Episode 335 - Putting Your Best Foot Forward
On this episode, Jeremy talks about putting your best foot forward whether in martial arts or in life.
Putting Your Best Foot Forward - Episode 335
Being the best that you can both in and out of the dojo is the ideal goal of a martial artist. We can ask now whether that is just superficial or it should involve your character. No matter how we see it, putting our best foot forward is how we as humans naturally behave in society. If you want to know more about this interesting subject, listen to find out!
You can read the transcript below or download here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey what's up everybody. This is whistlekickmartialartsradio 335. Hope I’m getting that right. Going off memory here. Have a few minutes in between appointments and meetings and all the other stuff. I’m in the car you can probably see that and thought I would talk to you. If you're listening to this, you should know there is a video version of this episode over on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/whistlekick and you should know that there, I’m in a parking lot so I’m going to be distracted, I’ll do my best not to be but there's stuff going on and people around and whether it’s a bit of my add or a bit of my awareness, my situational awareness kicking in, I’m not sure. Probably a bit of both but I’ll try to maintain eye contact with the camera. If you're new to the show, I’m sorry this is gonna be a weird kind of non-typical episode at least the fact that its video and the fact that I’m going to be a bit distracted from time to time. But you wanna check out whistlekick.com for everything that we offer and whistlekick.com for everything that we offer and whistlekickmartialartsradio.com for show notes and transcripts and all that other good stuff.Let's talk about today's topic. Today, we're going to talk about putting your best foot forward. Now what does that mean? It could mean a lot of things in a lot of different context. We're going to talk about it in terms of 1, martial arts and 2 life in general.When it comes to martial arts, putting your best foot forward. Something that we hear about from our instructors or maybe higher ranks or maybe it’s just instinctive for you. It could be ironing your uniform. It could be making sure you're finger and toenails are clean and trimmed and cleaned the wax out of your ears. In other words, when you show up to your martial arts class or competition or whatever it is, you show that you respect the environment, the other people there by dressing and presenting yourself appropriately. You wouldn’t show up to a job interview with wrinkly clothes and you know, not having shower for four days at least. You shouldn’t, if you do you're a fool cause you're probably not going to get hired. The way you conduct yourself in how you dress and present yourself for martial arts, shows how much it means to you. Now to be fair, we all have different ways that we look at this. To some people, a clean pair of jeans is nicely dressed. To others, it’s a three-piece suit. We don’t have those seem differentiators, within the context of martial arts. We tend to wear the same clothing we tend to wear the same clothing we tend to wear the same style of belt, we're usually the same type of protective equipment using the same training aids. But how well you treat those things how clean they are, how much you show implicit respect for them, shows how much implicit respect you have for the traditional martial arts and the people that you are training with including your instructors. That matters. I will also say that the way you present yourself for martial arts is synonymous with the way you present to the world. If you're out and about in dirty clothes and a dirty car eating dirty food, other people aren’t going to take you seriously. You're probably not going to reach the goals that you have, whether inside or outside of martial arts. Whether or not you think it should be this way, people do judge you based on the way you seem to be judging yourself and that's really all that is. When you see someone walking down the street and they are dirty, you assume they don’t have the opportunity to be otherwise, in other words, when we see someone who is really dirty and wearing tattered clothing, most of us, maybe I shouldn’t say most, many of us will jump to the conclusion that that person is either impoverished or homeless. We assume that people want to be clean, we assume people want to look presentable, to look nice. It is part of the social contract. Part of the construct of society. So when people buck that, we assume it’s because they have no choice. And you can argue whether or not it should be this way, or you want to be this way, we should judge people on other reasons, their personality, their contributions to society. It doesn’t matter it’s a moot point because this is what many people, I think I’m going to guess, most people feel. There are reasons of differences, there are differences by country, by culture and those all matter. But the next time, you start getting ready for class and you're planning out your week and you think you know, I really don’t want to iron my uniform if you have one that needs to be ironed. Or you know, I just took a shower, I don’t wanna do it because it matters because the people around you appreciate it. They don’t know that they do but they certainly know what it’s like when you don’t. And if you never had someone's disgusting three-day old sweaty armpit in your face, maybe you don’t know how important it is. But I have and I bet many of you out there have as well. The more importantly you treat martial arts, the more you're going to get out of it. Because the more you're signaling to the people around you and even to yourself, that is important, something that matters to you and we tend to put the most attention, time, focus, energy, into the things that matter. So make it matter.That's all I’ve got for you today, a little bit of a short episode. This was something that didn’t have to be discussed for 20 minutes. If you want to check out our YouTube channel that's whistlekick.com/YouTube. If you wanna find us at other social media accounts we are @whistlekick pretty much everywhere you could imagine. You can find the show notes for this and other episodes at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com products are at whistlekick.com, we just rolled out some new ones. If you are not on the newsletter list, get on the newsletter list. It’s important stuff. That’s where we let you know about what's happening, you could setup at either really any website that we do, there's a newsletter there. Alright. If you wanna email me, you can do so, jeremy@whistlekick.com that's all I’ve got for you today, until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day.