From The Desk of Tom Callos

How to Test for a Black Belt

2009-02-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

Hi, I’m Tom Callos and I’m just about as experienced in the martial arts as anyone (Oh sure, there are lots of people who started studying before me in the 1960’s and even in the 1950’s, but with 38 years of study “under my belt” and having been involved in almost all aspects of the martial arts –and considering I’m sitting here at my computer typing this, I hope you’ll give me a few minutes of your time).

When it comes to black belt testing, there are no universal standards or requirements. I mean, while there are some organizations that have set their own fine standards, there isn’t a single requirement that every school of every style in the world says, “This is required!” In fact, the truth is that any school can set their own standards and requirements for black belt testing –and they do, and those requirements can range from the ridiculously easy to the life-threatening stupid (and everywhere in-between).

Now this lack of universal standards isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like regionalism, as in going somewhere and not seeing the same fast-food restaurants, the same giant box-stores, the same everything until every town in Wisconsin looks like every town in California looks like every town in Texas, if you get my drift. Styles of martial arts shouldn’t look the same –and the circumstances that an art like judo developed under aren’t the same as the Russion art of sambo or the Filipino art of kali or the French martial art of savate, so it’s very OK that styles should have different customs and requirements.

What I’m here to fill you in on, is HOW one should test for a black belt (or if the “black belt” isn’t used in a particular system of martial art, then whatever it is that marks the passage between knowing nothing and knowing a lot –and having from between 3 and 10 years of experience). The black belt test should be an event that causes the participant to have to “rise to the occasion.” It should be an event that is a right-of-passage, sort of the way some cultures put their young men and women through some kind of arduous test (you know, like going out on a “vision-quest” or a “walk-about” or living through one of those big debutante balls where your family has to spend more money than God to get your picture in some blue-blood newspaper or magazine).

Of course, nobody on the planet Earth has any authority to make martial arts teachers tow-the-black-belt-line, if you know what I mean; so some black belts are just handed out (“Ok, here you go, you’ve earned it. Now let’s go out for pizza.”) and some look like some kind of college frat-house hazing (Sorry, no water or food for 3-days and you’re going to sit here and meditate for 8-hours, then you’re going to fight these 10 black belts until you can’t hold your arms up --and then we’re going to start your test. Oh, and at the end of this thing, we’re all going to kick you in the stomach. Good luck.”).

With all of the above being said, let me get to the point here –and tell you how I think black belt testing should be:

A black belt test should be your Olympics. It ought to make you reach, grow, stretch, and change. It should be something you work for, in advance, 1, 2, 3, 4, and even 10 years; and I mean “work for” as in “in-training” –where every meal, every workout, every day is lived with an awareness that the test is coming. Why? Because life just doesn’t give you many of those kinds of opportunities (any more). Testing should make you eat differently (and with great awareness). It should be a reason to get in the absolute best shape of your life. It should cause you to look deeply at how you deal with stress, conflict, and anger. A black belt test is one of those rare opportunities where you can change just about anything about yourself that you want to –and that you should, and nobody would think less of you. In fact, people would say something (in each other’s ear after you walk out of the room) like, “He’s getting ready to test for his black belt.”

If everyone treated their black belt test as if it were THE MOST important and empowering day of their lives, well...shoot, people would change (and for the better), the martial arts would get more recognition and respect for some of the things that are, really, most valuable about studying, and if we were really lucky, the world might be a wee bit better for it –as it would be filled with more people who hold themselves to higher standards.

To see more on black belt testing and how it might look if it were, indeed, treated as something important; visit the experimental black belt testing project called The Ultimate Black Belt Test (www.ultimateblackbelttest.com). You’ll find some very, very serious martial arts people there (people like us, and/but living with a serious case of “I’m on a mission.”).

Oh, and see my martial arts association at www.thenewwaynetwork.com

Callos on the UFC and Martial Arts Business

2009-01-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

Here Tom Callos talks about the UFC and the Business of the Martial Arts

My Advice to the Martial Arts School Owner

2009-01-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

My Advice to the Martial Arts School Owner Seeking Business Success –as of the Month of January, in the Year 2009

By Tom Callos

For a few minutes, please, take a break from what you have learned and know about the business of the martial arts. Empty your cup for this short report –and let’s see if I can refill it with something that, for you, rings the bell of truth.

If I succeed, then so be it. If I fail to offer you the direction or inspiration I think you ought to feel after reading this, then –at the worst –I will have wasted only a few minutes of your time.

Education is The Way

It begins with YOUR education. What do you know, what are you learning, and how are you USING it in your life, for your school, and for your community?

Warning: Through no fault of its own, as everyone involved originally intended to offer help to the industry, the martial arts business world has fallen in a rut of “make it easy.”

We have a mass of gimmick-promotions, a plethora of poorly designed ads, VIP pass disease, 200 “consultants” in every magazine who think this is their next meal-ticket (because the school-thing didn’t work out), and 90% (or more) of promotional strategies that cater to the laziest, least skilled, dumbest school owners on the planet.

Education is the new way to inspire, lead, promote, advertise, enroll, and retain. Whatever you do, from minute to minute during your work-day, in your classes, in your community, with your staff, and with your students, if it doesn’t involve education, it probably isn’t going to help your school grow.

Teach! Teach on 10 levels, no –on 20 levels! Teach fitness, teach health, teach wisdom, teach defense, teach compassion, teach humility, teach history, teach manners, teach kindness, teach goal-setting, teach communication, teach non-violence, and teach teamwork, leadership skills, and the power of education.

Point: If fitness, health, compassion, wisdom, history, humility, manners, kindness, and all the rest aren’t a part of YOUR daily life, if you do not live the practice of these ideas, then you’re trying to sell something you don’t really own. To teach it, you would be very wise to live it.

Yes, it’s a lot to ask. I’m sorry; I wish it were easier than that.

The inexperienced and uneducated teacher has a very small range of expertise and a very small range of wisdom and experience to share. Limited education and experience equals limited VALUE.

If the education you have isn’t getting you the students you need to thrive and survive, its time to learn and/or re-learn something new. It’s time to engage a new group of teachers and friends.

The Evolution of the Education We Provide

Would you recognize the future if you saw it? Here’s a bit of “the future” for you:

In the future (read: now), half of the education you provide (and, essentially, “sell” your students), will be imparted on the mat –and the other half will be delivered on your member’s only website.

The mat will be for TRAINING. The mat is for sweating, practicing, and polishing. Your member’s only website will have all the things you don’t have the time to impart on the mat; your site will have the philosophical lessons, the lessons in etiquette, the school’s history, the detailed (on video) curriculum, the interviews with the master, and everything anyone needs to know that you don’t want to have to say 1000 times on the mat.

Your member’s only website will be where you store the information, in part, that you’re SELLING to parents. It’s where you’ll store the video-lessons on manners, on anger control, on bullying, on healthy eating, on the value of education, and on everything a parent would want to know you’re going to teach their child.

“Out of the Dojo and Into the World” is The Magic Message of the Master Teacher

There was a time when “the industry” would say to you, “It doesn’t matter how good of a martial artist you are, if you don’t know how to market and manage your business, you’re going to fail as a school owner.”

That statement, in today’s world, no longer holds the water it used to.

The truth, today, is that the better of a martial artist you are, the BETTER your business will do. The issue is not setting your martial arts aside and being a “business-person,” the issue is expanding the definition of what a great martial artist is.

Do you want to be enormously successful (and YOU get to define what that is)? If you do, then your primary objective in your teaching and living is to practice whatever style you practice diligently and with tremendous focus –and then (and this is the main point), you must take what you are practicing on the mat and put it to work in the world.

“In the world” means you have to apply it to something other than a kick, punch, or throw; something outside of the school and outside of the physical aspects of the martial arts.

If you can do this, you can teach this. If you teach this, you have just elevated yourself above the huge quantity of martial arts teachers and schools who think the arts live and die with their forms, their methods of self-defense, and their tournament victories.

If you had a device which could turn mud into diamonds, you would be one popular (and wealthy) person. Teaching people to take what you live, teach and practice on the mat and apply it to their lives, to their communities, and to the world is the martial arts equivalent of turning mud into diamonds.

Things to Avoid

Imagine trying to sell someone the thrill of surfing when you’re not a surfer! Imagine trying to sell someone the benefits of the martial arts when you’re not really a martial artist.

It must be very difficult for these consultants to the martial art industry, you know, the ones who are more comfortable in a suit than in a gi, to advice an industry they know so little about (but claim to be experts in).

It must be very difficult to teach people how to promote the values and benefits of the martial arts when they don’t practice --or have never lived them themselves.

It’s no wonder they sell strategies for overcoming sales objections, it’s no wonder they dole out lame techniques for tricking people into “upgrades.” It’ no wonder that their ideas have, quite literally, got so many of us kicked out of the public school system! It’s no wonder that State legislators are looking our businesses over and trying to determine how much regulation we need.

You see, the martial arts world should operate in an entirely different realm than the health clubs, than the tricky bank contract-buying salesmen, and the water-it-down-until-any-20-year-old-can-teach-it profiteers. The martial arts world shouldn’t give a hoot about what kind of car you have your photo taken in front of –or the brand-name of the watch you wear on your wrist.

Success in 2009 is a return to The Way. Success will come with us looking deeply at how we can help the world –and in way that reflects the ultimate aim of the martial arts (remember what Funakoshi wrote: “The ultimate aim of the art of Karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of its participants").

What we need is an expansion of the definition of “martial arts” and our role in the world. Success in 2009 is in expanding our vocabulary and looking deeply at whether we are, truly, following a path that leads to mastery.

I, for one, refuse to give into the idea that our business success depends on hiding our prices, holding back our curriculum, getting people to say “Yes,” when they really aren’t sure, modeling “Wall-Mart” or “MacDonald's,” or any other giant corporate or franchise monster, selling long-term “get their money now” contracts, and/or the half-ass learning of some new curriculum that will appeal to kids or the masses so we can sign up more people.

I, for one, won’t be hanging up a Nintendo or Wi in my school trying to bribe people into bringing in their friends. I won’t be starting programs in my school just to “make money.” I won’t be selling a bunch of plastic crap at my front desk to “get my gross up.”

I’m going to stick with selling the genuine, deep-rooted, healthy practice of the martial arts –and the genuine, deep-rooted, healthy practice of applying the focus, the awareness, the self-discipline, and the courage we practice on the mat –to life, community, and the world.

Instead of spending your time listening to a bunch of business-people talking about how to maximize your profit potential, I’d like to suggest you look deeply at your habits, your practices, and your own life. Success will come with a life lived as an example of someone who is willing to be “The Teacher.”

The work we have to do to achieve any kind of worthwhile and fulfilling “success” in 2009, is to take where the old masters left off –and improve upon the ideas. We need to shape them to fit into today’s world. When someone writes or talks about the martial arts in the mainstream media, it ought to be with a voice of reverence.

We ought to be proving to the world that we do, indeed, teach people a lot more than kicks, punches, and throws. The evidence should be overwhelming (like this article).

Tom Callos Talks New Way / Martial Arts Business

2009-01-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

A Lesson in Black Belt Testing

2009-01-08T08:13:00.001-08:00

Team members, current and alumni; please allow me to remind/inform you of some of my beliefs/thoughts about our relationship and this “project.”

1. The black belt test is a sacred experience, but only if you treat it as such.

In my mind, when I say “black belt test” –it is a call to rise, it is to be treated with the utmost respect, it is a call to action. A black belt test is your own personal “Olympics” –and it calls you to train, to prepare, to rise to the occasion, and to evolve as an athlete and a person.

Do YOU have another event/thing in your life that asks so much of you? Perhaps you hear this call with parenting and/or with your significant other or with your career?

BUT, being that this is our life’s work, we would do well to hold the black belt test and the preparation for testing in the most sacred of places.

2. When it comes to your black belt test, require nothing. Nobody has to remind you.

Nobody has to wake you for training. No event, no obstacle, no injury, no bout of depression keeps you from preparing for the event.

You might miss a wedding, you might forget a birthday or an anniversary, but your training is who you are and how you work on yourself.

It’s your air, your survival mechanism; it is the outward manifestation of who you really are on the inside –and who you aspire to be. In your mind you hear the call to your test like an ever-present ringing in the ears.

You don’t sit at the dinner table, you don’t lift your feet into bed, you don’t breath, drink, stretch, or move without an acute awareness that you are testing for your black belt.

Very few people on this planet are bound by the code that you are. Very few people know how to apply themselves the way you are training yourself to do. Very few people treat their black belt test with the respect and reverence that you do –and this, my friends, is how you hone what it is you have given your life for.

3. You are part of a team. You may be a part of many teams, and some of them are very important to you, but in this endeavor you must cultivate an awareness of “team” in a way that warrants the most extraordinary care.

The fabric of the UBBT is woven on something intangible.

It is a recognition of our place in history –it is an understanding that collectively we stand to influence and change and improve the processes, the outcome, the culture, the direction, and the essence of “what is the martial arts.”

I am sitting at a table on my deck on The Big Island –and you are reading this in your own home or office –but we could just as easily be sitting next to each other.

This is the nature of the internet –and of a kind of connection, facilitated by our communication, that ignores distance and time differences.

Someday in the future I will be gone –and this body of work will be what I made of my life. This work will be what I did, what I worked on, and how I made my way. I might be remembered, for a time, as a very dedicated martial arts practitioner and teacher.

This is it.

This work, these messages, the call to treat our “test” and each other with a rare sort of respect, these ideas ---of peace, kindness, activism, environmentalism, anger management, leadership, purpose, intent, and mission ---this is what I/we will leave behind.

NOW is the time to recognize the opportunity we have to make change. We are not like Charles Barkley, who I heard declared he “was not a role model.” We are treating our position with the understanding that we are role models –and we are acting as if what we do –and how we go about it –will influence the quality of life in a million people who follow us.

All of this affects the solemnity of how I expect you to treat our relationship. TO treat it any other way would be far, far from “the ultimate.”

By treating our "black belt test" with this kind of respect, we make "being" a black belt something
worthwhile.

Tom Callos Talking from BJ Penn Academy in Hilo

2008-12-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

Here I am promoting my martial arts association, The New Way Network. Training with the Penn Family in Hawaii (ooh Boy, tough --but fun!).

My Birthday Message to the Martial Arts World

2008-12-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

At any moment, on any given day of your life, you can look in the mirror and say, “Today, I chart a new path for myself.”

You can give up smoking or give up eating foods that don’t offer the promise of good health –or you can let go of some hate, some disempowering opinion, some grudge or sour attitude about something that is, in the big picture of life, petty, meaningless, and a ball-and-chain thwarting some aspect of the happiness you seek in life.

At any given moment you can look at someone you live with or near and say, “Beginning now, I will treat you as if you were the Lord God Herself.”
At any given moment you can look at the people you have in your immediate sphere of influence and say, “Let’s do what cannot be done. Let’s live as examples. Let’s attempt something that is, in itself, the perfect example of that which is best about being human.”

You can add to your life.

One hundred push ups and sit ups for health. One hour of training for your head and the heads of those who share the space you train in. Three purposeful acts of kindness. One act of conscious non-consumption. One act of peace towards another human being and/or the planet. Ten minutes of silent and peace-focused meditation.

At any given point this “martial arts industry” could step up and say, “Beginning today, we will represent not only the best-of-the-best in the physical arts of personal self-defense, but we will step up as protectors to the serenity of that little boy and girl, to the peace of the village, to each community we live in, and to the world itself.”

As martial artists we must be able to execute precise, dynamic, and beautifully effective techniques. We must also be able to execute precise, dynamic, and beautifully effective ideas.

We must have a solution to every physical attack that might cause us or someone we love harm ---and likewise, we must have a solution to all of the non-physical attacks that might harm us or someone / something we love and cherish.

Whether it is the punch to the face or the danger of unhealthy anger; the kick in the stomach or the fear and hatred of the unknown or different; whether it is the molestation or rape of the body or the spirit or one’s confidence or the world in which we live and depend on for survival, we can look in the mirror, on any given day, and as martial artists, vow to step up and be the change we want to see in the world.

We are so much more than can be represented by a punch or kick. What takes place in our schools is so much more than the simple act of repelling the bully. What we have the potential to do is so far beyond the name of our style, what billing service we use, our petty differences of opinion, or what can be accomplished in the ring.

In 2009, we could, if we wanted to, demonstrate something about what the martial arts are –and are not –better than any year in recorded history.

We could show how we have evolved from fearful self-defense and/or revenge to holders of the torch of self-defense for the soul –and for the wisdom of co-existence and sustainable living.

I will, for as long as my legs support me, seek to learn and practice a brutally effective form of self-defense, and I will teach those who want to learn, how to defend themselves from physical harm. Likewise, for as long as my legs support me and my thoughts remain coherent, I will seek to learn, practice, and teach a kind of thinking and action that brings about peace and happiness for myself and others.

Tom Callos

Tom Callos on Connection

2008-12-02T06:57:00.000-08:00

This film is an example of the kind of material, whether in a film or by essay, that I hope to have come out of my upcoming Ultimate Black Belt Test Directed-Writing Project.

The "I am" project asks participants in the UBBT to take words --in the form of positive affirmations --and explore their meaning (in a context relating to the martial arts and/or their life).

In the past UBBT Teams, members were required to journal once a week --but this is the first team (Team 6) that has a "directed" writing assignment. The project seeks to expand the vocabulary of the martial arts teacher / world beyond the traditional "courtesy, integrity, perseverance, etc."

This film is also an example of a philosophy and education program I'm launching in The New Way Network, my association for professional martial arts teachers and school owners.

The UBBT School, a Movement of Engaged Martial Arts

2008-11-29T06:02:00.000-08:00

In art history there have been a number of movements or schools that defined a particular kind of art. The Hudson River school was a mid-19th century art movement comprised of landscape painters that embraced romanticism. My favorite artist of that movement is Albert Bierstadt, known for his beautiful paintings of the western United States.

The Ashcan School was a progressive group of American painters and illustrators who portrayed the realities of New York City life in a raw spontaneous unpolished style. Le Corbusier started the movement known as Purism in protest of Cubism. The German Bauhaus School was made up of architects, artists, and philosophers who had a significant influence on art and architecture before (and after) World War II.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Samuel Mockbee, and Frank Gehry, three very different kinds of architects, have each represented new schools of thought in their field.

Writers, artists, architects, scientists, fashion designers, poets, thinkers, and action-takers in almost every field can pioneer movements that end up generating new methods, ideas, and schools-of-thought.

I believe that the Ultimate Black Belt Test (UBBT) project represents a movement and a school of thought that is markedly different from what was the status quo prior to its inception. The UBBT was/is a protest of sorts; a movement to bring a new kind of innovation, authenticity, and intentional complexity to an “industry” that was/is suffering from a dumbing down and homogeneous commercialism of its methods, ideas, and character.

Many of the students and participants in the UBBT are practicing and implementing a new kind of methodology in their schools –much of which is a radical departure from commonly promoted methods.

The changes in curriculum content and design, promotional practices, philosophy, teaching methods, testing, and general motivation and intent pioneered and promoted by UBBT members represents what I would call an organic approach to teaching and living the martial arts.

The Buddhist monk and renowned peace activist Thich Nhat Hahn has coined his approach to spirituality as Engaged Buddhism; he advocates a kind of involvement with the world that brings the practitioner out of the meditation hall and into daily life. Being heavily influenced by Thich Nhat Hahn, I am coining the kind of martial arts being explored and practiced by UBBT members as Engaged Martial Arts.

There are two phrases embraced by students of Engaged Martial Arts that illustrate the UBBT School of thought:

“Out of the dojo and into the world,” and;

“My life is my dojo.”

The first was borrowed from Yogi Seanne Corn’s description of yoga practitioners needing to take their practice, “Off the mat and into the world.” The second is attributed to Master Gaku Homma, the last live-in student of Aikido Master Morihei Ueshiba.

Martial artists influenced by the UBBT School (school of thought) are experimenting with what I call martial arts activism –where they take what they practice on the mat and see it manifest in their communities.

This idea changes a martial arts school’s approach to curriculum, to philosophy, to promotional practices, and testing procedures. The UBBT Schools influence has spawned a variety of creative programs and practices including The National Leadership Team Proje ct, the Diabetes Education Project, The Environmental Self-Defense Project, and the Anger Management Teacher Education Program.

Participants and members of the UBBT include influential instructors such as Dave Kovar, Fariborz Azhakh, Bill Kipp, Chris Natzke, Charles Chi, Chan Lee, Dan Rominski, Dave McNeill, Gary Engels, and Tommy Lee. For more information on the Ultimate Black Belt Test and programs its members are involved in, visit www.ultimateblackbelttest.com.

My White Belt Story (Video)

2008-11-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

This year your life will change, for the better.

2008-11-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

This year your life will change, for the better.

This year you will have more influence with your students –and in your community –than you have ever enjoyed before.

This year you will save someone’s life.

This year you will simplify –so that your life isn’t ruled by things, by name brands, by the desire to shop, own, acquire, and consume; this year you will, as if you died and then had a second chance to live again, begin to appreciate what is genuinely important about living.

This year you will shed the pain you have been carrying.

This year you will step-up in an extraordinary way to bring peace, compassion, empathy, and wisdom to the world. You may not change things for the better single-handedly, but you will do your part to the best of your ability.

This year you will be part of a large group of people who are seeking to make being a “black belt” and/or a “master instructor” MEAN SOMETHING important, something vital, something heavy with integrity, purpose, and mission.

This year you will transform yourself into the person you want to be –and you will do it one day at a time.

This year you will be in the here and now –as often as you can be aware of, as often as you can pinch yourself to remember, as often as is humanly possible.

This year you will stop eating abundant amounts of sugar and processed food; you will be more aware of the connection between what you consume and how you think and feel.

This year you will forgive all trespasses. You will let go of all hate, misunderstandings, and grievances. This year, you will forgive and forget.

This year you will change your school’s curriculum to reflect wisdom, vision, and your mission as a human being; this year you will begin to teach the most important mental, emotional, and spiritual ideas –transcending the standard fare of the martial arts.

This year, whether you make more money –or less, you will live with a sense of joy, with a sense of “I am here for a reason –and it is to serve others,” and each morning you will awake, take a deep breath, say your prayers of thanks, and begin your day with a sense of purpose far and beyond simply “making a profit.”

This year you will practice being a true “master.”

Every year I invite a group of martial arts teachers, school owners, and students to join me in a project called The Ultimate Black Belt Test (UBBT). The UBBT is about living as a martial artist –but in a new way, a way that reflects something more than the kicks and punches of the martial arts; a way that transcends the “phone call,” the “intro,” the “black belt club,” and the profit and loss statement; a way that suggests the rank of “black belt” is meant to be something more than an incentive to pay for a course, something more than a piece of cloth and a certificate.

In the UBBT we seek to come together as a team, regardless of age, rank, style or system, and do, together, what would be impossible for any one of us to do individually. We’re working on changing and improving the entire martial arts world. We’re bringing new methods, new meaning, and a sense of mission to the martial arts that expresses our potential as human beings.

While people are capable of amazing things, they all too often do nothing, nothing at all about making a difference in the world. They sit back and watch, they sit idle and do as little as possible, self-absorbed - somehow justifying their inactivity.

In the UBBT we seek to BE AND DO something that reflects the best of what we are capable of. It’s not easy, but we must begin somewhere. By BEING "that kind of black belt" --we hope to leave a trail for others to follow.

We predict the martial arts of the future will be a richer, more interesting, more meaningful activity --and that someday "being a black belt" will carry with it a sense of responsibility that reflects those things that are best about the world --and about life. Real self-defense is recognizing our connectivity -and showing a deep respect and appreciation for self and others. Someday, black belts will not only be fine examples of the physical skills taught in their various styles, they will also be roles models of the best of the best of humanity.

This year I invite you to be a black belt, to be a martial artist in an all new light.

www.ubbt.squarespace.com

Tom Callos

Notes for Master Teachers

2008-10-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Teaching the techniques of the martial arts is an obvious part of our profession. While technical instruction is important, it isn’t as important as the ROLE that the martial arts instructor can play in the life of his or her students.

The role is that of a person who lives life with a certain disciplined gusto, using the practice of the martial arts to reveal an understanding of life. The martial arts teacher can have a significant influence with students based on the way he or she deals with conflict, with personal motivation, with business, with management, with community involvement, with spirituality, with failure, and with any number of the other parts of the recipe that make for a high-functioning human being.

No, the martial arts teacher isn’t the ultimate deliverer of all that is wise, but he or she can definitely stand tall as a part of the village of (potentially) wise people who can make a difference in the lives of others.

With this idea in mind, I offer the following advice to all master teachers:

You are not The Master, you are the Servant

You’re not to stand at the front of your class commanding your troops, shouting out orders, and acting like the top dog; you’re on the mat and in the world TO SERVE.

You serve your students, humbly, and through that process you help others to be better teachers, leaders, and human beings. Whenever you start getting that superior-human-being feeling, I’d like to suggest that you have a a trusted friends whack you across the knuckles with a yardstick.

Instead of nursing an inflated ego and a warped sense of entitlement, you should be falling on your knees and thanking your students for the education and opportunities they’re giving you. In the end, you learn more from your students than they learn from you.

2. What You do Outside of your School is More Important Than What You Do In It.

You’re school is a box –and in it you are a VIP. What you do within the confines of your box dictates what you “sell” as a teacher and business owner. However, what you do outside of your box, the way you engage the world, is the difference between running a “successful business” and being a “Master.”

The truth be told, if every man and woman in the world started making a difference in his or her community, started taking some sense of responsibility for fixing problems, and developed lifestyles (including sales, marketing, and educational strategies) that affected the quality of life for others, well...the world would be very different place.

I hold the opinion that a large group of very disciplined, focused, courageous, and determined people ought to serve as role models of how people could and should engage the world.

Know any groups like that?

Self-Defense Has Little or Nothing to Do With Punches, Kicks, Blocks, and Grappling.

Is flour an important ingredient in a cake? Yes, of course it is, but have you ever eaten a straight cup of flour? Are kicks, punches, blocks, grappling, and all the other physical aspects of personal protection an important part of self-defense? Sure they are; they represent the flour of self-defense.

But the physical aspects of self-defense don’t make up the cake of things a person really needs to know about personal protection in today’s world.

What really hurts people, today, are things like cancer, rampant consumerism, relationship dysfunction, diabetes, and poor money management (to name a few).

For the resourceful martial arts teacher this opens up a huge window of opportunity and adventure; for the less-than-resourceful instructor this idea represents a real pain in the behind.

The Ultimate Black Belt Test 6 (UBBT 6)

2008-09-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Ultimate Black Belt Test 6 (UBBT 6)

Preparing for your black belt test in a way that is sacred, extraordinary, and that brings about personal and community transformation.

The UBBT Project asks martial artists from around the world to come together, on-line, and LIVE an amazing black belt test for an entire year +.

This is a process that has the potential to challenge the participant physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

On one level, the UBBT is completely about the participant –as anyone who goes through the training will be transformed in one way or another.

On another level, the UBBT is about coming together as a team, as a group, a community.

The team, collectively, has the potential to do what no single person could do alone. By being on this team, a member reaches beyond his or her school, style, association, town, state, and/or nation –to find like-minded people who become friends, colleagues, classmates, and sometimes, family.

On yet another level, the UBBT is an entity that is influencing the international martial arts community. Thousands of school owners, teachers, and martial artists have visited the UBBT’s website, read articles about the program, and/or seen film and interviews with team members.

The UBBT is influencing instructors and students around the globe. The program offers dozens of previously unexplored ways to make one’s martial arts and life “journey” more fulfilling, exciting, and fruitful.

Teachers going through the UBBT Project come out of it with an experiential lesson in innovative black belt testing procedures. Every graduate knows, first hand, what the process feels like –and what it does for the candidate.

More to come (always, more to come).

Every Day, I Get to Begin Again.

2008-09-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you don’t need reminding, but I do –so hang in here with me for a moment while I remind myself of the following.

Today is a BRAND NEW DAY!

A new beginning, a new start, and NOTHING is as important to the present and the future as how I apply myself from this moment on. The past is the past –the present and future, my happiness and progress, is not contingent on what has transpired, but on how I think and act from this moment on.

I am a martial artist, a life-long career martial arts teacher. I’m pursuing my DREAM not because it makes great economic sense, but because THIS is what hooked me. In the face of everything I might have done, I was drawn to the mat and the practice and the delight of being physical, of learning and teaching and practicing.

While other people practice the martial arts, but feel no pull or obligation to bring change to the martial arts world, I am a different animal. I feel a call from the handful of martial artists who have made a global impact on the martial arts –and sometimes the world, because of their ideas and actions.

Today, I begin (again) my “test” to be a 7th degree black belt in a way that sets the pace for every 7th degree black belt in the world –and of the future. I’m going to set the best example I can –so that any one of my brothers or sisters in the martial arts that follow me, in whatever part of the world they reside, might look to how I applied myself and find some sort of guidepost, inspiration, and/or ideas.

I want to be a 7th degree to the best of my ability. I want to be a 7th degree who has looked deeply at his flaws –at his strengths. I want to be a 7th degree that is, in accomplishment and contribution, equal to those people who I most admire in history. I believe that this kind of expectation is the right one to have for someone of my experience, rank, and position.

Today, I begin my “black belt test” again. My life is my test.

Practicing Mastery and YOUR School

2008-09-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Getting a Grasp on How to Practice Mastery is One of the Best Things you Can Do for Your Martial Arts School

Call me old fashioned, but I still believe the best thing a martial arts teacher can do for his or her business is to BE the best darned martial artist he or she can be.

And note: I'm not talking about "best in your school or town good," "tournament champion good," "ring good," or get nominated to the "Universal Black Belt Grand Canyon Hall of Fame good." I'm talking about "transcend the martial arts good." I'm talking about the kind of martial artist that Rosa Parks would give up her bus seat for; the kind of martial artist that garners grants from groups that give money to people doing amazing work in the world.

I'm talking about the kind of martial artist that doesn't let anger and hatred or other destructive kinds of thinking invade and/or infect his or her life; the kind of black belt who truly understands the -real -enemy.

Call me unrealistic, but I think all of this damned torturous training is supposed to be for something that's more important than getting fit, earning belts, and winning medals. Oh, and it's not to learn how to upgrade my students to the Grand Vital World-Famous Master's Leadrship Club, either. I haven't studied this long and hard to see it boiled down to some sales pitch for a long term course, franchise, new Corvette payment, or Rolex. Please!

I think that, if properly taught and/or directed, the serious practitioner of the martial arts ought to start making a connection between state of mind and outcome, between fear and action, between clarity and confusion, and between compassion and happiness.

It's like the Ring, Only BIGGER.

For those of you who were competitors, do you remember the clarity that a 3-minute performance provided you with?

Whether it was a fight or a form, you trained HARD for that 3 minutes (and maybe a few others). You focused on that little bit of time and space and you fired it up!

Man, if life were only that small, only that simple, only that easy.

The ring gives you this small place to focus on; the rules provide you with clear boundaries and objectives. But the POINT of the game was not just to win -it was to show you, in a very practical way, how focus, concentration, goal-setting, effort, and clarity could give you power and purpose. You were supposed to learn how to plan, engage, and execute.

The BIG LESSON should have been about taking that learning experience and making the "ring" bigger -like as big as your family, as big as your career, as big as your circle of influence, as big as your community, as big as the world, as big as your ability to make a difference.

In the ring you focus on the task at hand. The audience doesn't distract you. The advertisements hanging on the bleacher's railings don't call to you; the negative energy from your opponent and his or her helpers don't detour you.

So what's the connection between the ring and mastery?

It's in defining what you want. What do you want to accomplish? What is your personal definition of mastery? How does it translate to your "daily training?" And are you smart enough, resourceful enough, creative enough, focused enough, compassionate enough, and disciplined enough to expand the ring to represent the remainder of your finite period of time left here on the planet?

The pursuit of mastery, relevant to your potential, is -I believe -the root system of the tree that bears the fruit that sustains your school and -very likely --your life.

If you don't focus on mastery -then you ignore the roots and spend an inordinate about of time on that which is visible, yes? If a tree doesn't have deep roots, what happens to it in the first big storm?

Mastery is about controlling anger, practicing detachment from illusion, expanding one's empathy and compassion for others. It's about making contribution (adding to, not taking away from); it's about awareness; it's about self-control and respect and courage to be different when you must -and the same when it's time to be the same. I also believe mastery is connected to simplicity.

I really don't know everything -if much - about mastery -but I recognize the power that the study and practice of things that bring about clarity and awareness and global consciousness brings to me. I can HEAR the words of masters -and I believe they are talking about a kind of thinking and clarity that I have, on more than one occasion, experienced as a practitioner of the martial arts. And everything in my life keeps pointing to the idea of mastery -the way everything used to, when I was younger, point to the mat and the competitive arena.

Getting a grasp on what mastery is, to you -and to masters -and the idea of beginning to PRACTICE mastery, on a day-to-day basis, is I believe, one of the best things you can do for your school, for your students, and for yourself.

My work with The Ultimate Black Belt Test -and the association, The New Way Network-is dedicated to exploring the idea of mastery for the individual and as a collective force for good, for clarity, and more contribution and meaning.

Martial Arts Teacher, Feeling Stuck? Find Your Mission –and You’ll Find Your Profit

2008-09-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

A sense of mission, beyond profit, beyond image, beyond “agenda,” and beyond anything but a call to duty is, I believe, THE factor to search for if you want to work in a martial arts school and feel like you’re doing something important –and for the world.

A child is not raised by occasional coaching or instruction; a child is not raised by the occasional direction and attention. A child is raised and educated daily, hourly, and by the minute. A wise parent won’t wait to give life-lessons and direction to his or her child once a month, as it’s all too important to wait, it’s too important to put off.

Work for the world, work that connects you to something more than a brand name, a corporation, some elite group of people, or the almighty dollar, shouldn’t be put off either. You don’t wait until you’re wealthy or retired or semi-retired or until the kids leave home or until the truck’s paid off to do the work that feeds your soul and the souls of those around you. It’s something you do in small, incremental, weekly, daily, and hourly pieces.

To be fueled by a purpose beyond profit motive is a kind of freedom everyone should enjoy, but it is sometimes looked down upon by people stuck in the money-mode like an infant stuck in some short, but important stage of brain development. We all know that money doesn’t buy happiness. We all know that we can’t take it with us. We all, in the end, would be better off having lived a life of service to others, a life rich in meaning and contribution, and full of love and compassion and kindness.

I am, in the end, a business consultant and I’m telling you that it’s a sense of mission, deep and meaningful, that is –in my opinion –the very thing that makes you and your business more important and valuable. If you take a partner in marriage because he or she has an inheritance that you would like to get your hands on, well...you’re destined to be in –and cause no small amount of –pain. Likewise, if you’re in your school and your primary focus is on your income and maximizing your profits, you’re headed for an empty kind of accomplishment.

Finances have their role in your life, there’s no avoiding it; but don’t lose sight of the kind of thinking and action that makes life worth living.

Find your mission and you may very well have the best money-making tool you could hope to find.

If you don’t know how to find your mission, don’t despair; a lot of us don’t know how to find our sense of mission because we haven’t been hanging out with people who “live” mission. If you’ve known somebody who has, then you already know what I’m talking about. For those who could use some “mission coaching,” look, for example, to people like the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize or the MacArthur Fellowship (called the “genius grant”).

Here’s a list of the MacArthur Fellowship’s 2007 recipients:

Deborah Bial, education strategist
Peter Cole, translator/poet/publisher
Lisa Cooper, public health physician
Ruth DeFries, environmental geographer
Mercedes Doretti, forensic anthropologist
Stuart Dybek, short story writer
Marc Edwards, water quality engineer
Michael Elowitz, molecular biologist
Saul Griffith, inventor
Sven Haakanson, Alutiiq curator/anthropologist/preservationist
Corey Harris, blues musician
Cheryl Hayashi, spider silk biologist
My Hang V. Huynh, chemist
Claire Kremen, conservation biologist
Whitfield Lovell, painter/installation artist
Yoky Matsuoka, neuroroboticist
Lynn Nottage, playwright
Mark Roth, biomedical scientist
Paul Rothemund, nanotechnologist
Jay Rubenstein, medieval historian
Jonathan Shay, clinical psychiatrist/classicist
Joan Snyder, painter
Dawn Upshaw, vocalist
Shen Wei, choreographer

(By the way: Why isn’t there, in the history of the MacArthur Fellowship, a grant that’s gone to a martial arts teacher?)

Go to Borders or any bookstore and you’ll find shelves of books about people who are making positive change in the world.

Be warned and be aware: Just like junk food is readily available at just about every turn, so is “junk influence.” Turn on just about any radio station, any TV channel, and go to any movie –and you might find yourself bombarded by triviality, by shallowness, by “buy this to be happy” messages, and endless discussions about the habits and behaviors of blond actresses and singers or ex-football and soccer players. It’s mind-numbing.

Spend a year of your life immersed in the study of people with a sense of heroic and purposeful mission –and you could very well come out of it transformed and empowered. Being an empowered person with a sense of mission --is, in my opinion, a fine form of “mastery,” and a very real form of “self-defense” for today’s world.

It’s also the right way to “do” our kind of business.

Intelligent Curriculum: A New Concept for Martial Arts Professionals

2008-09-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Curriculum is the term I use to express a method about how to design one’s martial arts school curriculum in a way that supports the education the teacher is seeking to provide the student.

I see the curriculum in most martial arts schools as more of an outline than a complete work. Most schools have a curriculum that is like a novel yet to be “fleshed out.”

To be intelligent, a school’s curriculum should not be a list of techniques and requirements written in a handbook or on a sheet of paper; with modern technology a school’s curriculum should shine, it should sing out and inform, inspire, and direct.

Why do we do these particular techniques? Where does this come from? Why has this requirement changed? Is there anything I should know that’s not written specifically in the curriculum? Is there room for changes or adjustments in the curriculum if I have some challenge that keeps me from doing a particular technique? What is this supposed to look like?

I’m looking for a few schools who would like to develop an “Intelligent Curriculum” model. I am certain that this idea will revolutionize the entire martial arts world’s approach to testing curriculum and requirements. Contact me at tomcallos at g mail dot com.

A Little More On Curriculum

A martial arts school’s curriculum is meant to bring a student to a certain level of skill and competency. What that level is, in most cases, is entirely up to the Master Teacher of the school.

As the teacher grows, evolves, and ages as a martial artist and a human being, his or her curriculum changes. At some point in almost every teacher’s career, his or her classes are pedal-to-the-metal competitive training sessions where, for the most part, only the strong survive. Somewhere along the line, most teachers wake up to the fact that they are losing some of (or MANY of) the students that probably need martial arts training the most.

The smart teacher adjusts the training to fit the student. Master Teacher and martial arts legend Jhoon Rhee expressed the idea perfectly when he said, “It is better to change your students through a peaceful evolution –than it is to attempt it by violent revolution.”

It’s an intelligent teacher that knows how to teach students in a way that doesn’t chase them off –and instead brings about a peaceful evolution of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation.

Advice for Martial Arts School Owners and Teachers

2008-09-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

I’m writing this to talk to you about how to have a healthy, successful, and profitable martial arts school, in today’s world, and in a way that makes a DIFFERENCE in the world. And before I really get started, let me tell you that I’m not talking about the kind of success or profitability you might see in Forbes, Worth, or WSJ Magazines. I’m not talking about something out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The kind of success I’m suggesting is grounded in global consciousness. It is more spiritual than it is material. The measure of wealth, success, and profitability I’m thinking about won’t fund the endless consumption of disposable things. It won’t have you driving a car that costs as much as a year’s worth of food for an entire village of people in Southeast Asia. It isn’t the kind of success that has every amenity you can dream up and acquire at your fingertips. It won’t fund $100 cigars or $20,000 watches or $1000 purses or $5000 suits or 5-million dollar McMansions.

In my world –and maybe in your world too –these things are an embarrassment. They are personal neon signs of narcissism, selfishness, and ignorance. They are the result of a kind of corporate consumer-brain-washing and snow job that convinces the unaware that the label, insignia, and hood ornament is a personification of success, intelligence, and style.

The kind of success and profitability I’m pointing to is about quality time with people you love. It is about enjoying the sound of the river as you soak your feet in it. It is in the slow preparation of a dinner, the sound of your child reading aloud, and the feeling of knowing you don’t NEED or WANT anything but what you already have.

With all of THAT being said, I’ll now begin:

I would like to suggest that you make your black belt test mean MORE than it means today.

I am not suggesting that you make your test a fierce gauntlet that weeds out the weak or an Ironman-like endurance event that breaks people down; I’m suggesting that the journey one goes on to become a black belt might be interwoven to activities that expand one’s ability to feel empathy and compassion for others, societal awareness and involvement and, perhaps, a more useful inner awareness.

I am suggesting that we (martial arts teachers) take a closer look at the idea of “self-defense” –and that a new definition ought to include more than defense from physical attack. We should train our students to recognize the damage and pain caused by self-centered living. We should link conspicuous consumption to self-defense. We should consider attitude and outlook as important as middle block and palm strike.

The way to make your black belt test (and all your testing) mean more, is to make your own job description mean more. If you could make the decision that BEING a master teacher of the martial arts means FAR MORE than teaching people combat –and if you lived this idea, you would then teach from an entirely new place.

Being a master teacher means LOOKING DEEPLY at conflict; at ego; at wants and needs; at community involvement; and at one’s own beliefs and habits. If you/we made BEING a master teacher mean MORE, we would then teach, BY EXAMPLE, something that is far more important that profit, than punching, than combat, than competition, than style and method and system.

Like a Round Kick to the Head

Getting kicked in the head is, well...a real eye-opening experience. It’s not one you soon forget. It can be, however, an excellent teaching tool. Yes, one solid kick to the head can teach someone exactly how much they don’t want THAT to happen again.

I have, on a number of occasions, used a kick to the head as a teaching tool. It’s not one I use often –and it might not be the “sharpest” tool in my toolbox, but let me tell you, sometimes it’s the magic key for quickly changing one’s behavior.

Changing your own habits, living a simple life, getting your own head together by looking deeply at how you can make a difference for others –and in the world; well, for your students and almost everyone in your sphere of influence, it can affect them like a kick in the head. It’s not in what you say, think, or write –it comes in what you DO.

To run a successful and profitable martial arts school you must look deeply at your own center, at what is driving you, and why. If you could actually BECOME A MASTER, a real, honest-to-goodness MASTER, then all the accoutrements of wealth won’t mean much to you anyway. Making a difference, living with compassion, living simply and giving to others, and enjoying today with whatever it is you have been fortunate enough to be given, I believe those are the concepts embraced in authentic mastery.

Under those guidelines, we should begin to run our schools and classes with a new vigor and energy. I believe that by focusing on these ideas rather than all of the boxed-up marketing junk-mail that some school owners have been convinced is the key to a school’s success, will eventually bring us a kind of success we hadn’t anticipated.

Your Students Become Limited By Your Limits

2008-08-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

On the whole –and I speak for myself here too, we ask very little of ourselves. We do very little for our fellow man. We are absorbed in our business, in our things, in our personal drama, and in our desire (conscious or unconscious) to conform.

As “martial arts masters” –and in general, there is absolutely NO CALL to rise, no call to perform, no call to unite or make change or DO ANYTHING.

Our profession asks very, very little of us.

We have no physical “standards” of performance.

We have no reading or educational requirements.

We have no expectations of activism, involvement, and/or anything that borders on “work for humanity.”

There is no martial arts master-teacher’s journal or magazine speaking out against violence or war or consumerism –or for peace or social consciousness or advanced education or even higher standards of performance.

I think that our “industry” –that is, the business entities that survive on our commerce, the business entities that provide most of us with the tools we think we need to achieve “success,” --promotes a superficial, politically inoffensive, dumbed-down set of standards for martial arts teachers.

For the most part, the men and women who seem to be leading the “martial arts industry” are cemented into a 20th Century definition of success –the success of hoarding wealth, of driving it, of living in it, of wearing it on your wrist, of shopping for it, and of using it as a measure of achievement and quality of life.

Personally, every hero I look up to in my life, both living and no longer living, have asked me in one way or another to refocus my thinking from accumulating overt wealth to accumulating the tools to make a difference for my fellow man.

The more deeply I look at my practice the more simple my needs become.

SO, let this note be a call to you.

Are you a teacher? Are you on a path seeking some sort of “mastery?”

Are you willing to step up, this year, now, and fix that which needs to be fixed?

Will you explore with me, for the coming year, a new definition of “martial artist?”

Of “master teacher?”

I am calling you to be a part of a revolution in thinking and action. I am looking for 50 teachers who are willing to ask more of themselves ---so much more of themselves that they risk inspiring the next generation of martial arts teachers. I’m looking for 50 teachers who would be willing to bring along 20 students each –so that we collect 1000 men and women for a one-year action-oriented exploration of a new kind of martial arts –for a new world.

We will get fit; we will do more than one-million acts of kindness; we will do 1000 community-based projects; we will simplify; use less –and enjoy MORE. We will connect with people who don’t live near us physically, but who we join with emotionally –and in recognition of our collective influence.

For the Ultimate Black Belt Test 6 I’m looking for 50 teachers who will “Proceed and BE Bold” with nothing more than a connection to the Internet –and the willingness to take LOTS of action, personally, with and for others, for the “martial arts industry,” and for the world.

I’m calling you out –to join one of the few, if not the only, martial arts movement of its kind in the world. With your help, we can establish a new set of standards for what it to be –and live as –a black belt and a master teacher in today’s world.

Tom Callos 530-903-0286

It’s Time to Upgrade Your Idea of the Black Belt

2008-08-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

It’s Time to Upgrade Your Idea of the Black Belt

by Tom Callos

Last year’s model was great. It’s a classic. We’ll never build them like that again! But this year’s model takes advantage of all the technology, all the learning we’ve done, all the mistakes we’ve made, all of the road-testing and repairs, and it’s designed, specifically, to deal with the world as it is today (and my, haven’t things changed!).

Nobody has to tell you that the world is a fast changing place. I just saw a video on YouTube of an anthropologist studying YouTube, who said that in just 6 months time there was more video loaded there than all of the TV programming created since the first television program aired in the 1950’s. Wow.

In the martial arts, some things have changed, dramatically, and some have not. One of the areas that I feel has not evolved enough in the martial arts is what it takes to earn, wear, and “be” a black belt.

Just the other day I watched a class in a martial arts school that was exactly like watching a black and white rerun of a TV show I first saw in 1971. The teacher was using the exact same methods, terminology, material, and class structure that I experienced when I started my first lessons in taekowndo in 1971. Now back then I thought it was all very cool. But now, 38 years later, I recognize it as not very cool, or practical, or even very refined. It might be “old school,” but it didn’t represent a school, in my opinion, that reflects the many years of growth, development, ideas, and education that have transpired since then.

What is a black belt?

No, the question should be, “What is the potential of a black belt?” It’s not what is that needs the most attention, it is what could be –if we changed our approach, intelligently redesigned our materials and methods, and modernized our expectations for being a black belt.

How does one prepare for the black belt test? What is the curriculum? And is it all physical? Does it all take place on the mat? Do we, as teachers, have the ability to teach our students to take their martial arts “out of the dojo and into the world?” And is there a way to measure, quantify, and record this process?

I am deeply involved in the 6^th year of an experiment, a “project,” specifically designed to revolutionize the what, where, and how of black belt testing in the world. The program is called the Ultimate Black Belt Test (UBBT). It is less of a “program” fixed in stone than it is a flexible and dynamic experiment to see what happens when we dramatically change our thinking and approach to testing for –and living as –a black belt.

The UBBT is, in my opinion, less of a black belt test and more of a Master Teacher’s training course; the first of its kind in the world. It is an experiential course that requires the participant to walk the talk of his or her martial arts, but far more importantly, it requires the participant to be a better, more cognizant, participative, compassionate human being.

Here is an excerpt of an interview that I did with What is Enlightenment? magazine that defines how I think about the rank of black belt:

What Is Enlightenment: What is the Ultimate Black Belt Test?

Tom Callos: The Ultimate Black Belt Test is a hero's journey—exodus, epiphany, and return—and passing it requires a physical, mental, and spiritual transformation ... Preparing for and taking a black belt test should be like preparing for the Olympic Games: win or lose, you are shaped by it. You go for it, full out. You hold yourself to the highest standards. You step out on the line and reach for a sliver of perfection.... To me, being a black belt is more than a physical experience. Yes, a black belt should be able to execute precise, effective, beautiful, and technically proficient martial arts techniques, whatever the style. But just as importantly, a black belt should be able to execute precise and beautiful ideas, equal to or better than their physical techniques. A black belt should have an attitude equal in its brilliance to his or her physical skills. What makes a master is not physical skill alone but mental clarity, emotional maturity, and spiritual awareness.

To read more about the UBBT and/or to see a film made on the project by Academy Award Winning filmmaker Nancy Walzog, visit www.ultimateblackbelttest.com.

The 13 month + UBBT 6 has begun, cut off for enrollment is January of 2009. I’m looking for a group of black belts, serious, career-oriented martial arts practitioners, who are interested in being in a project that’s intent is to change the martial arts world –and THE world –for the better.

It's time we re-design what it is to be a black belt in today's world. The UBBT is a training program for people who want to have a say in the best way to make that happen.

Tom Callos

Using Your Black Belt Test as a Tool for Promotion and Education

2008-07-28T14:30:00.001-07:00

Face it, if more people knew what benefits come out of martial arts training, more people would be knocking on your school’s door.

If more parents understood the value of martial arts training like they understand, oh say, the value of EDUCATION, then more parents would be knocking on your school’s door.

If only there were a little ray gun that you could point at somebody –then ZAP them with the feelings, the memories, the skills, the friendships, and all the experiences one has on the mat, well there would be a LOT of people in your school, yes?

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet perfected the ray gun you see above; so we must rely on more primitive methods of educating the general public about the martial arts. Here is, in my opinion, the next best thing:

Your Own Black Belt Test as the Ultimate MA BENEFITS RAY GUN for Teaching People about the Martial Arts –and About the Benefits of the Martial Arts

Your very own black belt test, whether you are a 1st degree going for 2nd or a 7th degree going for 8th, is the absolute perfect weapon for teaching your community about the martial arts.

In fact, it’s the absolute perfect vehicle for your own personal transformation, for motivating other people, for reaching out to your community, and for bringing your message to the masses.

Step No. 1 is rethinking what a black belt test is supposed to be.

Yes of course, it’s a personal victory –it’s about you, the mat, your effort, your determination, your dedication, your courage, and your skills. BUT, what if it were more?

What if being a black belt wasn’t JUST about YOU? What if your teacher (or whomever it would be that would or could hold you accountable) followed you around to see if you were applying your martial arts education to your LIFE? What if THAT was your real test?

What if a black belt test wasn’t just about what the practitioner could do in the ring or on the mat –but what he or she could do with other people? With the community? With the world?

Ahhh, now we’re talking! What if your black belt test wasn’t separate from your school’s advertising? What if your black belt test and what RESULTED from it –WAS the way your school advertized! Wow –talk about doing double duty!

What if all of your school’s testing contained some element of this idea?

This is So Radical a Departure from Mainstream “Black Belt Test Thinking” –that Most People Can’t Quite Get Their Head around It

Nevertheless, this is what the Ultimate Black Belt Test Project is about.

Get in the best shape of your life –WHILE promoting your school in the BEST possible light –WHILE teaching your students how to LIVE as a black belt –WHILE living a new kind of martial arts test process that you will use to re-engineer your own teaching/testing –WHILE motivating, inspiring, learning, growing, and teaching by example. Yeah.

The UBBT 6 is now taking enrollments for the GREATEST BLACK BELT TEST in HUMAN HISTORY. See the details at http://www.ultimateblackbelttest.com/.

Learn how to promote your school and services like a master, learn how to engage the world as a master –in a way that brings students to your school. Expand! Evolve! Grow! Inspire! Elevate! Change! Experiment! Play! Connect! Take it out of your dojo and put it to work in the world!

Get out of the fricken box.

The UBBT 6 is 100 years of martial arts evolution in 13 + months. Call Tom Callos at 530-903-0286. Come make some history.

Come Monday

2008-07-27T18:54:00.001-07:00

Come Monday –or any day you decide –you may wake up and realize that you have a new job, a duty, an obligation, and/or a mission. The subject is "self-defense," the definition of which is the key issue.

As a martial arts teacher –and a member (recognize it or not) of the international martial arts community, I present you with the opportunity to be something more than a fitness teacher, something more than a teacher of the arts of physical self-defense, more than an instructor in some classical or eclectic martial art, and something far more than a school owner with a particular gross income and student count and tax obligation.

Self-defense, in today's world, has little or nothing to do with kicks, punches, grappling, and bo-staff training. These aspects of the martial arts are the bowl that holds the mix –they are not "the cake." Self-defense in today's world is contained in what we do –or do not –consume. It is in our beliefs about ownership, about conflict, about relationships, about people with fewer resources that you or I, it is about anger and diet and attitude and community and the environment.

A young instructor inexperienced in life, without the understanding and knowledge that comes with life-experience, may have some difficulty in grasping this idea. Age and experience brings the appreciation of what is to have failures and lost dreams, with the burden and gift of being a parent, with the inevitability of losing those you love, and with the crazy brutality and injustice of war, of prejudice, of hatred, and of greed.

Without the educational foundation of history, of philosophy, and of all the things you learn along the path –a young martial arts teacher can be unaware of the value of everything on the periphery of "martial arts" that is not contained in the movements and techniques –and that is not practiced "on the mat" (and this doesn't, of course, apply to all young instructors, as some people are born aware).

If this last statement rings true to you –then perhaps you are ready to become a martial arts teacher cut from a new –and different –cloth. Perhaps you are ready to be a martial arts teacher with a sense of mission and obligation to the world.

To begin, you must first appreciate and understand that to be a MASTER teacher, you are not going to find your skills easily, nor will they come to you in a best-selling book, a box, a video, or in a weekend certification seminar. You're going to have to wake up and work and experience and network and be a part of something bigger than your "business" –something bigger than "the ring" or the arena.

Start with teaching anger management –and start that by really studying the subject (www.angercoachonline.com). Move from there to embrace diabetes education (www.defeatdiabetes.org).

Why diabetes?

Well, besides the fact that it will touch the lives of 1 in 3 children in the next decade, it could be ANY health subject; your job is to become a master of integrating various topics, intelligently, into your school's curriculum and educational materials. From there you should develop the most active and visible acts-of-kindness program in your community. You must OWN this topic.

Next, tackle an aggressive environmental self-defense program. Read "Last Child in the Woods" by Richard Louv –and integrate environmental education with unstructured outdoor play with your students.

From there, custom design your own Ultimate Black Belt Test Program –and start living as a real master teacher.

I have lots of ideas, tactics, and strategies for making all of the above the very things that bring students to your schools.

Should you, Monday morning or any morning wake up and recognize that you are being called to action (and that it's going to make what you may do for a living a LOT more fun and rewarding), please don't hesitate to contact me.

Tom Callos 530-903-0286
The New Way Network
The UBBT 6 (taking members now)

Mission Driven Marketing

2008-07-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Marketing Your Martial Arts School by Adjusting and Refining Your School’s Mission and Your Life’s Work

By Tom Callos

In a perfect word you would, as a teacher of the martial arts, make art –and that art would be so remarkable that it sold itself. Take for example the glass artist Dale Chihuly’s work (http://www.dalechihuly.com/). Chihuly has developed an international reputation and sold millions of dollars worth of art because his work is absolutely stunning. And while his materials are not much more than colored glass, Chihuly takes it and turns it into magic.

This is how I visualize the fully evolved martial arts master teacher. The art that a master teacher makes is, for the most part, human –it’s physical. Our tools are our various martial arts –and it really doesn’t matter if it’s aikido or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or taekwondo or karate or gung fu, because the methods are just a small part of the art. What makes the work turn the corner from mundane to magical is what the artist does with the materials –how he or she puts the raw material to work.

Point: Approach your work as art. Make art –and let the art speak for itself. USE the art you make as your primary source of marketing and promotion.

Sell your services because you make magic –and you know how to display that magic, how to light it, and where to put it for the best effect.

Find the art in what you do; use what you do to make beauty, to teach people, to produce the extraordinary, and to make positive change in the world.

So what is the “art” that you can make as a martial arts school owner / teacher?

Your School is Art
Some of the art is in how you present your school. By itself and standing alone, your school’s appearance says something about what goes on there. I like a school that looks at its presentation and attempts to make a statement. It doesn’t matter to me if the look is Japanese minimalism or Brazilian culture or Chinese pagoda or American pragmatism –it’s that the school owner recognizes and is aware of the presentation’s impact on the senses.

Two fine examples of this reside in Southern California with Dawn Barnes Karate Kids schools and Rorion Gracie’s Gracie Academy. If you haven’t seen these schools –I’ll have to describe them to you as “art in and of themselves.” Both schools teach dramatically different “styles” of martial art, but both perfectly represent the idea of “academy as art.”

Point: A school can sell its lessons because of the “art” of its presentation.

Your Classes are Art
How you run your classes is a kind of art. A master teacher mixes the paint of his or her students into a moving, yelling, rolling, kicking work of art. It might be a class of gently flowing aikido practitioners or a group of 20-somethings in shorts and t-shirts getting ready for a no-gi jiu-jitsu workout or a class of taekwondo students in bright white uniforms or a capoiera troupe rhythmically warming up to music; whatever it is, it can be art.

Point: Your classes are a kind of art; done right, they can sell your services. Look at your class structure and execution as a kind of art.

Your Testing is Art
There is no better example of testing as art than my own program, The Ultimate Black Belt Test (UBBT). The UBBT spreads the process out, it blows it up into something grand, it breaks it down into little artful pieces. In the UBBT each martial artist crafts his or her own test –and then plays the process out in writing and film and action. Even before the UBBT participant throws a single kick or punch for the test, he or she has something to talk about, something to show, something with an expectation of emotion, spiritual quest, and mission.

Point: Your testing process has the potential to be the art that attracts people to your work.

Your Philosophy is Art
What comes out of your mouth, as in your message, your philosophical mission, your intent and direction as a teacher –this is art too. It can attract people, sell your programs, and be the foundation of your marketing and promotion campaign –if you know how to make it fly.

What you say is up to you, but that it is ART, just as Chihuly’s glass is art, is the point. It is something the martial arts master teacher ought to understand.

Philosophy as art might take the shape of adhering to ancient traditions, it might come from Christian or Buddhist teachings, it might be cultural or motivational or, as in my own focus, about sustainability, peace education, global consciousness, compassion, and community activism. Whatever it is, I am suggesting that seeing it as art, treating it as art, and selling it as art, is a far more constructive and intelligent approach to marketing a martial arts school than a strategy that makes no consideration of the idea.

What You Get Your Students to Do is Art
How your school looks, how you run your classes and testing, and what you say is all a part of your art –your mission to do more with what you have been given than to simply run a “business.” But the finest art you can make as a martial arts teacher comes in what your students do with what you teach them.

THIS is what you SELL. This is the crux of your marketing and promotion. Your art your mastery your mission in the world reveals itself in what you do and in what you inspire your students to do.

I’m not talking about what they do on your mat –which is undoubtedly a beautiful part of your art. The ultimate art that comes out of your work is what your students do in their lives and in the world.

This is your life’s work –to see your teaching manifest itself in goodness, in results, in victory, in health and happiness and peace and accomplishment. If you could display this, if you could light this work up, put it out there for the public to see –well, this would be the venue where your art would be most appreciated, understood, and valued.

Point: The art of the martial arts is found in ACTION. What you and your students do in the world is your ultimate art –and is should be the foundation of your schools marketing and promotion campaigns. What you do, what you produce, what comes out of your efforts –THIS is what you sell. It’s what brings people to you, it’s what makes your phone ring and your front door swing open. Your art allows you to transcend the triviality of simply operating a “business” for money.

How to Turn This Idea into Action

-- You don’t sell lessons, you change lives!

-- You don’t teach “karate” in a “dojo” –you teach people how to make their LIFE THEIR DOJO.

-- Your brand of self-defense instruction isn’t meant to simply protect your students from kicks, punches, and arm-bars; you teach self-defense from the REAL KILLERS: mediocrity, lack of self-esteem, apathy, the inability to connect with other people, and –among other things –the idea that you are what you own!

-- You don’t only produce fighters or black belts; you are a part of the village that raises people to be aware, to be here in the moment, to enjoy their health, and to learn how to keep fear and doubt from destroying their sense of humanity.

Your mission in life –your life’s work –has got to be more, in my opinion, than in “getting your gross up” and being a multi-school owner. Our industry is fixated on business basics, on suit-and-tie professionalism, on coming up with the next big plan to “double your gross” or “fill your school.” Our trade magazines and industry e-mail campaigns are all about promoting the martial arts through some new movie or the next lead-box gimmick.

Point: We should be fixated on seeing the martial arts come out of our schools and into the world.

Where to start?

It all starts with the primary teacher / owner of the school.

Mr. or Ms. School Owner / Master Teacher, can you answer these questions with an affirmative response:

Are you in the best shape of your life? Are you in the kind of shape that inspires others to get in shape too?

Are you doing anything in the world besides the minimum requirements to thrive and survive?

Do you have a list of heroes –and do you look to them for inspiration? Does that inspiration manifest itself in any kind of daily behaviors?

Do you have, in your mind, a clear definition of what it is to be a true master of the martial arts? Does this definition make you a man or woman on a mission –or is it a non-issue in your daily life?

I created the Ultimate Black Belt Test because I felt that a school’s master instructor should be able to market his or her lessons by acting like a master on a mission. The very process of testing ought to promote the martial arts school. The very nature of the test, what it is made up of, what it causes the participant to do –ought to be the very things that make people stop, look, listen, and enroll.

I think a school can operate without a master teacher on a mission, but it’s like a marriage without romance. The school owner who doesn’t use a sense of mission as the fuel for his or her school ends up getting hyper-focused on the procedures and particulars of payroll, statistics, bathroom maintenance, employee handbooks, and what’s called “majoring in minors.”

Five Concrete Steps to Start a Marketing Campaign for Your School Based Upon Having A Sense of Mission

Ok, enough with the rhetoric. Now I’m going to step out on the line and actually suggest five things YOU can do to make your work the kind of ART that brings people into your school; the kind of art that gives you something powerful to show, something powerful to talk about and to promote and to SELL.

Action Step # 1
If I were you, I would consider joining the Ultimate Black Belt Test (http://www.ultimateblackbelttest.com/). Other than going to the Olympics or deciding that you’re going to go after BJ Penn’s UFC title, you won’t find another mission-based program like this in the martial arts world. And unlike going to the Olympic Games or fighting in the octagon, the UBBT is designed specifically for school owners and master teachers.

If you don’t join the UBBT 6 (the next UBBT project) then carefully look it over and undertake your own “hero’s journey” program. Make your training and growth and personal/professional development a priority. Read, mend relationships, meditate, train like you’ve gone insane, and put yourself smack-dap in the middle of a new circle of friends. Find people that inspire you and remind you that there is a whole hell of a lot more to life than driving a fancy car, buying the right clothes, and competing with that school down the street.

Action Step # 2
Over the course of the next 12 months, commit yourself –and all of your school’s resources –to saving one child’s life in your community. Somewhere in your community there is a child who is going to die from something you might help them avoid. Children defend themselves with their heads; that is, children protect themselves by knowing how to avoid danger.

What you have to know is WHAT is killing children in your community? Take for example, diabetes. This insidious disease is expected to touch the lives of 1 in every 3 children over the course of the coming decade. By the way, UBBT member, “Mr. Diabetes,” Andy Mandell, has a completely free martial arts instructor diabetes prevention training course –with dozen’s of free teaching resources –at http://www.defeatdiabetes.org/. Look for the MADDCAP program (Martial artists Defeat Diabetes Community Action Program).

Is there a possibility that a child in your community could die from smoke inhalation or a fire this year? Will there be any teenagers who might perish from reckless driving? Or from drug or alcohol abuse?

How many children could you reach with some kind of life-saving message in the next 12 months?

Point: A teacher on a mission to save lives is 10,000 times more powerful than a business-person looking to distribute 10,000 VIP passes. This is mission-based marketing.

Action Step # 3
Embrace Project-Based Leadership Training (PBLT). If you haven’t heard of –or if you don’t fully understand my concept called PBLT, then BOY are you in for some fun times. PBLT is pure rocket fuel, pure genius, pure marketing power for the martial arts school owner and/or teacher.

For you, for free, on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 10:00 am Pacific Standard Time, I will host a free one hour tele-seminar on the subject. Here are the specifics:

EVENT: Project Based Leadership Training Tutorial
DATE & TIME: Friday, August 8th at 10:00am Pacific
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast -- it's your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW...
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=3654912

Action Step # 4
You should OWN the acts of kindness program in your town. In 2001, I developed a program for the martial arts community called Random Acts of Kindness. Since then, more than a million acts of kindness have been initiated by martial arts students around the world. Starting an acts of kindness program with your students is still one of the most effective (and least expensive) forms of community-based, grassroots “marketing with a mission” you can do.

Can you name another business in your town that makes acts of kindness its business? Is there a better form of practical day-to-day self-defense than kindness? Do it for a day, do it for a weekend, or do it for a year –just do it.

Action Step # 5
Profile 10 living heroes. This might seem like a stretch, but I guarantee you that the PEOPLE you hang out with have the most amazing affect on your thinking –so amazing in fact, it might be the key ingredient to your school’s success (or lack thereof).

My 10 living heroes are:

Julia Hill; Nelson Mandela; Pam Dorr; John Bielenberg; The Dalai Lama; Thich Nhat Hahn; Ray Bradbury; Wangari Matthai; Oprah Winfrey; and Sarah Chayes.

If you want to find your mission, if your want to light a fire in your own life and in the lives of your students, then DO NOT make your primary influences people you read about in martial arts magazines. Get out of that box and into a new realm of quality thinkers and action-takers.
Point: In the future, the people who are going to have the most profound impact on your martial arts –and what you sell in your lessons, ARE NOT going to be martial artists.

Not only do we have to take our martial arts “out of the dojo and into the world,” but we need to bring the world into the martial arts.

About the Author
Tom Callos heads the Ultimate Black Belt Test and The New Way Network. He resides in Northern California. His e-mail is tom@tomcallos.com.

Letter on Non-Violence from 1995

2008-07-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about how to teach non-violence for many years. My first experience with the subject, as a martial arts teacher anyway, was when I read my friend, Dr. Terrence Webster-Doyle's books. He wasn't very well known in the martial arts world at the time, but I read his first book and immediately contacted him and offered an invitation to a yearly training session I used to organize for Master Reyes and our West Coast MA association --in Squaw Valley, CA. We hit it off right away --and had a great weekend talking about violence and the martial arts.

Shortly thereafter, I began teaching my young students about the ideas of non-violence. Part of my program was using the words and writing of well-known people. The following letter is from someone I'd written back in 1995 --first the letter, then I'll reveal the source:

Dear Tom Callos,

Your idea of a wall covered with letters about violence is wonderful. Here is my little contribution:

As you know, my Babar books are and expression of non-violence philosophy! And is not because I decided to give a message, it is because I deeply feel non-violent myself. I am glad that the message comes through.

Violence is the most horrible disease of the human race. Of course, there is violence against animals also, but it is mainly because we must eat! What is despicable in human violence is that it comes from hatred, contempt, simply will of power (I should say "man's" violence, because women's violence doesn't generate destruction as man's does).

I believe violence arises when you don't know how to understand the "other," you don't know how to listen. Of course, one can say that if you want too much to "understand" you might become vulnerable.

I simply cannot forget that there are occasions when I wouldn't dare to patronize and recommend moderation. I am talking of persecution, aggression, rape.

Personally, since I rarely feel mad at someone, my problem is rather, as you say, "dealing with bullies." My way is to try not to stand against them like a wall, it is to let them push but, at the same time get them to understand that I am not impressed, I am not going to accept their views.

This is not easy and I am not saying that I am always successful!

The difficulty, a real challenge (particularly in politics), is to come to compromise without being unfair to your own thinking, to come to a compromise without dropping what you care about.

With my best wishes,

Laurent de Brunhoff

2008-06-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

You do recognize, right, that I am suggesting that martial arts teachers are (should be) more social entrepreneurs than business entrapreneurs? At least the teachers in my sphere of influence anyway...

By the way, if you read these journals and are a professional martial arts teacher (or will be someday), you are invited to join me for a tele-seminar this coming friday at 10:00 am pacific standard time. Register at www.tom-callos.com.

Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society.

While it's very likely that this is the first time this idea has been stated as such, I predict that you'll hear it a LOT more in the martial arts world. All of my work is a reflection of this idea. --Tom

This note isn’t about you, it’s about how you teach your students.

2008-06-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, Wait, FIRST, if you're a school owner and/or teacher, go to www.tom-callos.com and sign up for my upcoming tele-seminar, June 27, 2008 at 10 am PST.

Ok, on with the program:

To get a student to genuinely value and understand what it is you offer them; step # 1 is to get them to train.

If they train, consistently, they will chemically transform their own mind/body.

If they train, they will see/feel results.

If they train, they will begin to understand things about what you offer them that are invisible without a reasonable amount of mat-time.

Training is the foundation that supports the structure above it.

Training is the shoes, clothes, canteen, map, and meals needed for the trip.

Everything above, coincidently, is also the key to enjoying and receiving genuine benefit from the UBBT process.

If a student joins your school but doesn’t train, how long does it take them to find the justification not to continue? How long is it before they open the book, “1001 Reasons Why Your School Isn’t for Them,” or the even more popular, “100 Certifiably Genuine Excuses About Being Too Busy.”

The truth? You can’t charge enough –or too little –to someone who isn’t training, as the key to all the locks begins with a student’s feet on the mat, with an elevated heart rate, with the mind absorbed in the movements.

If you don’t train in the UBBT like this is your personal Olympics, it won’t be long until you find the genuine justification for quitting a program that required you to pledge not to quit, when you began.

And now, these ideas translated into a letter to your students:

Dear Student (and/or Parents and Loved Ones of a Student):

First, thank you for becoming a member of my school.

Now I am going to reveal a “secret” to you; it is the information that will make what happens here a life-enhancing experience –or another “activity” among many.

Training in classes and with home-practice is the key that unlocks all of the benefits from the study of the martial arts. “Training” means coming to classes consistently and for an extended period of time.

If you train, you transform.

If you don’t train, you won’t be able to find the reasons to continue paying for lessons and attending classes.

With training, your body and mind react and respond –and a lot of other “things” take place inside of you, things that are difficult to describe, but that serve you in many ways.

All of the promises we make about what the study of the martial arts can do –are contingent upon regular and focused practice.

So my first priority is to get you to attend your classes in a consistent and regular fashion. Trust me, regular attendance has a huge payoff, so huge that I can’t even find the words to describe what you’re going to experience.

The second priority is to teach you how to practice, as it is practice above all other things that builds skill, confidence, mental focus, determination, and the ability to overcome obstacles.

Thank you for your membership; for me, your participation here is of the utmost importance. The two things about the martial arts that I hold most sacred are regular practice and the ability to overcome any obstacles as I proceed on my journey.

My goal is bring you a clear understanding of the magic that happens when intention and commitment meet in the same place. If I may ever be of assistance, if you ever need a reminder or help with your training, don’t hesitate to contact me. I wouldn’t be here today if someone else hadn’t helped me, too.

With respect,

Your Name

------------
If you're in the UBBT and/or the 100 --and these programs haven't caused
you to commit yourself to regular and disciplined martial arts training (in a way
like never before), then you're off track.

It will be very, very difficulut to keep you growing, to get you to understand your potential, or to show valid proof to the world of what we're capable of --and what the real benefits of the martial are ---if you aren't the old karate/aikido/gung fu/tkd/or what-have-you master practitioner who, day after day, training after training, puts on the uniform and sweats with the intention of not just understanding the art --but transcend it.

Thoughts on How to Use Your Martial Arts Journey as a Student/Teacher to Fill Your School with Students –and then Keep Them Training

2008-06-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on How to Use Your Martial Arts Journey as a Student/Teacher to Fill Your School with Students –and then Keep Them Training

By Tom Callos, Team Coach for the Ultimate Black Belt Test

You’re a martial arts school owner and/or teacher –or a “teacher in training.” A martial arts school is, well, a SCHOOL –and you’re going to want eager students who will do what you ask of them so that you can share the fun, confidence, rewards, and adventure that your own martial arts journey has given you.

Ahh, but remember, for your students to grow –you must grow.

The fact is, you won’t be able to stop your own journey, your inevitable aging, your evolution as an athlete, a teacher, and a man or women, no matter how “experienced” you esteem yourself at the moment. What you can control, for the most part, is your own journey, your direction, and your mission as a student and a teacher.

It is this journey and mission that will fuel your school beyond your initial “start up” as a business owner. It is your journey and mission as a human being/student/teacher that allows you to brilliantly deliver on the promises you’ve made in your school’s well-crafted sales pitch about the benefits of martial arts training.

Throw the Stone, Watch the Ripples

You started teaching (or thinking about teaching) —and that was where the stone entered the pond. Your first wave of ambition might have been to polish your won skills. When I first started a school I needed people to spar and compete with, as I was trying to be a “nationally rated” competitor. When someone joined who was about my size, I thought, “Oh, good! A new sparring partner!”

The second wave of teacher awareness is often based on developing top competitors. A lot of us used to live for our competition teams –and the measure of our skills as teachers was measured in the number of medals our students took home.

Each ripple that fans out from where you begin as a teacher is affected by your age, your experiences, your peers, your heroes, and things you might never have thought about. You become a far better teacher at the moment of birth of your first child. You take a leap forward as a teacher upon the death of one of your parents. When one of your young students dies as a result of something you and their parents never anticipated, but that might have been preventable had you known, your understanding of life, of self-defense, and of teaching, shifts into a new universe. As you walk the path of your life and as you watch your friends and students do the same, you start to assemble all of the ingredients that take a fine athlete, a good competitor, and a martial arts practitioner to the level of a “Master-Teacher.”

It is Not What You Know, It is What You Do in the Here and Now

Here, we come to the crux of this essay. What you know is the foundation of what you teach and what you “sell” as a martial arts teacher. However, what you DO, right now, this week, next week, next month, and in the next year –this is the heart, the blood, the cells, the brain, the everything of your school’s growth, its sales campaign, its vibrancy, and its power.

It’s what makes your school breath, it’s what gives you the drive to move ahead in good times or bad, it’s what makes you good to work with and for, it is what motivates people beyond “a paycheck.” What you do about or with your martial arts training is more important than what you know.

Running a real martial arts school –a school run by a real master, well it’s just like growing up. You start off wanting your own place. Then you want a car and all the bangles of success. Then you want love. Then your “stuff,” which has found a way to have WAY too much power in your life, takes a big backseat to the quality of your daily life. Then, if your brain hasn’t been fried by excessive exposure to corporate brainwashing and TV sitcoms, you go through this unexpected awakening. And, being that THAT is where you are, it is then that you start really living. This is when your experience makes you rich and the education you then provide your students has the potential to border on wisdom, to be parallel to what a student of a master in any field, in any discipline, might hear from his or her teacher.

And what does your wisdom say?

TAKE ACTION! Talk is cheap, what are you DOING in your life and in the world? In the words of the legendary master teacher Jhoon Rhee, “If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then an ACTION is worth a 1000 pictures.”

How to Bring Students in and Keep Them with ACTION

This info might not be ideal for the instructor who is just cutting his or her teeth as a teacher and/or school owner. However, let’s remind ourselves not to underestimate the understanding and awareness of any young person. Each generation seems to start with a foundation set by the generation before them.

To bring in students and keep them in the school, the first ingredient is running interesting, exciting, content-rich classes where people feel safe, respected, and cared for. If that’s not happening, you can hang it up. The second component is seeing what you practice on the mat –come to life outside of your school. The expression is “Out of the dojo and into the world” (copyright Tom Callos, thanks).

If little Johnny is taking his martial arts home and to school –and as a result treating his family better, being more polite, cleaning his room more often, and saying/doing positive things that reflect your influence, then your value goes way, way, WAY up in the eyes of his parents; his school teachers too.

If 25-year-old Shannone aspires to be like you, if he carries himself with a sense of dignity, if he controls his temper, you are doing something very important and valuable, both for him and for the world. If he feels a sense of belonging, if he treats his friends and family better, if he handles work and relationship and “life” issues better because of your coaching, well –what more could you ask for?

If 45-year-old Jennifer finds her power through your training, if she gets physically fit again, if she gets her “groove” back on, if she gets some of her life back, her vigor, and her courage, you have done something! If, as she evolves as a person she can also contribute significantly to the world through her love of martial arts training –NOW you’re really doing it.

AND THE BEST WAY TO DO ALL OF THIS is to be an example for them. Set the mark so brilliantly, so wonderfully, so exceptionally, and so high –that everyone in your sphere of influence is moved and inspired by your actions. Show them how it is done, both in victory and defeat.

School owners and teachers; take your martial arts out of the dojo and into the world. SHOW us that you have grown too large to be hemmed in by the four walls of your school. Show us that your footprint is too big for the size of your mat. Don’t just be an “exercise instructor,” or a “self-defense teacher,” or even a “business-person” or “school owner.” Be something bigger than that, be somebody that is hard to describe. Be a genius in action for the world. Look at self-defense from a GLOBAL perspective. See wrongs that are way bigger than what can take place in the ring or on the mat –and then make solutions! Sure, mobilize your students to do 1000’s of reps of techniques, but then show your wisdom and mobilize them to solve REAL problems.

The MASTER TEACHER of today engages in projects in his or her community that speaks of the real heart-of-hearts, the core, of martial arts teaching, of martial arts practice, and of why they have spent nearly their entire adult life doing this stuff. It’s more than kicking, punching, and grappling.

Is what we practice on the mat important? Isn’t it enough? Yes, and no. We begin, as teachers, to teach the ABC’s. We focus on the micro. We obsess over the details. They are important. Yet, someday, we hope to see those letters turned into something big, something that speaks to our potential as human beings, something like:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
--The Declaration of Independence
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

--Martin Luther King

“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. “

--John F. Kennedy

On some level you are just a martial arts teacher –and you’re there on the mat teaching the ABC’s of focus, self-control, teamwork, perseverance, courage, tenacity, and all the other character traits that make a good black belt. At the same time, you should be aware that those ABC’s can become something –and that you can open your mental door and recognize that each person has in them the potential to make a difference in the world –and that, in the end, that’s what all the training is for.

Start Hanging With People Who Blow Your Mind

To avoid being too presumptuous, I have to assume that many of you reading this are already “there.” If so, good for you! If you’re reading this and it doesn’t fit what you know or usually read about martial arts school management, I can tell you why. It’s because you haven’t been hanging out with the “right” people.

They say it takes a “village” of people to raise a child. Well, likewise, it takes a village of people to raise a master teacher. Some of those villagers are family members, some of them are old friends from school, some of them are people you work with, one or more of them might be the village idiot, and somewhere in that village, if you’re lucky, is the wise-person.

If you make a conscious effort to seek out (and it’s easier now than ever before) and be with, study with, read, listen to, and generally “hang out” with our planet’s wise-people, it will have the most profound effect on your school. You will have no shortage of topics to address –and no shortage of motivation, inspiration, and mental stimulation. Your advertising topics will go through the roof.

And here, now, is the challenge. Study –but most of all BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE. Tackle violence. Tackle environmental degradation. Tackle racial prejudice. Tackle anger. Are any of these subjects related to personal protection and self-defense?

But don’t do it alone. If you do everything you can as a person, it isn’t half of what you accomplish if you could inspire 200 students to one-tenth of what they are capable of. Teach and then mobilize your students in your community to take action where action is needed.

This is what a wise-person does. This is now our business –and getting your head in this space is exactly what you need to get your fire burning –and your school filled with people who haven’t come to you because they received a VIP Pass or a discount on lessons. I am challenging you to become a man or woman of extraordinary action.

This is what all the training has been for.

If you could empower your students and mobilize them to take even the smallest action steps, in the world and outside of your school, and each one of those people touched the heart of, the intellect of, the one, two, five, ten other people, you would have successfully waged the best advertising campaign in the world. The learning that would happen! The stories that would come out of this!

It’s a lot easier to do than you think.

Come join me on June 27th at 10:00 am PST for a tele-seminar to get your new business plan happening. Join a movement for a new and more relevant kind of martial art teaching; a kind of teaching that pays tribute to tradition –and forges a way for the martial arts to evolve into something everyone benefits from.

Tom Callos

Doing What A Coach Must Do Sometimes

2008-06-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hello and good morning friends,

Would you take a few minutes, please, to read this letter; I could use your help.

I began the UBBT—and then the 100, not to "change the world" as I might occasionally make reference to, but because I believe that the teacher who really walks the talk of self (and community) improvement through the martial arts has a very solid product to sell in his or her school.

Better product = better sales = a kind of martial arts with deep, emotional, concrete results. Those of you who run schools for a living want, I know, want financial success. Well, how to set up shop, answer the phones, sell lessons, do billing, conduct exams, and all of those school-owner essentials are well documented; you might still need help with them, but I saw no need to replicate what has already been done.

I founded these programs to address an authenticity issue, feeling that our industry had become so focused on finances and school business, that we were overlooking a kind of mental, emotional, spiritual, and "social" development that had equal (or greater) value.

I also believed that we (a bunch of school owner/master teachers/black belts) could come together and accomplish a significant body of work, create "a movement" if you will, towards a kind of martial arts teaching that was richer, more meaningful, and that was meant to sit on top of all the business basics the industry had laid down in the prior decade.

I selectively advertised for participants in these, obviously, complex programs –and felt, no I knew, that members who trained as we set out to train, would experience significant benefits from the process.

If members actually...

Studied meditation with a master –and then actually sat for meditation every day for a year –the experience would be life-changing... and for the first time (for many) martial arts teachers might have an authentic meditation program for their students.

If a member documents 1000 acts of kindness and 10,000 (new req.) to 50,000 acts through students and community, that the teacher would "own" the movement in his or her community –and 1000's of people would be touched by this simple concept. In a way, the acts of kindness program was meant to be the ultimate marketing campaign –as giving someone an act of kindness, from my viewpoint, is as good or better than giving someone a guest pass for lessons. Anyone who invested themselves in this concept would be driven by a goal that few, if any, people in their community had ever tackled.

If members took up the idea that mending relationships and fixing wrongs was as important to personal development as doing kicks, grappling, and testing for belts –and if each participant in the UBBT inspired his or her students to follow suit, that people would me moved by the experience –that stories worth telling would be created –and that people's lives would be improved, physically and spiritually, through the process.

With the 100. I sought to give UBBT members a place to hang their hat that had goals and ambitions beyond retail products or licensing programs. An association formed not to address competition, MMA techniques, words-of-the-week, and what-have-you, but an association of rather sophisticated thinkers and doers who recognized the superficial treatment of the martial arts –of the education we had the potential to provide, versus what had become the status quo in "the industry."

I felt that the standards for the industry have dropped to an all time low –and that people joining the 100 could be counted upon to take considerable and unified action to, if nothing else, offer an alternative to the obvious emphasis on physical skills and business practices (in the MA industry).

With the UBBT I needed 13 months of full-on commitment.

I needed black belts who were willing to step up as examples to all other black belts and martial arts students. I needed a "West Coast Demo Team" of teachers who would step up and show the martial arts world what being a master-level black belt was all about ---or at least DIE trying.
I never expected one black belt or participant to drop out.

I made it very clear at the beginning that this wasn't easy –and that the worst thing anyone could do it to drop out. It hurt me, it hurt the individual, it hurt the very "thing" we claim to promote and live by, and it would hurt this program –as it is so dependent on each members full participation.

Likewise, the 100. asks members to look deeply at peace, at environmental issues, and perhaps most deeply at how we can combine our efforts to make something together that made our schools different, more valuable, and more authentic.

On some scale, we have made progress in both programs.

However, this morning I received another e-mail from a black belt participant who asked me to cancel his/her financial obligation to the program, as he/she couldn't go on.

I would guess that this is a member who didn't tell his/her students about the seriousness of his/her commitment. This is a teacher who, undoubtedly, either didn't inform students –or created a justification for telling his/her black belt candidates why he/she is failing to see his/her own black belt test to fruition.

Do as I say students –but don't do as I do.

Is this because we (you and I) don't look in each other's face everyday? Is it because the UBBT website doesn't look pretty? Is it because the program costs about $10 a day? Is it because the listserve only works right about 75% of the time? Is it because I feel strongly about peace, the environment, anger control, diabetes education, and all of that ---and these things, for you, don't "ring" of any value? Is it because it is so very hard to write in your journal, weekly? Is it because I have asked you to show all black belts, all martial arts people, how strong you can be? Is it because this process is difficult to keep up with? Are you bored? Is it because the member roster looks like crud?

I don't know exactly what to say to you all ---except that I honestly expect you to make a commitment in the beginning, and then see it through.

No matter how hard it is, no matter what path your life takes, no matter what obstacles present themselves.

This IS perseverance.

This IS respect for my work and your "school."

This IS your self-discipline being put to the test.

And, frankly, this is an embarrassment to the rank of black belt.

Because of your inability to stick to your commitment, the UBBT is weakening.

How can we stand in the industry as an example of a different approach –and authenticity –a spiritual way to run a martial arts school –and one that isn't driven by purely economic factors, if we can't see a 13 month program through to its fruition?

Yes, "look at the ubbt" and see what these men and women are made of. ???? These are real "black belts." UGH.

I am, of course, not talking about YOU --but about our teammates who are, at the moment, self-absorbed with all the things that keep us from doing our best at something we are committed to (or have committed to, which is the case here).

Don't ask me again to cancel your tuition.

There are no refunds in this program. If you fall by the wayside due to cancer or death or ? –I'll stop your payments. If you simply can't hang in there with the commitment, I'm sorry, you're going to have to throw your hard earned cash into the program to support your promise to participate.

OR, just cancel your purely financial obligation to the program like any other business transaction –as this is purely "business" is it not?

Now a note to all other future UBBT and 100 Members:

My name is Tom Callos.

I am a 37 year student of the martial arts. I have two programs I designed to help school owners and master teachers do what they do, better.

Neither of them are easy; they don't come in a box; you can't open a package and unroll a poster for the wall from it; and both programs require thinking, creativity, a massive amount of participation, and a large degree of commitment.

The only people who are willing to join these programs are people willing to be role models and examples of what is to be a martial artist and master teacher in the world today.

These people will suffer.
They will fail.
They will try new things.
They will struggle.

They will, in many cases, do things that are so different, so extraordinary, and so telling of the true and deep spiritual commitment they have to their life's calling, that you will be stunned and inspired by their work.

Do not ask me to be a part of anything I do, please, if you are not willing to do whatever it takes to see your goals to fruition –and/or to recognize the big picture of my/out work.

Do not join to fail.

Do not weaken our campaign by being weak when things are not going well.

There are many programs in the martial arts world that ask almost nothing of members.
Join one of those --but this isn't one (or two) of them.

When you join the UBBT, you join to do as much as you can, as hard as you can, for 13 months. There is no quitting –and no dropping out. We are, after all, black belts –or aspiring to be black belts in a different light.

When and if you join the 100, join a group of people who are beginning the journey with the end in mind –and the end result of the "ultimate union" for martial arts teachers would be the Nobel Peace Prize. There's a good chance that we will never win any prize, much less the Nobel Peace Prize, but we do know as humans we have the potential to do great things –and so this is how we apply ourselves to the idea of it all.

At the VERY LEAST my friends, give it all you have. You're spending $6 to $10 a day –and that, in today's world, doesn't buy much. Spend your energy CREATING an organization of committed martial arts citizens using their art, their connections, their minds –for a purpose that's big and daunting and wonderful.

Let's bring more peace to the world –let's make the martial arts stand for something other than goofy people in uniforms walking around pretending to be warriors and talking the talk –but not walking the walk.

Tom

Click on Banner to Listen to Thresa Byrne Interview

2008-06-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

Theresa is the trainer (life-fitness coach) for a group of kids appearing on the ABC mornig show, FITTING IN...airing June 14th, 7 am. See her website at www.umac.us

A Reminder to Keep Our Eyes Looking inthe Right Places

2008-06-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

I feel the need (as usual) to remind you, teams, that the best place to find "martial arts philosophy and wisdom" is....

Wait, let me add:

The people who are going to have THE MOST influence in the martial arts world --the people who will give you the knowledge and tools to BE THE TEACHER you want to be (whether for 10 students or 10,000), the PEOPLE who can show "THE WAY" in a way that makes sense for today -and for tomorrow...

Have probably never thrown a kick or a punch in their lives.

I doubt that there is a martial artist in the world as wise as Jimmy Carter, as Nelson Mandela, as Rosa Parks, as Julia Hill, as Wangari Matthai, as E.O. Wilson, as Jane Goodall, as 1000 other modern day PEOPLE-WHO-TAKE-ACTION in the world.

THESE are the masters --and while we need to keep an eye on our precious "martial arts world" ---we really have very little to learn from in that context, and a whole lot more to learn about from a "global" perspective.

Today, the most amazing warriors don't carry traditional or modern weapons, they are armed with vision, the ability to take action, and a sense of their connection to humanity.

Intelligent Curriculum® SEE IT HERE!

2008-05-28T11:06:00.001-07:00

Hi, Tom Callos here, I'm team coach for the Ultimate Black Belt Test -and I'm the head of the martial arts association known as The 100.

My new venture, as you see it here, is called Intelligent Curriculum® --partly because the internet allows us, as martial arts teachers, to design and display our school's curriculum and everything that has to do with communicating to students, parents, and potential members, in a new, dynamic, and intelligent way.

Just take a look at how attractive the simple blog is that I've designed as an example -and see how I've made two entries as examples of how your own students could be seeing YOUR curriculum.

The other reason I call this work "Intelligent" is that looking at your school's curriculum in a new way, laying it out in a more complete and educational fashion, and doing it all in a format that gives you SO MUCH control over the what and why ----well, it's very intelligent, very "today," and let me tell you, it's going to be very good for your school/business.

Can You Bring Me 100 People?

2008-05-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

To: UBBT and 100 Folk

Re: Staff and Students and a Mission

My friends, YOUR SCHOOL is so much more than a “karate” or “taekwondo” or “kung fu” school. Your brand of martial arts is a quantum leap ahead of what the typical martial arts school used to be. And, of course, you’re not just teaching a richer brand of physical martial arts –you’re educational approach has evolved to a place where your work impacts lives deeply.

And not JUST the lives of your students, but everyone in their/your sphere of influence; If you tackle Project-Based Leadership Training (PBLT) you are making inroads, change, and improvements in your community.

Let me remind you of one of my favorite quotes from my Peace Flashcard set, Peace is More Important Than Punches:

This might be THE ESSENCE and the core of our philosophy. “Self-defense” is believing, understanding, and taking action on the idea that you CAN and DO make a difference. You are not powerless –and you are not a “victim of circumstances.”

But wait, we (UBBT and 100 folk) take this idea a step further. It’s not enough to have an empowering philosophy, ACTION on IDEAS is where it’s at. We are THE ACTION HEROES of this Century –and every student who comes into our domain is empowered with the ability to turn all these wonderful notions, ideas, and slogans into ACTION IN THEIR LIVES –and of course, since it’s NOT always about YOU –in the WORLD.

Our training is then, in essence, ACTION-HERO Training.

There will be a day, if I have my way, when a martial arts school is synonymous with community service, with mobilizing its students for projects that burn with the talk we talk so well. The education you provide your students will have everything our teachers taught us, like a concrete foundation, and from there we will build a structure on top of that full of rich experience and modern, functional, centered beliefs. You see, this is self-defense for today.

How YOU Can Help This Work, RIGHT NOW:

We need people--special people. We need more of the kind of people who see their martial arts journey as something more than memorizing 12 forms, a couple of dozen one-steps, and some self-defense.

I’m looking for people to join the UBBT, the UBBT Student Program, and the UBBT for Kids, who are willing to try new ideas –to take action in their lives and in their schools and in their communities.

I’m looking for people who would be willing to eat healthier –and not just for themselves, but to serve as role models for as many people as we can possibly reach through our collective work (millions?).

What if we had a website that was FAT with hundreds of people each working on themselves in extraordinary ways? Imagine the power of 100 young people exploring healthy eating –while working on their martial arts. Could those 100 inspire a 1000 others? Could we get this “school” of people living in different cities all over the world to create something –like a school without borders –that changed the world for the better (at the very least the “martial arts world?”). We could! And guess what, it’s never been done! We could do it!

When I started studying the martial arts in 1971, we (the martial arts community) met in magazines and tournaments. In the 1980’s we met through an audio cassette tape sent out by EFC and thru conventions, seminars, and tournaments. Then we met through a box and DVD’s. Today we meet here on the internet –and it’s rich and content heavy and in an instant messages and ideas and results are transmitted to groups of people who come together for, well ---good reasons.

Even this lecture I’m giving you now, which at one time might have been an outline for a full presentation at a convention, is delivered to you in the comfort of your own home or office.

I’m looking for 100 people to Join us in the Next 30 Days

I’m looking for UBBT members, I’m looking for YOU to bring in special people to the UBBT Student Program ($75 a month), and I’m looking for kids with a interest in joining a national experiment in martial arts activism to join the UBBT for KIDS ($9.95 a month).

Now what I’ll give your students who become a part of these programs, is...

· A consistent daily, weekly, and monthly education in human potential through the martial arts. We’ll expose them to thinking that supports YOUR work –and we will talk about the richness of the martial arts, about mission, about change, about being centered, compassionate, aware, and conscious.

· I will talk with them about the power of what they are doing when they step onto your mat.

· I will engage them in the Alabama Project (and invite them to attend). I will talk to them about fitness, about acts of kindness, about PBLT, about Intelligent Curriculum, about helping you, and about the mission YOU are on to make your path to mastery a rich and daily spiritual practice.

· I will talk to them about the kind of history we are trying to make (and you know what, we could make history. We could change the entire western world’s view of what the martial arts are about –beyond the ring, beyond the mat).

· I will encourage them to stay your student –to practice with awareness, and to help you in your mission to make a difference in your community.

· I will bring resources to the table, videos, books, ideas, authors, heroes, and concepts you don’t’ have the time to dig up. Your students will come to YOU with ideas –and they’ll feel like they’re a part of something big, something extraordinary.

What you’d have here is the first real, authentic, functional MARTIAL ARTS ASSOCIATION. You are, in essence, hiring me as a staff member –and my job is to INSPIRE. I inspire student and teachers to see their martial arts as a deep, important, life-enhancing practice. My job is to boost your sales by boosting your presence in your community.

Can you help? Can you bring me students you know would blossom in this kind of environment? Do you have members you’d like to groom for this kind of activism and activities? Any future leaders out there who might benefit from the relationships they would make in our group?

Bring ‘em on!

This year I’d like to move forward in the world with the power of 100 people committed to crafting a new mission in the martial arts world. 100 people doing acts of kindness, 100 people reading, training, talking, and exploring diabetes education, anger management, PBLT, and so on.

I can HELP YOU be a better teacher –and it won’t cost you a penny.

Can you help the UBBT grow to a place where we are recognized as the most amazing martial arts group in the world? Will WE have a chance to speak at TED (www.ted.com)?

HELP! Let’s Grow! Let’s see what 100 highly motivated, pro-active people bring to our table.

Tom Callos

The POWER of the MOMENT

2008-05-19T17:56:00.001-07:00

I’m Tom Callos –and I am an educational activist, working in the martial arts industry.

For the most part, I teach school owners, instructors, managers, and their staff members how to run martial arts schools in a way that is efficient, effective, fun, rewarding, and profitable.

There are a number of other organizations and consultants who do this kind of work too.

However, I have a very different slant to my advice and methods than do my contemporaries in the martial arts world.

I focus on business practices and concepts that are about raising the social consciousness of the owner, the staff, and students; I promote a kind of martial arts education that deals with issues far beyond the scope of what, traditionally, has been dealt with or discussed in martial arts schools.

I teach my clients how to embrace self-defense in a way that is relevant to today. I help them learn how to teach things that reside outside of the realm of kicking, punching, and grappling; things that people living in today’s world need to know about protecting themselves, their families, and their communities.

While most consultants, including myself, will deal with business statistics, sales procedures, promotional strategies, and all of the other obvious and basic necessities of running a business, I believe in a kind of martial arts that is an authentic path to mastery, a kind of martial arts that transcends the profit-and-loss statement.

The Power of the Moment

My clients and I have launched an authentic and experiential leadership training program –as until now, many schools claim to teach leadership, but very few have a sound method or curriculum to do so. We are championing the first-ever anger management teacher-training program in the martial arts industry. People might think that martial arts teachers know a lot about anger management and teach it to their students, but until now that has not been the case.

The martial artists I work with are coached in a new kind of Intelligent Curriculum®, a new kind of educational mission for their schools, and we craft a new stance, a new position and role for the martial arts school in the community.

A martial arts school, as I see it, should be a place where the student learns as much about peace, as she learns about the opposite of peace. Students should be inspired and directed to take their martial arts out of their dojo (school) and into the world. Anger management, environmental self-defense, dietary self-defense, community involvement, meditation, empathy training, and sustainable living represent a part of the new kind of “self-defense lessons” taught in schools that recognize what I call the power of the moment.

That moment is the opening that comes every so often; that moment when the young and impressionable student is listening to his or her martial arts teacher like only a child can –with that wide-eyed acceptance, that fully open mind, ready to grow, instantly absorbing, and highly impressionable.

When that moment comes, as I have seen it come so many times, my job is to make sure the teacher knows what power his or her words, influence, actions, and position wields.

It is at that moment that we want our hero at the front of the class to speak not about defeating an opponent or striking another human being or winning a tournament; we want to hear words and ideas that inspire compassion, awareness, respect for self, for family, for the community, for the global community, and for the planet.

We want a seed planted and/or watered at that moment; something that has the potential to sprout into a kind of wisdom and happiness that is uncommon, but the deepest wish of every mother and father. My clients are the kinds of teachers who are acutely aware of the power of the moment; they live to create those moments –so that they might make a true contribution to a better and more peaceful world.

We consider this “our business.” We spend only the smallest amount of time necessary working on how to run our businesses so that we can pay the bills and have money left over (like all business owners); we spend the majority of our energy on coming up with the most innovative, creative, interesting, and powerful ways to create moments of deep learning, constructive and useful attitudes, and the kind of awareness that promotes peace of mind –and peace in action.

Engaged Martial Arts

In my programs, the teacher must transform himself into someone who makes the pursuit of genuine martial arts mastery a deep, personal and spiritual daily practice. You can recognize my clients because they are training to be in the best shape of their lives; they are eating and living with full consciousness of what they consume; they define and engage their heroes; they practice meditation; they read; and they take on projects with their students that benefit their respective communities; projects that show, firsthand, how to apply their training principles to life —off of the mat.

My members are grounded, real –and exuberant people.

Among our ranks is an Academy Award winning filmmaker; there are songwriters, environmental and civil engineers, artists, attorneys, authors, world champions, school teachers, counselors, journalists, grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers—and all of them are martial artists with a desire to make a difference, here and now, through what they teach and how they teach it.

That is the mission of this work, which is now made up of my work and the work of my clients.

It manifests itself in all sorts of interesting projects, such as (to name a few):

The Alabama Project
Each year we build and/or remodel a house in Alabama with housing activist Pam Dorr (click on the link to see her video-profile from the Hallmark Channel) and students from the famous Rural Studio. In 2009 we will be renovating a two-room schoolhouse in Hale County, Alabama, one of the last remaining Rosenwald Schools in the area.

I use these projects to empower martial arts teachers to step out of their schools and engage their communities in all sorts of unique ways.

Our involvement with architects, artists, engineers, and activists is my intentional training program to show teachers how to break down the barriers between disciplines. Participants in these projects inevitably return to their own communities and begin to engage in activities with their students that teach lessons far beyond blocking punches and breaking boards.

Peace is More Important than Punches
One of my most important missions is to help martial arts teachers teach Peace Education to their students. In 2007 I developed a set of teaching flash cards called “Peace is More Important Than Punches.” A number of schools have started using these cards to introduce peace-thinking to students. One of our members, Ms. Debby Young, is helping to have the cards translated into Swahili –for use in the new Kenyan Library System.

The Dietary Self-Defense Program
Several of my clients, members of the UBBT and The 100, are working with a new dietary self-defense program. Components include posters, flash cards, and written lessons meant to be added to the curriculum of all martial arts schools, regardless of system or style.

The Environmental Self-Defense Initiative
In 2006 I called upon all martial arts teachers in the international martial arts community to adopt the Environmental Self-Defense Initiative, which asks schools to require their young students to do 5 to 10 “acts of environmental self-defense” along with their regular belt-testing curriculum to earn their green belts.

MADDCAP™
MADDCAP™ (Martial Arts Defeat Diabetes® Community Awareness Project) is the first-ever diabetes teacher and student training program in the martial arts world. More info may be seen at http://www.defeatdiabetes.org/.

The Veterans in Martial Arts Program
I have called upon all martial arts schools in the international martial arts community to give free lessons for the remainder of 2008 to all returning veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. What is Enlightenment? magazine is the first publication to publish this request, in it’s May, 2008 issue.

The UBBT ECO-Adventure
Each year I take a number of clients on a 4-day eco-adventure along the Pacific Crest Trail, just outside of Lake Tahoe, CA. As a result of this program, dozens of clients are now making outdoor education a part of their programs.

The Anger Management Teacher Training Program
The first anger management teacher training program in the martial arts may be seen at http://www.angercoachonline.com/

The Elder Circle Project
Still in development, this project seeks to involve grandparents in martial arts schools. We are proposing that at least once every quarter, a teacher invites one or more grandparents to come to the school and share his or her life story with young students. We intend to develop this idea for use in all interested martial arts schools.

What a pleasure it is to put all of this in this blog!

Tom Callos
tomcallos@gmail.com
530-903-0286

A Call to Associations

2008-05-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

A Call to Every Martial
Arts Association in the World

To: Every Supply Company, Every Consulting Firm, Every Billing Service, Every Magazine, Every Association of Every Style and who have Come Together for Every Reason under the Martial Arts Sun

For a Moment, Put Profit Aside
Money's a darn fine thing. It buys stuff. I value it as much as the next person. I think a portion of everyone's day, of their life, should be focused –like a laser beam –on making enough of it to make ends meet (and then some).

However, with that being said, for the reminder of this short request, I'm putting the making a profit part of the money thing aside. I'm not denying it makes "the world go around," I'm not suggesting it isn't important, I'm simply addressing that which has little or nothing to do with making money to show a profit.

Martial Arts Associations - Groups I'm Asking You To Consider the Following

Martial arts associations, whether you have 10 members or 10,000, I'm asking you to recognize your power. You have the power to reach your members –and, quite possibly, to mobilize them. You have the power (albeit sometimes a lot less than you would like), to influence people, to educate them, and to inspire them to DO SOMETHING.

Now, most of the time, you're trying to get them to buy stuff or pay dues, which is good. But there's something else you could get them to do –and it's that something else that could play a significant role in a better image for the martial arts, for the kind of attention we want, and to prove that the arts are really what we say they are (something special).

Let's Start with Something Very Simple.

Imagine this: If you had 500 members (or 167 members, each with two "significant others"), and each of those 500 people did 10 acts of kindness for 5 other people, you would have impacted 2500 people and be directly responsible for 250,000 acts of kindness.
What human being wouldn't appreciate a little more kindness in his or her life? Simple, yet it is something that we have never done –and something, I think, indicative of the values we promote.

Let's take it to another place:

Imagine if one of the billing services in our industry created a program that allowed students to voluntarily donate an extra $.10 to a dollar every month over and above their tuition. With a $.25 donation, 10,000 students could accumulate $60,000 in 24 months. Now imagine we gave that money to Oprah and let her gift it to the most worthwhile activist on her long list of people working on amazing and world-changing projects. How exciting would that be?
Think about what we could do with four or five times that much.

Century, NAPMA, EFC, APS, UFC, the WTF –everyone, everyone! What profits would be lost in utilizing the simple idea of combining forces to do something absolutely extraordinary? Something so stunning, so solid, so enlightened, that the good from it could light the face of a million martial artists --and possibly, a million martial artists to be.

It's not about profit, it's about the opportunity. It's about the martial arts and what is not fighting. It is about a lot of people doing very, very little –to show how much can be done. I'd like to see a half-dozen of the most prominent business owners in the martial arts world use their influence to do something amazing.

I'll bet you if these men and women led the movement, a whole lot of teachers and students would step in to help.

Why not? Why not in our lifetime? Is Oprah the only one who has the chutzpah to step up and take ultra-positive action in the world? We could do it –and a million "karate kids" could own a piece of it.

Note: Of course, in no way do I mean disrespect to any martial arts group; I simply dream of what we could do if we put down our company names, set aside our styles, groups, and differences, and just did something completely unexpected.

Tom Callos

Interview with Diana Lee Inosanto

2008-05-08T12:15:00.001-07:00

Meet Diana Lee Inosanto and listen to her talk about her directorial debut with her film The Sensei

She also talks about the movie's connection to Bruce Lee.

Click on the Image or HERE to listen.

Most interesting!

5 Reasons to Change the Way You Belt Test, NOW

2008-05-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

Professional martial arts teachers: When it comes to belt testing, whether it’s a green belt test or a black belt test, it is a mistake to get tied into a tradition of testing. What we want to get attached to is THE RESULTS that our testing process produces.

Some of the things we want to affect through the process are:

We want our students to be technically proficient (stances, kicks, and other maneuvers).

We want a student to have an attitude that is congruent with his or her belt rank.

And in a perfect world:

We want our students to have a sense of TEAM, with fellow classmates.

We want them to have a set of experiences, from their training, that have had an impact on their life outside of your school.

At a test we’d like to hear:

“I’m a better, more patient father, because of this training.”

“Because of my test, I have healed some old relationships that needed healing. This training gave me the incentive and the courage to do it.”

“I’m more fit now than I was in college.”

“I could never get myself to eat like I knew that I should, but this training changed that. Now I apply the same discipline to my diet as I do to my workouts.”

“The training has touched me deeply, in ways I never would have expected.”

The bottom line? We want our testing to be positive, to be powerful, to be indicative of our BEST work. So, with that in mind, here are my 10 reasons, no, make that WAYS, to change the way you belt test, now.

Reason 1: More Time to Affect Change

Make your test last longer. Like a month or two or three or in the case of high ranking students, a year (like the Ultimate Black Belt Test). Why? What’s the hurry? Aren’t 100 push-ups or three reps of a form a day for a year WAY better than 1 rep of a form on test day? Which is better for you as a teacher, challenging and helping a student to develop daily discipline, or having them kick-it on one day? In the long run, teaching a student to shape his or her day in a way that affects the future is better than teaching them how to shine on a single day.

Furthermore, a really good black belt test is a chance for the general public and your other students to see what you have created. They get to see a master craftsman and his or her
”products.” Well, what’s better, to have a day of your work on the showroom floor, or to take 100 days or more, and show your skills that way? A test that lasts a month, 6 months, or a year gives you that long to talk about the process, to show the process, and to enjoy the process.

Reason 2: More Time to Share

Everyone on your test should be writing and/or filming the PROCESS. Each member should be keeping an on-line journal documenting the effort and learning experience he or she is going through. Those public journal entries will make your candidates better writers and communicators; they will open the process to people who might never have been able to see, hear, or experience the journey of martial arts testing; and the record of the time your students test will ultimately become cherished memories that anchor the student to your school and the process with vivid intensity.

On line journals even have a way of guiding those students who come later; they serve as examples of effort, growth, and expectations.

Reason 3: More Time To Change

I can’t get nearly as much done in a day, no matter how hard I work or how organized I am, compared to what I can get done with just a hour’s worth of effort, every day for an extended period of time. In a perfect world, when a student comes up in front of you to test, they would bring with them this overwhelming body of evidence that shows you how hard they are working, how seriously they take the process, and how committed they are to your ideas. You can’t get someone to stop everything they are doing and commit themselves like an Olympian to your testing process, but you can get them to commit some time, each day to it. To elicit real, authentic, live-changing change, you have to give a student more time –and not just “time,” but QUALITY time.

Reason 4: It’s HARDER This Way, Without Being STUPID

Torturing student on the day of their test, trying to break them down –or being afraid that you might break them down or injure them, is not the way to go about testing. Torture them for a month or two or three or even a year! But push them in small digestible, non-injurious ways. Bring them to their black belt test having coached them through 1000 hard reps of their form over 6 months or a year, instead of driving them to exhaustion, like some kind of college frat-house hazing on the day of their exam. Make the 1000 reps over a period of time their “test” –instead of asking them to show you a form on one day. It is immensely more difficult to apply consistent, daily discipline to one’s life, versus doing something really good on one day.

What you really teach students through requiring them to SEE THEIR TEST as a daily thing, versus a one day or one week event, is that giant accomplishments, massive transformation, is achieve with DAILY activity, not cramming.

Reason 5: You Can Teach More Skills, More Stuff, if You Have More Time

You can’t get a student to read a book in your classes, but they could do it at home, if you give them enough time. What if all of your black belt candidates had to take an on-line anger management training program –and they could do it in 10 minute increments, at home, over a month or two?

Well, what you could do is talk about it to prospective members, to the media, to all sorts of people –and what more did you have to do? Did it change your classes? Did you have to invest more time?

You see, stretching out the testing process lets you coach your students with ideas and practices you wouldn’t have been able to implement any other way. And can you see, in your mind’s eye, the LIST of things you require? IMPRESSIVE, yet because of the time frame, not impossible –and in fact, quite do-able! If you REALLY want to have a life-changing, lasting experience with your students, WHY NOT?

Reason 6: IMPRESS (for a purpose)

Which of these two mini-tests are more impressive:

Test 1

Forms 1 to 12

10 rounds of sparring

Self defense drills 1 to 10

Running 5 miles

250 push-ups and 250 crunches

Break 10 boards (I’m not a board-breaking advocate, I think it’s a waste of natural resources, but I’ll use this example t make a point).

Test 2

500 recorded repetitions of all forms.

500 rounds of sparring.

1000 self-defense techniques, practiced at full speed.

A 500 mile run.

10,000 push-ups and sit-ups.

Breaking 500 boards

Reason 7: You Need to Change Your Test in a Way That Gives You a Unique Selling Proposition.

Tests are, for the most part, all the same; and the results we’ve been getting, well...it’s OK. But I ask you: Can’t we do better? Can’t we at least TRY some new methods to see what happens? Do you know any other school that is doing it? Do you want to distinguish the QUALITY of education you provide –from your competitors? Of course you do!

There are a LOT of reasons to change your testing process I haven’t mentioned here; but I have one final and grand suggestion for you.

START THIS PROCESS of reinvigorating testing, of making it vital, relevant, authentic, and more powerful by DOING it yourself, FIRST. Show what can be done; LIVE the process. You will benefit (are you currently in the best shape of your life? Why not?), your students will benefit, your school will benefit.

Come live the Ultimate Black Belt Test and learn more this year than you have in the last 10. That, my friend, is an invitation!

Tom Callos

Interview with Author Dan Millman about the Martial Arts

2008-05-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

Click this banner to listen to an interview with author and martial artist Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior) conducted by Tom Callos, May 1, 2008.

To Mom and Dad: Your Child and the Martial Arts

2008-04-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

A letter to parents –from an old martial art

teacher –about martial arts lessons and children.

I’m going on 50 years old, which really isn’t that old, but to talk to you about what a child, your child, stands to learn from taking martial arts lessons, it’s old enough. I took my first lesson at the age of 9, received my first degree black belt at 19, and this year I will celebrate my 30^th year of teaching and assistant teaching the martial arts.

I’m going to condense my experience into a few hundred words for you; the goal is to give you the 30-year perspective on what I have learned as a result of my training –and what I know your child will learn, should you decide to make the martial arts a part of his or her life.

In some ways, martial arts schools are all the same. Each school is going to be contained in some kind of space, like a shopping mall, a free-standing building, a room in a gym, in an office building, a garage, or maybe on a stretch of lawn in a park or in someone’s backyard. What makes a martial school great is not the space it is in, although as parents we want the school to be clean and safe; what makes or breaks a martial arts school is the people that fill that space.

Here lies the primary reason to enroll –and then keep –your child in martial arts lessons, from the moment they first meet the age requirements of a school, until they leave your nest: The people.

The teachers (and students) in a martial arts school become leaders, heroes, role models, and friends to your child; and while martial arts teachers, like every kind of teacher, have their various strengths and weaknesses, their influence and friendship is worth every penny you will ever spend on tuition, times 10.

I remember my teachers, I remember the senior students in my classes, I remember my classmates and the students who joined after me. I remember when I was 12-years-old and a red belt student, a man in his mid 20’s, told me, nonchalantly, that “practice was the key to being a great martial artist –or a great anything.” I can hear his voice as if he told me that yesterday –and the advice has shaped my life. My father probably told me the same thing a 1000 times, but who listens to their parents –until much later in life?

A martial arts teacher is a real man or woman; they’re not heroes fabricated by the entertainment industry. These are real people that will be there, in their classes, day after day, patient, persistent, and persuasive. Their message is about consistent effort, about perseverance, about focus and goals and defense and self-control. Even teachers who can’t speak English can, with an uncanny ability delivered through their coaching, translate values and powerful, life-changing ideas to their students.

The kind of education a good martial arts teacher provides a young person is different from anything they will learn in grade school, from parents, or from football, soccer, or gymnastics coaches. The magic that forms in the long term relationship between a martial arts teacher and his or her students makes them an incredibly valuable, but all too often unacknowledged, part of “the village” that can help raise your child to be confident, self-disciplined, resilient, and resourceful.

Literally thousands of adults have told me, long after they stopped practicing the martial arts, what a powerful and positive influence their martial arts teacher was, and still is, in their life. I concur. Even the teachers that I came to think were inadequate, when I look back, I realize were a gift.

I owe them all a huge debt of gratitude for helping me develop respect for my self and others, for helping me build by body, develop my coping skills, and for the confidence their constant attention and direction gave me. It took me a long time to understand the value of their friendship, but oh, now, I so completely get it. What a blessing! I would hope that every child would have the chance to interact with teachers like I had, men and women who coached and fixed and taught and laughed and yelled and, as I now understand, loved.

The second most valuable reason to have your child studying the martial arts, any style, any method, is the philosophy that goes with the training. Every style, every teacher of any skill, has something positive to teach your child. Some, of course, do it much better than others, but whether they know it or not, they are imparting wisdom of the most extraordinary kind –and at a time in a child’s life that they really need it.

I can still hear my teacher’s words:

“Eyes straight ahead! Focus!”

“It’s ok to be afraid, just don’t let it stop you from moving and trying!”

“What are the two qualities of a champion?” We would answer, shouting, “Attention to detail and follow through, sir!”

“Real bravery isn’t found in fighting! It’s found in not fighting!”

“Attention! Pay your respect!”

Pay your respect, indeed.

Mom, Dad, every lesson is important and it’s worth every penny, every minute you spend convincing your son or daughter that going to class that day is better than watching TV; it’s worth every bump, bruise, stubbed toe, and every tear.

The good times, the victories, the understanding of the value of finally breaking through a barrier, the friendships, the little kids, the teenagers, the parents, and the old folks –it’s so good, so very worthwhile, and so needed in today’s world, that I had to write you about it. I had to encourage you –and try to give you the big-picture perspective on the martial arts. If you can swing it, get your child into a martial arts school and keep them there, even when they don’t recognize the value of what they’re doing.

They will, someday.

About the Author

Tom Callos is a consultant to martial arts instructors, currently helping teachers to work environmentalism, anger management, kindness and leadership training into their schools. His websites are http://www.tomcallos.com/ and http://www.ultimateblackbelttest.com/. He may be reached by phone (PST) at 530-903-0286 and/or by e-mail at tomcallos@gmail.com.

How to Approach Your Black Belt Test

2008-04-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Your black belt test, in any style of martial arts, is your Olympics. From the first day you stepped on the mat, you began preparing for your test, whether you were aware of it or not. On the day you test for your black belt, you want to be at your absolute best, your peak; and going through the test should be like crawling through a long tunnel between one world and the next, like a birth; a rebirth. When you come to the other side, you should be changed; from that day on you are a new person.

When you practice your martial arts, whether you’re in your first week of lessons or a veteran of a thousand classes, knowing your test is coming up, that you are preparing yourself, that that day’s training session is connected to your test, gives you direction. You train with intention, with purpose and a sense of mission.

Every part of your life, every relationship, everything you consume, every thought, every action, every movement contains in it something that has to do with your test. You are in training. You are preparing yourself.

Getting ready for your black belt test requires that you become a representative of the martial arts. You represent the truth of it –or its frivolity. You represent every master teacher of every style of every school since the beginning. To everyone around you, you should represent the seriousness of the undertaking. It is more than your formal education, it is more than a contest, it is more than getting your degree, passing the Bar or getting married or any other event in your life. This is your black belt test, this is the event that requires you to practice ten-thousand repetitions, to dig deep, to be consistent, to train and train and train until the connections in your brain are so strong, so time-tested, and so automatic that the space between thinking and doing is eliminated.

Every toe knows its exact place. The foot is aligned, perfectly, as is the knee, the hip, the torso, the shoulders, the head, and the eyes. Like a master carpenter yielding a hammer, your hands, feet, elbows, and knees follow an exact path; they hit their targets with exact precision, with surprising force, with confidence that can only be born from practice. Your movement isn’t just movement, it is integration, it comes from your center, and your balance is perfect. You could do it all backwards, blindfolded, against one or more people, in the dark, on the grass, in the water, or anywhere, anytime, with or without a proper warm up.

When you test for your black belt, you are what you have shaped yourself to be. You have adjusted for any limitations and injuries. You move with a confidence that comes from repetition, from practice, from awareness, from intent, and from your breath. No stone has been left unturned. You ran the extra mile, you eliminated the unhealthy from your diet, you studied the best of the best, and you shaped and forged and worked on your movement. For you, it is all about the technique and nothing about the technique. Something drives you that is not your muscles.

When you test for your black belt, even your mistakes are polished. When you fall you flow, when you get hit, you embrace, when you tap, you win with a smile. You’re not hard on yourself, you don’t get angry; you cope, you adjust, and you accept. You have worked through the mistakes. You have worked through the frustration and the anger and the injuries.

The earlier you recognize the value of training for your black belt test, the better. The earlier you begin, the better. Preparing for your test shapes your experience; it makes you a better person. When other people are easily distracted, you are focused. When others eat without purpose, you choose a diet that prepares you for your training. When others give into anger, you see it as a chance to practice your control. You’re in training to be a black belt.

A professionally trained dancer carries with her a sense of center, of style, of confidence that lasts her entire life. A West Point graduate has a certain posture, an attentiveness and sense of confidence that shines –regardless of the time that has passed since graduation. A black belt who approaches his or her training with mission and seriousness –carries the experience to the grave.

You prepare for your black belt test with everything you have. When you do that, the experience serves you, it is rich, it is life-shaping, and it brings to you skills that you might never have acquired any other way.

Approach your black belt test, starting today, with these ideas in mind. When you step on the mat, remember where you are headed. Make your practice go deep –and then deeper, and then deeper yet. Put as much focus and energy into your hour of practice as you put into anything you do in your life.

Video and Speaking of Faith Interview with Tom Callos

2008-04-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

Out of the Dojo from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

The UBBT and 100 store link

2008-04-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

Stream-of-Consciousness Teaching for the Matial Arts School Owner

2008-04-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

Martial Arts School Business Advice –Coming at You From the Future, From Left Field, and Made of Things You Will, Most Likely, NEVER Read About in a Martial Arts Business Publication

Stream-of-Consciousness Teaching By Tom Callos

First things first:

Value. BUILD VALUE. Sell value.

Benefits. BUILD BENEFITS. Sell benefits.

Perceived value and actual value; perceived benefits and actual benefits.

Build them, sell them.

Concepts:

Make a tool; find out tool serves more purposes, has more value that originally perceived. Tool with many uses is valuable.

Teach self-defense; discover that people are hurt and/or killed by a LOT of other things besides round kicks and back-fists; learn what these things are –and integrate them into your curriculum.

Abandon the pursuit of business, become a martial artist committed to enlightenment and service; suddenly realize that this IS the business –and that you now have something (more)valuable to sell that serves you (spiritually) serves your students, serves the community, and serves the world. Realize that’s why you came here in the first place.

OK, with all of that out of the way, I am here to talk to you about your business –and what it’s going to be like in the future.

First off, recognize that our business is life-coaching, not teaching self-defense/exercise.

Exercise is self-defense from ill health. A healthy diet is self-defense from food-related health issues –and the food we consume has a direct effect on the planet, so consciousness about food production and what it does to the world is a form of global self-defense (like it or not, your consumption has a ripple effect far beyond your dinner table).

Practicing meditation is a form of perspective self-defense. Developing a positive and healthy perspective about things like defeat, food, consumerism, relationships, competition, death, impermanence, detachment, and compassion (the short-short list) is mental self-defense. Mental self-defense is the ability to use your mind to create understanding, happiness, health, connection and compassion as opposed to pain, suffering, jealousy, envy, lust, addiction, and hate (another short list).

Community involvement is self-defense from selfishness, narcissism, disconnection, and isolation. Practicing forgiveness and compassion is a form of spiritual self-defense. Spiritual self-defense is the ability to understand, feel, and put to use the idea that we are all of the same family, that we are all more connected than we are disconnected, and that there is nothing more important than love, kindness, compassion for others, and non-violent solutions to our problems. Spiritual self-defense is the idea that we would behave the way, now, that we would if our maker, our God, our _______ (name the person, place, thing, or idea that you would do and be your absolute best for) were here –and watching us.

Now, let me reiterate:

Recognize that our business is life-coaching, not teaching self-defense/exercise, not teaching a complicated skill-set of maneuvers and movements designed to prepare us for hand-to-hand combat. It is not found in the selling of belt programs, of contracts, and of retail gear. Our business is not about simply building self-confidence –we are in the business of LIFE and COACHING and COMMUNITY and UNDERSTANDING.

Now, understand this:

The purpose of your training is to be an example of the benefits derived from the study and practice of the martial arts. This is the best thing you can do for your school, for your students, for your community, and for the world. Getting your own poop together –makes it a LOT easier to help others get theirs together too. And on the other side of that note that helping other people get their stuff together is part of the way you get your own stuff together.

It’s a real give and take, isn’t it? That’s a good thing.

About Your Business

You’re only going to teach people to expand their skills to the place where you have expanded your own. You might fake some of that for awhile, but it won’t fool people for very long. The plan is to expand your own skills, your own awareness, your own level of compassion, understanding, your own sense of humanity, your own wisdom, your own centeredness, your own sense of community connectedness, your own inner-Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, or _________ (name your favorite spiritual person, place, or thing here).

Do this and you have something of real, deep, meaningful value. You can then give something to your students that they take with them into their life, something wise, something needed, something that will serve them and protect them better than any technique.

Let me break, here –to make a point:

Which of the following things cause more pain and suffering in the world?

Jabs and right crosses or emotional isolation?

Arm bars or anger?

Side and/or round kicks or unhealthy diets?

Foot sweeps and take-downs or bigotry?

Wrist locks or ignorance?

Knife hand strikes or greed?

Knee attacks or depression?

Our business is the business of making the world a better, safer, more compassionate place. We should go about it methodically, our first step being the introduction of a kind of practice, a physical/mental/emotional/spiritual exercise that helps us battle the ego, helps us see more clearly, helps us deal with the fear, helps us to find our center.

This work is harder than learning a kata, harder to do than mastering a technique, more challenging than running a successful business, but more fulfilling than just about anything else in the world.

A Request and/or Suggestion

I’d like to ask something of you. Consider it a request and/or a suggestion:

I’d like to ask you to ask more of yourself, this year, than you have in the last 10.

I’d like to ask you to renew your study –with a new perspective and a new idea of what you/we are here to do.

I’d like to ask you to re-craft your school’s mission statement, your curriculum, your goals, purpose, and intent to reflect a new understanding of your purpose here.

I’d like to ask you find a group of spiritually evolved people, not necessarily in your neighborhood, who you respect enough/so much, that when they speak, you will listen.

I would like to ask you to look very carefully, very deeply at who you’re hanging out with.

I’d like to ask you to step out of the current methods and intend of martial arts school management advice –and see if there isn’t something bigger, more valuable, and more relevant to today’s world just waiting there for you to embrace it.

I don’t know how to plot your course, exactly, from this place –but I do believe that this is the best work, the best contemplation, the best beginning for your school, your career, your business, your students, and the world.

Tom Callos

Expectations of Your Involvement in the Ultimate Black Belt Test

2008-04-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

Expectations of Your Involvement in the Ultimate Black Belt Test

Toss a rock in a still pond and watch the ripples of the impact fan out from the center. This is how I see your involvement in the UBBT. At the center are your own personal achievements; at the outside is the effect you have on the entire “pond.”

First

Your commitment to the UBBT, which is your commitment to your personal test, should first be a physical one:

Alter your diet by eliminating junk and paying very close attention to what you consume (conscious consumption).
Increase your cardio training, in whatever form suits you.
Increase your strength training, in whatever form suits you.
Practice your martial arts to the point of mastering those skills you’ve decided to focus on for this period of time.

You need to lean out, muscle up, and get rid of that belly. You should come to your final test looking like you’re in the best shape of your life. If you intend to test for rank, this is an absolute must.

Your form should be a masterpiece; as an example:

Here are some Japanese form masterpieces: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU2hqaaK8AA

Here’s an example of a Wu Shu masterpiece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ7oDlXq9BM

Your martial arts skills should show that you prepared yourself with hundreds of hours of practice for your performance.

Second

You are expected to treat your UBBT team exactly the way you would want your own black belts to treat their own teammates. Do it in a way that shows your students exactly how it’s supposed to be done.

Third

Craft your story in journal and video. While you are a student, always, you are also a teacher, always. Your documentation and test-diaries should explain and illustrate the ABC’s of test preparation –to the best of your abilities. After your test is over, you’re students should be able to review your journals and learn from them, they should model your approach to testing. If you are not doing this test to teach others how a test is to be done, they you have missed a significant opportunity.

Fourth

Your test must engage other people; your students –and your community. At some point, you should realize that your test isn’t all about you, only. In the “ultimate” test, many other people would be affected by your commitment, inspired by your actions, and involved in their own self-improvement because of your efforts.

Fifth

Your 13 month test should add up to be something more significant that a test of your physical endurance. You need to look for a WOW that can be initiated during your year. That WOW can take almost any shape, but it something indicative of understanding of the expanding role of the martial arts teacher –in the world.

In Closing

The UBBT isn’t just a black belt test, it’s a movement to improve the quality of education provided by martial arts schools around the world. Your test must set an example for the industry, you must, at whatever level you happen to be at, understand each layer of the project –and commit yourself to excellence, even in failure.

Tom

Interview with Tom Callos for Martialinfo.com about the Ultimate Black Belt Test, The100., and a New Vision for Martial Arts Teachers

2008-04-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

Conducted by phone, April 22, 2008 by Fariborz Azhakh of www.martialinfo.com

Martialinfo: Would you provide us with a little of your background?

Tom Callos: Martial arts wise, I was 6-years old when I saw the first episode of The Green Hornet (1966) featuring Bruce Lee as Kato, 9-years-old when I watched my first judo class (the instructor would invite me on the mat after the adults-only classes and show me how to roll and fall), and 11-years old when I first joined a school. That was 1971.

I received my black belt in taekwondo in 1979, and moved to San Jose, CA to join Master Ernie Reyes’ school in 1980. I opened my first school in 1981 and in 1991 I was overseeing two schools, 10 miles apart with a total active enrollment (at their peak) of about 800 students. Due to my success at the schools, I was invited to join Educational Funding Company’s Board of Directors, which is when I started becoming a teacher and consultant to the martial arts industry. Since then I have worked with most of the key companies in the martial arts industry. In 2003 I created the Ultimate Black Belt Test and in the following year I started working on my own martial arts association, The 100.

Martialinfo: Explain the Ultimate Black Belt Test.

Tom Callos: The UBBT is a complete redesign of the testing process. It expands the purpose of a test, it expands the nature of training for a test, and it investigates and redefines the objectives for all rank testing in the first place. The UBBT is designed to be the most challenging and authentic black belt test in the world, but it was also designed to improve the martial arts industry.

Martialinfo: How does the UBBT improve the industry?

Tom Callos: A friend of mine, John Bielenberg, is a well known teacher and innovator in the graphic design world. One of his primary slogans is Think Wrong, which spells out his viewpoint about conventional approaches to design, creativity, and problem solving.

The UBBT helps the industry by thinking wrong about what activities make the martial artist smarter, better equipped to cope with self-defense issues beyond the obvious physical ones, about the best ways to show and tell the general public the benefits of the martial arts, and about what role a martial arts teacher is supposed to play in the world.

You see, I believe in the power of the individual to make a difference in the world. My heroes are people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ali, and just about any person who has taken action for others, for a cause, on the side of right. I believe that a martial arts teacher is supposed to teach, educate, and empower his or her students to fight the big battles, to tackle issues that might scare others, issues that relate to personal protection, protection of family and community, and even of the planet.

The problem is most martial arts schools don’t know how to integrate these ideas into their curriculum. They don’t understand, yet, how to take their martial arts out of their schools –and put it to work in the world. There will be a giant shift in the industry, a huge upgrade in the perceived value of martial arts training, and a monumental change in what a martial arts teacher does in the world when school owners and teachers finally get the scope and intent of this new kind of martial arts educational mission.

Martialinfo: Does the UBBT’s curriculum contain the ingredients for this new mission you describe?

Tom Callos: It does, in part. There are requirements in the UBBT’s curriculum that might force a teacher to step out of his or her comfort zone. The curriculum requires the participant to get off the mat and into the community. It asks people to learn meditation, to get outdoors, to help others, to mend relationships, and to learn new things.

But there is something the curriculum doesn’t contain that is a vital part of the work. That missing ingredient is my belief that martial arts teachers should be extraordinary people –and I mean extraordinary in the image of people like Mandela, Armstrong, Julia Butterfly Hill, Gore, Dita Sari, and Wangari Mattai.

I mean, if a martial arts teacher and/or veteran practitioner doesn’t have the courage, the perseverance, the self-discipline, and the fortitude to tackle issues relevant to people’s health and well being, then who does? If a martial arts master teacher doesn’t know how to make his or her work more meaningful, more effective, more relevant to the world today, then what’s all this training for?

Do kicking, punching, and throwing contain all the value of the martial arts? Or is there something beyond the physical? And if there is something else, then is it meant only for individual benefit, or can it be applied to the world?

My job is to do for the role of martial arts teacher what Ernie Reyes and the West Coast Demo Team did for the martial arts competition world, what Dana White and his colleagues did for mixed martial arts fighting. I think martial arts teachers are in the perfect position to be leaders in a new global view of self-defense, a view that looks at the big picture, and a view that transcends the current definition of ‘what are the martial arts for.’

The UBBT and the 100. are both parts of a community that nurtures and encourages instructors to expand their curriculum, to step out of their schools, and to embrace a kind of thinking that may be new to the martial arts, but that is common among the most self-actualized, cognizant, proactive citizens of the world.

Martialinfo: What is The 100.?

Tom Callos: The 100. is my martial arts association and it was inspired by Rosa Parks. Rosa was a 43 year old African-American seamstress who took action at the right time and place and as a result, helped make history. I started The 100. with the idea that 100 martial arts teachers, I mean people who have spent their entire lives forging themselves to be warriors and teachers, ought to be able to equal the power of one Rosa Parks. Couldn’t we create the right time and place? Couldn’t we see injustice and do something about it? The 100. is an association about martial arts business for people who believe it is our business to make a difference beyond the ring and outside of the dojo.

Martialinfo: So the UBBT is about testing and The 100. is a about activism?

Tom Callos: All my work points to the same place. It’s all about walking the talk of the potential of martial arts training. It’s all about a kind of martial arts teacher that is a hero to others, a living example of martial arts principals put into action.

Martialinfo: Do you have members who are examples of your ideas?

Tom Callos: Mike and Karen Valentine of San Rafael, CA have the first officially Green Certified school in the nation and they have the first ever ocean-based cleanup requirements for black belt testing. What this tells the general public is ‘See, we’re not just fighters, we’re warriors for a better, healthier world too.’ Tim Rosenelli of Pennsylvania is now using his degree in environmental engineering in his martial arts school and it’s bringing him students he would never have met otherwise. Dan and Kim Rominski, Alicia Kastner, Bryan Klein, and Charles Chi, all of New Jersey, are running acts of kindness programs that are making community leaders stop, look, and listen to the martial art in a way that had never happened before. Brian Williams of Nevada has started the One Million Acts foundation where he’s working on getting people all around the nation involved in performing one million acts of kindness. UBBT member Andy Mandell is on the last 1000 miles of a 10,000 mile walk around the perimeter of the U.S. for diabetes education.

What’s happening is that the UBBT and The 100.are expanding the role of the martial arts teacher in the world. We’re practicing a new kind of martial arts that isn’t just physical, but that transcends the subject matter.

Martialinfo: So, someone we know recently called you a “Tree-hugger.” Are you?

Tom Callos: (laughs) No, I’m much more than that, there’s just not a name for it yet. I’m a martial arts teacher that believes in the power of the martial arts to make change. I believe that the fear I faced and defeated on the mat and in the ring was meant to be applied to other things. I believe in martial arts mastery –and I think it’s my job to carry on the work my martial arts teachers, people like GM Jhoon Rhee and Master Ernie Reyes, Sr., have been doing. I think I’m supposed to add to the martial arts world, not just exist in it.

Master Reyes was always fearless in the way he attacked competition and our demo team performances. I think he was showing us what could be done if you focused. I think he meant to empower his students with a belief that we should ‘go for the WOW.’ With the examples of my teachers and heroes, how could I shoot for anything other than something powerful, meaningful, and important?

Martialinfo.com: Are you still accepting people in the UBBT and the 100?

Tom Callos: Any time, any place. My only requirement is courage and the understanding that we are here to do something unbelievable, something most people can’t even get their head around. I’m looking for people who are tired of the status quo and who are willing to try new things to see what happens.

Martialinfo.com: Thank you for taking the time to talk.

Tom Callos: It is my honor to be here and to have an audience for these concepts.

Tom Callos may be reached at tomcallos@gmail.com. The UBBT’s address is www.ultimateblackbelttest.com, The 100’s is www.theonehundred.org.

Watch for a recorded interview with Tom Callos to be aired soon on the NPR radio program Speaking of Faith at www.speakingoffaith.org.

Fighting Belongs in the Ring

2008-03-31T16:55:00.000-07:00

Fighting Belongs in the Ring

By tom callos

I have been grappling (no pun intended) with the brutality of fighting in the UFC and the other MMA fighting venues. I mean, on one hand, I love it. I love the technical aspects of the fighting, the diversity and no-nonsense realism. On the other hand, I am often repelled by the violence, by the crowd’s behavior, and the spectacle of it all. I attended a UFC event in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and before and in-between the bouts they broadcast –on giant screen TV’s in the stadium –these images of a Roman gladiator preparing for and then walking into the Coliseum. I had to look around me at the other spectators and wonder if anyone else saw the irony in it.

As I understand it, the gladiator games were used by the Roman government to appease the masses –they entertained the general population and kept them distracted from the harsh realities of their own lives – while allowing the Government to do, for the most part, as it pleased. With the “war” in Iraq and all the other shenanigans of our and other governments, I couldn’t help but think about the statement that “history repeats itself.”

Until recently this love-hate relationship with the spectacle of professional MMA fighting had been going on in my head –and then BOOM, one day I just got it. I realized that the ring is exactly where fighting belongs –and that it is a million-times more civil, more dignified, more acceptable, and more just than fighting that takes place outside of the ring.

Fighting belongs in the ring, not in the streets. Fighting between two consenting adults, trained and ready, is the way fighting should go; it should never involve innocent men, women, and children. Children should not become homeless or lose members of their family because one government has a beef with another. We shouldn’t force children to run, burned and naked, from their homes –or risk being blown up by land-mines or unexploded munitions because two political bodies are fighting over the control of resources. Fighting in the ring between MMA fighters is at the top of the fighting food chain –while fat politicians sending poor kids from Michigan to fight useless battles for nothing (but in the name of “freedom”), is at the bottom.

In professional fighting you don’t have to see the mutilated bodies of innocent children, you don’t have to tend to villages blown to bits; you don’t have to worry about car bombs blowing out the eyeballs of your loved ones. No, from now on, when someone asks me if I think MMA is too brutal, too violent, I’m going to tell them that fighting in the ring is the most civilized and non-violent form of fighting and that, in fact, fighting ONLY belongs in the ring.

I’ll teach my students, from here on out, that fighting in classes, on the mat, and in the ring is noble and that it serves a purpose. It is the only way fighting should manifest itself; that is, as a game or contest. When you fight in the ring, you face yourself, your fears, your strengths and weaknesses. There are spectators who enjoy the game you have prepared yourself to play –and there is a referee to keep the game on track and to keep the contestants from being permanently injured. Both participants willingly step into the ring; they’re not conscripted or coerced to be there. They go into the fight of their own free will. When it’s over, they’ll give each other a handshake or a hug, and there won’t be anybody’s life or lifestyle ruined because these two fighters got in the ring and fought each other.

So all of you professional martial arts teachers out there –encourage your students to fight, in the ring –and never, unless for self-defense, anywhere else. The next time you watch an MMA bout or any professional fight, enjoy the fact that the two athletes in the ring are playing a game –and while they may often be young, brash, and theatrical, their contest isn’t going to kill innocent people. Their fight isn’t going to make any mothers and fathers wail in sorrow –the victims of insane politics.

Instructions for members of the UBBT and the 100

2008-03-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Instructions for members of the UBBT and the 100 from Tom Callos

You probably know that my work isn't about your black belt test or simply having a martial arts "association." At first glance that is what the UBBT and the 100 might appear to be. No, my/our work is about re-crafting the mission, the purpose, and the intent of the martial arts "industry" –but wait, it isn't just about that either.

The work, from a big picture perspective, is about re-crafting the role of the "martial arts teacher" in the world. It is about making the martial arts school a place where education about peace, responsibility, sustainability, environmentalism, compassion, and activism are taught, encouraged, and practiced.

This work is about taking all of the things the martial arts claims to promote –and seeing those ideas manifest themselves in all sorts of new, relevant, powerful, useful, and quantifiable ways.

All of the martial arts organizations that currently exist, like NAPMA, MAIA, EFC, The WTF, The JKA, and you-name-it, are valuable to the martial arts world. Each serves some purpose, whether it is to promote competition, distribute business resources and information, or collect tuition. The UBBT and the 100 aren't in competition with these groups, as we are (currently) operating from a completely different place.

While business, competition, collecting money, and staying informed about trends and happenings within the martial arts industry are a part –and sometimes a big part –of our work, these things don't adequately represent the soul of our work. We are here to bring peace, compassion, understanding, and awareness to the world –which, some might argue, is the potential and obligation of every man and woman on the planet.

Speaking personally, I am not a student of the man or woman driving the Porsche, wearing the Rolex, living in the mansion, dressing in Prada and Armani, and living a life focused on hording, consuming, and personal pleasure. While all of these things aren't necessarily evil, I simply do not see them as outward signs of authentic achievement and success. But I am deeply moved, impressed, and inspired by men and women who hear a higher calling; people who take action to make the world a better place, people who act like you might expect Jesus or Buddha to act, if they walked the Earth today.

The point here is that I am calling on you, Mr. and Ms. Martial Arts Teacher, to be something more than a business-person, more than a self-defense instructor, more than a competitor, and more than a teacher of the art of __________ (fill in whatever you call your method). I'm asking you to be a role model for the modern and cognizant citizen. I am asking you and expecting you (if you're drawn to the work) to:

Teach peace education, in all of its forms, to your students and community –and to do it alongside the things you currently teach. In the future, every school will teach as much about peace and with the same thoroughness and repetition that it teaches the intricacies of its various martial arts. I would think that it shouldn't be much longer that you, the Master Teacher of your school, would be the most vocal and proactive peace education advocate in your community.

Teach Environmental Self-Defense. I am asking you, as a very first step, to require all of your green belt testers to perform and record 5 to 10 "acts of environmental self-defense" as a part of their testing curriculum. I think you should be a living example of someone who is fully aware of his or her impact on the environment –and as proactive about reducing their impact on the planet as possible. All it requires is self-discipline and awareness, which is something your training was supposed to give you –so use it for the good of mankind.

Engage in Project Based Leadership Training (PBLT). Leadership training in the martial arts world is all too often a sham. Schools that sell leadership courses are often lacking in any real, quantifiable program. The idea is right, but the methods are lacking, haphazard, or non-existent. PBLT is about taking what you teach on the mat and seeing it used in the real world. I expect each of you to engage and record your own projects so that we may prove their value, prove our intent, and inspire the next generation of martial artists to follow suit.

Be a part of this movement. I expect you to engage in the team effort –despite your schedule, your obligations, your troubles, and your opinions. If YOU can't reach out and connect, if YOU can't make time, if YOU can't do what most people can't find the wherewithal to do...then WHO WILL? WHO CAN? If not YOU, who has the inner-strength, the heightened awareness, the self-discipline, the focus, and the perseverance to do it? With this message today, you have the opportunity to either demote yourself to the rank of fitness teacher/business owner/self-defense instructor, or you can promote yourself to Martial Arts Master Teacher of the 21^st Century. We have a mission, a purpose, and calling to fulfill.

Note: I may be "the leader" of this "thing" at the present time, but I expect you to share the position in the near future. I expect you to take ownership of the ideas –and to stay connected in a way (a most difficult way for most people) that puts the work and the mission above business, above petty misunderstandings, above disagreements, above style and system. If YOU can't do this, if WE can't do it –then who can?

Specifically, I expect you to contribute, to be vocal, to help your fellow teammates, to support our activities, and to DO AND BE what it is we are working on. Start with our website, YOUR journals, and our activities. If you don't participate, it' could all go way --and you can then go back to the "conventions" to find your inspiration and team.

Eat like a champion. What you consume makes a difference in your own health and for the planet. I fully expect you to eliminate 90% (minimum) of any and all processed junk from your diet. We've accepted dietary mediocrity, for a number of reasons, for most of our lives, but the time is now to change. You must serve as a role model for a generation of people who are eating themselves sick. It is the very least I would expect from a real master.

Forget the current accepted business model in the martial arts world –as it is today. Our potential is so much greater than what we currently see. There are SO MANY tools we could be using, so much more we could be asking for, so much more we could be adding to the requirements of our various belt levels. We do what we do in the martial arts world at the moment because it was the best we could muster under the circumstances. We had no idea what the world was to become, what problems we would be faced with, what technologies would come to light. Our teachers didn't always have a way to make us wake up to what they were thinking, learning, and experiencing –and we weren't paying attention anyway, as there are some things that almost everyone tries to tell you –but that can't be understood until you have enough experience.

We are NOT breaking tradition –we are doing the very work that those old men and women, those old masters, would be proud to see us do. When the founder of modern karate said, "The ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of the participant," wasn't he talking to us? When the founder of Aikido wrote, "Peace originates with the flow of things — its heart is like the movement of the wind and waves. The Way is like the veins that circulate blood through our bodies, following the natural flow of the life force. If you are separated in the slightest from that divine essence, you are far off the path," wasn't he speaking of something outside of the dojo, outside of the ring? Of course he was.

I am asking you to BE the ultimate black belt. To redefine what it is to be a master teacher, a martial artist, and a leader. The UBBT and the 100 must be made up of people who are willing to put their martial arts training to work –to the test. ARE THE MARTIAL ARTS only about war and war-related issues, or are the martial arts about life? Is the practice of the martial arts supposed to bring about any sort of clarity –or is the UFC the highest manifestation of skill for the martial arts teacher?

I charge for these programs because this is all I do –and I must support myself and my family. But for me, this work is not my "model for financial success." My "job" is to ask a whole bunch of martial arts people to take a small part of their time, energy, and resources and put them together to win the championship of a CAREER, A LIFE, WELL LIVED. In a big way, I am simply looking around the "classroom" and asking my classmates if we can tackle "this job" (whatever "this job" is). I think "this job" is making this martial arts journey of ours, this "thing" we have dedicated our lives to –something we can be proud of. I think it is about making this all mean something, something important, something that our most esteemed heroes would look at and say, "Hey, good work there, my friend."

When I was coming up the ranks as a martial arts competitor and performer, I was all about pushing my body to its limits. Now, with 37 years of marital arts study –and being "a senior teacher" of the martial arts, I am all about expanding my potential as a teacher, a citizen, a man, a husband, a father, a part of humanity, a student of Parks of Gandhi of Schweitzer of King of Carson of Mandela of Hahn and of so many other people who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to do what it needed, what is right, what is within their/our potential.

This is what I am expecting of you, too.

You have it within you. This is our community –for support, for reminders, for help, and friendship. It's almost nothing –and yet, it is, potentially, so much.

Tom

Martial Arts and the World - a Letter from Tom Callos

2008-03-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

Written to members of the UBBT and the 100:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I offer you a chance to be a more active part of something that is bigger than your school, your business, your commute, your personal habits, your training, your duties, your agenda, and your schedule.

I would like to extend to you an invitation to spend a small amount of your time in joining forces with 100 + teachers around the nation (and the world) to bring some needed ideas and practices to all the students, families, and communities that we represent.

Those "needed ideas" involve a unified and cooperative effort to bring such things as PEACE EDUCATION (in any or all of its forms), ANGER MANAGEMENT, DIABETES EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENTAL SELF-DEFENSE, DIETARY SELF-DEFENSE, and PROJECT BASED LEADERSHIP TRAINING to...Oh, about a 250,000 to a million people +.

Most importantly, however, is the conscious choice and effort --and realization --that you are or could be a part of a movement in the martial arts community to bring radical change to the what, where, why, and how of the martial arts. We can, if we combine forces, accomplish a number of things we might never be able to do alone.

You could, if you look carefully, recognize that I am reaching some kind of limit in what I can accomplish as an individual --and if you know me, you might appreciate that I am, rather consistently, chasing some big and fairly elusive objectives. I need help --and I would like to help you too --by engaging you in a revolution of thinking and action among a group of people who, I think, are perfectly suited to take on something of this nature.

We would do well to find ways to contribute more consistently, to stay on track with national and international objectives, to be more unified in our approach to what it is we are, in our "spare time" working on.

Honestly, I don't want to "run a program" --I want to make change in a way that allows us to look back on what we're doing and know that we REALLY, REALLY took it to "the next level." Why? Because we could...because when everyone else sat around and debated their gross incomes, their after school programs, their taxes, their latest holiday, who won the last UFC, and their what-ever ----we were pursuing an effort to bring social change thru education and action.

I'm proposing that you become a MASTER TEACHER in a new light --under a new definition of what a Master Teacher is -and what that title means. We could commit ourselves to fitness, to health education, to environmental education, and to all sorts of other easy-to-implement ideas...we could commit ourselves to implementing -in a unified and aggressive way -programs that were indicative of our potential. We could all come together in some way -in many different ways - and work on making history in a way that represents our life's work --our love for our chosen profession. We could, in doing this, leave a legacy for the future --for everyone who ever teaches the martial arts.

What I / we need is your participation. We can't make much happen if you allow yourself to become so busy, too busy, to recognize the limited amount of time we have left --and the opportunities which are presenting themselves. Truth be told, we might have a 10 to 20 year max "window of opportunity" to do something amazing. In 10 years I will almost be 60 years old --and every adult male in my family (except one) has died before the age of 65. Some of you are already in your 50's and 60's ---so, really, why wait?

Can you get involved? Can you contribute SOMETHING, some level of energy, of participation, of dialog, of resources? Can you recognize that these projects, the UBBT and The 100 might just represent the most forward thinking, progressive non-physical-based martial arts associations in the world? Can you appreciate how we are jockeying ourselves into a position, politically, to make the martial arts industry something worth being involved in?

Or are you going to "take the ubbt" --and then disappear back into your own circle of activities?

I'm out here hoping to engage you --I'm hoping to do something that allows you to contribute on a level worth contributing on. I'm not saying your work, as it is, isn't good or valuable...but let me tell you, I'm seeing a chance for us to Nobel Peace Prize this thing ---to bring something to the world that touches people --and that speaks of all the "stuff" we'd like to believe about "martial arts masters" --but that currently doesn't really exist.

I don't want to "kick people out of this program" ---but MY GOD you men and women, what is wrong with this picture? Are you content with NAPMA and MAIA and the "business approach?" Do you have something going on that's better than what we're working on? If so, tell me! I WANT TO HELP. I am compelled to help. Or are you going to be like every other Tom, Dick, and Sally out there ---and be too busy to engage?

I really wish I could reach you. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree? Maybe that's why I haven't been able to engage 100 powerful and proactive masters to unite as a team and bring some sanity to this trivial pursuit of ours. Maybe people are just better left to their "own thing" and I ought to quit trying to rally troops who don't really hear the call?

It's my heroes. It's those damned heroes. I look at them and I feel like they're looking at me --and expecting me to recognize the opportunity, the responsibility. They opened some kind of door --and I think I'm supposed to follow suit, I think I'm supposed to give a shit about the world, about one person's ability to make a difference -and some kind of obligation to something noble and right and beyond the scope of that which hypnotizes the masses to do nothing but the minimum to get by --and yet justify their inactivity.

Am I supposed to feel this sense of duty -or am I just an ego-maniac? Am I really out here working because there is a genuine opportunity -or am I just an opportunist? Is Thich Nhat Hahn calling me to action? Did Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and all those other amazing human beings try to compel me and others to DO SOMETHING, or am I just way, way, way out of my league?

Should I just shut up and appreciate the fact that I am just a martial arts teacher --and run my school?

Slide Show for the Ultimate Black Belt Test

2008-03-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

Tom Callos on Courage, The Teacher, and Martial Arts Business

2008-03-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have a view on what martial arts teachers should teach; that is, what they should teach beyond the physical aspects of the martial arts.

Perhaps you share this viewpoint with me?

I think a martial arts teacher needs to teach his or her students to use courage when it is needed. On a very base level, it takes courage to stand toe-to-toe with an opponent of equal or greater skill. However, summing up the courage it takes to fight or compete in a contest is just a drop in the bucket of what courage is really needed for in today's world.

If a martial arts teacher only manages to impart the idea of courage as it relates to kicking, punching, and grappling, well...what an injustice it is to the student! It takes courage to go against the flow of popular opinion. It takes courage to try a new business venture when most fail within their first five years. It takes courage to live with integrity, to be a good parent, to be a good mate, to accept our blunders, to open our hearts to other people.

It takes courage to do what is right, when the powers-that-be disagree.

The kind of courage we practice on the mat or in the ring is the drip coming from the kitchen faucet. The kind of courage we need to be fully aware and alive in the moment, in our lives, and in the lives of those around us, is the Colorado River in spring. How shallow is the thinking of a martial arts teacher whose lessons only involve the technical aspects of fighting?

To teach courage in a way that is powerful and lasting, one must take a look at courage on a global scale; as there is courage –and then there is Rosa Parks courage, Wangari Maathai courage, Martin Luther King courage, Aung San Suu Kyi courage.

Why is it that martial arts teachers embrace the most extreme forms of hand to hand combat without much thought, yet don't approach the idea of teaching courage from a big-picture (global) perspective? I think it's simply a matter of improper focus -and inadequate influences. We become so insulated in our schools that we begin to think the mat and the ring is the world –and out of the desire to teach people the skills of the martial arts, we have forgotten how unimportant they are, unless applied, courageously, to the world outside of the dojo.

It takes courage to look at injustice –and more courage to do something about it. The courage it takes to be a warrior is wasted, if the battles aren't worth fighting. In the Ultimate Black Belt Test, each participant is required to profile 10 living heroes. The reason for this is to expose the instructor to a level of courage-in-the-world that puts the subject of what courage is in proper perspective.

My 10 Living heroes are The Dalai Lama; Thich Nhat Hahn; Wangari Maathai; Aung San Suu Kyi; Julia Hill; Muhammad Yunus; Nelson Mandela; Shirin Ebadi; Pamela Dorr; and Sarah Chayes. These are (some of) the masters of courage --like Kano, Ueshiba, and Funakoshi were the masters of their respective disciplines. When you look at courage from their perspective, you get a much better grip on what courage is –and how it might be used in the world.

The kind of courage it takes to practice and compete in the martial arts is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $250 a month. The kind of courage it takes to make change in the world cannot be measured in dollars, but it is exactly the kind of teaching that a martial arts instructor has the opportunity to address --and, if he or she is wise enough, this is the kind of teaching that takes a martial arts school from a business --to an institution.

If you (Mr. and Ms. Martial Arts Teacher) want your lessons to hold a higher value, then get out of your school and get into the world --and then get the world to come onto your mat.

Meet This Teacher of The Martial Arts Not

2008-02-28T14:22:00.001-08:00

To my Dear Friends in the Martial Arts Industry / World (from Tom Callos):

I am writing you this letter to introduce you to one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn.

You may listen to a radio interview with Thay (“Teacher” in Vietnamese) by following this link:

CLICK HERE FOR RADIO INTERVIEW WITH Thich Nhat Hahn

Thay isn’t wise because he’s a Zen monk or a Buddhist or a revered figure or a historical icon, he’s wise because he so eloquently and precisely talks the talk and walks the walk of the absolute opposite of violence.

He knows how to talk about peace and compassion and finding one’s center in a way that is so clear, perfect, and enlightened that if you listen carefully, you will instantly absorb some of his wisdom.

It’s the kind of wisdom, I think, martial arts teachers should know and have (study) as well as they know how to block punches and kicks. It’s the kind of wisdom that popular fiction (take the TV series KUNG FU for example) often connects to martial arts “masters,” but that you and I both know isn’t taught at martial arts conventions or in the magazines or well, almost anywhere in the “martial arts industry” (and that’s a shame, as the world could use a lot more wisdom and a lot less “martial.”).

I’m not selling you something here –I’m just telling you that the first time I heard Thich Nhat Hahn was like the first time I saw a Bruce Lee movie. It was like the first time I saw Royce win the UFC. On all three occasions, I instantly became a better martial artist –moved and inspired by the obvious mastery of these individuals.

In our world (the martial arts world), we’re so completely inundated with the calls to “get our gross up” and to be a “martial arts millionaire” and with all the hoopla from the UFC and MMA, with all the association-based political neck squeezing, and with every other business guru trying to tell us (and sell us) on the latest business strategy –well, I find Thich Nhat Hahn’s dialogue a much needed break from all this trivial financial ego-focused voodoo.

In the end, I think Thich Nhat Hahn is the Bruce Lee of common sense and usable wisdom for the martial arts teacher. I hope you’ll take the time to listen to something I think is monumentally important to our industry –and the world.

Tom Callos

The Nobel Peace Prize

2008-02-25T18:51:00.000-08:00

To the Members and Friends of KAMA, From Tom Callos, Following the Los Angeles Convention:

I have to tell you I enjoyed myself this last weekend, spending time with KAMA members and sharing ideas. As often happens at seminars, we hear all kinds of good things, but soon after forget about them as "life" once again steps heavily on the gas pedal.

For that reason, allow me, if you will, to remind you about some of what we discussed –and offer a couple of "follow-up" suggestions:

Anger Management Training

Go to www.angercoachonline.com and click on the training program for martial arts teachers. It's a brand new program –and I want to convince you that is represents the highest level of intelligent, benefit-driven education in the martial arts world. This isn't some slick strategy for increasing your gross income, this is wisdom and tradition wrapped in education. Let's OWN anger management training in our respective communities. Let's arm children with the tools they need to make the world, truly, "a better and more peaceful place." Dr. Tony has agreed to extend the KAMA event discount to Friday of this coming week. Call me if you need help registering –or if you would like to discuss any sort of strategy for using anger control training to your advantage.

The Ultimate Black Belt Test

The UBBT is the future of black belt testing –of all testing. Ask yourself this: Is your black belt test the ultimate? If not, what would make it so? And why would you not do something that made your testing, your training, your martial arts better, more relevant (to the world as it is today), and more important?

Are you restricted because of tradition? Are you afraid that change will make the end product less powerful? Less important?

Are you in a "comfort zone" of testing and training methods?

Whether you choose to engage in this grand experiment or not, it is time to reevaluate, re-design, and re-engineer the what, why, how, who, and when of black belt testing. The world needs help –and we can provide it. Call me if you want to talk about how to make your martial arts transcend the current status quo. Tom Callos 530-903-0286.

The Kukiwon and Taekwondo in General

To the Grandmasters and Masters who attended the event, I would like your help in securing a meeting with those people in the governing body of Taekwondo who would be willing to open a discussion about how we might collectively craft a new and/or altered mission for Taekwondo in the world.

Taekwondo put its sights on the Olympic Games –and succeeded in making it happen. Could Taekwondo also secure a Nobel Peace Prize for its work in the world? Could the millions of followers of this art take action in a way that could make the world a better and more peaceful place?

There is a literal Taekwondo army out there in the world; could the leadership of Taekwondo use this army for something amazing, something spectacular? Could we accomplish a billion recorded acts of kindness in 12 months? Could we implement a peace education program and reach a million youth? Could we take Taekwondo out of the dojang and into the world in a way that no sports activity, no martial art has ever done before?

If it is within our "realm of possibilities" --then why not?

We inspire people all over this planet to do millions and millions of techniques –every day/week/month/year. Could we also ask them for something else? What if we took on environmental education, diabetes, dietary self-defense, peace education, and/or anger management? With technology as it is today, how hard would it be to talk to and convince Taekwondo practitioners worldwide to put their training into action for the world?

Could KAMA start this movement?

If you are politically connected in a way that can offer ANY help in this matter –if you can help facilitate a discussion and/or meeting about the possibility of Taekwondo being connected to a new kind of world strategy, please don't hesitate to contact me; this is just the kind of project I would like to invest my energy in.

Thank you again for the privilege of being able to share time and ideas with you!

Your friend,

Tom Callos

Martial Arts Philosphy and Our TRAINING

2008-02-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

I just wrote a note to someone about...well, “life.” Specifically, I wrote about a current situation, debating the pros and cons about how to proceed in a certain matter, and I wrote the phrase:

“If I fall back on my training...”

That made me take pause –as I had to consider what “my training” had been.

And that made me think of the book Dune, the science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. In Dune, many of the characters had, from early in their lives, received specialized training, which gave them tools that they used to get what they want, to pursue their various missions, and to cope with whatever life threw their way.

“If I fall back on my training...”

Like the characters in Dune, I’ve been “in training” since the age of 11 –and that training, if we look at it from a certain perspective, was aimed to give me certain skills.

Now the question is: What were those skills supposed to be –and what were they supposed to do for me? Were there certain powers I was supposed to be developing? Was the training for a purpose beyond being able to kick and punch? Beyond fighting? Beyond the development of the obvious physical skills?

These questions lead me to what I am today, what I do, and what our potential is as teachers of the martial arts.

What, for that matter, are the martial arts for? And what is the end result we, collectively, desire out of the work we do with our students? What ideology are we imparting? Do we have a collective “mission?”

“If I fall back on my training...”

Looking back, I think much of my training was haphazard; and if not haphazard, then it was simply –and probably unintentionally –trivialized.

Does a teacher teach his or her student how to read books for the purpose of reading books? Or is to unlock the ideas contained in them?

Likewise, do we, as martial arts teachers, teach the techniques of the martial arts just so that our students can execute technique? Or do we teach what we teach to help our students learn something else hidden within the practice?

Does the physical practice, does the time we spend together, does all the history and strategies and philosophy serve some other purpose than the obvious physical aspects of the martial arts?

How well-defined is our mission? Do we have one?

Now forget the past. All of these questions lead me, lead us, to what we are doing right now.

How big is our vision?

And tell me, Mr. and Ms. Martial Arts Teacher, what kind of training are you, right now, imparting to the next generation?

When, 30 years from now, one of your students writes the phrase, “When I fall back on my training,” what training will they be thinking of?

Will you have taught them the power of action? The power of education? Of the spoken and written word? The power of perseverance? The power of teamwork? The power of self-discipline of compassion of simplicity of open-mindedness –and the power of love? Or will you have taught them a bunch of exercises?

All of the above speaks of the work you and I are doing today.

We are educators –and so what is the education we are imparting?

My martial arts, that is, the “training” my students may some day “fall back on,” is about developing oneself as a fully engaged, compassionate, cognizant, participative, human being.

The physical training is for fitness –and to train the mind for bigger things. If we are training “warriors,” then it’s up to us to recognize the “war” we are preparing to fight. In my mind the war is not hand-to-hand combat, it is the battle to evolve mentally and spiritually in the model of those men and women in history who have done just that. It is to follow in the footsteps of ________ (list your most spiritually evolved heroes here).

If, indeed, we are someday held accountable; if indeed we are meant to learn something while we hold this form; then the training we give, get, and fall back on should, ideally, prepare us for that purpose.

This is how I am designing my curriculum. This is the intent I have as I prepare my lessons, as I interact with my students, with their parents, with my community, and with the world.

This is my sense of mission.

This is what makes me look for new lessons, for teachers, and for material for my classes. This is what I think about when I call my class to attention –it’s the mission behind all the movement.

This is our " business."

Now you know the motivation behind the UBBT and The 100 and Six Tasks and The Acts of Kindness Program and Take 5 for Education and Alabama and just about everything I do.

If someday you look back on the time (any time) we spent together, involved in any way, you might consider that the purpose behind whatever it is we did was to further “our training.” The training we “fall back upon” when we need it.

A Sense of Vision and The UBBT and 100

2008-01-31T11:55:00.000-08:00

UBBT and the 100

My Vision for What We’re Doing –for What You Are Involved In

When I think about our work (and “our work” is our involvement in a brand/style of thinking and action which involves a re-design, a change, in what our long-term objectives are –what our intent is –as martial artists, teachers, and citizens of the world), I think about the collective efforts of everyone involved. I think about 150 push-ups a day adding up to be 52,000+ in a year –and how that idea also applies to the small daily efforts of each person on our teams as well each person we are influencing as a result of our efforts.

I think about how all these small things have the potential to add up to something significant.

When I think about what we are doing, I think about Rosa Parks –which always makes me think of the power that one person can have in the world by taking the right action at the right time; how that person needn’t be famous or powerful or connected or anything but committed to doing what is right.

When I think about the UBBT and the 100, I know they are “programs,” I know they are ”products,” and “services,” but for me, perhaps to my detriment, I see them more as groups of committed activists working on something big –something important and healthy and historic. I may be “the leader” or “the owner” of these programs –but from my perspective I am encouraging each participant to take ownership of the mission...just about the way a good martial arts teacher would like his or her own students to take ownership of the “mission” of his or her own school (which might be called “your life’s work”). The tuition members pay is simply the cost of supporting the work.

I would like it, very much, if my work became a catalyst for you to do your work, better –and that the real lessons I sought to teach were:

1. Self-defense is more about thinking and action, than it is about blocking, weapons, and techniques.

2. A martial arts master teacher is a citizen of the world in the mold of Rosa Parks of Gandhi of Martin Luther King of Thich Nhat Hahn of people transcending the trivial to do for others –and to stand up for what is right and healing and important. Why not?

3. That the martial arts have very little value –if we do not move beyond the physical-ness of it, if we do not take the practice “out of the dojo and into the world.”

4. That the real “business” of the martial arts is the business of living more simply, out of respect for others and for our world’s finite resources, it is about teaching people that real self-defense is the ability to take action to right things that are wrong (Like Jhoon Rhee’s motto “might for right” –and without the need to hurt or kill others in the name of right), it’s about seeing the training go so far down the line that it transcends the sport of it, the exercise of it –that it takes it right to the core of what it means to be a human being in search of connection with something much, much bigger than AT&T, Microsoft, GM, Mercedes, Macy’s, and RJ Reynolds, Co.

I’m sure there are a couple of other things too, but the point is:

You’re not a businessperson teaching “karate” in a strip mall somewhere in America. You’re something much more than that, much more even than a father or mother or son and daughter. I see the UBBT and the 100 as symbols for the way things ought to be –the way things in the martial arts world should strive to be, and that is what happens after the enrollments, after the cleaning and the taxes and all the necessities of our work. These programs are about what we REALLY believe and what we really intend to DO in the world.

I want to be able to point to each and every one of you –and tell the story of the work you do in the world –and how you use your connection to these ideas to do extraordinary work, small work –and big work. Somewhere in one of your schools is a Rosa Parks –and perhaps you will be lucky enough to be a part of his or her education –maybe you will be one of the reasons this person becomes a person of action. Our world needs some more folks like that.

When I think of the UBBT and the 100, I think about the power of working together to experiment and try new things and to share our time together going after the grand. I think how together, all of us, doing our little things –have the potential to do something amazing.

I think about martial arts schools that really, honestly, provide a kind of education that lives up to the concept of mastery that is often attributed to “martial arts masters.” I think of how, in history, we might be viewed as pioneers in an educational movement that made a shift in the world –thru all of these martial arts schools teaching all of these young, willing, excited, people.

There are many groups in the martial arts community dedicated to helping your business. Good! --and my vision for the work we are doing is beyond the business --it's about the soul, about mission, about the kind of action-in-the-world that would have you standing on the same platform as those really brave folks, our heroes, who put themselves on the line for what must be done in the world.

Peace. Conscious consumption. Simplicity. Compassion. Awareness. Family ---these are the self-defense lessons of the martial arts taught by teachers who took what they practiced on the mat and applied it to life. This is what we're trying to "get" --and to put into action in our own lives -and in our schools/communities. This is what we want our students to talk about --when someday they talk about what they learned from us.
Tom Callos

A message to the UBBT Teams

2008-01-22T19:21:00.000-08:00

To Students, Participants, Friends, Alumni, and Fans of the Ultimate Black Belt Test,

I don’t know if you know this or not, but you are helping me craft an all new approach, a revolutionary approach, to black belt testing, rank tests, training –and the “martial arts” in general. Through your actions and commitment to your goals –you are shaping a new kind of meaning for the rank of “black belt.”

Through our work, parents are going to look at the martial arts in a different way –a better way –and so will the media; so will teachers, school administrators, politicians, students, and anyone else who finds value in transforming, value in giving, value in working on peace, activism, environmentalism, and all of the things that we are saying are a part of this process.

All the things we are working on –and doing –in this process.

You are a part of something much bigger than your own black belt test –something bigger than your own training. So many of our experiments here, in the UBBT, are new ideas, ideas that have not previously been executed the way we are doing them. When you apply yourself to the UBBT, you are bringing something very valuable to the martial arts –and to the world.

Long after this program is gone –what you’re doing here will still be an influence in the martial arts world. And if I can convince you to take it all very seriously –to apply yourself to your training like you are going to the Olympics –like it’s everything to you (things like empathy training, eating like a champion, performing and recording acts of kindness, reading, walking 1000 miles, participating in Alabama, etc.), then you will make this all so much more powerful, so much more effective and meaningful and influential.

Treat your time here as if you were aware that you are a pioneer; that you aware that you are influencing and/or will influence scores of other people. Document what you are learning, what you experience –not just for your own growth and record, but for every little boy and girl, for every young man, for every person over 30 looking for authenticity –and looking to the UBBT for inspiration. Do it for everyone who will study the martial arts in the future --and experience empathy training, who will keep a journal of their year-long "test", who will learn and then teach peace education, who will perform acts of kindness, and environmental clean up projects, who will forgive their enemies --and who will do all these things in the pursuit of the coveted rank of "black belt."

Be a champion –regardless of your age, your ability, your background, and your obstacles. Understand too, that you are not being “acted upon” in this program –no, you are laying the foundation for the program. You are actively involved in making it happen –you are growing the UBBT.

Tell me of a test –a martial arts test, where you might have the opportunity to change the martial arts world for the better? Have you been in one? Have you seen a test like that before? Perhaps you have –but either way, if you’re in the program now, then appreciate that you are making history.

I know that to be true.

Thank you. I’m glad to be here with you –even if you’re not up to speed yet, the fact that you have arrived here is a sign that we are making progress.

Tom

Ultimate Black Belt Test Team Message

2008-01-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

Good morning,

Let's talk business
The new strategy for 2008 is to get each of your students, even if only in the smallest way, to take their martial arts "out of the dojo -and into the world." What if, this year, each of your students took on a little community activism project –based on something they had an interest in? What if some of them banded together to help each other? What if people who were not your students got involved and/or heard about it? Even better, what if people heard about what you were up to –and were MOVED by it?

What if you decided that you were going to get proactive and "black belt creative" this year (starting now) about promoting your business and your services in unique, innovative, and emotionally powerful ways?!

That's the plan. It's all about PROMOTION, CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT, EDUCATION, and BEING A MENTOR/LEADER. It's NOT "buying an ad" –it's LIVING the talk. It's seeing if you can use your powers to inspire people to take action; action that shapes, action that teaches, action that creates CHANGE.

What will happen as a result?

You will TEACH people to USE THEIR POWER (too). You will reach out to people who care about your community and it's people. You will also accomplish several things at once –and your school will take on a new USP –and you will have things to talk about and sell that nobody else has.

Step # 1 is to create a PROJECT PORTFOLIO for your school –and document every project no matter the size, no matter the outcome.

Look to our new website to create an association-wide Project Portfolio —but don't wait, start now. The goal is to take each project and use it to write the book of black belt action, empowerment, activity, and outcome.

No more "this is what we can do" bullshit...it's time for THIS IS WHAT WE DO. Prove it.

Let's talk projects
Anger Management is, I think, "the thing" you should be jumping on –like yesterday. After you take the course at www.angercoachonline.com, the program's not going to fill your school like magic –you're going to have to WORK at using it....but let me tell you, there is magic in the subject, in its power, it's its potential –and you need to learn how to talk the talk, now.

Diabetes Education and the Acts of Kindess Program are your e-tickets to SELF-DEFENSE education for the HERE AND NOW. Can you get to every school-age (6 to 18) child in your town with a message about their health and diabetes? Do you have the wherewithal to use our connection with Andy Mandell and www.defeatdiabetes.com to get your black belt on and help prevent young people in your town from getting this insidious disease?

You might have to learn about diabetes first –but again, let me tell you, this could help you meet and get involved with all sorts of people that could benefit your school in a "get new students" sort of way.

This tool isn't going to come to you in a fricken box –so you're going to have to get on the stick a little and WORK IT. But you've never, ever had access to better resources to do that –than you have now.

ALABAMA. That's all I should have to do --is mention the name of the upcoming UBBT/100 event --and my phone should be ringing off the hook with offers for help. THis is the martial arts anti-convention convention. This is everything we hoped the martial arts would be about -but haven't seen become reality. It's 4 months away -and I need your help to make it happen --and I need you to be there, in force, ready to learn and share and grow.

Let's talk your head
I don't what your obstacle is. I don't know what your excuses are. I don't know what demons you have on your back.

What I do know is that you can do better. I do know that you would do very well to change your behaviors –to the kind that empower you to be who you want to be. I do know that you have joined a community that is working to MAKE A DIFFERENCE –and that if you can get yourself our of your normal routine, out of your comfort zone, out of your excuse-zone, you will become an integral part of a MOVEMENT in the martial arts world –and in the world itself, for something different –and better for the soul.

Get your power on. Hang out with better thinkers. Hang out with those that are DOING. Hang out with people working for others. Throw off the constrains of "keeping up with the Joneses" –throw off the need to feed your endless wants –and start living in a spiritual world.

As a MASTER TEACHER, this is your path. You aren't here to teach technical skills alone –you're here to inspire and make the world a better, safer, more compassionate place.

Just because you don't read about this in martial arts magazines --and just because "business associations" aren't talking about spirituality you YOU transcending the status quo ---doesn't mean it isn't important --or that it isn't time to grow up.

Let's talk journals

Besides the site getting hacked and photos not being up in any sort of timely way –what's your JOURNAL problem? Is it "hard to do?" Sorry. Are you feeling disconnected? Double sorry.

I understand –and now I have to tell you that this is THE ULTIMATE BLACK BELT TEST. And the UBBT is YOU –performing in an uncommon and remarkable way. It's you PROVING that the martial arts isn't a bunch of talk and fabrication. Studying the martial arts really does develop self-discipline, right? Black belts really have special powers, right? It isn't all show and tell, right? There is "a way," is there not?

You are a leader and a teacher, correct? You are pledged to "live as an example," yes?

Well, I'm sorry this is difficult –but the more difficult it is, the harder is for you to cope, the more challenging the obstacles, the CLOSER we get to something that helps us actually grow and evolve.

Let it BE hard! Bring it on! Come on -is that all you've got?!!! Get on your journals and journal like you're a genius -like you're a leader and a teacher -like you're a man or woman on a mission -like you're driven by unseen forces -like you eat the UBBT for breakfast.

One year –just one stinking year.

TO ANYONE and EVERYONE reading this message: LOOK to this program to see what martial artists really are -or are not! Let this stand as a banner to what "master teachers" and "black belt instructors" are capable of –what they are like under their uniforms. Watch them display the self-discipline they claim they can inspire in their students. Watch the UBBT to see if it's all so much talk –or if the martial arts are really what we so often claim they are.

Watch me make it hard for these teachers and black belts. Watch me create conflict and hardship to "test" them. Watch how they come together -or fade away...Watch all of this and it will reveal what they can actually teach their students. Collectively we will show you, now –right here and now, what the martial arts really truly are.

Self Defense for the Brain

2008-01-06T19:27:00.000-08:00

Peace is More Important than Punches Flash Cards

2007-12-17T12:05:00.000-08:00

This video shows a new handmade FLASH CARD series called PEACE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PUNCHES. It's a part of the TAKE 5 FOR EDUCATION series of products (5 minutes "POWER LESSONS" for kids --ages 6 to 60).

Take 5 for Education

2007-12-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

The video here is a look at a new series of flash cards for teachers (martial arts or otherwise) to teach history --and to introduce role models / heroes --to kids. It's called TAKE 5 FOR EDUCATION --and it's about 5 minute "power" lessons for the end of classes.