Posts Tagged ‘growth’

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As stated in one of my previous articles, I don’t feel that the movement towards character development has been bad for martial arts schools. Actually, it’s been great. On the other hand, when schools drift away from their core values, they come to be little more than motivational day care centers.

The life-skills programs in schools too often are there for one reason; to overcome the concerns of the mothers of the kids in class. Most dads want their kid to be honest and respectful, but dads tend to understand the value of being able to deal with bullies and life’s corporeal threats more than most moms.

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There are many students who come to us from bad situations where they have few if any role models of good behavior, and this is where the martial arts school can shine. Still, I think that child will be influenced more by a suited black belt conducting himself or herself in a respectful manner and not abusing his power than the reciting of a sterile end-of-class story about the tortoise and the hare.

In original martial arts, respect is a word that is emphasized from day one. The belts work as a great goal-setting agenda and, certainly, developing a never-quit attitude is key to attractive straight through the ranks.

To be clear, I see nothing wrong with organizing the lessons of martial arts into life skills to make sure they are articulated and apparent to the students and their families. That is like spice on the meal; it is not the meal.

Today it seems that instructors are focused more on their quality to get kids to retell pledges of good behavior and scream “Yes Sir” than on their students’ capacity to “knock person on their duffs” if they need to.

I know an perfect black belt who has transformed his school from adults to kids and now back to adults again. Like me, he had marketed to kids and cloned what the “Big Schools” were doing for character development. He began to pass kids for their “effort” in order to save their “self esteem.” More and more he found his school had come to be a kids’ center with hundreds of children yelling “Yes, Sir!” at all the right moments during a speech.

Never mind that many of the kids authentically didn’t know what they were responding to. They just knew at the end of a request to scream “Yes, Sir!” He also noticed that his upper-ranks began to look pretty weak. His exams became celebrations of mediocrity with lots of smiles, high fives, and weak technical skills. While passing every kid in exams may be good for retention, that very fact means ultimately you are going to have a school full of Pooh Bears. Kids who are soft and nice, but easy targets, despite the color of the belt.

In time, my friend began to dislike his own school. He didn’t want to be there. He missed the camaraderie and pride of creating black belts to whom he could teach fighting, without upsetting the student’s mommy.

Then one day, a threshold event occurred that left him disgusted and ready to make some serious changes. One of his 11-year-old Pooh Bears came running into the school, bleeding and crying. It seems another kid, who was no bigger or older, had popped him in the nose. The pupil had been standing in front of his karate school, wearing his uniform and his Black Belt while waiting for his parents. Somehow he got into an change of words with a neighborhood kid who punched or slapped him in the nose.

My friend was sickened. Not only had an unfortunate incident happened in front of his school, but one of his black belts was crying and bleeding. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in the movie A League of Their Own, “there’s no crying as a black belt!”

My friend was humiliated. That’s not supposed to happen. When we were students, stories of our school’s black belts defending themselves always ended with the bad guy in the hospital. That event was the catalyst for the end of the pupil creed and passing exams for merely development the effort to show up. It has taken him two years, but he now is back to nearly as many active students, with only 20 percent under the age of 12 – a faultless reversal of where he had been when the kid got popped.

He looks forward to going to his school each night and is enjoying running the school with a healthy blend of personal development and realistic training and expectations.

My friend is one of the best black belts I know. He and I have talked about this new dynamic in the manufactures dozens of times. The closing that I’ve come to is that the introduction into the classroom of inevitable character development is a good “undercurrent” for a school. It’s the perfect counter-balance to good corporeal training and self defense.

But many schools are out of balance. The line that, “We don’t just teach punching and kicking…” has come to be a cop out for not teaching strong core self defense and technical skills. Don’t apologize for teaching punching and kicking (or grappling).

Technical operation and self defense have come to be an afterthought to personal development. Why? It’s a heck of a lot easier to teach a kid to act like a Boy Scout with a belt than to take the time, effort, and honesty required to yield a black belt who can defend himself or herself.

But, as many people have discovered, in time you may be teaching at a school you hardly recognize. You will have students who stand up straight when shaking hands during their “polite greetings” but who have rubber backbones.

It’s foremost to be Ok with the fact that martial arts can’t be all things to all people. The very term martial means military. Troops relates to matters of war. This doesn’t mean each class is devoted to killing or war tactics; it means that our foundation is one of peace straight through classic firepower. It’s a agenda of self worth that starts with the belief that:

‘I am worth protecting. No one will touch me without my permission.’

In a good program, as your skills improve, your sense of contribution, respect, and accountability increases as well. Today, we’re seeing hybrid black belts awarded for blindfolding themselves so they can know what it’s like to be blind or spending a day in a wheelchair. This seems more like a high school sociology class than a study in the martial arts. To me, the ultimate black belt is a noble warrior who uses the martial arts as a recipe of personal and corporeal growth. It is a very private race that is best taken eyes wide open than blindfolded.

These are core attitudes and benefits that were inherent in the arts long before any pupil creed or message of the week.

The Motivational Daycare center

Daycare Childcare Centers