Nima King spent years doing exactly what you’d expect from someone training in martial arts: pushing harder, going all in, powering through injury and exhaustion. Then his teacher in Hong Kong showed him something that upended everything he thought he knew about strength.

You can achieve stuff but with less effort, or you can allow things to happen. And there is a sense of letting go that needs to happen, which is really, really, really scary—to let go of control.

King describes a demonstration he gives at seminars. He holds his arm out, palm up, as if balancing a tray. In this position, the bicep naturally contracts. Then he asks participants to try releasing that tension while maintaining the position. No one can do it. But King can—and when he does, something counterintuitive happens. The movement becomes not weaker but stronger: “very effortless, but very, very difficult to stop.”

This is the insight worth sitting with. We assume that more effort produces more power, that trying harder gets better results. King’s practice suggests the opposite: that effort itself can become the obstacle. The tension we bring to a task—the striving, the forcing, the determination to make something happen—may be precisely what prevents it from happening.

What does this have to do with conversation?

Consider what it feels like to talk with someone who’s trying too hard. The host who’s clearly working through a mental checklist. The interviewer steering relentlessly toward a predetermined destination. The conversationalist so focused on being interesting that they forget to be interested. We can feel the effort, and it creates distance rather than closing it.

King calls his practice “the art of subtraction”—not accumulating more techniques but removing what’s in the way. Applied to conversation, subtraction might mean letting go of the need to sound smart, to fill every silence, to extract a particular answer, to perform competence. These are all forms of tension we bring to dialogue, and like King’s contracted bicep, they may be limiting the very thing we’re trying to achieve.

The scary part, as King notes, is that this feels like giving up control. We grip harder because loosening our grip feels like failure, like not caring, like laziness. But King is clear on this distinction:

Letting go isn’t being lazy, isn’t not caring, not giving a shit. Letting go is a very powerful thing.

There’s a difference between disengagement and presence without strain. The former is absence; the latter is attention freed from the weight of agenda. A conversation where neither party is trying to force an outcome doesn’t become aimless—it becomes available. Available to follow unexpected threads, to sit with uncomfortable pauses, to arrive somewhere neither person anticipated.

What remains unresolved is how to practice this. King spent years standing still in a Hong Kong living room, having his posture physically adjusted by a master who eventually banned him from asking questions. Most of us won’t have that kind of training. But perhaps the first step is simply noticing: when does effort show up in our conversations? When do we catch ourselves gripping the steering wheel? And what might happen if, just for a moment, we tried a little less?

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Subtraction with Nima King,” published November 24, 2025.