I am often working with students in the kung fu school on the state of being Awake. This is an internal skill that develops over time while the student is working on developing the external physical skills of whatever style they may be practicing.

The Awake state is probably somewhere between serenity, rage, and terror. If you were to draw it as a Venn Diagram with three overlapping circles representing those emotional states, you would want to be in the center.  Other emotions could be added to the diagram like Acceptance (of what is,) Curiosity, Willingness, Compassion, etc., but I think the essential point is that too calm is too calm.

Too angry is too angry. Too fearful is too fearful. Even too compassionate is too compassionate. We do need some edge, especially in the fighting disciplines. But I think this concept applies to any task requiring effort, particularly during critical moments. Clutch situations require us to access everything we know, everything we feel, and sometimes even things that we don’t know intellectually or feel emotionally or physically. In these cases, access to our intuition may make the difference between success or failure, life or death.  The clutch moment requires us to be fully awake; fully human.