Chapter 7
Kokyu: Breath-Power
I lost half of a lung to cancer. I'd been through treatment already for testicular cancer. Then the cancer spread to my lungs, so I'd gone through months of exhausting, debilitating chemotherapy. Then, after all that, there was still a spot on my lung. The doctors said it could be scar tissue left over from the brutal chemotherapy, but I didn't want to take any chances. I chose to have surgery to be sure.
I still remember waking up after that surgery with all these tubes coming out of me. For 24 hours after surgery, I was on a ventilator. A machine was breathing for me. Gradually, they weaned me off the ventilator. I had to learn how to breathe again—with half of one lung missing. Normally, we don't use our full body to breathe. We use our lungs. We don't use our full capacity. But I had to learn to breathe in with my whole body. Otherwise, I would constantly be taking these shallow breaths.
For a while, I felt like I was always out of breath. I tired easily. Suddenly, I knew exactly what oxygen was doing for my body. I knew, on this completely visceral level, the power each breath gave me. If you've ever traveled to a place that's at a very high elevation, you may have some idea of what I'm talking about—it's not until you take in a little less oxygen with each breath that you become aware of what each breath really means.
I spent years learning how to use my new, physically weaker body. I had to relearn how to do many of the aikido techniques I thought I knew perfectly. And finally, a few years later, I had recovered to the point that I was able to run my first marathon—with only one and a half lungs. And I never completely lost that awareness of my own breath.
Take a deep breath now: in and out. Feel what happens to your body as you breathe. Feel your shoulders rise and fall. Feel the oxygen, and the energy, moving through your body. Take just a few seconds to do nothing but breathe, and see if you don't feel just a little more clear headed.
When you exhale, your body relaxes. As you breathe in and out, you're able to see more clearly. Oxygen powers your body through everything you do.
Kokyu-Ho: Knocking Someone Over with Only a Breath
Literally, kokyu (pronounced, “koe-Q”) means respiration. But in aikido, the concept of kokyu goes much deeper than the simple physical fact of breath. One way to translate it would be “breath-power,” but even that doesn't fully do it justice. Just as your breath powers your body physically, kokyu is what powers every move you make. It generates your ki energy, which flows through all of your actions. You can't find your one-point or achieve a state of true clarity without breath-power. It's the engine that powers your entire practice of aikido. It is life.
At the beginning of every aikido class, we do an exercise called kokyu-ho. This is a partner exercise. You and your partner kneel in front of one another and grab each other's wrists. They'll try to push or pull you off balance while you try to stay upright and topple them over. Both of you will use your exhale—your breath-power—to power through this exercise.
It sounds simple, even silly—and that's part of the point. It's a very humbling exercise. You're going to look stupid while you're doing it. You're probably going to fall over. Your ego is going to get in the way. The more you care about not falling over, the more you're going to be tense and easily unbalanced. The more you think about how this other person is stronger or weaker than you, or how you should be better at this, the more you're going to be stuck in place, struggling to accomplish something that seems like it should be easy.
Kokyu-ho also teaches spontaneity, creativity, sensitivity, and even humility and patience. As soon as you think you're going to knock your partner over, they're going to sense your intention. You have to remain completely in the moment and find the path of least resistance, the path that allows you to change your partner's balance simply through the power of your breath. It's a physical exercise, but success relies on your mental state.
Students often fail at this exercise because they're afraid of looking silly. They hold back. They don't fully commit. Or they revert to using force to “fight” their way through the exercise. And so they fall over—and their fears are realized. How often have you done this in your life? How often have you held back because you were afraid you'd look silly, or afraid you would fall? How often have those fears made you revert to force and effort, and muscle your way through life like a bull in a china shop? And yet, in life, as in aikido, it's only when you take a deep breath and let go of your fear of losing that you can see your way to success.
Time to Get Uncomfortable
Surveys have found that people rank public speaking higher on their list of fears than almost anything, including death.1 There are deep psychological and evolutionary reasons for this fear.2 Human beings are social animals. Alone, we're not strong enough to fight off predators. That's why we evolved to live in tribes. At some deep, instinctual level, we still feel that being part of a group is a matter of survival. And that means being laughed at, being ostracized, being rejected—these things cause a deep kind of fear that touches at the core of what makes us human. We fear public speaking because we fear this kind of social rejection. Somewhere in our deep instinctual core, we feel like failing at public speaking would be a kind of death.
Even I find it scary—still, as a professional keynote speaker, when I get out on that stage, I get nervous, and I feel myself breathing high up in my chest, the short, shallow breaths that come with anxiety and panic. In order to succeed, I have to take a minute to change my breathing. I have to center myself and breathe deeply from my belly in order to regain my calm and focus.
You don't even have to be doing a keynote speech in front of a huge crowd to feel this kind of fear. Think back to the last time you went on a job interview, or had a big, high-stakes sales call, or asked someone out on a date. Chances are good you found yourself breathing those short, shallow breaths I was talking about. It's a natural response to anxiety. But it will hold you back. In order to succeed and stay grounded during these kinds of important conversations, you need to learn to hold on to to your deep belly breathing even when you're nervous.
One Way to Get Past Your Anxiety
So how can you practice in advance of a big presentation or an important conversation? How can you get better at using your breath-power to keep you centered when the stakes are high? There's one simple thing you can do to learn something new, overcome a common fear, and create a kokyu moment. You can do this in over 15,000 locations in 135 countries around the world: You can join your local Toastmasters club.
If you've never heard of Toastmasters, the idea is simple. There are clubs all over the world, and members usually meet weekly to work on their public speaking skills. Meetings generally last an hour, and they're designed to fit into a working person's busy schedule.
I'm a Toastmasters member myself, and I've found it immensely helpful. Each meeting offers two slots for short, prepared speeches, usually five to seven minutes. After the prepared speeches, there's a session called Table Topics. One person is assigned to come up with 10 or 15 questions, and then picks someone out of the crowd to speak on each of these topics for one to two minutes. Yes, that means that you might be suddenly summoned to the stage to speak, impromptu, for a minute or two on a topic you just heard about 10 seconds ago. The questions can be completely off the wall. Your question might be something like: You're the cultural attaché for Scotland. You've just been invited to taste haggis for the first time. What do you do?
Speaking impromptu is a huge challenge. It provokes the purest form of that deep instinctual fear that makes so many people avoid public speaking at all costs. Not only are you in front of a crowd, risking your reputation and your status in the group, you're doing it without the ability to plan and prepare and make sure you're not going to say something stupid.
And that's exactly why I love it as much as I hate it. Speaking off the cuff is a perfect opportunity to practice harnessing your breath power. As soon as your name is called, you'll feel your breathing changing. You'll start breathing those shallow, panicked breaths. And you'll have to take a second to slow your breathing, focus your breath power, and get yourself centered again.
Public speaking is like any other skill—the more you practice it, the better you'll get. You'll get better and better at recognizing that moment when your breathing changes. You'll understand the meaning of that shift in your breathing, and you'll know that your nerves are natural, even instinctive. And you'll be able to deliberately shift your breathing lower in your body, slow it down, and get control of your nerves.
Once you get some practice recognizing this panic and getting it under control, you'll be able to call on this skill in a lot of different situations. So the next time you have a performance evaluation, a salary negotiation, a big sales call, or any other important conversation, you'll be able to keep yourself calm. You'll be able to harness your breath-power to stay centered during the conversation, and you'll be less likely to stumble over your words or say the wrong thing because you panic and you can't think of anything to say. Facing your fear will enable you to conquer it.
Breathing While You Work
It's easy to acknowledge how nervousness affects you when the stakes are high. But using your breath-power is just as important in small day-to-day conversations and decisions as it is in the big moments. Breath powers everything you do. If you don't allow your breath to flow freely and bring energy to your body and your mind, you won't be able to make good decisions. You won't be operating at your full strength. You'll be like me after my lung surgery—you'll be limping along with less power than you should be able to access.
I am convinced most people don't know how to work at anything like their full potential. Most people don't organize their days to harness and enhance their power and create peak performance. Most people don't organize their days at all—and so their days unfold by chance, taking them by surprise at every turn.
If you're like most people, you spend a lot of your workday reacting, jumping from mindless task to mindless task while constantly looking at your smartphone, instead of acting. And when you're reacting, you're thrown into that shallow breath pattern. Instead of breathing deeply and pulling energy into your body deliberately, you're in a state that's not quite panic, but not quite calm—and you're in that state for most of your day. No wonder so many of us suffer from stress-related illnesses.
As I mentioned in Chapter 6, I used to be one of those people who let my day take me by surprise. I used my smartphone as an alarm clock. I'd check my work e-mail and other notifications first thing, before I was even out of bed. That meant I was starting my day in reactive mode. I would find myself doing that shallow breathing as I read e-mails alerting me to some new crisis. I'd haul myself out of bed, rush through breakfast while trying to respond to these e-mails, then hustle over to work, only to be interrupted again and again by my staff, bringing me yet more problems to attend to. I'd end up trying to squeeze my real work—the high-level strategic work that I as the CEO of the business should have been focusing on—into the cracks between crises.
Does this sound familiar? Far too many people work this way. If you don't set yourself up for success, you leave yourself exposed to anything and everything the day throws at you. You'll only get to your real work on a slow day when nothing's happening—and how many of those have you had recently?
When you pause to take a deep breath and center yourself, you can structure your day so that you have longer periods of calm in which to advance your actual work. You'll be able to harness your breath-power throughout the day and avoid those moments of shallow, panicked breathing that naturally arise when you are taken by surprise.
How to Take Control of Your Day
Set a morning routine and stick to it. And whatever you do, don't start your day with e-mail. I don't use my phone as an alarm clock anymore. I don't look at e-mail first thing—in fact, I don't look at e-mail until much later in the day, after I've had a chance to get some real work done.
Here's how my day unfolds: I wake up to a very cool vibrating alarm clock. My smartphone is out of sight charging downstairs. When I do grab it, I don't have any push notifications on my phone showing me that I received 400 new e-mails, app messages, text messages, and the like, so there's no chance I'm going to be interrupted or thrown off by something unexpected. As a result, I'm able to have breakfast and prepare for the day in a calm and focused state.
Once I get into my office, I have a simple routine I go through before I start work. It takes about 15 minutes, and it creates an exhale moment, a moment of relaxation and calm, so that I start work in the best possible frame of mind. My grounding routine starts with a moment of prayer. Then I text one friend or family member I want to connect with—maybe I tell them hello or that I'm thinking of them. Or just send them a message to have a great day.
Then I journal, just for a minute or two, covering about half a page with whatever's on my mind—what happened yesterday, what's coming up today. Then I take a minute to read over some personal development materials—something that I've used in the past and found helpful. This routine means that I'm starting my day grounded in my connection to the universe and to my loved ones. I'm starting with a clear-eyed focus on what I'm trying to do, and a reminder of the best way I want to work.
After getting centered, I review my calendar items from the previous day. I move any uncompleted tasks from yesterday to today, and I organize my calendar for today. I know I'm at my most creative, productive, and present in the mornings, so I deliberately plan to give myself a couple of blocks of peak productivity time before 11:30 AM. I start with my most pressing task first, so I can approach that with a clear head and a fresh mind.
I like to work in 40-minute chunks of focused attention. I'll set a timer, work for 40 minutes, and then give myself about 5 minutes to get up, get away from my desk, and walk, preferably outside. Then I'll return to my desk and spend the remaining 15 minutes of the hour checking my e-mail or returning phone calls. Then I'll look at my calendar and see if I need to adjust my plan—did any of the messages I just received put an urgent new task on my plate? If so, I'll take a deep breath and adjust my plan.
Most people spend their days reacting. Their lives are ruled by their phones and computers and the dozens of little pings that demand attention throughout the day. That's a recipe for disaster. If you try to work this way, you'll be breathing shallowly most of the day, and you won't be using your breath-power as well as you could. But if you give yourself time to exhale, relax, and breathe deep belly breaths throughout your day, your kokyu will be working to keep you focused and help you make better decisions.
Risking Failure to Succeed
Most martial arts schools earn 70 percent of their revenue from youth programs. For many people, kids in little white uniforms are the first thing they think of when they think of a martial arts class. But I had always felt my school—my academy—was different. I prided myself on teaching adults, and specifically high-achieving adults. I was an elite practitioner of a specialized craft. The idea of teaching kids set off these negative ideas in my head, like my school was going to become a glorified daycare. Kids just didn't fit into my vision of who I was trying to be.
I believed teaching kids the discipline of aikido was important. I knew it could be incredibly valuable for a young person—martial arts had been immensely valuable to me when I studied it as a child, and aikido had become a huge part of my life since the moment I started studying it at 19. I knew the kids in my community could benefit from what I had to teach. I just didn't want to be the one to teach it to them.
Eventually, I had to face the fact that I was holding my business back. This was an easy way to essentially triple my business's income. The money I could earn from a youth program could make the school more stable, grow the business as a whole, and support my other programs. What I would teach kids would also impact their parents. I'd be introducing the concepts and benefits of aikido to adults who might eventually find themselves drawn to take classes themselves.
And why was I holding back? Because I was afraid of looking silly. I was afraid I wouldn't live up to my own inflated self-image as an elite expert. My ego had become attached to this image of myself, and I had to let it go in order to move forward. I had to exhale.
Once I accepted it was time to start trying to build a youth program, I realized I needed some help—another moment that forced me to let go of my ego. So I reached out to my network and found a martial arts school in New Jersey that had a thriving aikido youth program. I apprenticed to these folks to learn how to take this important step. Soon, I was ready to launch my own youth program. I hired staff who would help spread my vision to a younger generation.
Eventually, the youth program did triple my business's revenue and create more personal and professional opportunities than I ever could have imagined. But I could never have pulled it off unless I had been able to take a deep breath and let go of my fear—my fear that I would lose that high-powered self-image that I had been holding on to so tightly.
Starting any new venture comes with this kind of risk. For example, leaving my corporate job to start my martial arts academy in the first place required me to risk failing. Later, I had to risk failing again by letting go of the reins of my school and moving into executive coaching and consulting full time. And more than that, starting these new businesses required me to exhale and let go of certain images of myself to evolve into something new. To leave my corporate job, I had to let go of my image as a successful, well-paid businessperson. To move on from my martial arts school, I had to let go of my image of myself as a gritty entrepreneur. In both cases, I exhaled and succeeded. The risk was real, but I used it to fuel the flames of my success.
Real Risk, Real Rewards
My executive coaching client Jason was miserable at his job. He was working in the field of green architectural design, which he believed in and felt passionate about. But the corporate culture at the large company he worked for was driving him crazy. The atmosphere stifled his creativity.
And then Jason landed an opportunity to move to a smaller firm. This new company was basically a start-up. Taking this job would be risky. After all, most new companies fail—as many as 40 percent of them, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.3 Taking a job with a new company would require Jason to let go of some of his self-image as a stable, hardworking, sensible guy—but it wasn't just a risk to his ego. It was a real risk. If he did this, in a year or two he might find himself without a job. Taking this job would mean jumping into the unknown.
Still, the more Jason and I talked about this possible move, the more clearly I saw that he wanted to take this risk. He was holding on to the old job out of fear. Once he let go of that fear and put aside the ego that was attached to the generous salary he earned at his current job, it was easy to see what he had to do: He had to take the risk.
Jason took the job. And the company didn't fail—it was extremely successful, and Jason's star rose along with it. Even better, after taking this new job, he successfully tested for his black belt, and he met the girl of his dreams. It was like everything just fell into alignment for him. He could never have gotten to that happier, more successful place if he hadn't taken that initial risk.
Jason's fears about taking this new job weren't irrational. The company could have failed. When you leave a secure situation to try something new, you are taking a real risk. It's important to acknowledge that risk and think it through carefully. Are you at a place in your life where you're able to take that risk? Do you have a safety net that will support you if your new venture falls through? Do you have a Plan B? It's crucial to think these things through—but you won't be able to think clearly until you admit your fears and let them go. You have to separate your fear and ego from the reality of the situation in order to see whether you're willing to take that risk. And you can't do that unless you exhale. Relax. Let go for a second, and look with fresh eyes.
Don't take risks just for the sake of taking risks. And don't let fear hold you back from doing something that you want to do, that you can do, and that you are ready to do. After all, sometimes the biggest rewards come when you take real risks. And even if you take a risk and fail, you'll learn something from that failure.
Creating Emotional Exhale Moments
At the headquarters of NerdWallet, a personal finance company aimed at helping consumers, especially young people, make better financial decisions, there's something called a “Fail Wall.” What's a “Fail Wall,” you ask? Actually, it's pretty much what it sounds like: a wall in the office that's covered with notes about the staff's failures. People are encouraged to write their failures on sticky notes and put them up for everyone to see.4 I love this idea because, as I learned during my time in the Marine Corps, Marines never retreat—we just attack from a different direction. The way I see it, a failure is nothing more than a great idea that still needs a little work. You just need to attack the idea from a different direction.
There are a couple of factors that make this wall work. First, everyone participates, including the CEO, Tim Chen. This kind of open attitude couldn't work if it didn't start at the top. Lower-level employees would be afraid to discuss their failures if they didn't see their leaders doing it. In fact, Chen is particularly up-front about his weaknesses. He has spoken openly about how he's struggled to learn to communicate effectively, and how he worries he will fail as a CEO in a way that's too big to fit on a sticky note.5 Chen's open honesty sets the tone for the entire company to be up front about their weaknesses.
The Fail Wall also couldn't work if it were an isolated one-off. NerdWallet's management meetings start with a discussion of the team's successes and failures in the past week. The wall by itself would just be window dressing if it weren't backed up by an ongoing conversation that encourages this kind of honesty. But this company is fully committed to its culture of honesty.
The act of writing a failure down on a sticky note and putting it up where your colleagues can see it creates what I like to call emotional exhale moments. Remember, when you exhale, your body automatically relaxes. When you take a moment to breathe in deeply and breathe out, your life slows down for just a second. When you're trying to make a big decision—or even a small one—you need to find a way to let yourself relax, even if just for a moment, and slow yourself down. You need to create an emotional exhale moment.
Try It Yourself—Today
You can create this kind of emotional exhale moment by doing something like what NerdWallet's staff does—openly admitting your fears and your failures. Write them down on sticky notes, if that helps. Tell them to a trusted friend, family member, or colleague. Do something to get that fear and shame out of your head, where it will prevent you from seeing your situation clearly.
Once you get those fears out of your head, you will almost certainly find they don't loom quite as large as they did when they were unspoken. This effect will be especially powerful if you're able to share your fear with someone else. After all, fears are a part of being human. And many of our deepest fears are actually the ones we all share: that we're not good enough, that we won't succeed, that people will laugh at us, that our friends and family will desert us, that we'll end up alone. Chances are, if you went to a friend and confessed that you're afraid you're no good at your job, or that you're failing as a parent, they'd say, “Me, too.”
Getting these ideas out of your head and into the open can also help you do what NerdWallet's staff does thanks to its Fail Wall: Learn from your failures. If you can't admit to your failures, you can't look at them clearly, and if you can't look at them clearly, you can't learn from them. When NerdWallet's Chen writes on a sticky note that he hired an outside firm to handle the company's PR and got only five press hits in six months, that's not just a way to admit that he screwed up. It's also a way to underline the lesson learned: Nobody's going to tell the company's stories better than its own staff.
We all hold back at times because we're afraid of looking silly. Afraid of making a mistake. Afraid to fail. But there's no way to learn or grow if you don't take that risk. And even when you do fail, you will have learned something. So take a deep breath, let it out, and then move on. Make a decision. Take a risk. Learn something. And like we do in the Marine Corps, never retreat—just attack from a different direction.