Apr
25
Verbal Aikido
or: Spicing Your Life up with Improvisational Comedy and Clinical Hypnosis.
One of my business consulting clients is multilingual, and is now working in Japan. He came to me one day saying “When I speak in Japanese with people at the company, they often reply back in English. It’s frustrating.”
I told him – they’re probably just trying to be helpful. You can compliment them. Say “Your English is very good – you’re very bilingual, and I need your help to learn to speak Japanese better. Could you reply in Japanese when I speak Japanese?”
Just when I said “Your English is very good,” my client burst out laughing, and took notes.
The principle at work is “Accept what you are offered.”
In Aikido, we are taught that the opponents attack is an offer. If he pushes, you pull. If he pulls, you push. Any attack is an offer of momentum or energy that can be redirected. Directly trying to block an attack is painful, and escalates any struggle. Instead, one accepts the offer, utilizes the momentum to unbalance the opponent, after which one is in a position to lead. Even a “direct” martial art like karate doesn’t block punches directly, but deflects them perpendicular to the oncoming force.
Improv Comedy has this principle, too. Watch brilliant artists like “Who’s line is it, anyway?” and you’ll find that they are making it up on the spot, but they are following certain principles, the main one of which is that they accept all offers. At no point do they say “no” or “but.” They are always building off of each other’s statements into a funny, co-created reality. In a beginning improv comedy class I took, our teacher instructed us to start each sentence with “yes, and” so we could get a feel for it.
Naturally, hypnotists and physicians do this as well. When a client describes what’s ailing him, it is the job of the practitioner to listen and agree. What the client is feeling is the truth, and in order to lead him to a place of better health, the practitioner first recognizes this and agrees – this is as much to establish rapport as it is to make a diagnosis. What’s more, in hypnosis, we find that clients with something like a smoking addiction are obsessive, on just has to re-direct the obsession in the opposite direction. Another term for this is utilization.
So next time, instead of opposing, accept what you have been offered. Utilize. Redirect. Move so that the movement of your opponent is completely encompassed in the greater movement of you and your opponent, in a way that you can stay perfectly balanced. Accepting is not condoning, but it is the first step to redirecting.
