Monday 22 April 2013
At Factor10 we teach more than just Martial Arts. Although that’s very important, and clearly a life saving skill all people who are part of the Factor10 family learn, teaching coping strategies, listening skills, confidence, perseverance, compassion, and stretching ones intellect, to mention just a few, are all part of the Factor10 package.
What my intention is as a traditional Master Instructor is to really drive home to parents that just as Swimming is a life skill for children at a young age and needed life long, so is Martial Arts, especially as we teach them the Life Skills of perseverance, courage, concentration, commitment and so on. In fact, we have the ten Characteristics For Life that we know, as Martial Artists, we develop through the Martial Arts techniques that enable people to be at their best – no less.
Interesting that although this helps parents understand we are much more than just a Martial Arts organisation, and that we help their children learn real Life Skills in a fun way, the feedback we get so often from parents is that these 10 Characteristics For Life are what great parents also teach their kids. In a way it provides a template for parenting success, the biggest and most demanding job in the world for which there has been no training – well at least until now.
Back to the Martial Arts skills, though, is the idea that probably the hardest thing anyone would have to do in their life is to protect themselves to survive, in other words to fight to save their life. Possibly the only harder thing might be for a parent to lose a child, and for sure that would be on the top of the list of hardest thing to ever do, but for most people fighting to save their life is the hardest thing anyone could have to do. That’s one of the reasons why we teach our children swimming, because when a child is drowning they are needing to do something to save their life in the absence of any help. With the skills of swimming they can do just that.
And that’s the very reason we know parents at Factor10 want their children to learn Martial Arts. To be able to bring to the moment the skills they have learned while they are there, on their own, without their parents to protect them.
So I think this is a real point of difference for Factor10 in that we really want to have children, teenagers and adults safe from the bullies out there. But we also want them as confident people who aren’t one of the many statistics of anxiety, depression and suicide.
Master O
