Boredom causes many to give up taking action on their goals. Some people even give up on their dreams soon after they start working towards them.

Practising scales put a road block in the path of my piano playing ambitions. I did not know how to deal with the boredom of practising tuneless combinations of notes with awkward finger movements that the hands were clearly not designed for!

A year ago, the father of two of my most promising black belts told me that they wanted to stop training because they were bored. When they started they were full of enthusiasm for months on end but now they were bored.

I was disappointed but not surprised. Boredom is an obstacle that stops many people from achieving their goals not only in the martial arts but in almost any activity you can think of.

Geoff Thompson, the great self protection instructor, once wrote:

“Boredom is a major pitfall that loses many people from the martial arts arena and, in my opinion, it is a lazy excuse.”

If you want to get good at anything you have to repeat techniques over and over again. If you want a technique to work just once in a street fight situation you may have to practise it a thousand or more times and repetition can get very boring and even painful.

When I first started the martial art of Choikwangdo, my knuckles were soon bleeding from the repeated punches on the focus mitts.

Repeated kicks are even more necessary since it is often more difficult to kick in a street fight situation than it is to use your hands

Repetition can become even more boring after the initial enjoyment of quick improvement passes. How can you conquer boredom?

Visualize the benefits that repetition will bring - awesome and effective punching, striking and kicking skills or the power to use a skill you admire without apparent effort. Think about these benefits as you train.

Realize that repetition is necessary in achieving any skill. The pianist repeats very boring movements again and again until his or her reflexes and muscles are conditioned to move the fingers at incredible speeds. The writer may rewrite the same page a hundred times until it is ready to publish. The speaker rehearses the same speech many times until they can fascinate an audience.

Concentrate on the technique you are practising and not on how long you will be practising it. Jonny Wilkinson, the rugby union hero, describes in his book ‘My World’ how he gets through intense training sessions.

Jonny gives everything in his sessions with his coach. He does not ‘relish’ the thought of training but knows he has to do it and how good he will feel afterwards.

He also enjoys the feeling of having made progress. He puts himself through the pain barrier and feels like he is going to be sick as he ‘flogs himself’ onward. He explains his method for dealing with this tough training:

“The secret of dealing with the pain is not to look to the end of the exercise but to concentrate on what you are doing at that precise moment. If you let your mind think of the torture ahead it will try to persuade you that you cannot face it.”

Training sessions in most activities involve dealing with trivial and boring activities like putting on the correct clothes and shoes etc. A tennis player might have to spend a lot of time collecting balls from different parts of the court. Not everyone has ball boys and girls to pick up the balls as they do at Wimbledon.

A teacher has to carry piles of books home to mark and then spend hours reading similar pieces of work and writing similar comments on them before carrying them back again to the classroom. Writing reports involves even more boring repetition!

Martial arts instructors have to collect focus mitts, shields, gloves, belts and other equipment and transport them to the training hall and then collect them up and take them back home. They have to repeat the same instructions again and again until they sink in. This can get very boring.

Again Jonny Wilkinson has a solution. Make the boring, trivial tasks a part of your training. Use them to increase your mental toughness and will power.

Jonny accepts the boredom of having to fetch the balls he has kicked as part of his training:

“For quite a lot of the time, I train alone at Kingston Park. I think having to go and fetch the stray balls that have bounced into the stand in order to repeat the exercise adds mental toughness.”

Jonny’s concept of the fact that doing boring chores can increase your mental toughness is a very useful one. It gives the chores we all face daily the power and the importance of developing our discipline, toughness and character.

Many of us do not realize the importance of the little choices we make every single day. We think of them as a waste of time rather than as a means of strengthening our will power and creating an unstoppable character.

Instead of thinking: “I have to do the boring chore of cleaning my room”, one could think: “I am cleaning my room and at the same time making myself mentally tough and more likely to achieve great things in the future.”

As a bonus, your room gets cleaned! Cleaning and other boring chores can keep your house looking good and improve character and discipline at the same time.

It is no wonder that a large part of military training involves keeping your sleeping quarters and the toilets incredibly clean and organized! When I attended army cadet camps, every folded blanket had to be neatly aligned and every tiny piece of straw had to be off the floor.

Of course, not all training is boring. Some drills are not only effective; they are fun as well. Also, once you start getting good at something, enjoyment comes back into your training.

However, some students give up after a few sessions when they have not enjoyed the training.

As usual, Geoff Thompson puts the problem well:

“Lack of enjoyment in training is brothers with boredom; another feeble excuse. Enjoyment in training comes and goes; nobody enjoys it all the time. The real enjoyment comes from the fruits of training rather than the actual training itself.”

There are bound to be days when you really do not feel like dragging yourself away from the television series which you are enjoying and going off to a tough training session which you may or may not enjoy.

Remind yourself that you usually feel good after a training session whether you enjoyed it at the time or not. Remember, too, that you will have made some improvement in your skills whether small or not.

You will, in addition, have become mentally stronger and more capable of achieving great things in your own life as well as in whatever you are training for.

You may go to several training sessions and fail to enjoy any of them. Just keep going and you will find the enjoyment returns as you realize suddenly that you have made considerable progress.

Many people give up if they feel they are not improving or are making very slow progress:

“Why train if I am getting nowhere? I might as well be doing something more enjoyable like having a drink with my friends or watching my favorite TV program.”

When you start a martial art or any other skill, you are fascinated because you are learning something new every lesson and your improvement is fast as you learn the basics which will rapidly improve your abilities.

When I started the martial arts, I would train in Kung Fu for two hours in the morning and then train in Karate for two hours in the afternoon. This seemed no big deal to me as I was fascinated by the new skills and ideas I was being introduced to.

One of my Karate instructors called me ‘the iron man’ presumably because being keen enough to train twice a day was unusual. Many years later I was still fascinated enough to train in Capoeira first and then Choikwangdo immediately afterwards.

However, once you have spent some time at a martial art or any other skill, the techniques and ideas are no longer new and the progress seems to slow down. You may feel your abilities are not improving.

Students of anything need to realize that progress can be so gradual that you just don’t notice it. Other people probably will. Listen to what they have to say before you give up because of lack of progress. If you keep going you will soon notice, for yourself, that you are making giant strides towards your goal.

If the two young black belts who stopped training had kept going they would be second degree black belts by now with the potential to become future instructors and travel the world teaching their martial art.

One of my Karate instructors used to say words to the effect that: “When you take it easy and do not give one hundred per cent, you are only cheating yourself.”

When you give up training, you could be cheating yourself out of all sorts of exciting possiblities.

Let’s summarize the above ways of dealing with boredom, lack of enjoyment and slow progress:

We need to realize that if we want to get good at anything, we have to repeat techniques over and over again. If you want to be good cartoonist, you may well need to copy other cartoons thousands of times until you develop your own style and skills. Even Van Gogh started by copying other artists.

Concentrate on the technique you are practising and not on how long you will be practising it.

Make the boring, trivial tasks a part of your training. Use them to increase your mental toughness and will power.

When you start learning a new skill realize that your initial enthusiasm may fade until you reach a new level of skill. Just keep going until it does.

Enjoyment in training comes and goes; nobody enjoys it all the time. The real enjoyment can come from the results of training rather than the actual training itself.

It is important to realize that progress can be so gradual that feel you are getting nowhere fast. Keep practicing or dieting or working and your progress will eventually become obvious.

If you ever suffer from depression because of your lack of progress, get back to training and taking daily action. Get busy working on your goals.

Peter McWilliams sums up this remedy well:

“The simple solution for disappointment depression: Get up and get moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going.”

John Watson has just written a brand new ebook on ‘How To Reach Your Goals Now By Ditching Your Excuses’ which describes how to deal effectively with the excuses which prevent many of us from achieving our dreams. You will find it at: http://www.motivationtoday.com/howtoreachyourgoalsnow.php Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site but please include the resource box above

In my view, you are a success if you follow your plans whatever the results.

If you actually follow your own plans, whether you win or lose, you are several steps ahead of most of the human race who don’t even have a plan in the first place.

What can we do to make it more likely that we shall carry out our plans? Keep them simple!

When Seko, the Japanese runner, won the Boston Marathon in 1981, he was asked about his training plan. Seko explained it with only twelve words:

“I run 10 kilometers in the morning and 20 in the evening.”

This simple plan enabled him to outrun the world’s most gifted runners.

When Seko was told that his plan seemed too simple, compared to that of other marathoners, he replied:

“The plan is simple, but I do it every single day, 365 days a year”.

Simple? Yes!

Effective? Yes!

Easy? No!

Most people fail to reach their goals not because their plans are too simple or too complicated.

They fail because they do not follow their own plans. All plans are useless if they are not followed.

Seko’s plan was effective not because it was simple but because he followed it every single day.

On the other hand, we are more likely to follow a plan if it is simple.

The great marathon runner, Paula Radcliffe, has a simple race plan. She gets out in front and stays there!

In the film ‘Waterloo’, the Duke of Wellington is asked by his second in command what his plans are for the battle.

The iron duke replies: ‘To beat the French’.

Wellington was a man who paid close attention to detail in all his campaigns but he kept the simple over all plan in constant view. Every smaller plan must fit into the big simple picture.

Epictetus was another person who knew how to keep things simple:

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”

The writer who has the simple plan of writing for an hour every day will eventually complete whatever they are writing. The weight lifter who lifts for an hour every other day will become strong.

A simple plan that is followed is worth far more than a sophisticated plan which is not followed.

The great novelist, Anthony Trollope, had the simple plan of getting up at 6 a.m every morning.

Trollope wrote: “Few men, I think, ever lived a fuller life than me. I attribute the power of doing this altogether to the virtue of early hours.”

He would write 250 words every 15 minutes and would write for three hours before going to work at the post office. His writing schedule became legendary.

He finished his novels at incredible speed and started a new novel as soon as he had completed the old one. In the end he wrote over 40 books which were mainly novels. Many of these are classics like ‘The Barchester Chronicles’ and ‘The Palaces’.

Whenever he traveled by train, he would take his writing desk and write in pencil. His faithful wife, Rose, would copy in ink what he wrote in pencil when he returned home.

The achievement is remarkable since he also worked full time for the post office for 33 years and is credited with bringing the pillar box or mail box to England. He needed to write as he needed to eat but he also grew to love his post office work.

Trollope, in addition to all the above, had a happy marriage and was father to two sons. He even managed, in his later years, to fit in a harmless ‘romance’ with the beautiful young American woman, Kate Field.

Trollope reminds me of my granddad who also had the simple plan of getting up early at 6 a.m. and getting in a day’s work before the rest of us managed to get out of bed.

Charles Simeon, the great preacher, had the same early morning plan. When he failed to get up at 6 a.m. he threw a golden guinea into the River Cam. He only had to do this once.

I am not sure if chef Rick Stein gets up early but he, too, advises simplicity. He speaks of how the real secret of cooking is learning what not to do. When he was a young chef he would try to impress his guests with 3 different kinds of fish and 3 different kinds of sauce to go with them.

Now he laughs at this over complication and is content to keep his cooking simple and delicious. Simple basic cooking is often the best.

Bruce Lee, the great martial artist, used to do 500 kicks a day with each leg. This was a simple but very effective training plan. Bruce became world famous even though he died young.

Joe Calzaghe (aged 34) the Welsh super-middleweight boxing champion of the world, trains in a simple, classical way. His gym is also simple and lacks the sophisticated glamour of the bigger gyms.

Joe is trained by his dad, Enzo Calzaghe. Enzo has been described affectionately as a ’sadist’ by another world champion, Enzo Maccarinelli who now trains with him even though he has to commute for an hour to get to the gym and another hour to get home.

Enzo Maccarinelli is the WBO cruiser weight champion of the world.

Training with Enzo Calzaghe has already paid off for Enzo Maccarinelli. He was on the same card as Joe Calzaghe on October 14th, 2006. He knocked out the challenger, Mark Hobson, in the first round.

Enzo Calzaghe had noticed that Enzo Maccarinelli punched harder with his left hand than with his right. Enzo Calzaghe developed a simple training plan. He decided to make Enzo Maccaranelli’s right hand punches as powerful as his left hand punches.

The fight was won with a punch from Enzo’s right hand. No sophisticated combinations were employed. A simple left jab was followed by a glancing right hand blow close to Mark Hobson’s left ear. Mark lost all balance and the referee stopped the fight immediately.

Enzo had trained to be able to throw 370 punches a round but all he needed were two simple punches.

Enzo Calzaghe’s son, Joe Calzaghe, has become a legend in his own life time. He has won 41 fights out of 41. He won 31 of those fights by knockout.

On the night of October 14th, 2006 I watched, him successfully defend his title against a ferocious challenger, Sakio Bika, whose own manager said: ‘He fights like a wild man.’

Sakio, aged 27, is called the ’scorpion’ because he was stung by a scorpion as a young boy and survived. However, his right cross and his head butts, whether accidental or not, had all the venom and power of a scorpion’s sting.

The fight was a hard, bruising battle. Joe could have been knocked out at any time either with a head butt or a legitimate punch. He survived to win.

A former world champion, Chris Eubank, described Joe as the real thing - a true warrior. Simple, effective and home grown training has allowed him to dominate his weight category for about ten years.

To sum up: a simple plan you follow is far superior to a clever plan you don’t!

Any plan is useless if you don’t actually follow it.

Which plans are you more likely to follow: the simple or the complicated?

The simple.

So I suggest, at the very least, starting with a simple plan for any project you have in mind. You can always complicate your plan later when the simple version has been working well for a while.

You may not win any marathons or become a world famous author or chef or boxing champion but you will make progress in achieving success in any project you are attempting.

You may even astonish yourself by achieving success beyond your wildest dreams.

Incidentally, a simple ‘grocery’ list has the power to help you achieve these dreams.

Simply write down about 3-6 things you plan to do tomorrow. Sleep on the list (literally if you think it will help) and let your subconscious work on it. On the morrow, keep this list in view and refer to it throughout the day.

Stick at the first task until it is completed. Cross it off and then move on to the next. The head of a business corporation once paid a large amount of money for this simple 6 task list solution. He had realized its enormous value.

It is definitely worth a try if you haven’t already experimented with this suggestion. I tried the suggestion today and was amazed at how well it worked. Good luck and keep things simple.

Remember that if you actually carry out your plans, whether they bring the results you wish for or not, you will be amongst the elite of the human race.

John Watson is an award winning teacher and 5th degree blackbelt martial arts instructor. He has written several ebooks on motivation and success topics. One of these can be found at http://www.motivationtoday.com/36_laws.php Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site but please include the resource box above

It is a relief to be told that success demands that you do the boring stuff.

One of my three current internet business mentors, has just told me as much. I already believed this but it helps to have your view confirmed by someone who is a very successful expert.

Once you know, for sure, that you have to face up to and do the boring things, it becomes easier to do them.

If you think there is an easier way which does not involve dealing with any boring little details, you will resent and eventually stop doing those boring essentials which are the only way to achieve your dreams. You will probably waste time looking for a less boring but non-existent alternative.

Of course, there are usually easier ways to do things which you find out by bitter experience or by listening to those who have been there before. But even these shortcuts or easier paths involve taking some boring little steps.

So many sales letters for business opportunities dwell on the dream but forget to mention the often monotonous and repetitious steps which are needed to achieve the dream

According to the writers of the sales letters, you dance around your room in your underpants in celebratory mood. Occasionally you glance at your laptop to see steady streams of money pouring in to your bank account and then perform another victory dance.

You have a laptop because you are not at home but are living the high life in some exotic location surrounded by beautiful people! You sip your expensive drink as you sit by the mandatory swimming pool.

The authors of the sales letters forget to mention the small, unexciting steps you have to take to make the money to allow you to take off to the Bahamas with your lap top.

The steps may not be that difficult but they are boring and a little bothersome and that is enough to put most people off. One dictionary defines boring as “dull, repetitious, uninteresting.”

Few people can deal with the chore of taking boring, repetitious steps unless someone is cracking a whip behind them and threatening to throw them to the sharks if they don’t take action.

The dictionary forgets to mention that the boring often leads on to the exciting and the fascinating!

I find writing articles for my website and for ezines to be quite enjoyable and I submit my articles to one or two of my favourite article directories but then I get bored with the repetitious process of submission and go back to writing some more articles.

This is not a complete waste of time since the articles will be very useful to me, at least, but I am wasting 90% of the work I have already done by not doing the boring bit of submission. Submitting is not difficult; it is just very repetitious and not very interesting even if you use article submission software to help you.

I need to remind myself that submitting articles may lead to the exciting bit when more people visit my website and buy the ebooks and other products on sale there. Reading emails which tell me that real money has arrived in my account is fun and not at all boring!

When I was a teacher, pupils would argue that a certain book or topic was boring and they genuinely believed that was a good enough reason for not reading the book or thinking about the topic. The word ‘boring’ has become a mantra or universal saying among teenagers to excuse their lack of effort.

When I teach my martial arts students, some of them will drop out even though they are making progress. They may find the warm up repetitious. I can’t talk on this one as I avoid warm ups whenever I can.

But a warm up is essential. Without a warm up, you may suffer an injury and then have the even more uninteresting experience of being unable to train.

Warm ups also involve leg stretches which allow you to improve your kicking until it becomes awesome.

I remember Steve well. He always arrived very early at classes and was always seated on the floor stretching when the other students straggled in. His kicking was lightning fast and he eventually ended up as a British heavyweight Taekwondo champion.

However, martial artists too often forget the benefits of stretching and in the end give up because they have become half-hearted about the way they warm up and stretch.

You can vary the warm ups and you can play music in the background but you will in the end have to repeat some key stretches or movements which, in time, can become too familiar, repetitious and, eventually, boring.

Some students find learning the forms or patterns of movement too repetitious and boring. Even black belts will drop out of a martial art because they find it difficult to remember the movements and do not want to keep repeating the forms until they remember them.

They forget that, once a form is mastered; it can be exhilarating to do and can improve their technique to a level of power which can give them great self-confidence and skill.

Eating healthy food can be boring for those who are brought up on fat soaked, salty and tasty foods. It takes time to realise that the healthy foods are also tasty once you have educated yourself to appreciate the taste.

Even if you never to get to love the cauliflower or the brussel sprouts, you are still well advised to eat them or you will suffer the highly uninteresting experience of living a low energy life or falling ill or even dying early.

One way, then, to overcome the boredom obstacle to success is to fully accept that some unexciting steps are inevitable on the path to success. If necessary, talk to a millionaire or read a book about a millionaire and find out what boring steps they had to take to achieve their million.

Another way is to realize that the boredom will vanish when success is achieved and you start celebrating and enjoying your achievements whether they involve improved skills or a healthy bank balance or both.

A third way is to realize that if you accept and do the boring, you will then be equipped to move on to the fascinating. Learn the piano scales and then you can start playing the tunes. I never got beyond the scales!

A fourth way is to be aware of the need to avoid the dire consequences that can arise from not doing the repetitious stuff. Missing out on exercise because you find walking or jogging uninteresting can eventually lead to losing the ability to walk or jog. You lose what you don’t use as everyone knows or should know. Who wants to spend their later years in a wheel chair?

A fifth way is to make the boring as interesting as possible. I have written eight ebooks on how to make religious education fun. I have tried playing inspiring music in my martial arts classes and have used drills which are fun to do. All this helps but there is still a hard core of boring and repetitious work to do.

A sixth way is to work, whenever possible, with people you like and respect. Working with some one you love or fancy is a bonus! It may then, of course, be hard to focus on whatever project you are doing!

A seventh way is to use the powers of your subconscious mind to make the work you do easier and more interesting to do. You can access the subconscious mind by affirmations and by visualising your success in detail and with intense feeling. Eventually, however, you have to take some kind of action steps which may well be boring.

Try to commit to doing the boring, repetitious stuff for a month and see what happens. Even, within that short space of time, you and I will probably begin to appreciate the wisdom of taking those boring little steps and will begin to see one or two exciting results.

Eventually, if we keep going, a whole new and thrilling world will open up for us and we will achieve those dreams we had as children and/or as adults. We will then be able to dance around for real and even take a dip in that pool!

To sum up; accept that some boring work is inevitable and get on with it! Failing that, we need to relish our dreams because that is all we will be able to enjoy.

We will simply join the ranks of the millions who talk about what they want to do but never actually do it because they cannot be bothered to deal with the boring little tasks which must be completed on the way to achieving their dreams.

I hope that reading this article has not been too boring. It may be just what you or I need to hear. Try doing something boring right now! You may, at least, enjoy the feeling of having done it!

This blog will take a look at some of the key questions people ask about self-defence and self-protection.

No one knows all the answers but we will take a look at those too. Just reject what you are doubtful about and keep what you find useful.  

The blog will also examine and describe some of the key principles behind most effective self-defence systems.