Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

P.S. The Transcript –

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Welcome everybody. This is kind of a special success training today for our podcast. We’re going to do open Q&A with me. I’m Chief Master Greg Moody. Dr. Greg Moody. We have here Mr. Dwayne Flees, the normal, our usual band of crew here, Mr. Dwayne Flees here, fourth degree black belt from Grand Rapids, and seventh degree black belt, Senior Master Laura Sanborn from Cave Creek and our Cave Creek School. You can see all our books behind you there too, and our leadership posters there. Thanks a lot for being here guys, and we can get started. What kind of questions would you like to ask me?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

I actually had a question come up just the other day on what makes KarateBuilt unique from other martial arts schools.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s pretty broad. It’s a great question and I think we work really hard to pay attention to what other martial arts schools are doing. We interact with a lot of martial arts schools. In fact, Senior Master, you were on a meeting today with a bunch of other ones, Mr. Flees, you work with other martial arts schools. We respect what everybody’s doing. We love it when people are training in martial arts, whether they train at KarateBuilt or not. What makes us kind of unique and in our view better, but again that isn’t to down the other schools, I think, is that we bring everything that we’ve learned from all other aspects of our life into what we do.

We spent 30 years improving, improving, improving, improving. One piece is I bring in my psychology training, my counseling, therapy training, my engineering training. Mr. Flees brings in his self-defense training. You bring in all your training from your college background and everything else. We bring that in, but it’s not just the three of us, it’s really Chief Master Eric Thomas, an eighth black belt. He’s been doing this as long as I have and many of our other instructors over the years have contributed.

I talked about the highest level people, but I think even not lower level people, but our instructors that are fourth degree black belts, third degree black belts, we bring them together and talk about what we can do better. Every year we have a curriculum meeting that you guys are on. We have everybody Zoom in if they’re not immediately there so that we can think about what we’re going to do better and how we’re going to improve things and how we’re going to improve things with the idea that it matches our charter, that our charter, which is really always been in place but we’ve kind of formalized it recently, is that we’re a highly disciplined school, we measure our results based on not who we exclude, so it’s not an elitist type of environment, but who we include and we measure the results based on their constant growth.

One way that we do things at KarateBuilt Martial Arts is if somebody comes in and they’ve got a learning disability or they’re a high-powered athlete, in either case we’re going to push them to the limit that they can handle so that they grow and they grow and they grow. Hopefully we’re pushing you guys too and pushing myself too, the same way. It’s across the board for everybody. That’s part of our charter.

The other part of our charter is that we want to measure the results to black belt and beyond. Our goal for our students isn’t just to get first degree black belt or isn’t get to green belt or purple belt, although those are great measurements of their progress, we want them to get to second degree black belt at a minimum. They get to first degree and they can train for the time that as a black belt, so the get training as a black belt.

Really our expectation is they continue on from there. It’s not something where they’re doing compared to other, not just martial arts, but other kids’ activities. They’re doing it for a few weeks and then quit or doing it for six little, six week program and quit. That’s fine. That’s fine for people to do if it’s golf or a tee ball or another sport that has a seasonal type of way of operating. In our case, we want this to be something that they continue to grow in all the areas that we want to help them with, which is really everything. Our main life skills have to do with confidence, communication, self-esteem, respect and discipline.

The last piece of our charter is that our KarateBuilt black belts take responsibility to lead with integrity. That last part’s really important too because it means that they, without us telling them what to do, they are self-disciplined enough to take responsibility to be in the community, be everywhere outside of the martial arts, inside our school of course, but outside the school and everywhere to lead with integrity. That means they’re going to help other people move forward in their lives. Otherwise, what we do doesn’t matter so much if our students don’t then help other people as well. The integrity piece is that they do it with ethics and think about what’s in everybody’s best interests and that’s how they lead with everybody’s best interests in mind.

That’s what we do from A to Z here. That is what makes us unique. I think paying attention to those pieces is something we’ve done forever. As I said, we formalized that recently, but I really believe that all those pieces have always been with us and we continue to, as we talked about improving, but with those things in mind. That was a long answer I think.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It’s a tough question to just get thrown at you. For me, the part that when I was answering the question for them was really about the growth. Even for us as instructors, we look for other ways to learn new things that we can bring in. We don’t change the curriculum based on that, but we are allowed to have our own personality as instructors, but there’s a plan for people to continue to grow, and there is for us as well. Even you just got recertified, so all the way up to the top, we’re always making sure that we are up to speed on where we’re supposed to be and that we are learning more and checking out whether we’re doing it right and correct.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, so we have standards for ourselves, as well-

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Standards, that was the word.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

… as everybody else. Those standards keep evolving and getting really harder. I mean, it’s harder to get a black belt at our school than it was 10 years ago. Not that we weren’t tough on the guys 10 years ago or 30 years ago, but we’ve found ways that we can challenge people more and still keep it within the bounds of their capability and make it fun. You’re going to have more fun doing things if you feel like what you’re doing makes you better, that you feel like you’re better afterwards, you feel like you’ve accomplished more, not just get a belt because you got a belt. I mean you could buy a belt from the store, you could go online and buy a karate belt, but that represents something that we’ve accomplished. That’s something you feel proud of. Just like getting a college degree, you feel proud of getting that or graduating certain kinds of training, but we want that to be something that people can continually strive for through their whole life.

Mr. Flees, you got a question?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, I was wondering how our martial arts can help a child’s confidence and self-esteem then the self-efficacy that creates for other avenues in their life.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think self-confidence becomes poorly defined. There’s a lot of kinds of confidence. Many people feel like they’re confident if they’re better than other people. I’m confident because I’m better than the people around me. I can look at other people and go, “Well, they’re not as good as me, so I must be good.” That’s not a very strong way to have self-confidence because you’re going to run into people that are better and it might be a way to motivate you to get better, but it’s not a very positive way to motivate yourself to get better. It’s motivating yourself to get better because oh my gosh, I’m not good enough unless I’m better than other people.

The other thing is we get old and if I had to be confident about let’s say my sparring and my fighting now against the twenty-year-old when I was 25, I had a different body than when I’m 58 right now. There’s things that happen over time that they are going to change our capacity. The only measurement we have is that our capacity versus others, that’s a really common way people measure themselves. It’s not a very sustainable or healthy way to be. That’s one confidence.

The other confidence is that we measure ourselves based on our consistent growth and back to our charter, we’re having constant growth over time. When we see ourselves growing constantly, that’s a healthy confidence that we can build. That growth could be based on learning new skills. It could be having new experiences. It could be interacting with people so we have more confidence in our interactions with other people. Then we’re going to feel more confident in all kinds of new situations and we want to get the confidence.

Martial arts helps us, was your real question, martial arts helps us with confidence because no matter who you are when you start, you don’t know what to do. You be started as a white belt, which means pure and without knowledge. Then as we grow, we get different colors that are darker and darker and darker up to black belt. Black belt doesn’t mean we have complete knowledge, it just means we learned our student set of knowledge. Then we can be a black belt set of knowledge after that. Martial arts helps us build confidence because every time you come to class, every time you moved forward to a new belt, every time you advance, every moment’s about you learning something new. You’re exercising, you’re being physical, but you’re also adding to your skill set. Both physically, because you can do more stuff, and mentally, because you know more stuff.

That’s one reason that, and if we do enough of that, if one day you remember that, “I can do things that I couldn’t do before. I can do this kick that I didn’t think I could do and now I can do it,” then that translates to other things in our life because now when we come up against the feeling that, “I couldn’t do this,” now I have that same feeling in my martial arts class and now I can translate that to be, “Well, if I couldn’t read this book,” or, “If I couldn’t get this job,” or, “If I couldn’t talk to somebody,” or, “If I couldn’t speak to people in public,” now that feeling is very similar to what you experienced all along your martial arts journey and yet in that case you got through it, you achieved it. Now in real life or the rest of your life, not real life, but the rest of your life, you’re also going to get through these same kind of feelings when you bump up against obstacles.

I think that’s solid self-confidence and solid self-esteem when you get to the point where when you grow to the point where the next thing that comes up you feel like you can do. Okay. I wanted to distinguish between what solid self-esteem would be and weak self-esteem. You could have weak confidence because you think that you are better than somebody else, so now you think that’s good and that’s always going to fail in the long run.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right. Sometimes that comes out like arrogance.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, it can come out like arrogance or even people that are narcissistic will show that way. They’ll show that they’re confident, but really comes from weakness because they’re afraid. That’s the ultimate expression of that is narcissism, which people talk about all over and kind of misuse, but it’s “I am only good if I’m better than you.” I have two ways to do that. One is I can get better, which wouldn’t be bad, but the other way is I can make sure you feel bad or you look bad or you aren’t as strong as other people. That’s going to come across, it could come across as arrogance, but people are pretty sneaky about that. It could be sneaky ways that they’re doing it to build their own confidence.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yes sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Hopefully that makes sense.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It does.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah. As you were talking about the core values of the company and the charter and the goal is that we instill that in all of our students from every age, how do you approach teaching discipline and respect to children in the classes?

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

How do we teach discipline? We covered confidence a second ago, how do we teach discipline? I think it’s hard for parents to do their job because they don’t have an instruction book. We all three have kids and we didn’t have an instruction book when the kids came out. I have one kid, you guys have multiple kids. One kid is one way and another kid’s another way and another kid’s another way, right? They’re all different and so even if we had an instruction book, it only worked for one of them. There’s a challenge when I say that to know how hard we can push our kids. Our expectations in our martial arts classes are very, very strict. We often get people, and you guys have had this happen where parents or teachers, even when we teach in a classroom in a school, they’ll say to us, “I can’t believe you got my kid to behave. I can’t believe you got my kid to stand still for 10 seconds.”

We’ll do that at class number one. We’ll have the kids exhibit behavior that the parents probably never, they didn’t necessarily know how to do. I’m not blaming parents in that, it’s we don’t have guidance as parents for the most part. We’re going to parent based on the way that we were parented or what our observations were. It’s not really the way we were parented, it’s our interpretation of how we were parented, what we remember from we were kids, which isn’t always going to be representative of what reality is.

In terms of discipline specifically, parents tend to err on the side of less discipline because they don’t have the tools to help them with discipline and it’s harder to get their kids to do stuff that the kids aren’t wanting to be compliant about. It’s easy to get your kids to eat ice cream. It’s hard to get your kid to maybe learn how to cook for themselves or get up on time or make their bed. It’s kind of hard to know how to do that. It’s not hard to do it, but it’s hard to know how to do that.

When martial arts we represent, we model it for them where we have high expectations for kids’ behavior and we have high expectations that they put their bags away, their gear bags away in a specific place. High expectations that they stand a certain way, that they sit a certain way. We want it exactly right. That’s whether the kid is three years old. That’s another thing we commonly hear is, “Well, but we can’t expect three-year-olds to do that.” We do. We expect three or four, it doesn’t matter. Then, “You can’t expect teenagers to do that.” Yeah, we do. We expect this discipline. It’s not that the class is mean or that we’re being disciplinarians, like you think of a drill sergeant, it’s part of the structure of the class that these are expectations we have and this makes it fun. In reality, having more discipline makes it more fun.

We’ve done all that in our martial arts class, so how does martial arts apply? It’s very similar to what we just said. If number one, if a kid knows the rules about how to put stuff away and starts having the expectation that there’s structure, then at home when the parent starts to apply structure, it’s going to be more comfortable for the kid. If the child never had any structure, if you’ve ever babysat a kid that the kid didn’t have any structure at home and then you babysat a kid or had them come visit one of your kids, it’s really hard to get them to behave initially. You guys probably have a better chance of doing that than anybody else. If the kid had good rules and structure at home, then when the kid comes to your house, they’re helping you put the dishes away and they’re getting to places on time and they’re doing what you want. It’s a similar idea that discipline is a skill that you learn and if you learn it in one area, you can apply it in another or it’ll automatically be applied.

The last thing I’d say about this is parents don’t know how far they can go, how much discipline they can expect, as I said at the beginning. We’ll often have parents say to us, “Well, we don’t want to push our kid.” To me that is grinding in my ears because that’s not really what anybody wants. We don’t want you to push your kid, but we really want you to teach your kid to push themselves. We have to have you teach your kid to push themselves. If the child doesn’t learn to push themselves when they’re young, when they have somebody guiding them like you as a parent, then when they’re older and they get to the point where they’re having obstacles at job, obstacles in their relationships, obstacles in their life, then how are they going to know to push themselves? How are they going to know how far they can get if you didn’t help them learn to push themselves in the first place?

That’s what the Parent Action Plan… Fear book is about a lot. It says fear and anxiety, but it’s really about when people get up to obstacles, how do they push themselves through that and how do we as parents teach them to push themselves through these obstacles? That would be my answer on that.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, I know we talk about that with the kids all the time. Right now we’re working on that, on discipline and pushing themselves and asking what is hard that they have to do, but what happens if you don’t get through it and do it anyway, even though it’s hard to do.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

People are most fulfilled when they’re doing things that’s hard, that’s goal oriented, that’s measurable and that’s hard, but not too hard, not overwhelmingly hard. If we said, “We need you to climb up, go run a three-minute mile,” the three of us probably could not do it. Well, nobody has done a three-minute mile. If we said, “Go run a three-minute mile or you’re in big trouble.” It’s like, “Yeah, whatever. I’m not going to try.” If you said, “Well, we want you to run a twenty-minute mile,” the three of us could do that. I had bad knees from millions of years of martial arts and well, not really martial arts, it was football, martial arts was good on my knees. I mean we could do a twenty-minute mile, that’s a walk. We could do that. Now that isn’t hard ,so it wouldn’t be that fulfilling either.

Something that we want to accomplish that’s measurable, it’s goal oriented, that is hard but not too hard, that’s when we’re going to feel the most satisfying. That’s just built in and cooked into what we do because of our charter that we measure our results based on constant growth to black belt and beyond. Black belt is measurable and the beyond is measurable and constant growth is something that we’re going to pay attention to along the way.

Mr. Flees, you got something?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, that leads us to with that constant growth, then how do we motivate them to continue that?

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, and that’s similar to parents understanding that their role is to teach their kids to push themselves. I may say something controversial here, that parents don’t know what they’re doing. Again, back to the instruction manual, none of us do. None of us did when the kids came out. We don’t have guidance. The idea that a parent knows what’s best for their kid and the parents listening, I’m sorry, I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean, how would it make any sense that we know how far our kids can get pushed? How would it make any sense that we know what’s going on inside of them? A lot of that’s going to be our guidance and providing experiences and opportunities for kids so that they can grow and really making the decision about whether or not the thing that they’re doing is giving them value.

I’m not against kids going, I love Disneyland, I love taking my kid to Disneyland. That has some experiential value, but it doesn’t really have a ton of long-term value. Some people are Disney fanatics would probably disagree with me. Going to Disneyland or watching a cartoon that, some cartoons have some life skills in there, but watching something that doesn’t have any of that, that’s fun. There’s nothing wrong with that. Playing a game that’s fun, but that’s not what we do. I think parents want to consider what the value is of what they’re embarking on, whether that’s martial arts or anything else.

My kid took swimming lessons when he was young. That was really important to me because I didn’t want him to drown in the pool if he ever got in that situation. He didn’t want to go, he threw a fit. He really didn’t want to go. Now when he got there, he loved it. He loves swimming when he got there, but it was like, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.” Well kids say that all the time because they’re kind of stuck playing video games or they’re comfortable at home. It’s a common experience. I made him go or motivated them to go because I wanted him to learn to be safe, I was worried about his safety.

I think the same thing applies in any activity that’s going to be positive for your kid, a growth activity for your kid, they will always have times that they want to stop it because it’s uncomfortable to be on the edge of growth. If you’re lifting weights, that’s a good example. Well, you can’t gain strength unless you become uncomfortable, unless it’s very hard. If you just did the easy stuff all the time, you’d never get any growth. Life is like that. Whenever we’re to the point where we’re having a growth moment, that’s when our brain says, “Hey, that’s hard. I want to stop.” Those are the times that we have to get through, as long as it’s not overly hard, as long as A is knowing that this is a positive activity and going to provide an outcome in the end like discipline and confidence that you guys already talked about, then we have a reason as parents.

You ask the question of how to keep them motivated. I think the key thing is that parents stay focused on what the outcome is that they want. If they do, then it’s going to be really easy when your kid doesn’t want to go or your kid doesn’t want to do something, whether it’s swimming or anything else that they do, like I use the example of to go, well, they need to go. It’s not optional because this is going to be important for their future.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Going along with that, what methods do you use to engage the parents in their kid’s martial arts journey? We’ve all seen parents who don’t come into the school other than to drop the kid off or pick them up, or the ones that have their phone in front of them and are working on something else and are not actively involved. What kind of methods do you use to engage the parents in their child’s journey through martial arts?

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Well, I tell every parent that if they pay attention to class, they’re going to learn something. They’re going to get something out of the class. They’re going to get something not just from us as the instructors, but because they’re going to see their kid perform and they can tell their kid at the end of class what they thought they did well. Now we don’t want parents to then take that the wrong way that they’re observing class so that they can give their kid corrections. That’s our job. We will do that for you.

You have the opportunity at the end of class to tell your kid one or two things that they did really well, one or two things you’re really proud of them about. Imagine if when you grew up as a parent, when you were a kid, and every time you did an activity, whatever sport activity or school activity or whatever, your parent took the time to pick out one thing you did really well. If you pick out things that they do really well and let them know, then they’re going to continue to get better in those areas because it reinforces it. That’s the way our brains work.

Now, for a lot of parents listening, when they got feedback from their parents, I mean from their parents when they were kids, it was negative feedback, not because their parents were necessarily mean, although some of you guys might had some mean parents, but it’s a tendency in human nature to give negative feedback over positive feedback, to notice negative things over positive things. Why? We have something called negativity bias. Negativity bias means that we will always notice negative things at a higher weight than positive things. That’s built into our DNA because in the woods when we were hunter-gatherers, we had to pay attention if the tiger was going to jump out at us a lot more than the beautiful forest and waterfall that was gorgeous and everything, that might’ve been a gorgeous transcended beautiful thing, but if the tiger was coming, we better pay attention to that. We’re not going to survive. We have built into us negativity bias.

Any of you guys that ever did a presentation at work for the parents here, presentation work, what do people do afterwards? Maybe there’s a little bit, “Good job on the presentation,” but there’s probably a lot of, “Well, can you do this different? Can you do that different? What about this? What about that?” I mean, that’s kind of what it’s for, but people are really good at that. They’re used to this negative attention. There’s nothing wrong with that. We got to be worried about the tiger. I got to be worried about my kid drowning and that’s why I made him do swimming. We forget about the other things. If parents could pay attention enough at least to provide one or two positive things that their kid did, one or two things that they’re proud of, imagine what your life would be like if your parents had done that every time they saw you doing an activity.

I mentioned that to parents before and they almost get teary-eyed about how big of a deal that would’ve been. That’s what I would say. We are going to have to wrap up here. Any one last important question? I feel like I talked a lot and you guys had some really good questions. We covered a lot of stuff. Any thoughts on what we covered today?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

To me it’s important that it’s a family thing, that the parents can be involved and the parents can take class with their kids or take class for themselves and then they can compare their classes. “What did you do in your class?” Say, “This is what I did in my class today.” “How’d you do?” “I did this.” “Oh, you look great doing that, show me how you did it.” There’s a lot of interaction that as a family they can do, that reinforces all this. That’s one of the things that I know for me, my entire family did it. Me, my husband, both my kids, we all did it, coming on for years. It made a big difference in our lives at home, that we had that one thing in common that we all did. You could point out to your kids, “You did that better than I did that. Wow, you’ve learned that faster than I did.”

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, it’s the only activity that I know that you can do it in the same way as your four-year-old and you can both still continuously grow. If you went and played tennis with your four-year-old, you’re going to wipe them out until they’re 18 and then they’re going to wipe you out. Basketball, same thing. I beat my son a whole bunch and now he mostly beats me. There’s not really there any other activity where you can both grow at the same pace and do it together. It’s very, very, very unique in that way. At Karate Built, we have family classes, so the kids’ classes, the parents can attend and they can do the class at the same time so it’s super convenient. When you did it, it wasn’t that way. You had to come to a bunch of different times. We made it more convenient for everybody so that they can train together. Thanks a lot for that. Mr. Flees, any last thoughts?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

That’s very helpful that we can add that into our discussions with our parents as we conduct our growth checks with our students and parents.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Perfect. All right, well thanks everybody. Thanks everybody for listening.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

We’re really excited about the 30th year of KarateBuilt, so we’re excited about all the things we’re doing and our charter. I hope you get to pay attention to this and some other podcasts and we’ll look forward to seeing everybody later.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

All right.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

All right. Thank you sir.

P.P.S. Get Dr. Moody’s Book on Bullying – Click Here

KarateBuilt.com and KarateBuilt Martial Arts have been selected as the nation’s #1 martial arts schools for EIGHT YEARS IN A ROW!

KarateBuilt L.L.C. was founded in 1995 by Dr. Greg Moody, an 8th-degree Black Belt and Chief Master Instructor, KarateBuilt Martial Arts and Karate for Kids offer lessons for pre-school children ages 3-6 and elementary age kids ages 7 and up are designed to develop critical building blocks kids need – specialized for their age group – for school excellence and later success in life.

KarateBuilt Martial Arts Adult Karate training is a complete adult fitness and conditioning program for adults who want to lose weight, get (and stay in shape), or learn self-defense in a supportive environment.

Instructors can answer questions or be contacted 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week at 866-311-1032 for one of our nationwide locations. You can also visit our website at KarateBuilt.com.

About Dr. Greg Moody:  Dr. Moody is an eighth-degree black belt and chief master instructor.  He has a Ph.D. in Special Education from Arizona State University (along with a Master’s Degree in Counseling and a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering – he actually is a rocket scientist). He has been teaching martial arts for over 25 years and has owned eight martial arts schools in Arizona and California. Chief Master Moody is a motivational speaker and educator and teaches seminars in bullying, business, and martial arts training, around the world. See more at DrGregMoody.com.

The KarateBuilt Martial Arts Headquarters at KarateBuilt LLC is in Cave Creek, Arizona at 29850 N. Tatum Blvd., Suite 105, Cave Creek AZ 85331. You can locate the Chief Instructor, Master Laura Sanborn there directly at ‭(480) 575-8171‬. KarateBuilt Martial Arts serves Cave Creek, Carefree, Scottsdale, and Paradise Valley Arizona as well as Grand Rapids, MI.

Also, check us out on Today in Business and Educators Observer!

Here is Dr. Moody’s Amazon Author Page with over 16 of his Amazon Bestselling books: Click HERE

P.P.P.S. From a parent:

“Since joining this program, my son Herman is more disciplined, motivated, and unstoppable in every challenge he faces!” – Emily Green