A new twist on the Tenets of Taekwondo

January 13th, 2010

As is customary, we routinely hear students bark out the tenets – courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit. They are very good core fundamental values, and are primarily interpreted from the personal prospective, i.e. I should be courteous in my dealings, but in the new Master Instructor Course I am working on, the strategy is from another angle.

The twist is simply this: you should be treated with and expect courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit, and look for it in people you surround yourself with. The first two, no doubt, are easier to come by in friends and associates than indomitable spirit, which is an elusive term – in life there are times when you SHOULD back down or give in.

A solid example is courtesy. People around you (staff, friends, associates, vendors) should treat you with courtesy, and if they do not, replace them or get rid of them.

Integrity? Need I say more? Students should be treated with the utmost integrity by their instructors – it is a relationship that rivals a parent relationship (all business aspects aside) – and playing on the Korean custom, here are a few of my favorites:

An instructor has the obligation to:

                Assistant and help a student with a new business venture.

                Not date students or pursue any personal relationship that may dishonor either party.

                Be fair in all business dealings with the student.

Old school here: If the instructor is responsible for making the student lose his/her job then the instructor is obligated to pay the student their customary salary and find them another job.

So, the next time you recite the tenets, remember that they work both directions..

 

R

Thoughts on “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell

December 8th, 2009

 

Another casualty in my continued use of my audible.com account, “Outliers”, was highly insightful to yours truly and applicable to any student of the Martial Arts. An outlier, as defined by Wikipedia:

In statistics, an outlier[1] is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Grubbs (Grubbs, F. E.: 1969, Procedures for detecting outlying observations in samples. Technometrics 11, 1–21. ) defined an outlier as:

An outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs

Who is an outlier? Someone with exceptional and outstanding differences from the crowd, to put it simply, is an outlier. In this thought-provoking work, Gladwell analyzes some great successes – Bill Gates, Mozart, champion Canadian hockey players etc.

He discusses the 10,000 hour effect – to put simply, that any outlier and solid achiever never truly gets their best results until after 10,000 hours of practice or training in any study. Try that on for size – it is a daunting number – with obsessive practice (20 hours a week)you can achieve that level in 10 years. One 2 hour class 2x a month will take you 208 years.

The good news in this work though is that the seemingly unreal people are just like you – average people, they simply worked harder than everyone else did. Tiger Woods is a great golfer, but played constantly since he was 3 years old! As Jon Gruden says “it doesn’t take talent, it takes effort”.

So, my question to you is this: Will YOU be the one who puts in the extra work to be the best YOU can be?

The Contract Factor

November 23rd, 2009

As my students know, we operate our classes completely free of contracts for tuition. My thought is that if you are not motivated to train I don’t want you in class. This has some advantages – flexibility for the students, for one, but has one distinct drawback: commitment.


Frankly, most people operate in a sort of mental haze – moving from one distraction to another and need inspiration to undertake anything remotely as challenging (on several fronts) as Taekwondo. Paraphrasing Randy Snow, inspiration is no good because it does not last – MOTIVATION is key because it comes from inside.

Contracts usually represent a solid financial commitment. As one student told me years ago, “I’m already paying for this I might as well go to class” – without the constant payments the urge to foster the innate slothy behavior that permeates our culture would surely have taken over.


Does this mean my long-standing policy is about to change. No. We all need to make contracts and agreements with ourselves to achieve what we want out of life, and our Martial Art is no exception.

Behind Chuck Norris’ beard IS ANOTHER FIRST!

August 15th, 2009

I just finished reading “Black Belt Patriotism”, and contained within it is Chuck Norris’ exercise program.  I found this interesting:

Monday, Wednesday and Friday:

  1. Total Gym - he does a routine that takes him exactly 15 minutes.
  2. Fast Walk - walk a fast two miles or use an elliptical machine for 30 minutes
  3. Crunches - ten minutes of crunches. (he should get a fitbal huh?)
  4. Stretching - a couple minutes with cool down

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday:

  1. Martial Arts - stretching then on to isolated kicks in slow motion, followed by hand and foot combinations on the heavy bag. If he has a partner he does jujitsu
  2. Pool Exercise - finishes up by doing some kicks in the pool

I found this interesting because it’s not particularly daunting - run this up against what a Michael Phelps does or any professional hockey player. The message is be consistent and you will produce healthy results.

The Summer Blahs

July 19th, 2009

For at least the 32 years I have been in the art the summer months always seem to mean one thing: Low attendance. I don’t know if its a throw-back to the agrarian lifestyle or WHAT but summer months mean very little new students, and light attendance by existing students.

Lots of excuses are there - the family vacation, the family in town, etc.. But I think the real deal-killer is the heat-based onset of laziness. It happens even to the most OCD individuals among us. Summer heat means it feels better to go home, go out, lay out, or do anything that does NOT involve sweating.

I remember the summer months in Wisconsin - when the studio (nothing even remotely resembling AC) was 98 degrees at 6:20 when we were warming up for class. Even for a skinny eleven year old I found myself ringing wet even before we got into kick drills. The complaining was always a sign of who was going to succumb to their demons and play instead of train. What was interesting was what happened in mid September…

The people who did not come to class found their way back to class as the weather got cool, kids got back to school, and the leaves started to change. The other thing they found was that their skills had lapsed - badly - they were not at the same level they were when they blamed the heat for their absence. What Dad and I found, however, was that our skills were not the same either: they were BETTER. The toiling in the heat, as brutal as it was, created the foundation of skills and discipline that made the high times that much more enjoyable. Enjoyable for us, that is.

The folks who played in lieu of training, in most cases, were highly depressed at how far they had gone in the other direction compared to us in the right direction. This depression led literally all of them to quit. Now, 30+ years later we reminisce about what rank these people would be now, and the health and friendships they would have.

So, do yourself a favor and conquer yourself.. “A man can conquer a million men in battle, but a man who conquers himself, is indeed the greatest of all conquerors.” — Buddha