It's late June in the Song Mountains; it's close to a hundred degrees and only Buddha knows how humid it is.
You are in the courtyard of the Shaolin Temple. The slate gray, uneven stones of the courtyard are so hot you could fry and egg on them. The air is so heavy that it feels like you are parting a curtain every time you move.
You're stuck in a low twist stance doing your best to concentrate on your breathing and not the fact that it seems to your eyes that your legs have somehow switched sides and your feet are pointing the wrong way.
The pain is excruciating...seat dripping down into your eyes and off the tip of your nose; running down the small of your back, which would make you jump and wiggle but you don't want to attract any attention to yourself right at this moment...
Because you are saying to yourself, "Self...what the h@#$ am I putting up with this for."
You're doing it because the Head Monk is standing inches away, looking at you very intently like you are either going to be his next meal or you just might make it through this training session.
Okay, may be that's what it is like to be a Warrior Monk in training at the Shaolin Temple, maybe it's not. I can tell you from recent experience that the physical part might be close because that's what I went through about three weeks ago.
The point is why would someone put up with that. Put themselves through that type of stress and pressure.
It's simple. All of us make decisions. Some easy, some hard, but we all do it.
When we make the tough decisions, it always helps us to gather information and guidance from people wiser than us or people we respect. From there, it is our job to decide.
And once you decide, it's your job to follow through.
But...there's a secret weapon available to all of us that we can use to help us follow through with our decisions and get better results.
It's called a Coach.
Some names used are the Boss, Manager, Instructor, Mentor...there can be many names, but the duty is the same.
Your Coach's job is to get more from you than you think you can do. To push you to be your best. To hold you accountable for the results that you said that you desire.
I've had the honor of having both good and bad coaches and I am still being coached by several good ones right now. I've learned from both the good and the bad ones, as you probably have did when you were coached.
And then, there's always that One Coach. The guy whose death you plotted on many occasions. Whose name you uttered with various curses that questioned his heritage and anything else you could think of.
Why. Because out of all of them, he was the one who pushed you the most and made you go past your previous barriers. To be more that who you thought you could be.
Looking back, you probably think fondly of him and what he did to push you. I can think back to many things that my Senior Drill Instructor did to me during boot camp that are hysterical now...but the humor was lost on me back then.
Just like I imagine it was back in the day of training at the Shaolin Temple. I can imagine the trainees suffering through hours and hours of training with their Masters standing there watching them.
The Temple understood that this was necessary because they knew if it wasn't for their Instructors pushing their Monks, no one else had the discipline to train on their own hard enough to reach the levels of expertise necessary.
If you don't have a Coach, Instructor or Mentor, ask yourself why not and if you have any goals that you are trying to accomplish that are worth anything...that are pushing you to new levels.
Maybe it's time you got a Coach.
Best,
William Huff
P.S. - To find out what the Masters of the Shaolin Temple were teaching the trainees at the Temple, go to http://www.shaolinsecrets.com and get Secrets of the Shaolin Temple Volume I. See what information was so valuable and sacred that it required Masters to share it with the trainees.