WHAT’S YOUR SHUGYO?

As much as I’d love for everyone to think that I just sit down at the mic and start rattling off my thoughts and ideas into what eventually becomes a new episode each week, it simply ain’t so my friends! There’s a lot of work that goes into writing, producing, editing, and disseminating a podcast like this out to all of the different hosting platforms and podcast services. However, my point in sharing all of this with you is to share a concept that is as old as our oldest listener’s great, great, great, grandfather, maybe older. The idea, or practice really, is called shugyo. Shugyo is just the Japanese word for it and almost every culture has some kind of related concept, but I’m familiar with the Japanese concept so that’s the one that I’ll talk about in this episode. I’ve mentioned the word in other episodes, particularly in the carrying the bags of a zen master episode, I believe, that’s the most likely one anyway since that episode was all about my experience as the otomo, the servant leader, for my Aikido and Zen teacher as we traveled around the world.

What I learned during that time are lessons that have been serving me ever since then. It was as if I was being given little seedlings of lessons, lessons that I had no idea they were lessons, but lessons nonetheless, and ones that, if I followed, did the work being asked of me, and was consistent in my effort, would eventually reveal a new layer to the lesson. It was as if my teacher handed me an onion and said, ‘Blaine, just focus on each layer of the onion. Don’t worry  about the sweet inner layer of the onion, because if you just cut it open and start eating the inner layer, you’ll have no appreciation or deep understanding of all the lessons that this onion wants to teach you. Just start slowly peeling layer by layer and study it. Study each layer and become a master of that layer before moving on to the next layer of the onion. Each layer has a story to tell and a lesson to teach you. If you just start ripping away the layers and throwing them away in an effort to get to the middle, you’ve essentially discarded all the valuable lessons this onion is trying to convey. If you’d like to listen to the podcast version of this blog, just click here to be taken to the best podcast for appraisers!

Those lessons, of course, were lessons that I couldn’t possibly know about at the time because I hadn’t experienced all of the different things I needed to experience in life to give those lessons meaning and context, and my teacher knew that. I guess that’s what makes somebody a good teacher. He knew me better than I knew myself at the time. I believe he also knew that, over time, the seeds he planted would grow and reveal a multitude of lessons along the way if I just adopted this one thing that was like the fertilizer for those seeds he was planting. That fertilizer was this concept or practice that I mentioned earlier called Shugyo. Shugyo, in Japanese, is loosely translated as ‘austere or hard training’. Its often misunderstood in the martial arts world as some kind of command to train super hard and make everything painful. Its often believed in that world that if you aren’t in pain, you aren’t bleeding, or you aren’t ready to quit that you aren’t really training and you aren’t doing shugyo. This is a big misunderstanding though since Shugyo is more of a mental and spiritual concept than a physical one. Since, at the time, I was studying a martial art as well as zen meditation, two very different disciplines, I was able to see, experience, and gain a greater understanding of a few different ways that this idea of Shugyo could be understood and I’m going to do my best in this episode to explain my understanding of shugyo in a few different contexts and how it relates to our lives and businesses.

So, to begin with the most basic of understandings of this Shugyo concept and how its used in the martial arts world, they tend to use the understanding of Shugyo that it means hard and intense training, working through the pain, setting a goal that’s way off in the distance and pushing yourself through all of the obstacles to reach it despite your own perceived limitations, mental, physical, or both. For example, every Tuesday night and again on certain holidays while living in the dojo, we had a sword class run by a very experienced high ranking Aikido teacher who also happened to run the zen training program as well. Since one of the disciplines of the zen trainees involved using wooden swords called Bokken, which were also regularly used by the aikido practitioners, there was some crossover in the training. Since this particular teacher was both an Aikido teacher and a long time zen teacher, he would lead the Tuesday night sword training which always started with 1000 cuts. If you can imagine standing with your right foot in front and your left foot to the rear, with a wooden sword extended out in front of you at about your sternum level, this was always the starting position. From there, the teacher would call out a particular cut that involved some kind of step, usually a step back first, and then a step forward and a cut with the sword. So the first swing and cut was always the head cut. You step back and raise the sword over your head, and then you step forward and vigorously cut as if cutting somebody’s head in half from the top of the skull down through to the shoulders. That’s count one. Then you step back and then forward again and do the same cut, and then again, and then again, and again, and again, and this goes on and on with the teacher starting the count with each cut and going up to ten. Then the next person in line starts counting and cutting and the class follows along. When they reach the ten count, it moves to the next person and the next and so on down the line until you got through everybody in the class, which was always 30 to 40 people. This meant you were doing 300-400 cuts of this particular swing movement. Then the teacher would change the cut to a side of the head angle swing and cut and the whole thing would start over. Onward this would go until we had reached 1000 swings, steps, and cuts with the wooded sword. This always took about 45 minutes. So the warmup was 45 minutes and then for the next 45 minutes we would work on some particular technique with the sword.

I don’t know if you’ve ever swung anything over your head before, but I’m sure you’ve had the experience of working over your head on some project. Imagine doing some kind of work with your hands and arms fully extended over your head for long periods of time. Every now and then you have to drop your arms and shake them out because your shoulders start to give out. This is like the feeling doing the first 100 continuous cuts. Your shoulders are on fire, your arms are screaming at you, you hate your life and everybody around you, and you know you have 900 more to go. But that was the point. This class was a Shugyo class for many people who came to class. We lived there and had to do it so it was just training and torture for us at the time, but the people who had worked at their jobs all day, taken the subway or busses to and from work, ambled through the crowded streets and subway stations, and couldn’t wait to come to aikido class that night, for them, this was their shugyo. They knew what they were in for. They knew it was going to be painful. They knew it was going to be monotonous. They just did it the week before and it was no secret that Tuesday night was 1000 cuts night. But people showed up every week in droves to swing that damn sword 1000 times because it was their shugyo. To them, it wasn’t about learning how to use a sword, it was about the push. It was about forcing themselves to do something they knew was going to be difficult, something that would tax not only their body’s, but their minds and their resolve as well. I met several people in that class and the zen class who were stationed at or worked at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago who eventually became Navy Seals and were coming to those classes specifically to push themselves. They had taken up zen training and that damn sword class to test their resolve under difficult situations. Both of those things, of course, mere baby steps in the journey of a Navy Seal, but it opened my eyes a bit to this concept of shugyo beyond just austere or intense training. For them, shugyo was something they HAD to do or they would never be able to face themselves. The word took on a different meaning and a new understanding of it took over. Instead of the word being expressed as an adjective to describe a particularly hard or intense class, it became a word used to express one’s personal journey or undertaking to slay inner demons, tackle difficult challenges, recognize things maybe they were avoiding in life, and then apply this idea of Shugyo as a way to reassure themselves that it was simply something that had to be done. You would often hear somebody sum up their explanation about why they were doing Aikido, or zen, or even becoming a navy seal by saying, ‘its just my shugyo, I have to do it’.

Of course, since the word was pretty much used daily in the dojo setting, we would often abuse the concept with junior ranked students and new live-in students by giving them the worst tasks to do and the least desirable dojo projects. We would assign the task or the project and then say, ‘that’s your shugyo!’, meaning you don’t have to like it and its just something you have to do so get over it and go do it. Anytime somebody would complain, including myself, there was always somebody ready to blurt out, ‘that’s your shugyo man!, shut up and do it!’ And to a large degree, they were right! The greater concept of shugyo, especially outside of the martial arts world, suggests something more like the ‘absence of comfort’, as in Spartan conditions, few creature comforts, putting aside your own desires for comfort and relaxation and digging into those areas that you KNOW need to be explored but maybe you fear digging into for some unknown reason. Or maybe the reason is known and the reason is simply that you know digging into it is going to mean more work for you and less comfort. Once this new understanding of Shugyo was expressed to me, it was followed up by some more fertilizer from my teacher, the peeling away of new layer of that onion you could say. He would say, ‘any thought that comes into your head that then gets quickly pushed aside in favor of something easier or more comfortable is your inner self expressing its shugyo. If, even for a second, you know you should start doing something you’ve been avoiding, doing that thing becomes your shugyo. You will not rest or be comfortable until you do that thing. In fact, any comfort you may be experience or give yourself prior to undertaking your shugyo is simply making you weaker as a person. If something inside you says, ‘I know I need to stop eating so much junk’, then your shugyo is going on a diet and changing what you eat. If something inside you expresses fear about trying something or heading in a particular direction in life then that is your shugyo, you must do that thing or explore that direction lest you stay in the same place of relative comfort and live with regret. Shugyo, in that sense, becomes a mindset of constant digging within to ferret out what calls to you and then pursuing that thing, or the cutting out of that thing in the case of things that maybe are bad for you, and challenging yourself to make that your shugyo, or that thing in your life that demands the absence of comfort in order for you to grow. In essence, shugyo becomes a clarion call to get off your ass and just do it! If the thought pops into your head and some part of you pushes it back down because you don’t want to do it, that’s your shugyo calling to you.

For some in the appraisal world, maybe its undertaking to achieve that advanced designation. Its difficult work, lots of hours, lots of travel, and lots of money, but if it calls to you because you desire to be more tomorrow than you are today, that becomes your shugyo. You become willing to endure discomfort, or at least the absence of comfort, in some area of your life so as to address what your inner voice is saying to you. That thing becomes your shugyo. If you know you aren’t as healthy as you could be because of you eating habits and lack of exercise, that may be your shugyo. Figuring out the downsides of relative comfort and staying where you are in life may, in the end, be far worse than the effort and work it will take to move you out of wherever and whatever got you there. That’s your shugyo. If your business and life are not where you want them to be, you know both could be so much more but you cant seem to get any movement in either area, your shugyo is figuring out what got you there, what keeps you there, what discomforts, or at least absence of comforts you are willing to endure to move you in the direction you want to be moving. Shugyo is not a destination. Shugyo is not goal setting. Shugyo is not a diet. Shugyo is the recognition of the areas of your life, your mind, body, spirit, business, relationships, skill set, mindset, or whatever else in your life that need growth and simply needs to be done but hasn’t been getting done. Shugyo is the recognition of where you may be fooling yourself into thinking you’re comfortable but, after some deep reflection and tearing off of the blinders, you see that the recliner you plop into each evening after work is surrounded by prison walls. You think that the relaxation is the reward for your mostly half assed efforts at doing the same things you’ve always done when, in fact, real rewards lie beyond the easy chair and in the direction of your shugyo. I cant know what that is for you, although I’m pretty good at figuring it out after talking with somebody for 5 or 10 minutes on a coaching call, but you know what it is! Your shugyo is whatever you’ve been avoiding. Your shugyo is whatever means less comfort for you. Your shugyo is that thing you know you’re supposed to be doing but are not.

By the way, you can have multiple shugyos in your life. One of my shugyos right now is intermittent fasting, cleaning up my diet, and changing my relationship with food. If ever there was something in my life associated with comfort, its food. Food and I love each other very deeply! We stare longingly into each other’s eyes every day. We tell each other after each meal, I’ll miss you! Until the next meal, of course, when we embrace and spend some not so quality time together. Food for me has almost always been a reward I gave myself to give me comfort. I learned to not enjoy the rumbling in my stomach, I mean who does? If my stomach growls, that means put food in it, simple as that! As soon as I start feeling hungry I would tell myself, ‘I’d better get some food in me soon or I may faint!’ I told myself a story for a long time that I needed food to feel good. The problem with that is that I was always seeking comfort through food, which is a very temporary type of comfort. Once recognized, changing all of that becomes my shugyo. I know I need to do it and so that means rewriting the story I tell myself and the meaning I assign to the feelings in my stomach. Recognizing it as my shugyo, or something I simply need to do and the absence of comfort is simply a given, means I have to rewrite the script, give new meaning to the sensations in my body, mind, and stomach, and I simply can’t rest on this until I’ve reached some of my goals in this area and until another shugyo reveals itself. Which was the next layer of the onion for me in terms of my understanding of this concept of shugyo. My teacher would always say, ‘It never ends Brain, it never ends! You’ll never be done and you never arrive because once you get there you need to be headed somewhere else!’

Shugyo never ends my friends. What you’re focusing on at any particular time may change but there should always be something in your life that you recognize as your shugyo, your thing that you have accepted as your struggle and the thing you simply must do or be working on, even though it represents, at best, the absence of comfort, and at worst possibly some pain and suffering for a time. And on that point, remember, suffering is simply effort laced with emotion. I’m not referring to the global or universal definition of suffering like a massive drought, a holocaust, a tidal wave that kills 250,000 people, starving babies in other countries, or the loss of a loved one. There is real suffering in the world and I don’t mean to make light of it. The suffering I am referring to is the suffering we create in our own minds by our habitual thought patterns, by the tape that plays in our brains that says, ‘I’m not good enough’, or ‘doing that is going to be painful’, or constantly complaining about how the world isn’t as you’d like it to be. This is the suffering we create in our own minds and it’s because we add emotion to our daily struggles as human beings. What shugyo teaches us is that acceptance of any of these things simply as life, without all of the negative emotion added to to it, is a way to alleviate some of the suffering and struggle we create for ourselves on a daily basis. What shugyo also teaches us is that by taking on things that represent the absence of comfort in some area or areas of our lives, we’re actually rewriting what comfort means to us. We’re assigning new meaning to the word comfort and, eventually, when you fully embrace this idea of constantly identifying what you should be working on and towards and making that your shugyo, you’ll start to find some comfort in the work and the effort that is expended in direction of your shugyo. Comfort comes now through doing instead of it always being related to the not doing of something.

Some may be tempted, by the way, to loosely define shugyo as discipline. Some will say, ‘well Blaine, it sounds to me like you’re just describing somebody who is disciplined.’ And to some degree, you may be right. It takes some discipline to figure out what you know you should be doing or what direction you should be heading and then taking the steps to do that thing. However, shugyo is different in that many who are disciplined are simply good at routine. Take distance runners, for example. It takes discipline to get up, put on your running shoes, gear up, and head or for a 3, 5, or 10 mile run. But many who do have been doing it for years and its simply part of their routine. Shugyo is finding the other things in your life, after the running, that maybe you’ve been avoiding but know doing that thing will make you a more complete human being. The not doing of that thing will always leave you in a state of wondering ‘what if?’, ‘why not?’, and, ‘if not now, when?’ You can be very disciplined in some area of your life and addicted to comfort in other areas. Find those areas, ask the deeper questions, dig into what your next shugyo needs to be and then start doing that thing.

I said I would relate it to business as well so I will share with you that, for me, of course, this podcast is one of my shugyos. I told myself that I knew I should be doing it, that it would be work, that it would take time, that it would be a struggle to write every day and every week, that I may not feel like it some days or weeks, but that I know what the absence of comfort feels like, smells like, and tastes like so producing a podcast become a shugyo for me. It became something that I simply said, ‘if you don’t do it it will always haunt you. You’ll always wonder what if and you’ll always regret not sharing your experiences and information.’ Another shugyo for me are the live events we have coming up. I’ve thought about it for a long time because I have some experience doing one day to multi day workshops and seminars so I have some goals in that regard and it would be so much easier to simply not do them. However, because I have a deep understanding of this shugyo concept, as soon as the thought pops in my head, something in me says, ‘aww shit, now I have to make this my shugyo!’ and I have to do it. Maybe for you its getting more familiar with your numbers. Maybe for you its going and giving agent talks and workshops. Maybe for you its prospecting non lender or direct lender work. Again, I cant know what it might be for you, but you know. You know right now as you’re listening to my voice what you should be doing but aren’t. That, my friends, is your shugyo! Accept that it will entail the absence of comfort for a time and be ok with that. Put it on the calendar, schedule it, buy the new running shoes, join that gym, hire the personal trainer, clean out the fridge, pour out the soda, start doing a monthly P&L, open that IRA, start making a budget, whatever it is, just tell yourself that that thing is now your shugyo and that you’re just going to do it. Saying that its your shugyo relieves you of all responsibility for having to want to do it or enjoy it! Your not supposed to enjoy it! That’s the whole damn point man! But you do have to do it!

What’s your shugyo? What aren’t you doing that you should be? And you know you should be? How many cuts are you doing today? 100, 500, or are you going to push yourself to do all 1000 cuts? Figure out what it is for you and schedule it! If you need somebody to hold you accountable, find an accountability partner, share with them what you’re doing, and set up some accountability measures. What you must NOT do, is tell yourself that you have to like it to keep doing it. This is one of the sad conditions of our existence as human beings. We really ourselves that we must like and enjoy it or we’re not going to do it. In fact, its one of the best parts of being an adult, we get to do whatever we want. Shugyo is like an internal parent, a coach, a sensei whispering to you and saying, ‘you know you’re supposed to be doing this and by doing it you’ll be better, so what aren’t you doing it?’ What’s your shugyo my friends? I shared some of mine, I’d love to hear some of yours. If you’re part of our private Facebook group called the success dojo, more specifically the Real value coaching academy success dojo, share it there. If you’re not part of that group, feel free to share it on the Real Value Podcast facebook page.

Speaking of shugyo, we are taking applications for our January coaching class that has, as of this recording, only 10 openings. We just started our October class and their off and running and identifying their own shugyos. If you’d like to be part of a hardcore accountability coaching experience, shoot me a message and lets chat. If taking your business and life to the next level is not part of your shugyo at this point, that’s ok too. The levels II and III coaching experience is not for somebody who isnt ready to do some work. As the past coaching members know, and as the current teams are finding out, there is lots of accountability, some work involved both personally and professionally, but lots of growth as a result. Our coaching experience is the very definition of shugyo because there is a designed absence of comfort since comfort is synonymous with stagnation and a lack of growth. If you want to grow, there must be an absence of comfort and accountability. If you’re still seeking comfort, our programs probably aren’t for you. If you’re ready for some discomfort, however, and you want to be pushed a bit, decide if that is your shugyo and reach out to us, we’ll help you figure it out.

With that my friends, I thank you for investing your most valuable currency which is, of course, your time! Invest it wisely, spend it sparingly, try never to waste it, account for it regularly, and spread it over the areas that give you and your life the most meaning. I encourage you to take some time this week and ask yourself the all important question, ‘what is my shugyo?’, ‘what do I know I should be doing but am not and why not?’, ‘what steps could I take in that direction and am I ok with the discomfort, or maybe just the absence of comfort that may lie ahead?’  The answers to those questions will point you in the direction of your shugyo. I appreciate you all and, until next week my friends, I’m out…