Black Belt Essay

TKD Motivation – Keeping on, Keeping on

Philip Dunn

In Taekwon-Do, especially when you reach major age milestones, 30, 40 and 50yrs and over not only does the body give a few groans of frustration but your mind can throw a few curved ones in there as well.
I have been training for more than 18yrs now and instructing for 14 of those years so have some first-hand knowledge of some of the signals the body sends – ‘had-enough’ – ‘mentally over-it’ – ‘body packing up’ etc, etc.
Without a support network of friends, some of whom are seniors and junior TKD people, you will find battling those feelings very difficult.

When I have reached my low-points, I have always been fortunate that my wife (who also is a TKD practitioner) is the first one to begin the healing/realism process. I also am very lucky to have one particular TKD friend who has always helped me back.

So the moral is, surround yourself with these people, do your best to KEEP mixing, KEEP attending tournaments and functions because these TKD people in various ways, will be the only ones who can keep you motivated in the low periods, and there will be low periods along with the highs.

Some things will happen. You will get older. You will not be able to do (exactly) for every 10 years you age, the sparring or techniques you have enjoyed throughout your TKD career. You must consider teaching/instructing, especially the younger Black Belts, it is the only way you will keep learning.

Mentally, should you become an instructor (now there is a play on words) you will have troughs and droughts where you run out of ideas, or need to freshen up to keep the learning process interesting. This is where you need (as an instructor) to move about the clubs to see what everyone else is doing.

If you live a long way from other clubs, then when a function comes up (workshop/international course etc) that is close then attend it! This becomes a key element to mix and mingle and swap ideas. I can’t remember how many courses I have done with Mr Mike Lowe, but I know after three in three years, that I was going to get ideas on how to teach, not just how to instruct.

Find a senior (or junior if no seniors are close to you) that can become a mentor. Currently here in Counties-Manukau we run a mentoring system, where Black Belt instructors can keep in touch, via phone or email as well as face-to-face meetings to discuss instructing/management issues with schools. This works well and keeps us close as a region.

My backup or safety net if you like, came into play during 1994 when my original club ceased to exist and I went through a very dark period where even continuing in TKD seemed to be a waste of time. But my TKD mentor kept in touch with us (at that time we had a family of five practising) and gently kept pressing us when we were ready, to just come along and try it again.

The club we decided to try a class at, made us feel like we had not been away at all, and the rest is history. Later that year I opened a new club in Mangere Bridge in Auckland and though that club has now ceased training, some of those original members are still training at clubs around Auckland.

When I took over the Waiuku Branch and moved out of Auckland, again the mentoring system worked, with a very strong network of helpful parents and keeping contact with instructor mentors made that transition much easier.
Please believe that running a club on your own is probably the hardest of the hard tasks to do. Harder than any grading. I was lucky once again with my wife being able to assist in the running of the club.

So the name of the game is try and start a new club or take over an existing one, with at least one or two (reliable) black belts that you can share out the training nights with. If you try and do it all, it will nearly always end in burn-out.
Once established in your settled (new or used) club, put your mark on it with your teaching style. Again USE your mentors and contacts, bounce ideas. Try not to haul up the drawbridge and do everything by yourself. Remember that a lot of the instructors around you have done more years teaching than you have even been doing TKD – even up to II Dan!

Motivate your students and if that is done right, the motivation will keep coming back to you, no matter how sore you are… Try and get them to any tournaments or workshops that are happening (and make sure you go too) and they will remember them forever.

Look way ahead for upcoming regional or local tournaments, check out whether it is below/above or near-on their skill level. Explore a build-up period prior to these events. It is hard sometimes attending these events to keep close to your students to second or keep tabs on them, due to your responsibility to help an event run, but again balance it with using reliable and/or qualified black belts (if you have them) or reliable/qualified parent help from parents who actually want to help.

Find them, seek them out, and try and build on any positives of the event. Even if this means putting a happy spin on one or two individuals out of eight that may make a second round…
Take any positive results, back to your club, put the students out front, make them feel proud of even attending, friends made, black belts admired or techniques that they may want to perfect for themselves. These motivational moments have a way of spinning back to the instructor and even the black belt assistants (if any).

For the older instructors – seeing as this is written by one – you will really need to feed off these, as successes help feed all the individuals at a club level. Success doesn’t need to be a medal, but a good performance or major improvement that can be translated as a step forward towards a grading perhaps, can be reinforced.

For yourself, take these positive moments and push yourself from the inside out.  Once you begin your own march onward for Second, Third and Fourth and onward Degrees, you need to be able to draw some of these motivational moments back into yourself to help you focus on your future goals.

Don’t be afraid to have a laugh with the students, give them some fun occasionally. I like to sometimes pick movements from my patterns, just two or three and filter them down to the green belts. I actually don’t tell them where they are from but get incredible admiration for them trying to master them. And once I tell them where they are from they are amazed that they even had a go!

So try it out, you may give both your students and yourself a real fright and see some incredible potential in your already amazing students, you will keep on keeping on.