Never give up…

A story of Indomitable Spirit

Indomitable Spirit

It’s fifth in the list of Tae Kwon Do Tenets.  But it is by no means the fifth most important.  It’s one of five pillars that embody the principles of Tae Kwon Do. Knock a pillar out and the foundation becomes unstable.

“Never give up, never surrender.”  Yes, I just quoted a movie from 1999.  The movie is Galaxy Quest.  For those who have seen the Star Trek TV shows, it’s an affectionate parody of those.

Comedy action movies aside...  The tag line is extremely accurate when it comes to defining indomitable spirit.

Merriam Webster describes the word indomitable as this: “incapable of being subdued: Unconquerable.”

In the last post, I spoke about perseverance.  When you compare indomitable spirit and perseverance, they seem pretty similar.

I don’t disagree initially with this assessment, but Indomitable Spirit goes deeper than Perseverance.

Indomitable Spirit requires a person to not only persevere but to conquer one’s own fear of embarrassment, rejection and/or pain.

Here at W. Kim Tae Kwon Do, we cap off each of our belt testings with Breaking.  Most of the time, wooden boards are broken.  But for our bigger milestone testings,  bricks are items that get broken.  You’ll see it most often in the ranks of 2nd degree and higher.

The first time I was given the opportunity to break bricks, I was instructed to break two bricks for my promotion to 2nd degree.

I tried many times and each time I failed.  Overall, my testing that day wasn’t bad and by the grace of the judges, I was given the opportunity to do a different breaking technique to officially promote.

But the fact that I didn’t succeed loomed over me for many years.

Fast forward to my testing for 3rd degree.  I was brimming with confidence and absolutely sure that the brick breaking finish to an already successful testing was in the bag. (Three bricks this time.)

Talk about counting chickens before they hatched.

I failed again.  

This time, by the judges' grace (again), they let me try again at the next testing, three months later.

I threw myself into practicing that one technique.  When the next testing rolled around I am happy to say that, with Grandmaster Kim’s guidance, I was successful.

I wish I could say that after that, everything was sunshine and rainbows, but when it was time to test for 4th degree, things didn’t go as planned.

The confidence was there.  I wasn’t worried that it was one more brick than last time.  I had already done three, so four didn’t seem insurmountable.

Adrenaline pumping, I approached the stack in eager anticipation.  

I struck..and only the top brick broke.

That got in my head so much that I tried and tried multiple times after that and failed.  Again.

It wasn’t until our Founder told me to adjust how I was striking it that I finally met with success.

Since then I’ve broken many bricks with aplomb but there was an instance in that testing, a moment, where I didn’t know what to do.  Still, I knew I wasn’t going to quit.  I had come too far and wasn’t going to back down.

My passion, my spirit would not be defeated.

“Never give up, never surrender.”

Photo credit - Eberhard Grossgasteiger