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Hello and welcome. This is Battle Ready. I’m Ciara Morrison. Coming to you slightly diseased today, it has to be said. My sensei has gifted me, although she’s in complete denial. She’s gifted me this cold, so it isn’t your device or speakers or anything like that. It is just the fact that I sound like as if I’m at the bottom of the deep blue sea. Today, I want to talk about… The thought arrived after an interview last week. So if you’re new here, I’m a psychologist. I work in HR and operations. I help companies grow and basically expand if it’s startup or scale up. I’ve been in the world of cancer, cancer care, cancer recovery for the last few years. Obviously not by choice. That one’s very personal. But today, a little bit more positive, maybe in some ways, I want to talk about The answer to a question that kind of floored me in an interview last week. So I’m a consultant. I spend a lot of time in interviews. I can talk for length about good interviews, bad interviews, good interviewers, different ways of approaching interviews.

But actually, I was having a really interesting conversation with a recruitment consultant last week, and she was a breath of fresh air. I said it to her on the call at the end of it. I said, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. And in the middle of it, a parrot landed. On her shoulder, her husband has a baby parrot that he’s training. It was just, honestly, it was like as if the stars aligned. We got on very well. But she asked me a question. And I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, actually, over the last weekend. The interview was Friday. Today is already Wednesday. And the question was, you do martial arts. What makes you or what keeps you coming back? And I think on a previous podcast, I talked a lot about how I started and the family involvement, my uncle, rest him, who had been, you know, very senior in Waterloo in Europe. My entry was a lot less glamorous than you might think in that I was basically bundled into the car with my sisters and taken to the local dojo completely under duress.

I, yeah, summers back then were really different. So we grew up outside of Cork. Although Dublin is kind of, what I identify most with, you know, we grew up in the countryside in Cork. So there’s actually a split in the family accent-wise, which is quite funny. And then for a while, it was decided that in order to guarantee a source of heating for the winter, we would go to a place called Canturk. And I think actually the bog itself was called Nat. Yes, I did say bog. Yeah, we were taken to a bog where you could basically… buy access to part of this bog and whatever you could cut during the summer months and take from the bog you could use for your home heating and so somewhere along the line the parents decided this was a really good idea now they had three daughters four daughters actually me having three sisters and I was very vocal about the fact that I did not enjoy this. It was hard work, you know, in fairness to my dad, who was cutting this actual turf and we would make little houses out of it for it to dry.

Yeah. It was not in any way pleasant. And I think because I was an annoying daughter, it was decided I needed some sort of discipline. So I was taken to the local community centre along with the sisters to learn martial arts and in the hope that I would learn some sort of discipline maybe not be so vocal I’m not sure that really worked for them and you know I would I joined actually what was a very good dojo we’d never have known really if you didn’t know martial arts you wouldn’t know from the outside um and I stood at the end of the line like every other beginner in my tracky bottoms and a t-shirt in the middle of the summer um And really, at the beginning, it was just get through the class and go home. I didn’t want to do any of the Irish sports because I knew very well that, yes, the summer might be OK because the pitch would be dry. But for me, outdoor sports, not really. Not really my thing. I’m very, very glad I do an indoor sport. So it wasn’t really the kind of fairytale start.

But what happened over time was was this whole idea of learning and development. And that for me, when I got over the initial shock and I made a few friends and we were seeing the same people in the same classes, we went twice a week in the beginning. And again, the parents would be standing in the car, getting you into the car to go the three and a half miles downhill. That’s going to become relevant later to this dojo. And then at some point it flipped and I was then the person saying, can you drop us down? Come on, we need to leave. I don’t want to be late. I don’t want to do push-ups because there was a tariff. If you came in late, it was never frowned upon if you were late because we were depending on parents and et cetera to get us there. But you definitely did have to do push-ups. So I, at some point, flipped the script and then it was suggested, of course, that we should cycle. In the summer we should cycle… Which was about a 20 minute cycle downhill… On the way there… And about an hour on the way back… Because this was a massively steep hill…

But yeah… I was young when all of this started… And… I think I was really lucky… In that the dojo that we started in… Was very strict… You know… We lined up a certain way… You had to wear your gi a certain way. You had to have your badge. You had to show respect. And, you know, at that time, we didn’t really have black belts in the dojo. We had some brown belts who’d managed to get there. But actually understanding then how to move up the line, because I was at the end of this very long line of people. And as I looked to my right, you know, unlike other dojos, our sensei would only grade us minimum every six months. minimum, Q grades I’m talking about here. And he had two white belts before you moved to yellow. So you had first white, second white, both of which you had to grade for, and then yellow. And then you moved on up into the other grades. So it was a long, it was a long way to progress. And I remember years later having the conversation with him saying, look, why did you have the two the two white belts.

And he went, well, you’ll be a black belt for the rest of your life if you can’t get through the two white belts. By the time you get to purple and brown, you’ll never make it through. And that actually resonated quite well with me. But, you know, early days, it was very much around going to the dojo to progress, to be able to move up the line, to be able to do what some of the other people were doing. And of course, it looked like magic. You know, I wasn’t that flexible. I was always the same kind of strong-ish build. So I could power through and just be quite brute force and ignorance in certain things. But understanding the nuances was always a bit of a challenge. And then as we started to kind of see progress, it was then aligned to things like school and that discipline and realizing you did certain things at certain times so yes you would go home and do the homework or whatever it was and then you’d go to the dojo and come back and you know as school went on later on then you’d finish the homework um which I guess as a as a as a form of discipline yes that definitely helped but the other side of it was really how you behaved and I must admit from the very beginning you know our sensei was like look now that you come to these classes you’re different not everybody can do this.

You know, X amount of thousands of people start training. This percentage make it to black belt. And if you’re coming to these classes, you’re already special. And that was a great message, you know, for a kid to hear, to hear you’re special. Yeah, that was, yeah. You know, you were already winning by walking through the door, I remember him saying. And then when we started to go into like our Hombu Dojo, which was in Cork City, ironically up a really steep slope, hill as well you’d already gained something you know and it was it was it was all about the training and the learning and the exposure so when gashikus were on getting yourself to gashikus was was seen as the right thing to do and you know if you couldn’t afford to pay sure the money would be found somewhere and I don’t know if that’s what I took into like school etc etc but because somewhere along the line, it went, you know, there was a change, obviously, from you have to go to training to I want to go training. I want to learn.

I want to move up through the grades and how you dealt with pressure. You know, it was one of the first times that you get pulled out to do things on your own and actually also failure, because in those days, failure was a real option. many, many people failed gradings. I remember going to big gradings and, you know, a lot of people not even making it to the start line because they weren’t good enough or they hadn’t done the time, especially bigger gradings when we started to get up to brown belt. Failure was an absolute possible outcome. And it wasn’t just what you did on the floor for that grading. It was everything that went up to that grading. And in, you know, in some dojos, You were a grading candidate, certainly for senior grades, for a year beforehand. So you were locked into a process. That meant you had to be on top of the cleaning. You had to be on top of the rota for making sure the toilets had toilet paper. Everything. And if you dropped the ball at any point, there was a conversation.

And that conversation might take you out of that situation. round, if you like. So you’d go back into, if you were lucky, the next year’s cohort, if you like. So gradings were a privilege. Certainly, I looked at them as a very good benchmark. I was also competing at this point and doing all sorts of things. But the traditional side of the martial arts was something that I knew was if I wanted to maintain my place in the dojo, I had to do and I had to do well. So I couldn’t sacrifice one training to go to another, for example. So as I started to realize that I got a real big buzz out of competition and the training that went with that, I stayed with it. In the same breath, I was doing international courses with well-renowned instructors and also weapons as well, which was a kind of a new area In Ireland at the time, we were very lucky with, you know, the instructor and his students who shared their knowledge, you know, really, really keenly with us, actually. And so I was just this pot of information coming at me and seeking out opportunities to go and add to it as much as I possibly could.

So, you know, obviously living on an island has its limitations. So as I moved into the world of work and I had money, I remember… going to a course in Scotland, coming home and realising the flight had cost me, it was back in the Ryanair days, it cost me, I think, £25. And we’d taken a train and it had all worked really well. But, you know, it was of those days where you could, you know, get to Scotland and back for, I think, less than £100, including accommodation. Like we stayed in a, I stayed in a hostel actually a few times just to get to this course so that we could go and train. And they were wonder days. It was absolutely amazing. And then that realization that, oh, hang on a second. I actually have some money now. I’m working. What else is possible? Who else could I train with? And I’ve been very lucky. The dojos that I’ve trained with over the years have always had phenomenal routes. And I’ve been guided by… both the senseis and the participants in this dojo. And as time went on and I had the opportunity to go to Japan and I had the opportunity to stand amongst amazing people and compete beside them.

I’ve stood beside some of the greats of karate in competitions who’ve gone on to win their sections and I’ve just been there in the background, but at least I’ve been there. And as Steve Cattle said once many, many, many years ago, you know, get the information, get the experiences so that you can be the most interesting person in the room. And I think that’s one of the things that’s guided me a lot over the years. And I read a lot of, you know, ways of training and ways of improving. And I try, I try anything, you know, and some of it’s worked, some of it hasn’t. my life has been shaped massively around martial arts and I have some of the most amazing networks. And again, you know, when I was in the, in the throes of cancer, et cetera, I had videos from dojos in Australia and all over the world and that they were just the things that kept me going. And I said, I’m part of this community. I’m, I can’t die now, sure. And that’s, that’s a bit of a funny thing to say, but it was like, okay, well, okay, I’ve got to, you know, get myself together and get going with this and get better and get back to training.

And it’s something that drove me. And without it, you know, without martial arts in my life, it would have been so different. I’m a definitely, you know, a different person than, you know, if I hadn’t, you know, had the pleasure of these martial arts and standing in places that, you know, sometimes I do think, oh God, I wonder if another Irish person has ever stood here. certainly, you know, in some of the dojos I’ve been to and you look around and you’re like, wow. And you have to appreciate that in the dojos that I’ve been to, there are other people’s lives.