The biggest problem of self-improvement you never realized

Self-improvement is hailed as the savior of everyone’s existence, but it holds ONE very dark secret.

I was always into martial arts, training 5 to 6 times a week was as normal for me as eating spaghetti. I once wrote in a previous article:

Everything has a price.

Unfortunately, even with training, this principle remains the same.

I was always training, driving to competitions, teaching, and training again.

Unfortunately, the price I had to pay was that I never met any girls, my training schedule just did not allow for it.

For many years I was training until late Friday night, so I was too tired to go out.

Then on Saturday, I could not go out, because Sunday was competition day.

I think many semi-professional athletes can relate. As I said, everything has a price.

It was not like I was a ‘shy’ kid, or unattractive kid (at least, I do not think so, lol).

After my university studies began, it became harder and harder to combine a master’s degree with national-level competition.

The time came when I had to make a choice

I wasn’t ready for it, even twenty years later, I remember that feeling like it was yesterday.

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball when you least expect it.

I simply was not smart enough to train AND keep my grades up. Studying less meant worse grades, and training less meant not winning competitions and lower national rankings.

Life sucks sometimes. I had to make a decision and I had to choose for my studies. My martial arts career would never make any money.

In hindsight, it meant getting a master’s degree and making my parents the happiest people in the world.

They were convinced I would get paralyzed for sure in one competition or even die. I only understand their feelings now that I have kids of my own.

Sorry dad, sorry mom…

So, back to the no-girls situation. At university, I realized that I did not have a steady girlfriend, like everyone else.

I had tattoos, wrote a motorcycle, and felt untouchable, but for the first time in my life, I realized that something was not right.

Martial arts teaches you to adapt to certain situations

Competing teaches you to change your strategy and style if it is not working during a fight.

Martial arts are about improvement, so it was at that point that my self-development journey began.

I realized I had to go out if I wanted to meet girls. There was no Tinder or Facebook at that time.

I will keep my opinion on that for another article :)

My second realization was that I had no friends other than my martial arts friends.

Luckily I live in Belgium, the land of beer. Here we pay some random guy a beer and we gain a friend for life.

So I started to go out, first with an old friend, but soon met many new friends.

I specifically chose men who were amazing with women.

Martial arts taught me to imitate the masters’ style first, and then develop my own style in time.

Bruce Lee famously said: learn, keep what works, discard what doesn’t, and form your own style.

I met great guys, all of whom were very impressed to go out with a guy who knew how to fight and (to his surprise) turned out to be very charming and open with strangers.

We partied, we traveled the world, and I had the opportunity to meet fantastic women all over the world. I treated self-development with the same passion and total commitment as my martial arts.

The problem with self-improvement

It was after a few years, that I realized the dark secret of self-improvement:

the concept of self-help actually implies that at a certain point in your life, you are NOT good enough.

I never had to learn how to be attractive, all I had to do was put myself in a place where I would meet women.

I never had to read all those self-help books or spend 1000’s of euros on clothes, ‘I’ was already enough.

Self-help culture keeps you in a loop, and it keeps you buying books and spending money.

Conclusion

Self-improvement can be a great tool if you use it to ADD to your life. If you start from a place of ‘missing’, it can mercilessly send you into a downward spiral of death.

Use it as a resource in your life, take on the advice you feel you were missing, and then move on. Never get stuck in self-improvement: it will make you feel inadequate ALL the time.

In hindsight, all I needed was me!