I have trained in martial arts for 25 years now and I have noticed a few things in that amount of time. One thing I continue to see is that students will develop their skills (or not) due to their own level of effort and commitment, not their instructor’s. Whether the instructor is a new black belt or a seasoned master, there are always students who excel and those who struggle.
The instructor’s level of skill can always be surpassed, so the question is not how skilled the teacher is, it is really how much effort the student expends.
Unfortunately, in America, we often see teachers in the same way we see service providers, rather than honoring them as experts. For example, when I studied kung fu in Chinatown Seattle, people would sometimes complain that the master did not show them enough during class. I always found that hard to hear because, in my mind, I wondered how the student thought they knew how much they should be learning? After all, the master had done martial arts all his life, and he was incredibly skilled, so I trusted him to lead me in the right direction. Obviously, the other students had a different point of view.
Recently I have come to realize that, as Americans, we see everything we pay for from the customer perspective. Our nation is full of customers who want excellent service, great prices and instant gratification. When we order products online we can choose to receive the product in a week or overnight depending on how much we are willing to spend. When we pay a gardener or an accountant, we want them to get things done as quickly as possible. When we are the customer, we expect to be served well. Because of this point of view, we transfer certain expectations to our teachers.
We enroll in martial arts classes with the idea that the teacher is our “service provider” and that their job is to serve us as the customer. Teachers with real skill help their students grow by pushing them to train harder and training them to dig deeper on their own, not by just showing more technique. We also must remember that when we hire a gardener to landscape our yard, we don’t have to do anything but pay the bill. In martial arts, the teacher can show us the way, but we have to do the work.
No matter what techniques I have been show throughout the years, it has always taken a lot of effort to understand their function. Martial arts is an acquired skill for every person – from gifted athletes to de-conditioned couch potatoes. Regardless of what techniques any individual learns or how skilled the teacher is, a person can excel in martial arts if he or she puts forth the effort.
