Teaching Martial Arts, Some Insights

I’ve read Dave post on Formosa Neijia about the hardship of establishing a martial art business in a world when people are not really willing or able to give a lot of time for the hard work needed, when they search for something to suite their hours and for a technique that is well known and in fact most of the hard work each teacher does to reach a teacher status goes to waste as people have no special interest in the originality of the teaching or many other things for that matter.

I guess that when one sells a unique product no matter if it is a training in a special less famous martial art or a painting he faces the same situation of having a huge gape between him and his target market.

From my experiences there are two options to choose to be there and let people come to you when they’ve heard or read about this special technique and what it can do for them or when they are searching for that special teacher with the exceptional training or you can create your own market.

My brother is learning Sitar for many years now in India and he specializes in Indian classical music, his teacher would starve if he had insisted on teaching only serious students and only classical music. What he does and what I did when I had my meditation classes is to teach sitar to everyone that want to know and play a song to his friends. Even two sessions are welcomed.

From all the people that tried taking lessons during their travel just to experiment there were always the few that fell in love with the music the instrument and the teaching and stayed for longer periods, some of them settled in India for long periods to be close to their teacher and some have brought the classical music to the West.

The key is to think of yourself as a bridge rather than an important teacher. If you are interested in serving the community, you might be able to share your passion with them in many occasions but it all depends on your willingness to enable them to see things through your eyes, rather than expecting them to come prepared and have a great appreciation for you and what you can give them.

If they know nothing about what you teach or have no mental image of this or that tradition, open courses that offer people introductory knowledge of the martial arts. When a teacher loses all expectation that people would acknowledge his hard work, expertise and experiences and simply serves people by showing the beauty of the martial arts and the specific technique that he specialize in, he would always be recognized by those who choose to go deeper.