I’d like to talk about a martial arts concept, which I think has some applications in rationality. It’s called stance, and you’ve probably heard of it.
I. Definitions
What is stance?
Stance is the way you stand and hold your body when you’re not at that particular moment doing anything, but you want to be ready to do something soon. There are many different stances for many different martial arts, but it’s not just a martial arts concept. Baseball pitchers have a stance when they’re on the plate. Massage therapists have a stance (they call it “posture”) when they’re standing next to the massage table.
A stance is often useful because it’s something you can hold for a while if you want without putting too much strain on yourself, though often it takes a bit of practice to get into it. Instructors often have strong feelings about doing a stance correctly. The small adjustments to posture and angle might not seem important to a new student but often matter later, either when you hold that position for a long time or when you try to do more active movements from a bad stance.
(Ironically, the obvious way to stand next to a table to give someone a massage will give you a crick in your neck after half an hour and this will get really bad if you keep using that bad stance five days a week, eight hours a day.)
A good martial arts stance might make it quick and easy to block, kick, throw a punch, or suddenly turn and sprint for the door. There are tradeoffs; a good comfortable stance for a fencer is hard to move sideways from. That’s fine for fencing, which takes place on what’s essentially a narrow straight line, but wouldn’t be good for basketball where you might need to dart in any direction at a moment’s notice.
And in martial arts (and in many fields) stance is something you’re trained to stay in unless you have a very good reason to be doing something else. It's not that you only are ever in one stance; many arts have several. It's not that you never leave stance; sometimes you do have a very good reason to be doing something else.
I think mental stances are useful as well.
II. Stance as a Default Action
When I find myself suddenly off balance, my first response is to go to a high horse stance.
Why?
Well, if someone shoves me or if I overextend when kicking, I’m vulnerable to being thrown or knocked over. I don’t want that to happen, and my instructors didn’t either, so we drilled a habit of returning to a specific position that’s a little higher than in the picture.
It’s a good place to be; I can move in most directions, I’m pretty well planted, but it’s the kind of thing I can hold for half an hour if I need to. (And believe me, I got plenty of practice on holding it for longer than that.) And it’s lower than I usually carry my weight, which means that if I was off balance then dropping into horse stance usually gets my back upright and ready. My head is up, where lots of ways I get shoved around or put off balance might mean my head and gaze is looking down at the ground instead of around at whatever’s going on.
If I don’t know what to do, go to high horse stance and look around.
I’ve dropped into it when slipping on ice, and it saved me from falling over. I’ve dropped into it when a rope bridge started swinging, and it helped me catch myself. And yes, I’ve used it when getting shoved. It’s a good neutral place to be in. It’s also a place I know how to get out of; I know how to roll from this, sprint from this, attack from this, all sorts of things. It’s not great to sprint from, but it’s not surprising or unfamiliar to me. You can kind of think of it as being step 2 of half the karate kata;[1] step 1 is get to horse stance, step 2 is be in horse stance, step 3 is doing basically anything else.
(That is such a horrible oversimplification I can hear my old sensei start to berate me. Sorry, to paraphrase an old maxim, writing about martial arts is a bit like dancing about architecture.)
The default nature of stance means that I don’t have to think about it. When things aren’t going well, if I don’t have a very specific plan I should get into stance and then reassess.
Have you ever been told to take deep breaths and count to ten when you realize you’re getting angry? That’s kind of a mental equivalent to this. It’s good to be in a familiar mental place from which you can make your next move.
III. Examples
What are some mental stances (or at least pointers to them) that you might already be familiar with?
- Take deep breaths and count to ten. Go into it if you notice yourself getting angry.
- The 3-2-1 method, where you name three things you see, two things you hear, and one thing you feel. Go into it if you notice yourself getting anxious.
- Challenging thoughts, asking “is this true?” when your brain suggests catastrophes. Go into it when you notice yourself thinking about how everything is awful.
- This meme:
I want to note that these are only sort of descriptions of the position. They’re more like instructions for how to get into the position, as though the way to refer to horse stance was to call it the feet-outside-the-shoulders-sink-at-the-knees position. They’re all pointed at getting you out of particular bad thought spaces and into something less off balance, more able to usefully react and assess the situation.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I worked from home. At first, I had my work desk next to my personal desk, which was next to my bed. This was bad for maintaining work-life balance. Eventually I moved my work desk to its own space, and I would maintain different music playlists as well as a small stretching routine before I started work. The goal was to keep a mental stance where I was focused and working, instead of the mental stance where I was trying to relax.
When I was on a sports team (quidditch, and yes, I know I'm a nerd) sometimes before a game the team captain would gather us into a huddle and talk about how hard we'd trained, how well we knew each other, and how we were going to leave it all on the field. We'd shout back that we were with him, that we were with the team, or just shout with enthusiasm. This is a very common way to get into a certain competitive mental stance, it's just one that I hadn't had much experience with before university. (Because, again, nerd.)
And then when I was losing sometimes I'd start to get angry or frantic. That was something I'd had experience with before, and I already knew it wasn't good, and I already knew how to recover from it. I was taught from a young age, as perhaps many of you were also taught, that it's okay to lose sometimes. It's a game. It's important to try hard, but it's more important to have fun. And I'd step into the mental stance where it's a game, and laugh at the feeling of springing off the ground under my feet and grin at the slap of the ball in my palms and relax into the simple joy of motion. "Don't be a sore loser" is, in its own way, a pointer towards a stance.
I've never liked being wrong. Saying the words "I was wrong" was hard growing up. I would have much rather given an oral presentation naked or jumped into ice water than admit I was wrong out loud. And yet, once I realized the importance of saying oops I realized I needed to practice, and practice I did. Fumbling blindly with only that distant candle, the stance I found was one where hiding the error is the more obviously foolish mistake. It feels fluid, a little unmoored, but now I have a stance where it doesn't hurt.
When I’m working on big projects with tight deadlines sometimes I feel like everything is out of control and I don’t even know what’s going sideways. That’s bad. My Project Manager horse stance is to start writing down every single task anyone is going to do for this project, then start tagging them with who is doing them and what priority the task is. It’s not just a useful artifact to have at the end, but also a position from which I can move whichever way I need to. If I’m confused and stressed and I don’t know what to do, getting into project manager stance is seldom the wrong move. Nothing I’m about to do in the next three minutes of the project is going to be made better by not having a list.
Even just reciting a mantra or catchphrase can be useful. Remember, some of the value of a stance isn’t just that it’s good, it’s that it’s a default path to get you somewhere that isn’t bad. It’s bad to be leaned so far forward you’re about to fall over, nothing in the next three seconds of the fight is going to be made better by being there. It’s bad to be so angry you’re hyperventilating, nothing in the next three seconds of the argument is going to be made better by being there.
Reciting "If the box contains a diamond" under my breath (or its close cousin, "metaphorical even bigger spiders Merrin") is a way for me to get in a particular mental stance where I'm ready to receive information that might be unpleasant.
IV. Usage
If there are different mental modes you occupy in life, especially if the habits you have from one mode would be bad to use in another mode, it can be good to think of them as different stances.
Even better is if you find some particular frame of mind effortful but useful. In those cases, drilling them as stances have paid off for me. It's easier to hold with deliberate practice.
I think it would be good and useful to practice mental stances. Pick one or two, and practice reliable ways to get into that headspace even when the unexpected happens.
I think it would be even better to have good mental stances and instructions for how to find them, other than the stance “calm.” I feel like there is more Art here to create, but I do not yet have more than the unwoven edges of it.