Picking the right instructor

Picking the right instructor

Martial arts is going to make your kid great. You sure about that?

Parents bring their kids to martial arts class because they're hoping to give them confidence and maybe to help their character. But this is not an automatic thing. We can be silly and just look at a TV show like Cobra Kai or an old 70s kung fu movie. And there's always a bad character and they're a skillful martial artist. So even in our fiction we can acknowledge it. Unfortunately, if you look at the news occasionally you'll see where some martial arts instructor was way out of line and something really terrible happens. And that's really a tragedy. You can't just assume that because a person's going to take martial arts class that they're just going to automatically be great people.

I can't tell you how many times people have gone to martial arts schools and assumed that because that person was a high-ranked martial artist that they're probably a good person. You sure about that? Nope. I was a musician before this and there's plenty of excellent musicians who are not nice people. Just because a person acquires a high level of skill doesn't make them automatically across the board that they're good.

There's a Miyamoto Musashi quote from his book where he talks about if you can see the way specifically, often you can see the way generally. If you understand how martial arts work, you can have insight into other things. There's a famous story where he was trying to draw something for a noble person in Japan and he didn't like it. He ripped it up. That was not a smart move, because that nobleman could have gotten rid of Musashi. And he redrew it. And when he redrew it, it was really wonderful. They asked, well, what was different? He said, the first time I drew it like an artist, the second time I drew it like a swordsman, and I'm a swordsman. I'm not an artist. So it is possible for that to happen, but it's not automatic. And that still doesn't make you a good person. That's about skill acquisition.

So what does make someone a better person potentially in a martial arts school? It comes back first to what do you value as a parent? What is it that's important to you? Is it that they are successful? Because if it's just that they're successful, it could be very Machiavellian. They could be successful, but not at the cost of their integrity. Yeah, this is important, but not more than this. It's important to be a good martial artist, but not at the cost of your soul. Having that kind of hierarchy to what's important.