Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

P.S. The Transcript – The KarateBuilt Charter:

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Everybody, this is Greg Moody, the KarateBuilt Martial Arts. I am looking forward to our success training today, our podcast, and it’s going to be about our KarateBuilt Charter, which is a lot of things, but the last line in it says, “Lead with integrity.” So we’re going to talk about that today or the last part of it. I’m really excited to be here with you guys. Usually I’m joined by senior master Laura Sanborn and Mr. Dwayne Flees, but I’m going to be on my own today, so I appreciate those guys going through all the different parts of this KarateBuilt Charter because they were instrumental in designing it and creating it.

So our KarateBuilt Charter is the KarateBuilt is a highly disciplined martial arts school. We measure results based not on who we exclude, but on students’ constant growth from the moment they start to black belt and beyond. And then KarateBuilt black belts once their black belts take responsibility to lead with integrity. Last time we talked about taking responsibility and what that means, today we’re going to talk about leading with integrity. So that next part of the process that once you’re a black belt, our expectation number one, was last time to take responsibility. And the second part of that is wrapping up the whole charter.

And it’s wrapping it up because it’s one of the most important things. We started with the most important thing, we’re a highly disciplined martial arts school and we wrapped up with when you’re through our process, not that you stop at black belt, but when you’re continuing to black belt and beyond and when you’re acting as a black belt, you’re going to lead with integrity. And that has two parts. One, the parts is lead and the other part is integrity. So lead means a lot of things. There’s lots of definitions of leading and leadership. What we teach and what we work with our students to do is become leaders of other people.

So it’s not just lead by example, although that’s a way that people can lead, but it’s lead by being able to be confident and strong enough to motivate other people to take action. So leading in this case is motivating other people to take action. And we do that in our leadership program, we do that in our instructor training. So there’s lots of ways that we lead, is motivate others to take action. And that can be a lot of ways. It sounds like we’re always using positive reinforcement and ideally that’s what we do use, but sometimes people need you to be, for example, for the parents on our call, on our podcast today, sometimes people need you to be fun and sometimes people need you to be maybe stern because they need to focus with the right mindset on what the activity is. It depends.

If it’s something like a safety issue, somebody is bleeding and they need first aid, well, we need to be direct and stern and take action immediately. If somebody is afraid of, let’s say as I wrote about in my book, Parent Action Plan… Fear, if they’re, let’s say they’re afraid of going on a roller coaster, well that one is more of a motivational leadership, but still, in either case, we’re motivating others to take action and being clear about the action that we need to take. Integrity means doing the right thing even when nobody’s looking. Doing the right thing not just because you’re going to get positive reinforcement from it, not just because somebody’s going to like you because you did the right thing or not because in front of other people will do the right thing, but doing the right thing even when nobody’s looking.

And that’s very different. Now that means that means as far as integrity goes if you’re doing push-ups and we’re doing push-ups, we’re doing kicks and nobody can tell whether or not you’re doing them as good as you possibly can. If you’re stretching and you’re bending over to stretch, nobody can tell except for you how much you’re pushing yourself, how far you could push yourself. You could do a stretch, for example, and bend all the way over and touch your toes and the instructor might think, “Well, that’s good. They’re doing a good job. That’s as far as they can go.” But integrity would mean I go further to the point where I’m getting the full stretch. I’m doing it as hard as I possibly can without injuring yourself.

So having integrity in what you do is where it starts with. The next level would be having integrity when we’re operating with others and we’re having interconnections and interactions with others. And that’s what lead with integrity means, is you’re motivating others to take action. That’s going to be something that you personally embody. You’re not just telling people to do what you say and not what you do. It’s something that you’re continuing to motivate people and following the same rules that we’re asking other people to follow. So a couple things that this is important in martial arts is one of the reasons it started in martial arts is because martial arts is a martial system. It means a military system, which means it’s related to fighting or protecting others.

So relating to fighting and protecting others if we don’t have integrity, then those powers that we create, the powers that we create to be a black belt, the powers that we create to learn to motivate other people could be used for bad purposes. So lead with integrity, I could be a leader and I can motivate others to take action, but as we see in society and history, there’s a lot of people that have led other people without integrity and to take action that might be bad for other people, that might take action to start wars, might take action to do things that are pretty evil. With our students and when we create black belts, the idea is that they are strongly motivating other people to do lots and lots of things, but it’s for purposes that are going to be beneficial for everybody, beneficial for the whole.

So there’s a component of morality that has to get put in there, and that’s not any kind of a morality doctrine. It’s the idea that we want to lead with doing as far as we can tell the best thing possible for everybody. One of the ways that we teach this is that we have different levels of teaching this. The leadership with integrity at the lowest level is shown in our leadership class that, well, really the lowest levels in our basic class. So to start out really with that in our basic class, let me start over here, one of the ways that lead with integrity comes about, they’re not black belts yet, they’re white belts or beginners or colored belts in our basic class, they’re asked to do a lot of things.

And ideally by the time they transition out of the basic class, which may only be a few weeks to a month, could be a couple months, as students transition out of the basic class, what we’re looking for is that the things that we’ve asked them to do, they’re starting to embody. So for a couple examples of that. When you come into our school, you’ve got to grab your attendance card and you’ve got to put it in a certain place, you’ve got to put it in your uniform and sit at attention. Now, we could tell you to do that every time you come into class, but our expectation is that you have the integrity to do that on your own without us telling you.

That you have the integrity to do it exactly right and sit up straight as well as you can for as long as you can before class. Lots of things like that that we direct you to. So in the basic class, that’s what it means. In master club class we are learning the foundation of this is so that you become… Let me make sure that this is showing up on our podcast. A little bit of a system error. We will start this part again and talk about master club. Okay, we’re back. So we talked about basic. The next level in master club is that it’s the curriculum and foundation of becoming a black belt. It’s not our leadership program yet most of our students are in our leadership program, some students though they’re simply wanting to train to become a martial artist trained to be a black belt.

So that’s fine. About 10% or 20% of our students are in that group. Those students still learn to lead with integrity, and this is more by example. So if you’re going to become a black belt, you have to be able to do all the things we ask you to do and we’re going to wean you off of directing you. We’re going to wean you off of the need to have direction when we tell you to do something you’ll know how to do it and go exactly where we want you to go. We want it to be fast, we want it to be disciplined, and that’s what the martial system’s about. So becoming a black belt in that context is about learning the curriculum, learning the material, and being disciplined enough to be able to take responsibility to lead with integrity.

In that case, leading integrity means you’re leading yourself and you’re an example for others. In leadership, this is where it starts to really come out, which is our primary and premier program for the general population of students. So our leadership program, what happens there is, you’re not only doing the things you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it, which is our definition of discipline, but you’re showing other people how to do it. And this may seem like too advanced a skill for somebody that’s three or four or five or seven or eight to learn, but it isn’t. We’re teaching people the basic fundamental skills of presentation so that they can learn to present to other people or communicate with other people so that other people can do the things that we ask them to do.

And the reason that the integrity part of that matters is once somebody gets to be able to be a motivator and be a good communicator and be a leader, they could use it for negative things. We would create better bullies at school, we create better other people that would be, whatever, doing other negative types of things. That’s not what we create. We create people. In fact, our research shows that people are nicer, they bully other people less, they get bullied less when they have martial arts training with KarateBuilt Martial Arts. So leadership is the idea that I’m able to motivate others to take action and we’re giving you the basic communication skills to do that.

Our instructor program is the highest level, and we only accept about 10% of our students into this program because these are people that want to not only lead other people, but create new students, be able to take responsibility for other students from the beginning, from white belt onto black belt and beyond. They’re people that want to maybe at one day they want to open their own school, that’s great, but even if they’re not in that career path, they want to learn to teach other people to do other things. And when they can do that in our martial arts program they can do it as well in some other place. So they can do it in their business, in their work, at their school, at the university they’re at in their church.

They can be leaders in their church and teach other people and bring other people along to motivate other people to take action. That’s why it’s so important that that has a fundamental component of integrity. So they motivate other people to take action and it’s action that’s going to be beneficial for everybody. So just to review basic they’re learning integrity within themselves. Master club, they’re expanding on that to become disciplined and more than that self-disciplined. Leadership is they motivate others and then our instructors are all of this combined and focused on integrity. So doing the right thing even when nobody’s watching. So we expect our black belts and instructors to be this way everywhere.

And our black belts get a special pin. I mentioned this last time, this is our special pin that the black belts get that you wear as a black belt, not just in the school. Well, you don’t wear it in the school on your uniform because you poke yourself, but I wear it when I wear my dress suit, when I wear my instructor uniform, which is a dress like a suit, I wear it when I’m out and wearing a sport coat, I wear it at other times when I have a shirt on and I’m teaching something. It doesn’t have to be something fancy. So think about it like the president has a flag or politicians have flags that they put on their suit coat or their clothes so that they can show that their having some responsibility to the United States. That’s their job.

You can like politicians or not like politicians, but they do have a job to be responsible for the United States. In our case, this pin means that we have a responsibility to be black belts and act the same way even when we’re not in our school, even when we’re not doing martial arts training. So all the things that are part of our KarateBuilt Charter, let’s look at that again. All the things that are part of our KarateBuilt Charter are all wrapped into doing the right things, doing things that are going to be beneficial for everybody all the time. So let’s review that to wrap up our whole series of the KarateBuilt Charter today. KarateBuilt’s a highly disciplined school. So again, we have integrity.

The end of this is talking about doing all these things all the time. We’re highly disciplined martial arts school. That means that we expect the black belts to be highly disciplined in the rest of their life. We measure our results not based on who we exclude, but on constant growth. So our value is not to filter people out so they can’t get in or exclude people because they aren’t talented or that they don’t have a natural ability. We want to include as many people as we can because we want to help as many people as we can. And the constant growth part is if you’re at this level of talent, we want to push you to this level of talent. If you’re at this level of talent or ability, maybe you’ve got an injury or something that’s a permanent disability that you can’t perform a certain thing, we still want to push you this much.

We still want to push you to have constant growth. It’s within your own personal capability. And that’s from the moment they start, that’s at white belt to black belt and beyond. Beyond means once you’re a black belt then we keep pushing. And we want to get really from beginner to first degree black belt, however much development you got there. We want that to escalate and multiply. So from first to second degree, we really want 10 times more development. And from second to third degree, we want 10 times more development than you got from beginner to first degree because you’ve got the foundation of the black belt training. So that’s what from the moment they start to black belt and beyond means.

Then the last line, KarateBuilt black belts take responsibility to lead with integrity. That means when nobody’s watching, when you don’t have to be disciplined, when you don’t have to be nice to people, when you don’t have to show respect, when you don’t have to communicate well you’re still going to do it because it’s in the best interest of the people around you. And in the end it’s also in your personal best interests. All of these pieces are our values in the school and what we teach by anything we do we can point to this sign on our wall and tell you about how it fits into this charter. How we are teaching fits into the charter, how when you come in and do your first lesson and we get you enrolled, that fits into the charter, how as you’re a black belt and as we train you at this high level of black belt that’s part of the charter.

And as you’re an instructor and you teach other people and maybe leave someday and have your own school or have your own students, or this is just part of your lifestyle and part of what you do to get better in your own life, we’re going to have the charter be part of that. All of these things are part of what we built in the charter. We’re very proud of it and we’re very proud of being KarateBuilt Martial Arts and having these values in our school. So thanks a lot for being part of our podcast series. This is a seven part podcast series. Part six was the first one after the introduction to it. So I recommend if this is the first one you’re watching, go watch the rest of them. And we’re going to be having this published on our website and online on YouTube as well. So thanks a lot everybody for being part of the podcast, and I hope everybody has a great day.

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