ego and competition

Hello, everyone. I am a 40ish female martial artist who has been training for ~15 years. For the past 10 years I have mostly reffed and judged at tournaments, only competing in a few. It was the right decision for me at that time. Now I am getting back into competition, having moved to a new place, in order to meet people. In my previous home I enjoyed having a circle of friends from different martial arts.

My struggle is this: I have always focused on the traditional, technical side of things and am not interested in glitz, glam and especially ego gratification that I consider to be NOT what martial arts is about for me. I don't want to judge those things. I am worried that it is possible to get caught up in that when competing. What I am truly worried about is, is it impossible to avoid becoming drawn in by that?

This is a really long way of questioning if there is anyone out there who considers these types of things when they are competing and what your experiences are?

Are you talking about competing in forms or sparring? If you can pull it off in sparring, that's nice, and will help. But not necessary.

In forms? Depends on the tourney and judges. Unless it is a traditional competition/division that you're in, the musical/back-flipping/neon-nunchaku crowd will probably always have the OOH AHHH advantage over you.

Both. Yeah, I don't care if I win. And I can say that without it being theoretical. I did not win at a tournament yesterday and I WAS surprised, not that I did not win, but which form DID win. And I am still OK with that.

To refine my question, or even change it, what philosophical/psychological approaches to you use in tournament competition?

How does competition affect you?

You're right, MattJ. It will be different at traditional tournaments. I was twitching a little because of the tournament I attended yesterday. There were some interesting forms.

I had fun noticing which judges awarded what I value and who awarded for things I don't. I helped judge some forms and I met some people. It was a good day because of some of the peopel I met.

I did alot of tournaments in the 80's when I was a kid, here are my thoughts:

Basically I think most people enter competition for ego-based reasons, there are some that enter competition to learn and to test themselves, but they are a minority.

In my limited experience most people are in it to prove something to themselves, or to others; this is not neccessarily a bad thing, in fact I think it can be healthy to a certain degree, but I think it is near impossible to remove ego from competition as honestly they go hand in hand.

So instead of worrying about whether or not ego is involved (I don't see how it wouldn't be), to me the most important thing is simply someone's motivation for being there, as long as the competitive aspect is healthy then it's all for the good.

Quote:

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Yeah, I don't care if I win

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From one point of view this might b why you have doubts about competition. I basically put my lack of success in competition down to that point. Had I wanted to win more, maybe I would have (sorry, I don't know your competition record, maybe you are very successful).

I've spoken with some competitors and even interviewed a world champion or two and ego does figure a lot in their game, many even admit the fact. I think wanting to compete and fight must involve a certain amount of ego. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing. When you ned to use MA for real it is sometimes the ego which spurs you on because it wants to survive.

I think a vital question is what one does with the ego.