Self Awareness & the Martial Artist

Awareness is a BIG topic in the RBSD community. Some discuss it like a disclaimer before they can move onto their WWII eye gouging whereas others go on about it to the extent that aware turns to paranoid. I certainly place awareness high on my self protection agenda. However, its positioning comes after attitude or "Respect". Withouth these all your 20/20 vision, 180 degree sweeps, walking commentry and Cooper colour codes mean bugger all. Knowledge is no good without the proper intent and drive behind it to make it applicable. Nevertheless, actual awareness was not what I wanted to discuss here. What I am talking about is another type of awareness quite sadly missing among most in the martial arts community - self-awareness!

How many instructors have you seen that harp on for ages about the fence and pre-emption before launching into a seminar that mainly concentrates on reactive techniques?

How about those who jump on the life coach bandwagon and harp on about positivity before slagging everyone else off?

Then there is the big speech about defeating the ego when it is quite abduntantly clear that they have alpha male/female issues.

What about those - and you see this all the time at Seni - who seem to walk around in a bubble all of their own, completely dismissive of all the people there?

There are loads of examples of this type of behaviour found in the martial arts world. It is not just a case of being hypocritical, although that does come into it, it is rather this almost pseudo (or real?) autistic lack of realizing how one comes across in the bigger scheme of things.

This sounds like a vent, but it is not. I am genuinely interested in this characteristic/behaviour of martial artists.

Comes down to EGO...

Some guys are so full of it, they have no self-awareness or little of anything else. Which makes them blind, no matter how well they say they can see.