by Matt Embree
For an introduction I'd like to get into the mental aspect of fighting and in particular the resolve you carry as a fighter. You've probably heard it many times before, that fighting is for the most part mental. Drawing on my own experience of fighting plus lots of research into the mind state of warriors, soldiers and fighters alike one thing that sets apart the winners from the losers is their resolve and morale.
Napoleon said that " The morale is to the physical as three to one." Resolve and Morale go hand in hand. Once you've made up your mind and decided on victory you've set your resolve in motion. Morale is what will keep your resolve firm. So from the get go, before the fight even happens you should have made victory clear in your head. It starts in the training, in your approach to each training session. You have to visualize the victory before it has happened. I try to make it a point in my head to accept nothing less than victory. I either win or I die. Carrying that into each training session, whenever the thoughts of easing up or slacking arise you have to push thru and beat those doubts out of your mind. The thing is it is something that has to constantly be refined because negative thoughts will continue to pop up.
It’s easy to keep your composure and be positive in nice, calm situations, but it’s the mark of a true warrior to maintain that composure under fire in the chaos of a fight. Cultivate a winner’s mindset for when negative thoughts appear. Remember that internal dialogue affects external performance. Resolve to be great, tell yourself you’re the best, take a stand that you will do whatever it takes to win. In my opinion, it's that confidence in yourself and resolve to win that is characteristics of all great fighters. When it's time to fight, there's no more time to be humble, it's time to be audacious, time to be confident, to prove why you’re the better fighter. Fighting, if you want to be good, is about winning, plain and simple. Set the standard high for yourself, give yourself permission to be great and don't let anything stop you.
It all starts with training. "In combat we don't rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our training". It is hard to beat an opponent who never stops trying to find a way to win and refuses gives up. So when you maintain that in training, you refine that state of mind and transfer it over to your fight game. Resolve to win every day, every battle. When you forge your resolve in the trivial things, that same mastery will transfer over in the great and important things. If you treat every fight as your last, and put yourself on death ground everyone will have significance, and victory will become a must. If that is your mentality going into every fight your will to win will be unbreakable and your victory will be almost guaranteed.
F.N.O. - Failure's No Option.
Matt Embree is a Muay Thai fighter based out of Toronto, Canada. He is a WBC Muay Thai and WMC Muay Thai North American Champion. He has has competed all over the the world and has fought on some of the biggest shows including Lion Fight and Top King. He has trained in Thailand on several occasions and competed at the highest level.
