A judo black belt.

Former head of the KGB.

President of Russia.

Knocked to his arse by a ten-year-old girl!

I’m not making it up.

See link to the picture (coming up below).

Maybe he didn’t expect the ten-year-old to show so much fighting spirit.

That was his first error.

She was a green belt.

He was a black belt.

She was ten, he was 47.

He weighed about 170 lbs., she was a mere feather in comparison.

So how did Natsumi Gomi, a green belt, ten-year-old girl take one of the world’s most powerful leaders to the mat?

First off she wasn’t intimated by her opponent, when she stepped onto the mat.

She was focused.

She didn’t attack straight on. (A frontal assault on a bigger opponent almost never works.)

She stayed moving.

She exploited his strengths, his size, physical strength and expectation he would win.

She used it against him.

She reduced his advantages (grabbing him and holding him close so he couldn’t knock her off balance) and leveraged her speed and fluidness on her feet.

Then she spotted her opportunity.

She quickly moved inward and threw him to the ground, to the surprise and cheers of onlookers.

A ten-year-old girl did something many other black belts could not and did not do.

He was so impressed he invited her to Russia to watch an international judo tournament and meet Russian kids.

When she met him there again, she told him she was already in training to qualify for a future year.

Through her training, Natsumi learned that if you stay focused, alert and prepare yourself to respond, you’ll find a way to get what you want.

That each of us have strengths and weaknesses and it’s foolish to ignore them (or those of your peers and adversaries.)

15 years on she is still training and competing today.

Next time you think you can’t achieve something or your internal voice is shouting “give up”, think of Natusmi.

And remember every problem has a solution.

Every challenge has the seeds of a greater opportunity.

A chance for you to become an even better version of yourself.

Do you let yourself get stopped or do you find a way and keep moving forward?

Are you taking risks or pulling back?

Successful people from every walk of life are not blessed with some magic talent that only a select few have.

Talent is all too often over-rated, and can only get you so far.

Successful people work out in the dojo of life every single day.

They get knocked down. They bounce back up.

If they were lucky they had great mentors growing up, if not they developed a winner’s attitude from within themselves.

Bottom line, they are tenacious and possibility focused.

They think about their goals constantly, they stay alert, are action oriented and figure out how they can achieve what they truly want.

That’s why I love NLP.

It gives you dozens of cool tools to transform and change any area of your life.

To compress time. Learn from anyone and everyone and radically improve your performance.

What you do with the toolkit is up to you.

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