I’ve been thinking about the Jedi again, and how they are a mythical type of the warrior-monk.  Different cultures have expressed this type throughout the centuries: the Sohei warriors of ancient Japan, the Knights Templar, perhaps the Islamic Assassins, and definitely the Shaolin monks of Kung-Fu fame.

There is something attractive to me about this combination of seeming opposites.  The war-maker and the peace-keeper.  The ‘this-worldly’ and the ‘other-worldly’.  Aristotle contrasted the ‘contemplative life’ with the ‘active life’, arguing in favour of the former; Aquinas followed his lead.  Those in the Roman Catholic tradition make a similar contrast between the interior life and the exterior.

From the personal development viewpoint, there’s something very familiar to me in all this.  There are many such contrasts that need to be overcome in order to achieve something higher.

• Assertiveness Training – contrast between passive and aggressive (unified by assertiveness)
• Emotional Intelligence – contrast between self-smart and social-smart (unified by empathy)
• Transactional Analysis – contrast between child ego state and parent ego state (unified by the adult ego state)
• Stress Management – contrast between hypostress/‘boreout’ and hyperstress/’burnout’ (unified by eustress/flow)
• Negotiation Strategy – contrast between win-lose and lose-win (unified by win-win scenarios)
• Problem-Solving – contrast between left-brain and right-brain (unified by whole-brain thinking)
• Skills Training – contrast between soft-skills/’high touch’ and hard-skills/’high tech (unified by high concept)

You get the drift.

Anyway, back to the Jedi.  I came across a powerful passage in the Hagakure – that book most beloved of all real-life, wannabe Jedi – that speaks to this matter.  I paraphrase it here:

“A monk cannot fulfill the Way if he does not manifest compassion without and persistently store up courage within. And if a warrior does not manifest courage on the outside and hold enough compassion within his heart to burst his chest, he cannot become a samurai. Therefore, the monk pursues courage with the warrior as his model, and the warrior pursues the compassion of the monk.”

A Jedi, then, is someone who seeks to live a life of compassion and courage - what we might today call empathy and resilience – in equal measure.  Whether these two are brought together by balance or some other form of integration – such as perspectivism, as in “your focus determins your reality” – is something I don’t yet know.

I’ll be touching on some of this stuff – especially assertiveness and flow – in the forthcoming Jedi Knight Training Event in Belfast.

Image credit: kevinpoh.

This exciting 1-day workshop is a joint venture between me (Allen Baird of Sensei Learning and Performance) and Rory O’Connor of The Creativity Hub.

In 2008, I designed and delivered the UK’s first university course teaching Jedi Skills. Held at Queen’s University, where I am a tutor, the 1-day workshop gained coverage in The Guardian Education Supplement, The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Times Online, The Daily Telegraph, The Irish News, The News Letter, and BBC News Online.    Called Feel the Force: How to Train the Jedi Way, we were also featured on international radio and local TV.

Our new event is timed to coincide with the Invasion Belfast II event held at W5 in the Odyssey in October this year.

Rory, creative thinking expert and creator of Rory’s Story Cubes, will join me to offer Northern Ireland’s most exciting/only Jedi training event of 2009.  Rory and I will explain the famous Jedi Mind-Trick by showing how to gain control over and from the minds of others.  Rory will explore the subjects of Energy Psychology and Subtle Energy fields to gain modern insight in the mystical Force.  I will then walk participants through the films to see those psychological skills Luke Skywalker gained in becoming a Jedi, and those Anakin lacked in his fall to the dark side.

Other special features of this workshop include a demonstration by Rory of the latest Jedi training technologies such as the Force Trainer.  Also, local instructors will give a talk and demonstration on Aikido and Iaido.   Aikido is a powerful martial art that emphasizes defence rather than attack, and means ‘the way of harmony with life force’.  Not known much in Ireland, Iaido is the Japanese art of drawing, striking with and sheathing the samurai sword.

As the highlight of the day, each participant will receive their own dueling lightsaber and have a chance to test what they have learned! This lightsabers are combat-durable – not the cheap, breakable one’s you had as a kid. Especially imported from the US, these lightsabers are the closest you can get to wielding the real thing!

Our Jedi Training Facility for the day is the Conference Suite of the Belfast Activity Centre, a personal development charity off the Malone Road in south Belfast. Ample, free car-parking space is available.  It will take place on Saturday 17th October 2009 from 9 am to 5 pm.

Cost for the day is £77.50.  This includes lunch, snacks, and tea/coffee throughout the day. Also included is the cost is a lightsaber, which every participant can take away with them.

Click here to book online and take your first step into a larger world.

If you book before 19th September, you can chose your lightsaber colour from blue, orange, green, red or silver. If you book after this, we will post your lightsaber out to you later.

To avoid disappointment, book early you must!

Apart from their use as a double-handed thing hitter, a lightsaber and a cricket bat don’t seem to have too much in common.

But that’s where you’re wrong.  For the skillful wielding of both, it is mind rather than muscle that wins the day.  You will learn all about this at our Jedi Knight Training Event in October, where experts will instruct you on the proper use of the samurai sword and the flash of lightsaber duels will electrify the afternoon air.

More details on this exciting event next week, but for now, let’s go back to cricket.  In an enlightening article called The Ashes mind game, a consultant psychologist shows how mind tricks are necessary for excellent performance in any field of action.

Here are the two insights I found the most interesting (italics mine).

“During the game the players need to focus on the processes…We wouldn’t be having conversations with the players about the outcome and how it’s going to feel at the end.  It’s more about what are we doing today, what do we need to execute today to put us in the strongest position possible to win this game, rather than the romantic dreams of what might be happening next Monday or Tuesday.”

“Our focus is about us, about what we need to do, what we can control, how we can prepare and how we can position ourselves to start this game strongly…It’s about controlling the controllables and focusing on what your can do in our environment.”

We have a culture that emphasises goal-setting and planning as methods of gaining success.  I strongly feel that we must balance this with a sense of mindfulness (awareness of the present) and flow (engagement with the present).  I will be speaking on both these concepts at the forthcoming Jedi Training Event (with reference to Star Wars).

Tenuous link?

Then hear the words of Martin Seligman: “Role models and paragons in the culture compellingly illustrate a strength or virtue.  Models may be real (Mahatma Gandhi and humane leadership), apocryphal (George Washington and honesty), or explicitly mythic (Luke Skywalker and flow).”  So there.

Or, as Yoda said about a young, excitable Luke: “This one a long time have I watched.  Never his mind on where he was.  Hmm?  What he was doing.  Hmph.”

Dreams are good.  But what are you doing right here, right now?

Image credit: nickstone333.