What's up! Dan Blewett here and today I've got another awesome book review
this one is the code of the samurai it is not super thick so don't be deterred
and this is a book I read in college and it is literally what it sounds like this
is a code of conduct written for samurai warriors hundreds and hundreds of years
ago so especially if you're a coach and you're trying to instill good values and
your players you're trying to get them to understand why we hold some of the
principles dear that we do like why should you respect your opponents why
should you honor your parents why should you dress a certain way why is
professionalism matter in sports as an athlete it's a good question like why
don't we just do whatever we want to do who says we should act a certain way
well obviously there's codes of conduct there's books like this one that are
very very old and this is just a little handbook that samurai were expected to
live by covers lots of different topics there's one here on Fame so which
basically says if you're gonna die it's gonna feel the same you know losing your
head whether you die a coward or right whether you die a hero so might as well
go down a hero it's kind of what it says there's lots of interesting stuff in
here though there's about guardianship there's about what to do when you're
facing your death how to approach it so that you were respected so you don't
have this whole body of work and then go down as a coward
there's about service about honoring your parents about discretion about your
facial expressions there's all sorts of stuff how to treat your relatives how to
conduct yourself with courtesy and respect other warriors to your overlords
all these different things right and wrong it's really just a quick little
book of principles and I find it really interesting and it's definitely valuable
as something that a team could study together you know you could all sit
around have a powwow coach could go over all right we're gonna go over Fame and
how to die gracefully today so it's kind of fun it's translated obviously into
very actually plain English so it's easy to read unlike some
philosophy books I've read but this is a really cool interesting little thing it
connects us with our history and again the samurai warriors were incredibly
powerful people they're incredibly disciplined and they paved the way for
much of the mental training that the European athletes have done for also for
decades and centuries and American athletes are just kind of getting it's
becoming more of a common practice now but it's still very overlooked which is
why I'm doing these book reviews so it's often unclear where we should go for
guidance but if you're looking for mental training for baseball for
softball mental training for any sport there's a bunch of really good books by
some american sports psychologists but there's also lots of good stuff like
this that are historical that were used by people in combat when your mental
training really mattered because it was the difference between being afraid in a
battle and probably getting tense and then not being able to really um what's
the word here protect yourself versus being really
fluid and being able to defend yourself against the sword and all that crazy
stuff you see in movies there's probably so much fruit of life right so when your
mind is free and fluid and you're unafraid you can just react and do all
the crazy stuff and hopefully stay alive and when we do that as athletes it's the
same thing so we all know when we play our best when we're calm when we're
confident when we're moving through the motions that we practice so many times
without thinking and tensing up and getting nervous about them okay so this
is just another one of those little mental training books that can
definitely help you it can definitely help you with your conduct and
understanding just what it's like to be a professional and the standards that
you're supposed to hold yourself to okay so the code of the warrior this one's
translated by Thomas Cleary highly recommend it against a short read be
great for teams the little study thing and I hope you check it out all right
hope you enjoyed this book review and I will see you in the next one