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Kevin Secours was here in January for a great seminar - 3 days of Systema. While here, he quoted Konstantin Komarov: ”If I have a choice in any situation between surviving and living, choose living. Take your least favorite thing and learn to find joy in it. Find the sweet smell in the most horrible odor. Find some beauty in the ugliest sight. Feel some goodness in the worst pain. Don’t allow yourself to refrain from it and to convince yourself that this is horrible, I hate this, and I’m going to avoid it. Tell yourself, I’m doing this to make my health better, to make my combative capacity better, to control my emotions, to control my brain. Everything is good about it, except focusing on how painful it can be. As soon as you focus on the good things, you suddenly start to laugh, you start to chuckle, you collapse, you make fun, it doesn’t matter, and it’s not that bad. It really is not that bad.”
Reading this today got me out of the chair and out on the road for 7.1 miles.
Watch the video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGa_SCfkaHw&feature=player_embedded
Sparring has become more realistic lately - we’ve been starting off with working together, striking and moving, then doing techniques, then continuous sparring, and then point sparring. Point sparring gets a bad rap sometimes, because it’s considered to be staged; it does, however, require a good defense, fast reaction times, and an aggressive offense. Putting them together gives us a well-balanced program.
One mother talked to me because her son was being matched up with bigger kids, and was losing, and taking it badly. I explained that her son was being matched up that way because he needed to start thinking, to develop more control, and to stop charging in furiously. It works with some kids, but not with bigger stronger kids.
Another mom called because her daughter, while sparring, received a hit to the face. Her daughter was the more advanced student in the pair, has been sparring for a while, and continued to spar and did well even after the event. We strongly discourage face contact, giving out big piles of pushups when it happens, but incidental contact does happen - and any program that eliminates it completely leaves a huge gaping hole in the student’s ability to defend. Many schools bar students from striking to the head, or hitting the back - and they accept the loss of defensive skills that comes with that safety.
My goal - to make the program effective and realistic, while avoiding injuries. We’ve never had a serious injury in the 8 years we’ve been opened - nothing beyond a twisted ankle or jammed finger. And everyone needs to remember that the journey here is what’s important - the important part of sparring is THE SPARRING - not the point count at the end. Or, as I sent back to one parent:
I’ll go more into that with everyone. He (and maybe other kids) needs to understand that winning and losing the match doesn’t really matter. If I put him up against kids who beat him here, every single time, for the next 5 years, and he never won a match, but saw his skills improve, then he’d be successful. In our controlled environment, winning and losing is, to a certain extent, decided by the instructor who matches you with your opponent. There should be no pride in beating someone less skilled than you, or no shame in losing to someone more skilled – it’s all about what you got out of it. Did you learn something? Can you apply it? Did you get stronger?
We’ve had a lot of students moving up over the past few weeks. That’s good – because forward progress makes it easier to stay with it. In any activity, plateaus are dangerous. You can get stuck, and when that happens, you get frustrated. When people get frustrated, there are two options – get through it or do something else.
There are lots of plateaus – lots of sticking points – where progress stalls. Jumping from Green to Brown, and from 3rd to 2nd to 1st Brown – it takes longer and the gains are smaller, because more is expected and because you’re already pretty good. Think about how much better you could get at tennis in the next month with some private classes and a few hours of week on the court – and then think about how much better Serena Williams could get with the same effort. You’d get a lot better – but she’d see little or no gain. She needs a lot more to make that small incremental gain, while you, at a lower level, would improve rapidly.
Or, as you push that rock up the hill, it gets steeper near the top. And stopping is easy.
The Black Stripe helps. Once you add the Black Stripe to your belt, you’ve made the decision to stay for a year. You know that you’re paying for a year, whether you come or not, so you’re committed. You might get stuck, but you’re going to get through it. If you’re a White Belt and you take the Black Stripe at Yellow, you’re really saying that you are going to make it to Blue Belt over the next year. Maybe even Green. Even with slower progress near the top, taking the Black Stripe (or, more likely, keeping it) guarantees you to more promotions.
Before you know it, Black is the next belt, and suddenly it gets easy.
This week, a parent told me that his child was leaving the program. The child in question was promoted in February to Orange Belt with a Black Stripe, and if you know anything about PowerKenpo, you know that the Black Stripe indicates that a student has moved up to a higher level of training. A commitment to black belt has been made, and it also includes a 1 year commitment to train. As often happens, the conversation did not go well; in fact, the parent made posts on Facebook that I felt misrepresented the conversation and what I said. Fortunately, though, our entire conversation was done in email, and I felt like the things I said really expressed some things that I feel strongly about. So with that in mind, and with his permission, I’ve posted the email thread below. To read it properly, you should scroll to the bottom and read up. Some of this will be going out in different ways, because I like how it came out, but this blog will put it all in context.
>>>>Scroll to the bottom and read up to get the thread in order.
I’ll make this easy for you. Ask your kid what it means. He should be able to tell you. If you weren’t paying attention, I’m pretty sure he was.
People tell me that their kids don’t understand what taking the stripe means. Then, I walk up in front of the class and ask, and everyone knows. We hit this hard in class because making commitments, setting goals, and meeting them is part of the program. There’s nothing particularly special about any of this if it just happens randomly; and when a kid takes the black stripe, powers through the difficult spots, and achieves the next belt, that’s special.
And the lesson? Yeah, the lesson is to meet your commitments. It’s pretty simple. I don’t want the belt back, I just want anyone who takes the black stripe to do what they committed to do. I’m very specific in class and in testing about what the black stripe means, and it drives me crazy when people come back later and insist that they didn’t understand, that their child didn’t understand, or that, in some cases, they just don’t care because their kid is just a kid and if he or she gets bored or is having trouble getting to the next belt, then they should be able to walk away.
Not that this applies to your kid - he’s excited and enthusiastic when we do karate. He likes it. He’d do well if he came to class. I have no doubt that black belt is within his range.
Knowing what the belt means, though, I’m really surprised you want him to keep it as a trophy. Teaching him the lesson that if he’s not going to stay for a year, then swapping the belt for one that shows what he successfully did, seems to be worth way more than having a cool black stripe that he 1/ knows he didn’t earn or 2/ doesn’t understand what it means.
Down the road, if either of you want to do more, we’ll be here. Or you might want to find another studio and try something else. I’m moving towards more of the deeper meaning of training in the martial arts, not less. If I failed to get the message across to you or your kid about what we are doing or where we are going and what it means, then I apologize for not getting the job done. I’m a work in progress too.
Finally, I sent an email out a while back about the black stripe. You must have missed it - here it is if you’d like to read it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If you’ve watched class, or done class, you’ve heard us talk about the black stripe and what it means.
I can ask anyone, from Little Dragons to Adults, what it means, and I get two answers; It means you’re committed to Black Belt (or some varation of the wording) and it means you’ll stay for a year.
Walk into most karate schools, and good luck getting on the mat without signing up for at least a year. One karate studio in Carrollton does a great job sellling, and they get students to sign a 4 year contract when they start. They give you a 90 day cancellation, sometimes, but 90 days goes by fast and then you’re in. And no - they don’t care if you change your mind. You are paying whether you come to class or not. Either way, you have to walk in and make a decision about what to do with pretty limited information.
I don’t like doing sales in karate. I do plenty of that in other places, but I do karate because I like it. We don’t do a hard sell at PowerKenpo, and sometimes that means we lose some students to other studios. But I would rather have it that way. I like that our commitment is about more than money.
At PowerKenpo, you can walk on the mat and train, month to month, for as long as you want. When you move from belt to belt, when you get promoted, you have the opportunity to commit to Black Belt. Nobody has to do it, and we don’t put any pressure on to do it. It’s a personal decision, and if it’s not right for the student, then we don’t want them to commit.
In effect, we have two tiers of students; a group that has not yet decided to commit to Black Belt - they are still trying the program. And another group that has made a commitment and is more serious about the training. The students in the second group are long term - they have very little turnover and tend to move up - they are much more likely to get to Black Belt.
Having committed, though, the student gets to wear a special belt, with a Black Stripe. He or she gets to tell everyone there that a commitment has been made, and they are serious about getting to Black. They check a box and sign on their promotion form saying “I will get my Black Belt. I want to wear the Black Stripe on my belt to show my commitment to Black Belt to help inspire other students to do the same”.
They also sign the line that says: “I will attend at least two classes each week for the next year.”
For kids, the parent has to sign a line that says that their child “has convinced us that his/her commitment to Black Belt is real and we agree to support him/her on the journey by bringing him/her to at least two classes each week for the next year, and by encouraging and supporting him/her in classes and in practice.”
You can’t be committed to Black Belt day to day, or week to week. There will be times when you want to quit, or times when students and family just get busy, and it’s easy to drift away. Being committed gets you though the lows. Students wearing the Black Stripe are more likely to succeed than students who do not wear it, because they are more likelly to stick it out when things get tough.
There is no line in here that says “I will come twice a week unless I get bored, or tired, or I’m really busy, or can’t get to the next belt as easily as I would like.”
There is no line on the parent affirmation that says “If my child wants to quit, I’ll let him or her walk away from the commitment that they made. I mean, reallly - he or she is just a kid and shouldn’t be asked to commit to something like this”.
Tiger Woods understood commitment. Michelle Kwan understood commitment. Troy Aikman understood commitment. Nobody had to hold Emmit Smith’s hand and make him go to practice.
Nobody has to take the Black Stripe. I know some people do it because it’s a cooler belt than the other belt, but whatever reason gets them to commit, we expect, that, once the commitment has been made, that it will be kept. When someone takes the Black Stripe and then tries to walk away, I don’t tell them it’s ok, and I don;t try to make them feel good about them choosing to abandon that commitment to themselves, to the other students, to the instructors, and to the studio. They shouldn’t feel good about it; it’s a failure. In the case of kids, the parents have committed to supporting their child in committing to Black Belt, and have decided instead to support their child in breaking that commitment. There are better lessons to teach a child than that.
Very importantly, if we don’t demand that people who make the commitment to Black Belt follow through, then the commitment means nothing. The Black Stripe means nothing. We owe it to every student who has made that commitment, who is wearing the Black Stripe, to defend that symbol aggressively and demand that the people who wear it live up to the commitment that they have made..
We have 313 students. We see a certain amount of churn in students without the Black Stripe, as do all karate studios. We see very little churn once a student commits - in fact, only 5 students have ever broken their commitment to Black Belt since we started doing our program this way. That’s an incredibly small percentage - but every one is a failure, and every one hits hard.
Summer is coming up. Classes are going very well. Ed Parker will be here in June. We’ve had a great year so far, and it’s going to get better. If you, or your child, is on a plateau, talk to us and we’ll get them through it. If you are in class, stick with it. If you’ve been out for a while, this is a great time to get back in. If your kid is in class, think about signing up for the family class on Wednesday - even if it’s only for a month or two, you’ll gain skills and insight that will help you help them move ahead.
We’re adding a special class on Tuesday and Thursday, starting next week from 5:45 to 6:00PM, and on Saturday from 12:30 to 1:00PM, open only to students who have the Black Stripe on their belt. We’ll work on weapons, teaching and leadership, and advanced fighting skills.
—–Original Message—–
From: xxxxxx1@yahoo.com [mailto:xxxxxx1@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 8:32 AM
To: jim@powerkenpo.com
Subject: Re: PowerKenpo Invoice
There are a lot of things that I take seriously as well and my childs well being tops the list. I’m sorry Jim there must be a misunderstanding. I was not aware of any expectation either verbal or written, of the belt being returned if black belt, or even the next level was not attained, but that by buying the striped belt you were making the “commitment” to strive for the next level. And definitely not having your belt taken away if you did not make it. That would be difficult for a CHILD to understand and I have to question your judgement if you truly feel this is a positive teaching tool.
To lose your trophy because you decided that you were bored with the karate classes, or they weren’t active enough for his age group, or the classes that we wanted to take him to were over booked and too crowded to be effective, or he had a desire to play baseball, basketball, soccer, gymnastics, golf, or tennis? I don’t think that is fair and I won’t do that to him. He is a kid but he would remember that for a LONG time as a negative.
We are great parents and I don’t appreciate the implication that we or him “let anyone down” by leaving kenpo. That is not true and is extremely offensive. Similar to me saying that you are running a business and the more kids you have the better so you put the kids that do leave on a guilt trip, humilitate them by taking their belts away and making them feel like they “let everyone down” to increase the percentage of return students.
This won’t be happening to him.
.
Please keep my kid out of the loop on this. I don’t want this mentioned to him under any circumstance by anybody but me as I do not agree with the teaching.
He will be keeping his belt as is.
Thanks
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
—–Original Message—–
From: “Jim Dryburgh”
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:09:48
To:
Subject: RE: PowerKenpo Invoice
There are some things we’ve been taking a lot more seriously lately. But maybe there’s a misunderstanding.
He certainly earned an orange belt. He did all the material for yellow and orange, and he did it in front of the class. There’s no question that he earned his orange belt.
But you can’t earn the black stripe. The belt looks backward - at what you did. The stripe looks forward, at what you are going to do. It says that he’s committed to staying in class, coming twice a week, getting his black belt, supporting all the other students who got their black stripes. It represents a promise to do something…and the problem is, that when you don’t do it, it becomes a symbol of failure. He promised to show up and didn’t. He committed ot getting a black belt, and did not. He promised to help other students with the black stripe get their black belts, and then he let them down.
For kids, it also shows a commitment by their parents to support them. No kid gets that stripe without having the parent step up and pledge support.
You had to check a box and sign this: Parent Affirmation: (My kid) has convinced us that his commitment to black belt is real and we agree to support him on the journey by bringing him to at least two classes each week for the next year, and by encouraging and supporting him in his classes and practice. And if it doesn’t happen, it becomes a reminder that the support was promised but not given.
Of course, he’s just a kid. He’ll probably forget that. But when I ask kids in class what the black stripe means, they know what it means. He definitely knew what it meant at the time he got the belt, and he knew what it meant when we discussed the black stripe in class last week. If he shows that belt to someone a year from now and they ask what the black stripe means, what should he say? That it means he made a commitment to black belt and failed?
I’ve got kids on the mat that want that stripe but aren’t taking it because the parental employment situation isn’t good, and they might not be able to continue, or might have to move. I’ve got kids where the parents are divorced and both parents aren’t supportive, and they are NOT taking the black stripe because they don’t know if they can keep the promise. They want it, but aren’t taking it because they know they might not be able to follow through. With that in mind, how can I not take it seriously?
Really though, knowing what that belt means, and what it represents if he stops, wouldn’t it be better if he brought it back and got one without the stripe?
As to the rest, those are good points. I missed time injured over the years and never asked for time back, because I was taking it seriously and supporting the school and sometimes being out hurt or unable to train because of work was part of it. I never felt that Rick Fowler should ignore things he thought were important just because I’d paid tuition to him or recommended his school to people. If I’d thought he would have done it, I’d probably have gone somewhere else.
I do appreciate any support you’ve provided over the years. I enjoyed working with you in class, and I was disappointed when you wandered away.
But karate isn’t for everyone, and people leave. Sometimes they come back - I’ve had half a dozen people come back since we started the family class.
Usually, though, people decide whether karate is right for them and it’s not, they leave and they’re done with karate for life.
—–Original Message—–
From: xxxxxx1@yahoo.com [mailto:xxxxxx1@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 5:26 PM
To: jim@powerkenpo.com
Subject: Re: PowerKenpo Invoice
Sure jim. As soon as you refund me all the classes I missed due to injury and still paid for. How about all of the people I referred to your school?
How about some. Appreciation for that? I have had nothing but great things to say about you and your school even regarding things I did not agree with, out of respect for you. My kid earned that belt, he is keeping that belt.
You are taking yourself way too seriously on this one.
——Original Message——
From: Jim Dryburgh
To: xxxxxx1@yahoo.com
ReplyTo: jim@powerkenpo.com
Sent: Jun 24, 2009 2:52 PM
Subject: RE: PowerKenpo Invoice
I don’t. But he got promoted to Orange with a Black Stripe on February 14th.
The commitment to get that stripe is one year of classes, twice a week. I talked to him at the time about it, and you signed the form agreeing to it.
If he;s quitting, and you’re not keeping that commitment, then I need that belt back.
—–Original Message—–
From: xxxxx@yahoo.com [mailto:xxxxx@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:19 PM
To: jim@powerkenpo.com
Subject: Re: PowerKenpo Invoice
Hey jim, we r taking our kid out of kenpo. Do u still need a check?
Ed Parker is Senior Grandmaster Ed Parker’s son. Choosing not to rely on name recognition alone, though, Mr. Parker has built a career and a following of his own in the community. He has been featured in Black Belt Magazine and has done seminars worldwide. As a martial artist, he has focused his talents on creating innovative learning tools and visually dynamic art pieces for his community. He is also responsible for close to 1,000 portrait renderings of martial artists. During the past 20 years Mr. Parker has taught, lectured, produced, published, written, illustrated, designed, choreographed and acted in various Martial Arts related areas and has a Black Belt in American Kenpo Karate.
At PowerKenpo, we do something differently from other karate studios in the area. Most places push for a contract - 1 year, 2 years, even, in the case of 1 local school - 4 years! At PowerKenpo, though, you can walk on the mat and start month to month. Our commitment comes when you move from one belt to another. You have the opportunity to commit to Black Belt. It’s a commitment that should not be made lightly - it’s a commitment to yourself, to the studio, to your faimly and to the other students training with you, to approach your training seriously and to make every effort to make it to Black Belt. More specifically, it’s a 12 month commitment to train with us. For students who choose to follow the path to black belt and to show that commitment by wearing the black stripe, there’s a two class a week minimum and tuition is due whether they attend or not. This commitment, of time and energy and money, will help the students who make it stay on track and move up in the belts over the months and years needed to make it to Black Belt.
After a year of pursuing our program of allowing students to voluntarily commit to Black Belt, the results are in. 75% of our Junior and Little Dragon students are wearing the black stripe. 90% of our adult students are wearing the black stripe. The art, and how we teach it, is clearly reaching our students and motivating them. I, personally, like this system. I like that students make the choice on their own to go to Black Belt. I like that every one of the students wearing the Black Belt could train without it, month to month, but have chosen to make a deeper commitment, and I and our staff are working hard to find ways to help every one of them make it to their destination.
Would you like to do karate with your child? We have a class during the summer on Wednesday from 5:30 to 6:15 for families - all ages, Little Dragon, Junior, and Adult - on the mat at the same time. It will be a fun class and will give you the tools you need to help your like your child to move ahead more quickly. Whether you decide to stay in and follow your own path to black or just make it a fun summer class for the family, you’ll have fun with your kid in class this summer!
© 2009 Martial Arts, Self Defense and Karate Classes in Dallas - PowerKenpo Inc. | 3108 Old Denton Road, Suite #111 ( Map ) | Carrollton, TX 75007 | (972) 394-7385
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