Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

P.S. The Transcript – The KarateBuilt Charter:

Dr. Greg Moody:

Hey, everybody. Thanks a lot for being here at our success training for KarateBuilt Martial Arts. I’m Greg Moody and I’ve got Mr. Dwayne Flees and Senior Master Laura Sanborn here.

How’s it going guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Great, sir.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Great.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Awesome. So we’ve got a great topic today. Our topic is The Power of Black Belt Parenting and What You Learn When Your Kids Train. So being a black belt parent is something that’s very important. Now, what we’d love to have is that the parents are all training and we have family classes so you can train at the same time as your kids, work really hard and get better fitness and all the different things that we talk about. We’ll talk about how to look at what black belt parenting is and how the things that we do in our program are models for how parenting can be. And if you follow some of the things that we’re talking about, it would hopefully make your life easier and make your parenting world better and end up having better results for your kids.

So we want both things. We want you to be able to be a great parent, not that you’re not a great parent, but give you some tips on how parenting can work ’cause we never get directions on how to be a parent, we have to figure it out as we go. You have kids and then nobody gives you a manual or operating manual how these little suckers work. So what’s black belt parenting? And we’re going to relate it to our charter.

So our KarateBuilt charter is that we’re a highly disciplined martial arts school and we really believe that that everything we do is about discipline, starts with discipline, and that’s what we’re going to talk about first with parenting. And we measure our results not on who we exclude, but on students’ constant growth. If your kids are constantly growing, then they’re going to be successful, they can learn more and be more productive and happier in their life. And then lastly, that KarateBuilt black belts and where we want all of your kids to go take responsibility to lead with integrity. So we’re going to start about black belt parenting with all these things.

What do you guys have to add there? I said a bunch.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

No, I know how it starts with discipline though. That’s the first thing. That is the thing most people come in as parents when they’re bringing their kids in. That’s the number one thing people are looking for is help with discipline on their kids. So the fact that we do that often teaches them skills, whether they’re taking class or not, which obviously we prefer that they do, but even if they’re just watching a class, they can take home the techniques and the skills that we use to discipline a class to discipline at home.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Well, let’s talk about that first ’cause that’s our first topic, it really does start with you. Now, we do a lot of things in our school to model discipline, and that’s why we listed the Parent Action Plan Fear book. That’s a really good book for you to start with as parents because kids are, it’s easy to have discipline when it’s an easy thing to do like it’s easy to follow directions if you’re going out to the ice cream store and you’re getting ice cream. It’s harder for your kids to follow directions when you have to get them to remember to make their bed all the time or remember to put their stuff away or even be disciplined to treat other people the right way, to have that skill. And that’s why our instructors start, even in our classes, that discipline is the first thing that we measure.

But what would you guys start talking about or what comes to mind when you think about being a parent? You’re both parents and teaching in our martial arts schools regarding discipline.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

For me, it’s communication and expectations. The way we talk to the kids is with the expectation that they will follow the directions and behave. And it’s not accepted that they don’t. It is not that we give out punishments or anything like that with discipline. It’s that our expectation is that they’re going to follow the directions, they’re going to do what we tell them to do the first time. And it just starts with that, that’s our expectation. And they know that from the first time they come into their first class. We show it to them, we explain it to them, we give them stickers when they’re doing things right, so that they know that’s what we’re looking for.

Dr. Greg Moody:

We’re giving them verbal rewards and reinforcement and positive benefits when they do things correctly and when they don’t do things correctly, we make sure we explain about what the expectations are. I think a big challenge we have as parents is knowing how high our expectations can be for kids.

And I just taught a seminar Saturday, Senior Master, you were there, and we had tons of kids, the whole floor was full, and I I had them do some things that were very difficult and I asked the group of parents that were watching if anybody was an elementary school teacher and one of the parents was an elementary. Usually we get one or two elementary school teachers that are one of our parents. And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well,” so all these kids are standing very still. We were doing a whole bunch of high-energy things and then they would come back to standing still. And I said, “How would your classroom operate if you were asking them to stand still like this? How would your classroom operate if you were asking them to do what we asked them to do?” And she said, “No, none of the kids would ever act that way.”

And we have that experience with schools a lot when we go to a school and we teach a class, we immediately get the kids behaving and doing what we want them to do ’cause our expectations are really high. And it’s no criticism of teachers there, but they don’t teach teachers how high their expectations can be for their students. And it’s the same for us as parents. We’re not even pros at this. We only have one or two kids or three or maybe some people have four or more kids, but that’s not a huge sample of kids to deal with. Teachers have big sample of kids and they still don’t know how hard they can push, don’t know what their expectations can be.

Anything else to add on expectations, Mr. Flees.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

And even when we start at age three, we expect that from the kids and a lot of times the parents will say, “Well, yeah, but they’re only three.” Well, exactly, they’re only three and this is when they need to start learning that, so when they’re 13, you don’t have to fight with them to do little things.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, that’s a wonderful point. We start kids as young as three and people often don’t think that they can handle it or they can do it or when they come in, they think it might just be a playground or a playroom, and it’s not that way at all. We want those guys to be disciplined and doing what we want to do. And what it turns out is that that becomes more fun. I think a message to the parents might be if you have high expectations and you have high level of discipline in your house, you’re able to have more fun because you don’t waste a lot of time, you don’t spend a lot of time complaining to your kids trying to get them to do stuff that they’re not doing.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

And I’ve talked to parents about how their kids have improved on their discipline and stuff and where it’s going to take them. One of the questions I ask is how do you see that affecting your life when your kids have more discipline? And they always talk about how much happier the entire household’s going to be when there’s less fighting and less just spending time, “Yes, you have to do it. Go do it. Go get your thing done, go get this done,” and repeating themselves on something that’s not enjoyable.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, that’s a great point. Discipline equals more fun and it is a happier lifestyle in your class. And that’s something… What would you say the parents need to do to model that for their kids that they can learn from what we do in the school?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Recognize good behavior, recognize things you do want them to do when they do it, recognize it immediately and massively. Make a big deal when the kids are doing something they’re supposed to be doing.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody:

If I could talk about that a little bit. I’m sorry, Mr. Flees, go ahead.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, and then also secondary to that would be to correct the little things when they’re little.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Oh, yeah.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

So that it’s easier to avoid the bigger things.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, I love what you guys are saying. One is recognizing good behavior. Even when I talk to teachers about this, they often say they recognize good behavior all the time. And then I probe a little bit and I say, “Well, so you recognize good behavior all the time or do you recognize good behavior when you’ve noticed they did something wrong and now they’re doing it correctly or when another kid is doing something wrong and you point out the kid that’s doing something correctly.” In other words, kids misbehaving, I say, “Hey man, I really like how Johnny’s sitting at attention” or” I like how Johnny’s listening or Sally’s listening,” and then the other kid kind of straightens up. So you’re doing it not to recognize good behavior that’s always happening, you’re doing it to recognize good behavior when it’s corrected. Nothing wrong with that. That’s a great idea. That’s a good thing to do.

But what we tend to not do is recognize behavior that’s good all the time. If I’m a teacher or if I’m teaching a martial arts class or being a parent, if my kid always makes the bed, once they learned to make the bed and they always make the bed, that would be really good behavior probably. But if they always made their bed or they always brushed their teeth when they went to bed, well, after they learned to do that, we probably don’t say, “Hey, I really appreciate how you always remember to brush your teeth before you go to bed.” But those things, recognizing good behavior that’s always happening is just as important and can be more important to keep your kids disciplined and know that you appreciate them and be disciplined in a positive way instead of trying to fix something once it’s wrong.

And the second piece of that is, kind of an extension of that is when they’re doing it a little bit off, correct it right away, then it’s not a big deal. If they didn’t brush their teeth for four days in a row and then you go, “Hey, I can’t believe you didn’t brush your teeth, you forgot,” or whatever, then it’s harder to correct because they haven’t gotten in the habit.

Anything else to add there guys? I guess I talked a lot on that one. Those are great points.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

I think, yeah, both of those things are going to yield great results when you do them consistently.

Dr. Greg Moody:

The other thing that I think, it’s good to point out, we recommend the book 1-2-3 Magic by Thomas Phelan. So for everybody listening, that book is a really good example if you want to read a book that’s a good foundational piece for how we model behavior in our class and then how you can then do it at home. I mean, hey, put us to work. We’re doing the work to help your kids with discipline. If you copy some of the stuff that we’ve been doing for all these years that we know works, then it makes your life a lot easier.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

The other one is consistency.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Okay. That’s a really good point because that’s part of this book as well, be consistent. And that goes along with what Mr. Flees said is if we correct little things, if they didn’t brush their teeth one day and we kind of let it go ’cause we weren’t paying attention or we were busy or whatever and we don’t get them to do it, or we know they don’t brush their teeth quite perfectly, they miss some spots or they leave a little bit of a mess somewhere, if we correct these little things and we consistently are watching them, that doesn’t mean we’re giving them a hard time all the time. That just means correction. So it’s easy to correct if it’s little. It becomes a fight if it’s something that’s pervasive, they’ve been doing it wrong for a long time, or it’s really severe. So those are really, really good points.

Let’s move on to the next piece, which would be constant growth and that’s part of our charter. We measure our results not on who we exclude, but on students’ constant growth from the day they start until black belt and beyond. And this is something that I think is, you could see the growth that we get in our martial arts classes, but it’s something that if you’re doing the stuff we just talked about, you’re recognizing your kids for that, but also modeling them and modeling it for them. What are some things that come to mind when you guys think about constant growth and how parents can pay attention to that and model it?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Again, recognition of what their kids are doing. Did they improve on something, whether it’s discipline and behavior or just on technique and learning something they learned that was hard for them and now they can do it? Recognition of that behavior or that growth makes it worth doing it again, learning something else new.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, and I think at the progress check, I was going to mention that, it came to mind as you said that, I wanted to write it down, at the progress check we do it in two weeks after somebody starts and then we do it consistently throughout their career as a martial artist. Every few months we ask them to fill out a progress check form. We look at it and then we can do a progress check with you. And that’s our opportunity to help you as parents notice the progress that your kids made. Take a little bit of a timeout in your busy schedule. We know parents are busy with all the stuff you got to do. It’s hard to take a little bit of a timeout and recognize and notice that your kid has made progress and sometimes recognizing that you’ve made progress in how you’re working with them or how you’re interacting with them. I think the progress check is a key point in that.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes.

Dr. Greg Moody:

And you guys chime in whenever you want to. The other thing I would point out is teaching them to push themselves.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, that’s probably where the good deed sheets would come in from from the stuff they do at home. Doing a good job at home, teaches them to keep doing that so they can get stars at karate.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, that’s a great, so one is the progress check, the other would be the Personal Victory program where the parents that use this a lot get more results. It’s another tool they can use to help reinforce their kids.

And the other piece that all three of us have talked about a lot is we get parents not understanding, it relates to what we talked about earlier, how hard they can push their kids and they go, “Well, should I have them do other activities? Should I push them to go to maybe a tournament or push them to do something?” And we like to think about it not as pushing your kids, but teaching your kids to push themselves. None of this matters if your kids don’t get a benefit when you’re not around. One day you’re not going to be babysitting them, you’re not going to be paying for all their stuff. They need to get a job, they need to be out on their own, and they need to learn to push themselves. If they don’t do that by the time they get to be an adult, then they’re going to be in trouble. They’re not going to know how to operate.

So when it comes to how much growth they get, it’s going to be dependent on not how you push them, but how much we all teach them to push themselves. That’s a key point. And that’s that Parent Action plan Fear book as well on how to do that.

Thoughts on that guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It does fall back to a happier household again, frankly, that if the kids are doing stuff for themselves and continually learning to do stuff for themselves without somebody constantly having to be on them about it, the household is happier because it’s just not requiring that type of oversight where a parent becomes a helicopter parent and never lets their kid try anything or never lets their kid just succeed or fail at something because they hover, partly because they haven’t taught the kid to push themselves to do it on their own.

Dr. Greg Moody:

And that leads to independence. There’s a story, some friends of mine just told me, where they went to Disney World the same time we did, we all went together as a group. And so some friends of mine had two kids and I brought my son and when my son came up and they all got ice cream and he had his ice cream cone, we were at Disney World, it’s all this stuff going on and he turned around and he dropped the ice cream cone. And the parents, my buddies, the parents of the other kids looked at me like I was going to help and I was going to go get him another ice cream cone. And I just said to him, I didn’t remember this story, I said to him, “Well, if you want more ice cream, I guess you got to go ask him for it.” And then he went over to the counter. He said, “I dropped my ice cream, can I have another one?” And I knew that Disney is good about that, they gave him a replacement ice cream.

And the parents were shocked, they were shocked. He was five years old that I didn’t take him with me or I didn’t go with him to get the ice cream. For me, it wasn’t anything, any big deal. I just told him, “Well, it looks like you need to get more ice cream,” or “if you want more ice cream, you got to go ask him.” And then he was able to do that, whereas their kids, I don’t want to say even now, but their kids don’t have the skill or they didn’t think they had the skill, they didn’t know how hard they could push them to be able to fend for themselves and deal with them themselves. And look, we talk about starting kids at three years old. Three-year-olds can do a lot. Can they memorize a whole bunch of stuff? Probably not. But they could do a lot. They can behave really well. Although the other-

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

The header on this page… Sorry.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Please, no please.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

The header on this page is It’s Not Just for Kids. So are the parents teaching themselves to push themselves and are they recognizing their own victories as well when they’re getting, even if it’s better, just better at, “Hey, today I didn’t yell at my kid about something and I helped them get better,” or “today I got something done at work that I planned on getting done because I made the plan and I did the plan and I followed the plan, ta-da.” Are they recognizing this in themselves and demonstrating it for their kids that, “Hey, this is what I did today and I got it done, what did you do today? What did you get done?” So they’re growing themselves, so the kids have a model to follow.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, it seems trite to say that if you don’t do it, it’s harder to get your kids to do it, but it’s kind of like monkey see, monkey do. If they see you growing and paying attention to your own growth, maybe being supportive of your spouse when they do something and say something positive to them and then backwards. Sometimes it’s hard to pay attention to those things ’cause we’re so busy and everybody’s so distracted with all the different things that, you know all the, I don’t want to complain about social media, but you get a lot of notifications and things happen. It’s easy to get distracted and not pay attention to either making progress yourself or mentioning that to you, to your family, to other people. So that’s a really great skill.

The last thing I was going to say on this was we talked about the fourth level, the different levels of skills that people have. And it may be worth revisiting for a second or fourth levels of things, activities that kids do. And we always talk about the bottom ones as the parents. That’s fundamental, your parents are there for survival, for care, for love. The second level is school. You have to, in our society, go to school, learn to read, learn to do all the school stuff and the academic things. And then we’ve got in the middle there are some fun activities that might be you could do baseball or have some fun. Those are important things to do. But the top one is what we are. We’re not in this, our activity’s fun, but it’s a different level of activity and we call that the fourth level, which is in Maslow’s Hierarchy and other psychological areas, it’s if all these things are taken care of, then you can develop and grow.

So all these things need to get taken care of. You need to be safe, you need to learn stuff in school. Fun activities are great. They may or may not be critical, but for us to develop, we’ve got to invest time and we’ve got to invest energy and development and that’s the highest level of activity you can do. And that’s what we are. We’re not like a sport or a fun activity, even though it is fun, it’s developmental activity. And so that’s what parents can pay attention to and that’s why we’d really love to have them in class, that’s really the best way to support your kid and do this.

Anything else to add there guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It leads to another point though. When the parents are doing it and pushing themselves and developing and growing, that’s an integrity thing for the family. If the parents are doing it, then the kids see that the parents really mean it.

Dr. Greg Moody:

You brought us up to the next point, which is integrity is if I am eating bad, it’s hard to tell my kid to eat well. If I won’t eat my vegetables, it’s hard to tell my kid to eat some vegetables, and all of these things. And you said the word consistency, have to do with integrity. Integrity is doing what you’re supposed to or discipline is doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it. And integrity is when you can trust that other people are going to do the things that they say they’re going to do. It’s like having a congruent life.

Other integrity things to add, ’cause this is really important as we get people to black belts, our charter is that our KarateBuilt black belts take responsibility to lead with integrity, and that means that everything’s congruent. They’re not different in the school and outside of the school. I want to let you guys talk, but one of the things that we give our black belts is the black belt pin. I’m going to pull it out of the wrapper, so it’s easier to see. But the black belt pin, and this is really designed to signify growth and there are black belts inside the school and outside the school. When I’m outside the school and I’m wearing my suit coat regardless of its martial arts activity, I have the pin on.

Maybe you guys want to talk about that a little bit.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Well, I was thinking actually about how if you tell your child, “Karate is really good for you, that’s why I’m making you do it because it’s good for you. You’re going to learn all these different things.” But when the kid says, “Hey, well, why don’t you take class with me?” And they go, “Oh, but it’s too hard for me. I don’t have time right now. I can’t do this. I don’t have time to do that and my knee hurts and my back hurts sometimes and I can’t do it,” it loses integrity. It loses just what you were trying to instill in your child in the first place and now you’re just giving excuses why you can’t. And then you expect your child to not give excuses when the time comes for something because it became hard for them that they can’t find those excuses or they’re going to find every excuse, “Oh yeah, but I got too much homework today,” or, “Oh, but I wanted to go see Johnny today and I wanted to do this and I planned on doing that.”

It’s again going to be the modeling of why we have families take class together, why we have families out there doing stuff. If you want your family to have a standard, if you want your family to grow together, if you want everybody in the family to grow, you have to show them that it’s worth doing to get the growth.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, there’s a great quote I just heard, well, I’ve heard it before, but I re-heard it the other day, how I do anything is how I do everything. And I think this is a really good quote. It means that if I am sloppy at how I clean my room, then I’m probably going to be more sloppy at other things in life. And it’s hard to say, “Well, I’m really disciplined when I’m at work, but at home, I don’t keep that standard up.” It’s really hard to be different and not have consistency and integrity about how you behave in one area versus another. And if we ask our kids to do something, then we have to be willing to do that. And it also comes back to parents, as you said, the number one thing we get asked to help their kids with is discipline. But if the kid doesn’t feel like coming in one day, then they don’t help teach them to push themselves to come in.

Not everybody’s going to want to do everything all the time. Not everybody works out consistently all the time. Well, we do ’cause we’re doing this for a different reason and is a part of martial arts, but most people don’t do it consistently. That’s why the average time that people actually train at a health club when they sign up at a health club is four weeks. That’s the average. And that includes people like me that consistently go, all the people that really consistently go is bringing that average up. So most people, they’re probably only doing one or two weeks. They do a couple of weeks and they quit. They keep paying it to health club, but they’re not doing it, and that’s not what is going to help you or help give you benefits in the future.

Other stuff to add on integrity and how parents can show that?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

If you say it, do it.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, I think that’s a great way to do it and I like this, how I do anything is how I do everything. That’s a good way to think about it if we ever find ourselves saying, “Oh, but in this area, it’s okay to not be so disciplined” or “it’s okay to not be as consistent.”

So that covers the main key points that we have in our charter that relate to this, which is discipline, constant growth, and integrity. The last one is lead with responsibility, but I think it’s kind of combined in the other pieces that we talked about today.

Any last things to add guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

I know I trained, my whole family trained together, all of us did. And because of that, I honestly couldn’t tell you what my kids would’ve been like without it. Just because it was maintained for such a long time in their lives that I can look at them and see where it’s helped and where specific things that they learned come out. But I can’t even begin to picture how much less they would have in their characters if they hadn’t trained and if we hadn’t trained with them to keep them consistent and show them that, “Yes, even as grownups, we keep going to class. We keep doing what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to go twice a week, we go twice a week.” So that is something that just for me is a very personal message about training with your kids. It’s just we showed them, they did it and now they’ve got success because of it.

Dr. Greg Moody:

Yeah, I think that’s a big point. All three of us have had our kids trained in martial arts. And your kids are young enough, they haven’t gotten, they’re not out in the world as adults yet, so you can’t see those results, but you can see I’m sure a lot of other results, Mr. Flees. And Senior Master, your kids are phenomenal and they’ve had really great careers. And my son too just graduated college and has a lot going on. One of the things I might say is for me is that because he’s had that development, of course I was been doing it before he was born, but because he’s had that development, I don’t worry about how his future’s going to turn out. If your kids have all these things, then when they go off and start a career or decide they want to do a business, which is really scary or they want to be an actor, that most of the time people don’t make money in that, I wouldn’t worry about any of our kids doing those things because they’ve got this foundation that they can build off of.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Exactly.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right, yeah.

Dr. Greg Moody:

All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate this as always. You guys are great and I love doing our podcast together.

For anybody who’s watching this and maybe they haven’t watched any other podcasts, we’ve got a lot of them on a lot of topics, pretty much anything you can think of. So you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, thanks a lot, everybody.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Thanks, sir.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thanks, sir.

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