An Unlikely Master

I lost my voice just recently, teaching classes. Not a complete loss; I’d lost the usual projection and boom. I was more raspy and soft, and words were catching in my throat, voice cracking.

I’d started classes just fine but by half-way through the first youth class, a bright-eyed 10 year old girl declared, “Master Chris, you’re losing your voice!” Of course, that opened the floodgates and it quickly became an obvious focus. “Why did you lose your voice?” a six year old asked. “Yeah, why?” inquired another. “Master Chris lost his voice!” “Do you need help finding it?”

The explanation I offered was that it was because I had to yell at them too much, that they were too loud and didn’t pay attention. All true, but they knew I was teasing-admonishing. Continue reading →

Just this morning, six guys sitting around.  Five guys in their 70s. Me, young enough to be a son. We meet in a youth group room: old furniture, foosball tables, red plaid carpeting (it IS a Presbyterian — Scottish roots — church after all).

Every Friday morning, 6:45 am, leave when you have to. Sometimes discussion centers around a common reading, video, or podcast. Those are the most targeted discussions. Sometimes we have no focus, just sharing. There is always too much time distressing over local and world affairs.

We often view this distress talk as coffee shop banter, wasted time. However, I see it as older guys sharing their concerns in the context of life not being all-right, running out of time and not being able to do anything about it. How did things get so wrong?

Scene change to belt promotion testing just last night. An eight year old makes three sloppy attempts at a turning side kick board break. He seems worried, in early stage exasperation. I give him a tip. His next attempt is slightly better, but still not nearly good enough. Continue reading →

In my last blog entry, I wrote about the challenge of change, drawing from the experience of just recently closing down and relocating our dojang of many years. We’ve now finished four classes in our new home and I think people — students, parents, instructors and ME — are more at ease that Everything’s Going To Be OK. I knew we could do classes in a different training environment but I was still stressed that too many others would not. I did not want students to quit because of disappointment, nervousness, or even fear. Just because we’d be training in a different kind of space.

Possibly quite different to many eyes. Parents in particular looked a tad agitated the first night or two. Lots of pacing and peeking. Continue reading →

It was at my test for Second Dan back in 1998. I stood at the side of the head table and read my required paper, on the assigned topic: Constant Change in Taekwondo. I recall being very uninspired on that topic, challenged to speak good insights but feeling strained to stay within the bounds of what might be considered proper thinking in regards to not challenging the system or certain aspects of tradition. “Permission to speak freely, sir?” was not even in the vocabulary.

I can’t lay my hands on a copy of that paper at the moment, and I don’t recall what I wrote, beyond feeling it was just a mishmash of haphazard thoughts, walking in the pasture and two steps shy of landing in bullsh*t. Continue reading →

This past weekend, I volunteered for a few shifts for my Cloquet Rotary Club’s annual rose sale days. The first day, I was in the foyer of Cloquet’s L&M Fleet Supply, a hardware and home & farm supply type place.  Like our other fund raising activities, proceeds from the rose sales go toward the various charitable service efforts our club supports, whether sponsoring youth for our RYLA  leadership camp, purchasing backpacks and school supplies for kids from area low income families or supporting polio vaccinations or well digging in other countries. That’s my Rotary plug. It’s great stuff; service above self.

As if being at a large folding table with bouquets of roses displayed wasn’t enough presence, I’d greet people and affirm that they could certainly purchase some roses at a great price. At one point I delivered my message to an older man leaving the store. Continue reading →

Getting older is an adventure, not a problem. — Betty Friedan

My feelings included a unique combination of pride, nervousness and intrigue as I surveyed the three black belt candidates about to test. The first was Hawkeye, a lanky, athletic, 15-year-old boy who has been a Taekwondo student since around third grade and is gifted enough to have recently begun gymnastics training. The second was Cecilia, a young woman from Mexico who is a veterinary medicine student at a local university. The third was Ramona, a 62-year old woman who only began her Taekwondo training three-and-a-half years ago as a new adventure following her retirement from her job — as a pilot flying wide-body jets around the world for a large commercial airline.

The pride I felt speaks for itself. I am always proud of students of any stripe who train long enough and with enough diligence to reach the milestone of a black belt test.

Continue reading →

This time of year, I have some challenges with the Presidents. By that I mean the presidents of the seven BNI chapters with whom I work. The presidents, or in some cases, the larger leadership teams, work with me in various ways to identify the incoming fall leadership.

One challenge we face is timing. Things just seem to move along more slowly than ideally, and sometime slowly enough to be a problem. Information has to be entered, communication begun, the incoming people have to clear their schedules for training, get oriented, identify support people, and other such transitional activities.

Another challenge is the exact role I play with each of the chapters. Each chapter has  Continue reading →

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb

Class was done and Angie was one her way to change out of her dobok back into her street clothes. I commented to her, “You are such a different student now than when you started, and now you’re going for your first promotion test!” Angie replied, “I tell people I know that I am doing this and they can’t believe it.”

Meeting Angie on the street, one would take her to be a nonathletic, if not clumsy (sorry, Angie, but you’ve said it yourself!), middle-aged, mild-mannered librarian. She’s not a librarian, but the rest of those descriptors are pretty accurate. Yet, after knowing me for several years through my BNI work, she finally reached the combination of understanding and trust in me and my messages about Taekwondo such that she actually started classes. She wanted to do something physical and beneficial to her health. And her greater self. The self-defense benefit would be good, too. But she could have picked a lot of things to do. She picked Taekwondo. Continue reading →