Patience

By Ethan Price, 2nd dan

Patience is defined as the ability to accept or tolerate delay without becoming upset. 

As a Black Belt in CTI, Patience is far more than a necessary skill; it is practicing Patience that has led to attaining a Black Belt in the first place.

Students in CTI do not move quickly up the ranks without being patient. At all ages and abilities, the CTI student will only move as fast as he or she is capable of learning. However, there are set schedules of ‘time in rank’ (via stripes and credits) that mean that even the best students will have to wait for an appropriate amount of time to test for the next rank. 

The patience to work diligently towards the next rank requires self-motivation and self-control. The CTI student must take time to work on his or her skills, and must allow time for growth. Even the best instructors have taken a lot of time to perfect the skills they teach their students. Every baby step is a step forward. It takes patience to see the long view of attaining each rank up the ladder, but patience in small things will inevitably lead to positive results.

An important example of this is exemplified by a study done on children, where participants were presented with a marshmallow on a plate. The children were told that if they waited to eat it until the researcher came back, they would receive a second marshmallow in addition to the first. Not many children waited, and of those that did, they showed, in a follow-up study, that they had better life outcomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment). This study has had numerous follow up experiments since then, and has shown similar results.

As a Black Belt, patience is a perfected skill, though it is all the more necessary in every way. Black Belts do not learn new poomse every class; they do not learn a new One-Step or Self-Defense technique every week. They will learn, if their instructor sees that they are ready. Black Belts will learn one small chunk of a poomse and then it falls to them to practice over the weeks before they will learn more. Patience is as essential to the Black Belt learning process as wearing the belt itself. However, it is not the patience of a Black Belt that makes them able to learn this way; it is patience gained through every rank that is the reason that they earn that belt at all.