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VIP Audio – Fighting Spirit

Hello VIP and welcome to this month’s training. Now the topic this month is a very nice topic, one of my favorites, it’s called ‘Fighting Spirit’ aaahhh! And what is fighting spirit?

Well, fighting spirit is a very general emotional attitude towards life and especially towards problems and difficulties, even tragedies. So we’re continuing with this theme of how should you think about and approach problems, difficulties and tragedies.

One of the inspirations for this lesson, and a few recent lessons, comes from my Facebook page, actually. On my Facebook page I sometimes put inspiring quotes. You know, just little ascends or something basically with the idea of you can do it. You’re the master of yourself. These kinds of things to help people feel a little more confident, inspired, something like that and most people respond to that very positively, but always, always, always there are a few people who put these little comments that I find really annoying and also sad.

I’ll have people who will kind of contradict these powerful sayings and, basically, the message they’re writing on their comments is that I’m different. I’m a victim. I can’t do it.

I can’t overcome my problems. I’m special. Unlike everybody else, none of this will work for me. You know wah, wah, wah, wah. What these people are lacking is a fighting spirit.

Now, in the martial arts, I’ve done martial arts on and off during most of my life and I’d say every martial art has this idea of a fighting spirit. You see, you can pick any martial art, anything from boxing to mixed martial arts or jujitsu or Japanese karate or Korean Tae Kwon Do or whatever, it doesn’t matter, any kind of martial art, you have kind of different aspects that make someone who’s a martial artist or a fighter good.

Now, in every martial art you’ll find certain kinds of fighters or martial artists who have really good technique, right? I mean if it’s Tae Kwon Do they can do these kicks and they’re amazing at the kicks. They’re really good. They’ve got great technique, but they lack a fighting spirit. Meaning, whenever they go up against a difficult challenge, a difficult opponent, they just kind of ah, become weak and then they lose. Even though technically they might be better, they might even be physically bigger and stronger, but they lack that fighting spirit and therefore they lose. And, of course, when you are looking at things like boxing or mixed martial arts, which are much more aggressive, then it becomes even more important.

So I’m not teaching you fighting in this video, but what I am talking about is this inner strength, this inner fighting spirit, because it will allow you to overcome incredible problems and obstacles in life which we all have to face and without this fighting spirit, I don’t care how rich you are, I don’t care how educated you are, I don’t care, all that other stuff, without the fighting spirit you’re just never gonna achieve those dreams.

With this fighting spirit you can start with no money, no education and seemingly terrible luck and fight your way to the top. People do it all the time. We have a lot of models, a lot of examples of this.

So here’s the good news, you can develop this fighting spirit. It’s not something that you’re just born with. A lot of people have this idea oh, if I don’t have it in me now then I’ll never have it. Well that’s bullshit and totally wrong. You can develop it. You can train it into yourself. Now, first let’s start with the basic attitude towards problems and challenges.

At a very basic level, I mean very basic, I’m not talking about anything spiritual or anything, I’m just talking about very, very basic, you can look at all your problems in life, all your difficulties, either as something to be endured, you know bad luck to be endured and to survive, or you can view them as challenges to be vigorously and relentlessly defeated and overcome. You can see how that’s a much more powerful approach to it.

Of course you can take even more spiritual approaches, that you’re being guided in your learning, which I’ve talked about in another lesson, but at a really basic emotional level, I’m talking about emotion in this lesson, emotionally you can view it as ah. You know it’s this kind of reaction if you had to do it physically. Oh, this terrible thing happened, oh, right? It’s just kind of shoulders down and this kind of oh no, I have to endure this problem, oh no.

Or, aaahhh, you rise up and it’s like oh, okay, I’ve got this big challenge. I’m going to overcome it. I’m going to attack this problem and I’m going to keep attacking it until I go around it, find another solution or just overcome it with sheer determination and persistence. If nothing else works then just persistence will work.

So, here’s the problem with that victim mentality, like I said, that I see in some of the comments I see on my Facebook page and, you know, just in a lot of aspects in life and, you know, I think all of us have done this. I’ve done it too in parts of my life. I’ll have a little period, something bad happens and my first reaction will be this kind of victim mentality, but I had to get out of it and so do you if you ever want to have a great, wonderful life and if you really want to overcome major difficulties in your life.

Let me give you an example of this. I used to be a social worker and I worked with people, mostly teenagers, but adults too, who had suffered abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, meaning a man hitting a woman, different things like that. So my job as a social worker was to help them heal from that and to develop a more empowering attitude, because a lot of those clients, those people, had very much a victim mentality. You know this happened to me when I was 14 years old and now my life is ruined and it always will be.

That’s the belief and the attitude they had and they had this sort of weakness, this lack of a fighting spirit about it and it did, it affected their whole lives. It made them weak with every single problem they faced and they just developed this victim mentality about it and they used it as an excuse for every other problem or failure in their life. They used it as an excuse to feel weak.

On the other hand, you may know there’s a popular celebrity in the United States named Oprah Winfrey who, if not the richest, she’s one of the richest women in the United States. She’s a billionaire, a multibillionaire I believe and she suffered incredibly horrible sexual abuse and physical abuse all through her young life, a child through teenager. I mean it was horrible and, in fact, far worse than what most of my social work clients endured.

Now, Oprah Winfrey, of course at the time it was horrible and painful and a tragedy of course, but after she got out of that situation she decided to have a fighting spirit about it. She’s a woman who has that fighting spirit and she decided that okay, this is not going to destroy me. I will not let those people and what they did to me destroy my entire life and so she developed emotionally this anger, a healthy anger and this fighting sprint and she decided she was going to overcome it. She was going to heal from it and she was going to use it to grow stronger and she did.

Now she talks freely about what happened to her. She had a TV show and she’s helped a lot of people who also suffered abuse and helped them change their way of thinking about it and lead happier, healthier lives. So the same event, right, the same basic thing, sexual abuse or physical abuse, and yet Oprah had the fighting spirit. She developed it and that’s what gave her a much higher quality of life than some of the people I worked with.

So that, of course, is an example of a very severe tragedy and for most of us we haven’t had quite that horrible level of tragedy or maybe we have, but the point is we can choose, again, to see it as a challenge to help us grow stronger or as a problem to be endured and oh, we’re a victim, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh.

So to develop a fighting spirit the first thing you have to decide is this. You need a few beliefs that you have to change or to develop within you. One of those important beliefs is the belief that challenges are inevitable, problems are inevitable, meaning, cannot be avoided. They will always come.

There will never be a point where all your problems are done and you never have any more challenges or problems until maybe after you’re dead. But as long as you’re alive you’re going to have problems and so the fighting spirit in you, to develop that, you first have to decide you have to accept that and stop bitching about it all the time. And “to bitch” when we use it as a verb means to complain. So if you bitch about something it means you’re complaining about it.

So most people are sitting around complaining, complaining, complaining about their problems all the time, I do this too, but if you want to overcome them you gotta change that and you have to eventually decide okay, look, problems are inevitable. They’re always going to be there, they’re always going to come and when I solve this one a new one is gonna come. So I’m not going to just focus on that anymore, I’m just going to see them as challenges and I’m gonna be ready.

It’s kind of that martial artist attitude, right? A martial artist welcomes the opponent. They know that there’s always gonna be another person to fight against, because that other person is what tests you. It helps you to get stronger and motivates you to get stronger and to get better. If you never faced a challenge, if you never faced against another person, a problem or a difficulty, you just become soft and weak and lazy. Those challenges kind of motivate you and bring you up and get your energy going and give you a focus to grow and to get stronger and better.

Here’s another core belief that you need to develop is that bigger challenges equal bigger growth. See, a lot of us we complain that we overcome a small problem and then next a bigger problem comes and then a bigger problem comes. Well that’s almost natural by design. It means after you get used to solving those smaller problems, they really don’t even become problems anymore they’re so easy for you. Well, guess what?

Bigger ones are going to come and force you to get stronger and grow and get that fighting spirit and attack them. After you attack those and solve them bigger ones are gonna come. It’s part of life. Don’t complain about it, accept it.

Here’s a metaphor and what you need to think about. It’s an obvious metaphor. It’s just like lifting weights, right? Someone who’s lifting weights, a bodybuilder or a power lifter, they’re always trying to add more weight, right? They don’t just life 100 pounds and then when they can do that easily they just say okay, I’ll just stay at 100 pounds now. Do-dodo, this is easy. No. They know to get their muscles stronger, their body stronger, well now they gotta add some more weight. One hundred-ten pounds, ah, that’s a little harder again.

They keep working it until that becomes easy. Boom, 120 pounds, boom, 150 pounds, boom, 200 pounds, it never ends. They just keep adding more and more and they don’t complain about it. Oh, man, this is more heavy now, aahh. No, they have that fighting spirit. They’re like yeah, bring it on! Give me more ah! They even add it themselves and that’s the true fighting spirit when instead of waiting for a problem or a challenge to come to you, you go looking for a new challenge.

You feel yourself getting a little bored and everything is a little too easy you don’t wait around waiting for something to happen you start looking. How could I challenge myself? How can I find something difficult that will force me to grow? You look for it and you actually go and find it and do it, right?

People who go and climb mountains, well that’s why they’re doing it, right? They know it’s the process of challenging themselves, making themselves grow and overcome something that is hard and difficult. It trains us. We’re such a soft society and generation now and I’m talking about everywhere in the world. We’ve become so soft where we don’t want to do anything that’s difficult. We want everything to be easy and convenient.

Well that just makes you weak and soft and lazy. And, of course, life is gonna give you challenges anyway, but it’s more fun when you choose them.

I’ve found this in my own life so that now it’s become such a habit it me that any time I find myself getting a little bit lazy, a little too comfortable, I go looking for something difficult, something difficult that inspire me. That’s my fighting spirit and it’s part of who I am now and, in fact, I am bored without it. If I don’t have some big difficult challenges to overcome that will force me to grow and learn more and do things that are uncomfortable I get bored and as you develop this you’ll start getting bored too and you’ll start enjoying it.

Just like a weightlifter enjoys lifting heavier and heavier weights, you’ll enjoy overcoming bigger and bigger challenges, dealing with bigger and bigger problems, because they’ll force you to grow and grow and you’ll feel that sense of confidence and strength. That’s where confidence really comes from. That deepest level of confidence comes from overcoming more and more difficult challenges and knowing you can handle it, knowing that no matter what happens you can handle it.

So fighting spirit, how are you going to develop it? Right now you can start at home.

First of all, practice your physiology. Practice your body, right. It’s the foundation. So you’re going to practice not just walking around huh. When a problem happens if you find the shoulders going down and eyes going down, you’re just going to raise up and do this and you’re going to practice this every day, standing like this with your eyes up and hum.

Then you can just say something to yourself in a powerful way, whatever you want to say. I welcome this challenge! I am ready for this challenge! I have a fighting spirit! It doesn’t matter, just say it a strong powerful way. That starts to develop it and you do it everyday it becomes a habit. You get used to standing like this, talking like this.

The other thing is to just repeat that belief every day. I’m ready for more challenges! I’m ready for more challenges! I have a fighting spirit! It’s an emotional thing. It’s not logical, it’s emotional. It’s developing that powerful emotion again and again and again. And that’s your job this month to focus on this. Find some things in your life that are problems and attack them with a fighting spirit.

All right, see you again next month. I look forward to hearing about your experiences attacking your problems. See you again.