Soft Personality and Hard Skills

A lot has been said about what it takes to be a great Shibari master. Most rope practitioners become so enthusiastic about bondage, that they want to keep improving. In this article, we sum up the profile of the best rope player in terms of two factors: a soft personality and hard skills.

Let’s begin with the hard skills. This term refers to the technological knowledge that a person must have to perform a specific task. In the case of Shibari, this clearly has to do with the ability to deal with ropes—the capacity of tying and doing the rope patterns properly. You will never be a Shibari master if your knots look like the work of a ten-year-old tying his shoelaces.

Hard skills also have to do with safety. Safety measures are a serious matter. A skilled Shibari practitioner will never leave them to chance. Likewise, they will never make a scene unless the safety measures are adequate.

Preparing the scenery and the lighting for a scene are also part of the hard skills Shibari demands. Ideally, you shouldn’t do a scene just anywhere. Quite the opposite, you should consider the space, the colors, and the light. It’s additional work, but it will greatly improve the scene.

Finally, hard skills also include the ability to create the necessary structure for a suspension scene. Once again, this is hard work that requires careful calculations. After all, a good suspension scene is a true piece of engineering.

As for the soft personality, what we mean is a personality with the proper soft skills. Remember, a Shibari master is a great communicator and a fair negotiator. Moreover, they are people with an extreme emotional sensibility and loads of empathy for their partners. This combination of factors is what makes a scene a lot more than just a session of knots and tying.

So, ask yourself, do you have the soft personality and the hard skills necessary to become a Shibari master?