Talking to one of my kung fu brothers we were discussing why we don’t feel the need to demonstrate or video ourselves doing forms or techniques anymore.

High level skills are supposed to be ‘hidden’ and subtle so they’re not necessarily social media friendly and if people don’t have the vision or perspective to see what’s being done there’s no real point in putting it out there.

Being old and disabled I’m not so easy on the eye anymore either but last Sunday on the Coaching programme, instead of limiting my demonstration to what I wanted the students to work on I decided to show how I did the Yang Chen Fu form in my own training sessions to see what they’d pick up on.

As expected they picked up on what I’d been teaching and the deeper body skills and connections, I was pleased with that, but in my own training there’s quite a lot that I do that I haven’t taught yet because either we haven’t got there in our relationship or I’m still developing the skills myself and of course they missed those or were unable to verbalise what they’d seen.

It shows the importance of structure and layering in coaching and also growing perspective in the right way as we’re also layering what the student can see and understand. Demonstrating in the way that I did also helps to validate what’s been taught and where we need to go next.

I was taught that we shouldn’t teach anything until we can hide it. That means that we have learned and practiced it mindfully until we have internalised it and are able to fit it in to the way we train and respond using the skill in a spontaneous way and make it subtle.

These days it’s “show us on video” rather than visiting and then studying with a teacher, so we can only demonstrate on social media in the most overt, ‘dumbed down’ manner and in a way that fits the viewer’s current zeitgeist of understanding.

Subtlety in many ways is a thing of the past.