What martial arts has taught me about leadership

As a leader and manager of people you are at times confronted with tough choices and when the pressure rises and things start to get heated, I like to lean back and reflect at my younger years.

During my late teens and all the way into my thirties I have been a student of martial arts. I have spent countless hours in Dojos all around the globe and I have enjoyed it to the point of obsessing over it.

Shotokan Karate Kata bunkai
Shotokan Karate Kata bunkai, Nijushiho

My base has been traditional Shotokan Karate but I loved straying off course and discovering other martial arts such as JuJitsu, Judo, Aikido, Aikibudo, Shinjitsu, Kempo, and more.

I could go on about my glory days and the benefits of practicing these arts and the physical strengths you will gain if you are practicing between four and seven times a week. However this article is not the about physical strength but about mental strength.

Kihon

Karate requires practice, and it requires a lot of it. This is due to learning the proper coordination of movements to end in a single focused blow to your opponents body.

You start out to learn your basic moves. At first, they will look and feel odd. You have to use your mind to force your body to follow the moves. Then, as you move up in the ranks, you learn to internalize these moves and as they become more natural to your body, you start to learn how to apply those moves in combination with other moves.

kihon, the basics
kihon, the basics

Oi zuki, mae geri, gyaku zuki, or in tongue-in-cheek-English “Punch, kick, other-punch”, is a basic combination you learn early on. It will take about three to four training sessions to get used to this particular combination, and it will take you between five and ten years to master it. Really, I mean it, it will take that long to learn this basic combination to the point where you can apply it as a matter of reflex rather than -Think- about applying it.

Here is where this will help you with your leadership development.

As a leader you too have to learn basic moves in order to learn and grow in your field. You usually start at level one, which John Maxwell calls the positional leader. At this level you have become a manager of sorts over a team of people. At this point you will have to learn to Earn Trust.
At first this will feel odd. You have to Think about every decision and every meeting you have with your team. Then, as you grow your trust in your team, you learn to internalize these lessons and as they become more natural to your mind, you start to learn how to get to level 2, which is the permission level.

The Oddness of leadership
The Oddness of leadership

Kata

From Wikipedia: “Traditionally, kata are taught in stages. Kata is often described as a set sequence of karate moves organised into a pre-arranged fight against imaginary opponents. The kata consists of kicks, punches, sweeps, strikes and blocks. Body movement in various kata includes stepping, twisting, turning, dropping to the ground, and jumping.”

Shotokan Kata
Shotokan Kata

While this will seem strange at first you will eventually come to realize that performing a Kata with the right emphasis and the right mindset will help you improve your techniques, your strength, your form, and your timing.

Once you have a fair grip on the basics ( kihon ) as a leader, you need to learn to combine a whole range of different qualities and environments in order to achieve the best results with and for your team. You have to study different approaches to solve certain situations to be able to pull them out when you have to. You have to be able to set and monitor goals, give feedback, encourage, request, teach, be empathetic or strong. You have to add as many tools to your repertoire as you can, and as a leader you have to be willing and able to use those tools.

In most cases you will be able to select your management style. From tough love, to lending a shoulder to cry on. There have been plenty of studies which seem to show that there is no one-size-fits-all approaches to management. However in Leadership you have to have certain characteristics which will help you achieve level two with your team members. You have to have a mindset of servanthood. You grow yourself and your team. You are very good at observing and listening.

At level two, the permission level, people will follow you because they want to. Your team trusts your decisions and they trust that you have their back. It is where you build relationships with your team, they like you and you like them. In return, they do work hard to keep their commitments to you and your company.

Now at this level, results starting to appear.

One of my Sensei in Kata Bunkai – action

Kumite

Kumite is the practical application of kihon and kata. It is, in essence, a formalized fight following stringent rules. These rules are in place to allow the student to learn and practice a combat situation without the fear of a broken nose or other bodily harm. Kumite is what most people think of as a martial arts competition and is as close to combat as traditional Karate will get you.

You will not only learn to apply your techniques but you will also learn to be relaxed, concentrated, anticipate when an attack will happen and improve your reflexes. One important lesson I have taken home from practicing kumite was to always move forward, never move back. The best benefit of kumite however is that of friendship.

If you as a leader are at level three, the production level, you will lead by example. You work hard and you start to help the bottom line of the company. You start to build positive, reinforcing momentum and that momentum will help you break through the largest obstacles.
If you can get yourself and your team to this level, you will soon learn to be relaxed in a stressful environment, concentrate and focus on finding the required solution for the business, and anticipate when an you will have to make a change to the team, the project, or the goals before they become a real issues.

Kumite
Kumite

At this point you will always move forward. The only time you can lose is when you give up on something. You cannot be defeated for as long as you learn and grow and try again. And that folks is true in all parts of life.

Bushido

Karate, which stands for empty-hand, the karate-do, or the way of karate is given great emphasis. It is where the bushido, or the way of the warrior, makes its mark on Karate and lets us reflect on the roots of the art we are students of. This is in contrast to sports like UFC, or modern self defense styles which may or may not borrow from the traditional martial arts. In the self-defense sports, the goal is to enable the trainee to defend himself in certain situations.

My personal motivation to training martial arts has always been to seek control over mind and body, as well as staying in good shape. I was never under the illusion to defend with a single kick against a knife or a semi automatic. I have had the pleasure of training kids, and lower ranks in those days and it was one of the most rewarding activities I have ever experienced.

karate - do
karate – do

After all, in nature, we are bound to grow up, Learn from others, Apply the lessons learned, and then pass the information on to The next generation. Do as I do, not as I say has become one of my rules. In order to get there though I had to become the best I could be and I had to remain in that shape for as long as I wanted to teach.

Leaders as well should always strive to follow learn from others, apply those lessons, and then pass them on to your team.

“Leadership is a journey and not a destination”

The wise Sensei

For me, those days have long since passed and I know that the younger-me could pick me apart in an instance. However the ‘do’ ( the way ) has remained with me ever since. I am working hard, I am humble in working with and for my team. As a leader, I am forward looking and I have the back of every single individual in my team.

I try to lead by example and teach and grow my team. As a leader you should strive to be the Samurai and not the Ninja. Be committed to your team and your company, learn, read, study your whole life and most importantly practice what you preach.

John Maxwell – 5 levels of leadership
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPwXeg8ThWI

Crypto Portfolio app

Keeping track of your overall Crypto Portfolio is not as straight forward as it should be. Investing into crypto currencies can leave you with multiple wallets and online resources. Each one may contain different coins and tokens for different purposes.

It is highly recommended to store all ( or as much as possible ) offline, detached from the internet. This way hackers won’t be able to get their fingers on your hard earned Bitcoins, Ethereum, etc.

I have started to look into Crypto currencies in early 2018 and I see great potential in the basic ideas behind the technologies. While my timing was especially bad I wanted to know what the fuzz was all about. The best way to understand things though is to start playing with them. So I did spend some time and money learning a new technology.

Shut up and take my money

Shut-up-and-take-my-money
Shut-up-and-take-my-money

You need to sign up with and exchange when you want to buy some coins or tokens in order to convert your dollars into a crypto-currency. With Coinbase being one of one most popular which people would recommend for n00bs.

Coinbase allows you to convert to deposit funds using your credit card or your bank account information. Paypal is no longer supported. You can then exchange your fiat currency ( I.e. Dollars, Euros etc. ) into Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Etherium, or Litecoin. Any other crypto currency requires you to sign up with another exchange of which there are many to choose from.

Coinmarketcap.com, and coincap.io provide you the information as to which exchange supports the crypto token you are interested in.

Binance is one of those larger exchanges which has received good online reviews and has supposedly the lowest transaction fees.

Getting your hands on some crypto coins or tokens also requires you to safely store them somewhere. Here we have probably one of the weakest points in this area. Every crypto-currency has their own way of storing the tokens. You can keep them on your computer, in an online wallet, in offline wallets or as a paper wallet. You will quickly arrive at a point where you can lose track of your virtual wealth ( or as we have seen recently, the decline thereof ).

Crypto Portfolio

So I wrote a Crypto Portfolio app which will allow you to enter your token amount and then look at the market data for it. I will not store this information on the server but instead store it in your browsers’ cache so you don’t have to fear releasing any data to my servers.

One thing I quickly realized is that almost everything you do in crypto will cost you either a fee or a transaction cost.

Binance fees

So yeah Binance has a 0.1% trading fee however one thing which you will not see right away is that you will not be able to convert all of one crypto token into another crypto token.

Binance will always leave you with some leftover on their platform. These may vary but my worst case leftover position is worth about US$1.00.

On top of that Binance also requires a minimum transaction for certain coins. E.g. you require at least US$97.181- ( as of Feb 2 2018 ) in Etherium before you can transfer it out of Binance.

Then you have to pay for the actual transaction fees which for Etherium ar 0.01ETH, which is … well about $9.71 as of this date.

Since Binance does not display this information in a useful way I went ahead and added this into a table in my little app which you can sort to gather some more information on trading conditions of a certain coin. [ Menu -> Utils -> Binance Fees ]

So you add this all up and you end up spending a lot of money in the whole exchange process.

If you exchange E.g. $100,- by the time it leaves Coinbase you are down to about $97,- Then you exchange it for ETH on Binance and send it back to your private wallet, you end up with only about $85,- worth of ETH.

This of course does not take into account the huge market swings, which could increase or decrease your position a few percentage points in the time it takes to go through the whole operation.

To sum it all up

First though I have to remind you that; yes it is possible to lose money, which is why you should never put in more than you can afford to lose.

This app is in its early stages and I will certainly add more features as time permits. Please feel free to check it out here …

Please leave me some feedback for enhancements if you find it useful. Or follow the link below to the source code, make changes yourself, and then send them to me for integration 🙂

Resources

Graphing library used : NVD3 Re-usable charts for d3.js

If you click on the image below you can start using the app online from within my WebOS.
You can find it under [Start -> Utils -> Crypto ]. Note: This app does not send any data back to any server.

Feel you want to play with the code: follow the link to the Battlefield.