My school has a very successful trial team. They practice hard. They “scrimmage” with other law students often. These practices allowed them to dominate the trial competitions for a number of years.
Their dominance has started to wane in recent years. Other trial teams are taking their tactics and using them, making the techniques used to defeat them into their own tools.
I recently heard one of our current trial team members bemoaning this phenomenon. Without thinking, I told him that I would have considered his circumstances a blessing. He looked at me like I’d grown horns and started spouting devil-speech. He quickly changed the subject and found a reason to go somewhere else.
In retrospect, it occurred to me that the thinking-model I embrace really is alien to our culture.
In my training, I’m eager to find the guy my techniques won’t work on. That’s where the art gets tested and made “real”. That is also where I am forced to analyze more deeply, understand, and push past my boundaries. I have to improve. I’ve seen arts where people never open what they do up to questioning. They never allow “outsiders” to test it. Often, in a subtle form of collusion, insular training partners end up lying to each other and “giving” each other unrealistic techniques. Often, they aren't even aware of this insidious deception. The result is that the art de-evolves and becomes useless (or, at least, not very realistic).
Therefore, the person who can effectively deal with my technique is a blessing: an opportunity to become better. This idea has been so repeatedly instilled in me that I sometimes forget that a large portion of the population doesn’t feel the same way.
Consider the real import of what the trial team member was expressing: what he really wanted was status quo and continued “winning”. That was more important than improving his advocacy skills, which is ostensibly what one would be doing mock trials to accomplish. It seems counter-productive, but the real inner mechanic is this: the utility of progress wasn’t worth the pain of having his short-comings made plain by his defeat.
