One of the best things that you can do for yourself is to attend a seminar outside of your current organization. When the only ones you interact with are the ones just in your group, it can sometimes lead to not learning as much as you otherwise could. Do you “have” to? Not at all. But it can be a very positive experience, even if the seminar is on a system or style you do not necessarily prescribe to.
The first thing I always recommend to anyone attending a seminar is to leave your ego at home. The whole reason for even “going” to a seminar is to learn, and it does not matter who is leading the event or what they are teaching. For any real kind of learning, you want to get the most out of it, and to “get” the most out of it (especially if it is a seminar that you paid for), you have to leave your ego home.
The second thing is to go with an open mind. As Wing Chun (Ving Tsun/ Wing Tsun) practitioners, we know that our chosen method is among the most effective in the world, but because of that, we have all encountered those that walk around with a chip on their shoulder.
For those particular individuals, they will never really excel because they prevent it from happening themselves. They have a certain way of viewing and doing things, and anything that deviates from that is, in their eyes, wrong. Unfortunately, those individuals miss out on some great training by keeping themselves barricaded behind only one view.
So when attending a seminar, definitely keep your mind open to varying opinions and “soak in” everything that you are being exposed to. As one of my students said after a recent event, you have to be careful with what you know and are accomplished at, and how to present that to an opposing viewpoint. There’s a fine line between being the turd of the group and showing respect for someone doing something differently than you.
Third, find out if a video camera is acceptable to the host presenting the seminar. Sometimes there is a lot of activity and it is impossible to catch everything going on around you. Having someone filming the event will help to ensure that you glean even more from it by reviewing the videos later on.
Fourth, take a notebook and document things along the way if you can. If that is not possible, then when do it in your car when the event is over. In this way, you can ensure that you do not forget what you learned and that you are writing things down while they are fresh.
The first couple of seminars I attended, I did not have a notebook and was quite disheartened that I could not remember the myriad of details that we covered during the event. From that point on, if I forgot a notebook? I immediately went to a local store and purchased a cheap one, and then sat in the car – sometimes for an hour or more – writing down everything I could remember from the day’s event.
Lastly, never forget to thank the host of the seminar, as well as any special guests that were in attendance. Even though you paid for being there, it is a matter of courtesy that someone made the effort to make their knowledge available, and it is an honor to be in attendance of when they choose to impart it.
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November 30th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
A good question that one of my students posed to this subject was:
“I was reading your blog on visiting seminars. I’ve heard it said many times that you have to be careful not to introduce something into your Wing Chun that your Sifu did not teach you for a number of reasons, one being that something may have to be fixed later as it does not fit our version of the system and so on.
“My question is… when you learn these other styles, how do you assimilate it into what you already know without conflicting with the version you are learning?”
That is a great question and one that many probably have.
The best way to answer that is that you have to experiment with it in order to really see what it can do. Let’s use Bong-sau as an example.
In some styles, Bong-sau’s elbow is trained to go above the shoulder. In their view, this height will allow the shoulder to press Bong-sau into the oncoming action, thereby giving it the power needed so that it does not collapse.
In other styles, however, a different view is seen. Rather than the elbow going above the shoulder, the elbow “never” goes above the shoulder. With the wrist on the centerline, the structure as a whole is what keeps Bong-sau from collapsing, while simultaneously triggering your actions to respond by either turning to the side or changing to a punch, etc., whatever it is that your arm is interpreting at that moment.
With such varied training opinions, the only real way to see “what’s what” is to train it. Some things will quickly show themselves to be inferior to what you currently do, while other things might give us pause to think about it and train it more, showing us that the new way we learned is, in fact, better than what we were doing before.
The best way is to keep learning what you are being taught by your Sifu, but also keep enough of an open mind to explore the other methods as they come in. If it gets confusing? I recommend “not” exploring so many other styles or concepts as trained by others “because” of the confusion.
If you think about it, it is hard enough to learn ONE way of doing something, much less MULTIPLE ways. In that, however, we want to cultivate an open air about our methods so that we can remain unstifled when things come around that might differ from what we do.
Confusing? Most definitely. Welcome to Wing Chun.
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