Martial Arts for Children: How It Can Help Them Cope with School Life Stress?
October 5, 2018
You may not know it but throughout your life mentors have had a massive influence on who you are and how you perceive the world around you.
Like most things there are good and bad mentors, the former brings out the best in you and the latter the worst. People often overlook the importance of having different mentors in various different fields or expertise. No one is born knowing everything, it all has to be learnt, but if you have a nurturing mentor the learning curve is that much steeper.
Throughout history, the educators with the biggest demographic were military leaders, because they had to train warriors and soldiers from different backgrounds without prejudice. Every soldier had to hold a certain standard of expertise to ensure the army as a whole could function effetely.
Now I can guess what you’re thinking,’ what about religious leaders, or village elders’ and you would be right, they were also successful mentors but their reach and demographic audience was initially very limited.
There are Spanish Cave paintings from Morella la Vella, Valencia, that date as far back as from 10,000 to 6000 BC that depict people fighting each other with bows and arrows, a skill that had to be taught for the survival of that tribe. Combat for survival or dominance has been one of the biggest driving forces for wide spread education on a topic.
By no means am I trying to glorify war I just want to highlight the major influence combat has historically had on mass education throughout history.
Now what does this have to do with life coaching you say? Well a lot, before going to battle many tribal rituals involved eating or drinking specific things to imbue the consumer with extra power or strength on the battle field. This was some of the first nutritional advice to enhance physical performance in stressful situations.
Roman Gladiators were fed a high energy diet while receiving rigorous physical training. It was expensive to own Gladiators (most of which were slaves). You didn’t want to pay top dollar for a slave only to have them die in the arena, so you got them mentors to train them the art of combat to ensure longevity.
A mentor is automatically a figure of authority because they know something you need, there is an element of respect that you hand over without conscious thought. Even more so with martial arts instructors because you know they should be able to kick your ass.
A good instructor can relate to their student even if they have not been in the exact same situation. Great instructors know what works for them and others, they know the pitfalls and shortcuts to success.
With all this going for them it would be hard not to see them as wise sages that know the answer to everything, which was and is usually not the case.
Instructors and mentors are everyday people that have a lot of experience in their chosen fields, with many problems of their own. The difference is that the student only sees the mentor in an environment instructing the subject they are most confident with, having all the answers.
This causes the mentor new and unexpected challenges. If a student that respects you comes up and asks for advise on a personal subject that has nothing to do with your field of expertise what do you do? Do you send them away saying that you are sorry, I can’t comment on that or do you give them your honest opinion and hope you don’t put them on the wrong path.
I have seen mentors and instructors do both, and both responses have been the right ones.
In not commenting you have ensured that the student doesn’t receive any advice, although possibly poor advise, in hopes that they seek further from someone more qualified to help them.
The mentors/instructors that do the opposite on the other hand often surprise themselves with the amount of insight they can offer about topics that they have little to know experience with.
An outsider can offer you another perspective on a problem or situation that you can’t see because their insight is not blocked by emotions or feelings that might be hindering you.
There are other factors like economy of motion that is a governing factor in most fighting arts. To get from point A to point B, a straight line is the quickest route. When this has been ingrained into you after years of training it is hard not to apply this kind of thinking to your everyday life. The mentor/instructor will see the most efficient way to deal with the student’s problem. Now the greatest mentors/instructors know that the student already has the answer or how to find it, they just coach them through the decision and understanding process.
I have been lucky to have had some great mentors, from teachers at school, to work mates and bosses with more experience, to friends that have been kind enough to take a little time to educate me on different subjects. But there has only been a couple of mentors that I have felt comfortable to talk with about any subject. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the others, I just didn’t see them having enough all round wisdom to steer me on the right path. With hindsight I can now see that this was an unfair assumption but time can change your perspective. It was always my martial arts instructors that I would go to for advice first, they were impartial, often offering well thought and measured responses to my problems. Considering that none of them came from a back ground of psychiatry or counselling I never got bad advice.
Having been the recipient of good advice from my instructors/mentors I knew I had big shoes to fill when I became an instructor myself.
I never wanted to be the instructor who turned people away that needed to talk about their problems. It takes courage to ask for help especially when it is something personal. When a student respects you enough to come to you with their problems you need to take it seriously. Let’s face it, problems are embarrassing, you don’t want to be the person that doesn’t have their life in order, when you REALLY ask for help it’s a hard thing to do. As a mentor/instructor you might be the first or only person the student will ask.
After a few years of winiging it with the personal advise I was asked to give by the students, I decided that I needed to take this responsibility more seriously and study life coaching.
I enrolled in a Life Coaching course and dedicated my spare time learning everything I could. I was pleased to know that I had been life coaching for years and that I didn’t even know it.
People came to the school because they wanted something from martial arts, be it confidence, an outlet for stress, fitness, discipline or just something exciting to do. It is the instructor’s job to help the student achieve their goals and improve the student’s life.
A person goes to a Life Coach because there is something wrong with their lives, they are unhappy or unfulfilled and want to change their life for the better.
In my Life Coaching studies I found that most people have ‘Limiting Beliefs’ I prefer to use the term ‘Limiting Assumption’. In the book, Time To Think by Nancy Kline the author suggests that a belief is harder to change than an assumption. When you put in the question ‘why do you believe this?’ to someone, you are reaffirming that they believe something and it then becomes your job to try and convince them otherwise. When you say ‘Why do you assume this?’ you then give them the possibility to change their mind, making it easier to help them.
A Limiting Assumption is something that a person negatively assumes to be true about themselves, like I’m broken, I’m too stupid, I’m boring, I can’t change, I’m not good enough, all of which are not true.
As a martial arts instructor I sometimes see beginner students looking disheartened because they are having trouble understanding or being unable to perform a technique that you make look easy. I often tell them not to worry, and explain it in a different way and with patience and perseverance they are able to perform it, giving them a great sense of achievement.
Much like a life coach you see their limiting assumption and show them it was false, with some work and greater understanding anything is possible.
Beginners find it hard to believe that their instructor was once a beginner too with much the same problems and concerns. It is a mentor’s job to show the beginner what is possible, and how to achieve it quicker than they did.
I like to imagine the soldiers, warriors and gladiators of the past being able to approach their commanding officer/Chief/ trainer for advice on something other than how to fight.
I am in no doubt that those of you that are reading this will be or become mentors to others in varying different degrees. Nobody has any real idea how far their influence goes, like ripples in a pond through one act of kindness. You mentor on a subject to a person, they share that knowledge to someone else, who shares it with another and so on, your mentorship might even spread beyond your lifetime like the warriors of old.
Half of a Life Coaches job is to remove the clients Limiting Assumptions about themselves.
Imagine having no doubts about your abilities and looking at each day as an opportunity to achieve you dreams, how free would you feel and how much could you achieve in life with no limits to your potential.
By Louis Tandoh Family Martial Arts Gravesend Chief Instructor
