teams
lodged formal protests against the American team because he and his coach

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were blatantly cheating throughout the event. The whole situation made me
sick. The problem is that it also made me angry.
Time and again in critical moments of our games, Boris would pull out
some dirty trick, and I would get irritated and make an error. To his credit,
Boris knew how to get in my head. As a teenager, anger clouded my vision and
Boris played me like a drum. After losing a couple of games to him, I realized
that righteous indignation would get me nowhere. I decided to block my anger
out. When Boris tapped pieces, I took a deep breath. When he talked about the
position with his coach, I just played knowing I would have to beat both of
them. When Boris shook the board, I ignored him. This might have seemed a
good strategy, but the problem with this approach is that Boris didn’t have a
limit. He was perfectly content to escalate the situation (for example by leg
kick combinations) and eventually I would get pissed off and have a meltdown.
It took me some time to realize that blocking out my natural emotions was not
the solution. I had to learn to use my moment organically. Instead of being
thrown off by or denying my irritation, I had to somehow channel it into a
profound state of concentration. It wasn’t until my martial arts career that I
really learned how to do this.
It took work. The first time this issue came up in my competitive martial
arts life was in the finals of my first Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands National
Championship in November 2000. I had cruised through the tournament thus
far and was in the lead in this match until my opponent head-butted me in the
nose, which is blatantly illegal. The referee didn’t see it and play continued.
The rules of this particular tournament were that points were scored when
someone was unbalanced and either thrown into the air, on the ground, or out
of a large ring. No blows to the neck, head, or groin were allowed. About
fifteen seconds later he head-butted me again, harder, and a wild surge of anger
flew up through my body and into my eyes. The blood rush to the eyes that
comes with a hard blow to the nose is, I believe, where the expression “seeing
red” comes from. I saw red and went out of control for about ten seconds. On
the video it looks like my methodical style somehow mutated into a bullish
madness. I was over-aggressive, off-balance and completely vulnerable—quite
literally, I was blinded by rage. I almost lost the Nationals in those moments,
but fortunately I returned to my senses and was able to win the match. A
weakness of mine was exposed and luckily I didn’t have to lose to learn.

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This experience was disturbing to me on a number of levels. There is the
competitive angle, but for me there was also a much more important idea at
stake. My relationship to the martial arts is rooted in nonviolence. I don’t get
into fights. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I believe that our world is destroying
itself with a cycle of violence begetting violence, and I don’t want to have any