A metaphor for life - The Punching Bag...

[Phil Parkinson]

The punching bag…

I have tried to write this piece a few times now, but it never seems to come out right. Whenever I am punching the bag, it all makes perfect sense, but my laptop is never in the boxing gym; I would probably find it quite hard to type with 12 ounce gloves on anyway.

So I was punching the speed ball yesterday and it occurred to be that there were a great many commonalities between boxing or getting good at boxing and personal development or getting good at life.

Some of my observations:

1) It’s hard work. Boxing training is some of the toughest physical exercise you can do. If you don’t believe me, try punching with reasonable speed into the air for 30 seconds. Then just imagine that some boxers do that faster, with footwork and with punches raining down on them for 12 rounds of 3 minutes. It’s a tough sport. Life is also very tough; particularly when you are starting out on the road of personal development. Skills in boxing and a fulfilling life both mesh perfectly with the following quote “nothing of any value in life ever comes easy.”

2) You get out what you put in. The harder you work in the boxing gym, the better you will become. The more effort you put into developing yourself, the more fulfilling and enriched your life will become.

3) No place for quitters - When you are two minutes into a round and your shoulders are burning and your lungs are hurting, it’s so easy just to give up and leave the gym. Every time you quit a round, you are hurting one person: yourself. In life, it is so easy to avoid that “difficult” conversation. So easy to leave work half an hour early. So easy to call time on a relationship because you can’t be bothered to make it work. As with boxing, if you have a propensity to give in at life, you will never achieve your goals.

4) Dedication – To be a champion boxer, you have to display enormous levels of dedication to your training. To be a highly successful human being, you must be dedicated to improving yourself.

5) Progress is often subtle. Every punch on the bag seems to be the same as the previous punch. In fact, every time you punch that bag, you get a little bit better than before; the results are very subtle. Over a period of time, your punches become sharper and stronger. When we develop ourselves, it often feels like we have not moved forward when in fact we have. Every interaction we have, every step in the dance hall, every repetition in the gym, with every piece of knowledge we acquire, we are moving forward. We may not see the results immediately, but over a period of time, the results will come. We must bear this in mind when we travel down the road of personal development.

6) It takes time… You can’t expect to be a boxer after 3 classes… there is so much to learn. You can’t expect to have a successful and happy life because you went to the gym three times last week. You have to apply prolonged periods of concerted effort.

7) You get good at getting good. I have learned so many things in my life that I actually now feel like my ability to learn has improved. When I start a new discipline in the boxing gym, I will now pick it up extremely quickly. I learned how to dance to a professional standard in 3 months. I will do the same with DJ’ing. It is possible for one to get good at getting good at things.

8) You only have so much time. I have one hour a day to practise my boxing skills. I aim to improve as much as I can in that one hour. We only have so much time in our lives. Try to maximise your time and seek to better yourself in every waking second. Every time I go in there I try to pack the most into every session. I train right up until the final second on the clock; I never leave early. I try to pack as much into every day as I can; I constantly look to move forward in everything that I do.

9) More than one discipline. When you think of boxing, you think of two men in a ring, each trying to knock the other out. This is the end result, but boxing training entails a large number of disciplines. You must be able to spar, use the heavy bag, the uppercut bags, the speed ball, the mitts, core strengthening work, medicine ball, fitness training. My trainer Ronnie Wood told me if you want to be a world champion, you must master each and every area of the boxing gym. If you just learn to spar, you may not train your punching technique, you may forget about power; you may not be fit enough. In life, if we focus on one key area, we will do so to the detriment of many other areas that also require our energies and attention. For example, if we obsess about getting women, the rest of our lives will suffer as a result. There are far more skills to learn in life than in a boxing gym, but the overall concept is the same. We must focus on areas in order to improve, but we must also continue to develop in many different areas as a lack of balance is detrimental to our personal improvement.

10) Knowledge brings results. Ronnie Davis has been training me for just over a month and I feel that I have progressed more in that time than throughout the entire year I spent boxing before I met him. Why? He has fixed my technique so that I punch harder, keep my defence stronger and use less energy. He has given me the knowledge to train in the correct way. The same can be applied in life. There is nothing that we cannot do; we just need to acquire the knowledge to take us from A to B (perhaps this board can help us in that regard).

Hope this is useful to some of you guys.

Phil

[da1prophet]

Excellent article!