This is a copy of an article I recently sent to a karate magazine. A long time ago, I did a post called 'the difference between wearing a black belt and being one' and I thought to myself that I could talk about  it in much more detail, which inspired me to write the article. Many of my ideas expressed in it are a result of developing them through my blog posts. So thanks to everyone who read them! Enjoy reading this:

The Difference between Wearing a Black Belt and Being One

As a kyu grade, I often wondered why so many karateka stopped training shortly after they had become 1^st dans. Black belt was the point where one could start to make karate their own and understand it at a greater depth, so I’d understood. What would make somebody stop training when they had all of that ahead of them?

 December 2014 marks the end of my first year as a black belt; a 1^st dan. Since my grading, I feel I now have a better understanding of why new 1^st dans give up karate so early after passing their gradings.

The way I see it is that, as a kyu grade, a karateka develops the skills and knowledge so they can begin to make karate their own and take full responsibility for their training at black belt level, with the belt system providing a systematic approach to the vast amount of learning which has to be done before black belt and making it more manageable. One cause of people stopping karate shortly after passing their 1^st dan grading  is relying solely on the belt system and working towards the next belt for motivation, since there isn’t that incentive as a dan grade; gradings are further apart and not as important at that level. No longer motivated, karateka this way inclined give up.

The other cause is  the main focus of this article. Training as a kyu grade is far from identical to doing so as a Dan grade. I don’t recall training with the same burden of responsibility, the same independence or the same mind set that I do now as a kyu grade. One has to train with a different mind set once they make the transition to black belt from 1^st kyu, as training with the same mind set just doesn’t work, with the need to take full  responsibility for training and be more independent as a karateka.

As I’ve recently found out, this transition from one mind set to a different one isn’t all that easy to make; it certainly wasn’t for me. I’d passed my grading, felt the usual mixture of pride and relief but after I’d settled back in to training again, the reality dawned on me. I was at the stage where I could make karate my own and there was this greater burden of responsibility with more independence coming with it. This demanded a different type and different level of commitment and effort from me. I suddenly had this huge thing to live up to, or I became more aware of it. I also became aware that, although I’d passed my grading and had the belt around my waist to prove it, I was still a 1^st kyu underneath it all and yet to fill the role of black belt effectively. This was when I discovered the difference between wearing a black belt and being one.

The fact I’d come  a long way in training, still had much further to go but was unsure which direction to take as I tried to find a way to live up to black belt meant I felt really lost and confused for a while, the first nine months following my grading, for that matter. As I moved deeper in to this wilderness, the change in training,from what I’d known as a kyu grade meant I felt distanced from my experience before black belt, which was more or less all of my experience in karate! It was as if my life as a coloured belt had never happened. Although I enjoyed this opportunity to ‘start again’, as it were, it also caused part of me to feel very insecure about my training. Far worse, was the feeling that my training had ground to a halt, not something I’d been accustomed to as a kyu grade. As a result I found myself, for the first time, fighting laziness and complacency and I gave in to them. I still trained 3 times a week with all the energy and conviction I’d always done but, outside of the Dojo, my personal practice was in a significantly less respectable state.

I hated myself for doing this, for training 3 times a week as if karate was everything to me but the opposite being true in the rest of my life. I felt like I was just messing about on the fringes of karate and not going deeper, staying in my comfort zone. You don’t have to be a 10^th Dan to work out these aren’t ideal traits for a karateka to possess. My training felt like a lie, which I found really unsettling because inspite of the sorry state I’d let my training reduce to, it didn’t mean less to me than it had done before. It still gave me the confidence in myself and life that I hadn’t really had in the same way before starting karate, it was still important to me, so having those things undermined because I felt I was deceiving myself was far from pleasant.

It wasn’t just me I felt I was deceiving, or that it was just my karate training that I’d let down. I also felt guilty when I remembered that there was a certain kind of respect for Dan grades because of the level in training they’d reached. I was not living up to that level and didn’t deserve that respect. As well as myself, therefore, I felt that I was deceiving everyone else too which brought with it a moderate sense of self-disgust. Alongside this, I felt I’d let my Sensei down, after training hard in and out of the dojo, only for it to change after my 1^st Dan grading. The fact my training outside of the dojo had deteriorated but was the same as before during training sessions meant I felt I was deceiving him in that way, which I felt incredibly bad about because if it wasn’t  for him and his way of teaching, I could’ve given up long ago.

I was hating myself for letting my training deteriorate and deceiving everyone, I was feeling daunted and insecure about training as a Dan grade or, to put it more simply, training just didn’t feel like it used to. This, alongside the directionlessness and lack of progress in my karate, meant that it got to the point where I considered giving up karate, which was when I finally began to see the cause of   karateka who worked towards improving their karate rather than the next belt hanging their gi up as relatively new 1^st dans , as I was now experiencing what they had evidently experienced on some level. To be completely honest, it was quite scary when I considered giving up karate because I had never anticipated it happening; I was serious about training and had wanted to make serious progress, not for it to end in this manner. At the time, it hurt to think that I was just going to end up as a karateka who had become a victim of human nature and I would agree with you if you said that I was being unnecessarily proud if I thought that, I’ve learnt from it; nobody is ever immune to becoming a victim of human nature in their training. The fact is I could never see myself stopping karate as I’d feel like part of me was missing. Equally, I didn’t want to end up doing karate but not make any kind of progress for the rest of my life. I did remember the amount of experienced, high Dan grades there were, (and still are), out there who had been black belts for decades and didn’t seem to have trouble making progress and still getting a lot out of their training. Had I missed something if I was, after less than a year of being a 1^st dan, having trouble making progress? I decided it was time to speak to my sensei and try to put my anxieties at rest.

Even when writing this article and reflecting on my experiences, some things I wanted to put across took more than one attempt for me to put in to words in a way I thought was accurate.  At the time when I spoke to my sensei, it was even more difficult to do so as I was still experiencing it and all the emotions that accompanied it and had not had that chance to reflect on it with the benefit of hindsight. I was anticipating having to give a long and awkward explanation but I had just begun talking when he said he knew exactly where I was coming from. This was something of a relief to me, to speak to someone who understood and reassured me that things would improve if I stuck it out. I was also relieved to know he wasn’t disappointed in me even though he had every right to be.

Come mid-July, things did start to improve for me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a huge change, I would not have said, even at this point, that my training was in a respectable state. But I felt that somehow, things had started to move forward again. I can’t pinpoint the exact cause of why this change came about but I think it was something to do with me becoming more relaxed about life. This meant that I could face practicing at the end of a long day because I had the energy, even if I didn’t, it was still manageable because I started to work on breathing properly with techniques and improving my ability to do things slowly which meant I was less mentally and physically tense (something I struggle with a great deal in karate) so I did not exhaust myself at the end of each practice I did. With this happening, I felt myself settle in to a rhythm of regular practice again.

 

I am aware that a karateka does go through highs and lows in their training. I am also aware that what I have just written is not uncommon among 1^st dans fresh from passing their gradings; I think we all experience it on some level at that stage in our training considering it can be a cause of so many 1^st dans giving up. This long and detailed account of my personal experience of it is to shed some light on something, in my limited experience of karate, I admit, is not often discussed. I am not trying to make my experience seem worse than it was by writing about it in a detailed manner.

Although unpleasant while they take place, low points in training do give us something to learn from afterwards and we should take the opportunity to reflect on them so we don’t repeat our mistakes. Considering that things started to improve when I began to relax more, I have realised how much my lack of relaxation in karate and the rest of my life can hold me back. I properly understand it and how much it needs working on now.

Alongside this, I had never before considered the importance of love of karate until it was what stopped me giving up training for good. I might still hate myself for my lack of commitment and effort if my experience hadn’t taught me the place that being hard on oneself has in karate. In many cases, saying to ourselves ‘this isn’t good enough, you can do better’ isn’t a bad idea but sometimes it is. I am finding it easier to make progress in terms of commitment and effort by looking ahead and being positive rather than having a go at myself for the progress I haven’t made. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I don’t self-administer the odd kick up the backside sometimes. 

It’s true, I felt for a long time that it was my lack of effort and commitment that meant I was doing a bad job of living up to black belt and I do still think that in order to live up to black belt, an extremely high level of effort and commitment is required. But consider this: there is always something more we can do in terms of these things, or to put it less optimistically, we will always seem too lazy and not committed enough. My point is that like that perfection of character and technique so often talked about in karate, living up to black belt could also be unachievable because there’s always something more we can do. Some people live up to it more than others, I think, depending on how long they’ve been training and the amount of effort they are prepared put in to it but nobody can ever fully achieve it. But we can do the next best thing: even if it is out of reach, strive for it and gain so much out of it along the way.