Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

P.S. The Transcript – The KarateBuilt Charter:

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Hey everybody, this is Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor, and I’m here with Senior Master Laura Sanborn for our success training today on the KarateBuilt Charter. It’s our third part in our series to talk about the values and the ideas that form KarateBuilt martial arts and how we implement them in real life. And really, senior master, it’s been a million years since we started the school, it seems like, and it’s evolved over time. And what we get a constant set of feedback about is how much of a difference we make in people’s lives. So this is part of us putting this together in a format that not only helps explain how that works, but also helps us do more of it when we train our instructors and we work on these things with our students. Would that be a fair statement that we get a lot of that feedback?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Absolutely. And just as doing this to me epitomizes how we talk about constant growth for others, but we’re doing it for ourselves as well, and for the company, and for KarateBuilt.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s perfect for our topic today because that’s how we always had these values and it was always part of our KarateBuilt values. But now we’re put it into a format that we can explain more clearly to people and then we can use to reinforce it ourselves and continue growth. So perfect segue to our topic, our particular part of the KarateBuilt Charter today, which is Part 3, Constant Growth. I’m here again with Senior Master Laura and this is the KarateBuilt Charter. We’ve already talked about the beginning parts of it, that we’re a highly disciplined martial arts school and 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 the last part is, KarateBuilt Black Belts take responsibility to the lead with integrity. So that middle part about, we talked last time about what it means to be inclusive, and that doesn’t mean we have low standards.

That means we have high standards, but our work is to be good enough as instructors and as a school to be able to work with a wider variety of people and help a wider variety of people. Today we’re going to talk about students. The thing we really measure, which is from wherever you come in to the constant growth from when you start become a black belt and beyond, because we expect everybody to go way beyond first degree black belt in our school. So let’s get started on this. So this is our statement that we’re going to be talking about. And what, in your mind, does constant growth mean?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Just that nobody’s plateauing and staying still and they get to a level and they feel like they’re done. It’s that there’s always another thing we can push towards and another goal we can set, for them and for ourselves, that it’s not just, all right, we did it. We’re done.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah. One thing that we talk about and some people don’t quite get is that unlike a college degree, we’re similar to a college degree in that you’re achieving something after years of training. You choose your first degree black belt and achieve your second degree black belt and so on. So there’s a similarity to a college degree, but with a college degree, the purpose is to get your degree and then go change to go work or use that degree. And it’s not that people, it’s not built in to the college experience that you continue learning forever. And if you do learn what you learned in college, the idea is you’re supposed to be able to do your job and you don’t necessarily need much more training, even though a lot of people get more training. And what we do, you still get achievement levels, but if you stop training, then you’re really not just plateauing, but you’re kind of going backwards.

People that got their black belt and then they stopped training in other schools that tend to do that, they get their black belt and then they, a year later, they haven’t trained in that year, and they’ve really lost all the benefit that they’ve… Or lost a lot of the benefit that they got from that training. So one thing we’re always talking to students about is the past, the present and the future, and modeling this for them so that they can have an idea that they started here, they got to another point, later on after a long time, they got to first degree black belt, second degree black belt, and I’m an eighth degree black belt. We’re not doing this to scale, but I’m still working on learning, and one day I hope to become a nice degree black belt, and then I continue to want to work on learning and we train all the time. So I think you said it really well is there’s not, that plateauing isn’t really a thing. Generally, when you start plateauing, you go down.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah. So I think constant growth, the other term in Japanese culture, there’s something called Kaizen, which is continuous never-ending growth. And that’s what people apply to manufacturing and companies. And you hear that a lot in certain types of research that people do, but that idea that they’re continuing to grow forever. The other thing that I think that’s important here is, one is that you don’t plateau. The other is that some people come in, and if we were drawing this and you’re doing it for a lot of other activities, if you were in music or gymnastics or sports, or even if you were learning math, if it was math, you might come in and the starting point might be algebra, or the starting point might be calculus, or the starting point might be that you just know how to add. So whenever people come in at wherever they’re at, they could be, we start kids as young as three.

They may not have very good physical skills, they may not have very good memorization skills. They may not have very good discipline qualities. They may not show respect very well, but some of them come in at all different levels. And the constant growth idea is that from the moment they start, so wherever they start, and then we’re trying to get them to the point where they continue to get better, better, better, better, better all the time, they don’t have to start with talent. They could start with lots of talent. Either way, we’re going to be pushing the people to get better, better all the time so that they can achieve more.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Absolutely. And that’s where I was thinking of with constant growth as well, is that no matter where you start, you can get better. There’s just no reason to think that, well, I’m already a world-class athlete because I’ve done this and I’ve gone there and I’ve done this and I’ve competed at this level. When you come in, we appreciate that you’ve got that skill. We do. But we know that we can take you even farther, whether physically, mentally, there are skills that you can still learn and we can push you to get better with those and take those skills to another level, and take them on farther to some other things that you may not have thought of because your skills were just super physical or you’re super good at mental. We can combine those things. That growth doesn’t have to be only on one track.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Well, I think you hit on a key point there that when somebody comes in, we’ve had people that come in that are high-level athletes and maybe they’re really great weightlifters or they’re good marathon runners or anything. And when they come and do training with us, they always find the holes in the rest of their training. They could have great endurance, but then they get exhausted when they get up to sparring, or they’re very, very strong because they lift weights, but then they don’t have the strength in certain areas that we’re working with them on. Because what’s great about the martial arts that we do is that it’s so encompassing that you can continue training on it forever. That’s the thing that becomes, really, makes it more interesting too. One reason that what we do is so much different than what people do at the health club.

In health club, It’s the same stuff over and over again. And sure, you’re trying to get stronger, faster, or better, but we’re also intellectually challenging you. So there’s these steps that guide you all the way through these steps as you move up. So even for me as an eighth degree black belt, I’m the second-highest rank we can be in our martial arts style. There’s only… Ninth degree black belt is the last one. I still have lots of stuff to learn. In fact, I just got done training with the Grandmaster M.K. Lee in our system.

So I love training, and the idea is that number one, we have different standards of training, so you can grow in lots of areas, but the second is there’s some guidance through each of those areas so that students get to see where they’re going. That way they tend to stick with it because there’s different levels of achievement, versus if you were just lifting weights, there’s nothing wrong with lifting weights. I do that, but I’m not going to have a constant growth of 20% every time I lift weights, I’m not going to see the achievement, and it’s not measured and recognized with your peers.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

We see that a lot with kids where they need that, well, pretty much everybody, actually, needs to have a level that they can go to and know what the next one is and know where you’re going with it. That’s why people plateau is just like, well, I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know how to get to something next. I’m already at the top of… I’m the best player on my team. I play soccer. I’m the best player on my team. Everybody looks to me, I’m the team captain. I’m the one who does it all. I come to practice every day.

All right, well what’s next for you? Where are you going to take that to the next level? And it’s hard to find that whereas it is built into our system that there is another level, there is something else you can do. Whether it’s on the same track of I just want to get the next rank, I want to get better physically, I want to get better physically. We’ve got so many other tracks they can do to take things to the different level. And every track has different levels.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

And we are very unique in martial arts and very unique in physical activities for people, whether it’s kids or adults or athletes or people that have challenges, because we’ve got our curriculum book, we’ve got a beginner curriculum book and this is our advanced one, that takes people all the way through 30 years of training, 30 years of training’s all in here. And this is what we’ve been teaching for all this time, so that we know exactly is, to your point, what people can do next, and what they’re going to be challenged with.

And it’s not easy. We don’t want it to be easy, we want it to be challenging so that the next piece is hard and the next piece is hard. I think the other thing I would want to mention, so we kind of, I think, we talk a lot about working with families and kids, but for our adult students that are even getting older in age and they’re close to the sixties or even seventies, they still have a way to get challenged. Even though their physical prowess may not be the same as it was when they were 25 years old, they can still get challenged to get better all the time.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes. And you see them be really proud of that when they do it. When you see somebody of that age who just continues and is like, oh, I had no idea that I could do that, that I could get to that. I honestly didn’t think I could get to black belt because I’m 70 years old, and that seemed it was too far off and it wasn’t a goal I could set. We set the goal and get them beyond it, and just the pride they have in themselves for being able to do that and to know they’ve stepped up to a challenge that was not easy to get to, but they could do it.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

And it may end up being a little bit different for everybody. So that idea of constant growth from the moment they start to black belt and beyond. If somebody had, we’ve had students with physical challenges, we’ve had students with mental challenges, we’ve had students with all kinds of different challenges, along with what we’re talking about the high level athletes, and where they start to where they get to may be different for all of them, but it’s still challenging and they’re still proud of what they accomplished when they got there. And those are key points in wanting to measure our results based on their constant growth all the way through and not just making it easy. It’s got to be growing, but it’s got to be hard at the same time. If it wasn’t hard, they wouldn’t be proud of their achievement.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, it wouldn’t be worth it.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah. I was talking about older people, because it’s you and I, and are close to 60 and 60, even though you don’t look like it, you look younger than me, but the challenges for us, and we’ve been doing this so long, I’ve got injuries and different things, but I can still do it. So I can overcome the challenge wherever I’m at from the moment I start. And the start isn’t just a white belt when they start. The start could be Monday when you and I train in our class on Monday. That’s the start that day where we’re going to go to whatever’s next, and we’re going to get better from wherever we’re at.

And so that’s exciting because now there’s something I can always look forward to. And again, that’s why people stick with this when they get into this mindset, rather than something that they’re going to just jog every day for 10 miles and jog every day for 10 miles. It’s not that that’s bad for their health, but it’s very difficult to stick with it and to do something where you don’t have a measurement of progress. And I know we talked about that concept of flow, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this concept of flow, where people are happiness and most fulfilled when they’re doing something that’s hard, that’s measurable, and goal oriented.

And he did a study of thousands and thousands of people and found that when people are the most engaged things that are difficult but not so difficult, they couldn’t, it was too much. And we watch that as well is that we want things to be difficult, but achievable, difficult and achievable. And that way you’re always challenged and always growing. What about once they get black belt? Why is it really important and different about what we do when they get black belt? And that seems like they get their college degree, but it really for us isn’t that, but we get our students to continue training.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Our curriculum is designed that way, that as they get to black belt and beyond the upper levels, there’s new curriculum for them, there’s new challenges, something they didn’t get to do in the first years of getting to the black belt. It’s altogether different. The techniques change, what they are and how they’re designed because we’re building on what you learned up until then and now advancing those techniques so they’re more effective in a different way. We’re adding in different levels of expectations for leadership for them, that they step up and use what they’ve learned to help other people. We’re having different expectations of what they’re going to do with what they’ve already learned. And then here’s new things that you can learn as well to take it even farther.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

And I think that’s the basis of self-esteem and confidence. You get self-esteem and confidence because you get more skills, and you learn to achieve more. And when you do that, every time you do that, you believe you can do more. So as you move up this path to eighth degree black belt or ninth degree black belt, as you continue to move up the path and you learn more skills and they build upon the last skills that you learned, I mean, hopefully our students are not getting in fights and having to defend themselves. That’s not the point of the training.

The point of the training partially is that, so that they are very safe and can defend themselves very effectively, but also that they get better and better and better and they see themselves getting better and better, better, which means I can then, oh my gosh, if I got better at this, I can get better at the next thing, and the other challenge in other parts of my life. And if I stop doing that, if I stop challenging myself in martial arts, at KarateBuilt Martial Arts, then you’re going to start drifting away from that confidence level because you won’t be as good. And that makes it tough. But that’s the idea, that if you keep training then you feel better, you get better, you feel better, and you get better at the same time.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

And it builds capability. Just that I can do something and I can use what I’ve learned before to do something entirely different. Even if you would not have looked at it and gone, oh well, becoming a black belt, how does that help you with doing math? I am now capable because I’ve had to learn something that was hard. I’ve learned to break through that and go through the hard hardships of it and be challenged by it. Okay. So this new math that you’re coming up with is challenging and hard, but I am capable of achieving things with what I’ve done before. So I am capable, again, of the next thing.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

I think that one thing you hit on really well there, ma’am, is that when people come up against challenges, so there’s some challenge, and it was easy over here, and they come up against challenges, that’s when, it’s the same if it’s physical, it’s the same if it’s mental, same in reading or if it’s math or whatever, or other things that work that we have. So when we come up against challenges and we’re not used to that feeling because we haven’t been challenged before, then those are the edges of growth.

We’re never growing unless we’re bumping up against some edge of a challenge, and it feels difficult and we’re a little bit scared of it or we’re a lot scared of it. And that’s exactly when our edges of growth are. And this is a good example of, if you’re a parent listening to this and you’re working with your child, your job is not to push them, but to teach them to push themselves through these times. We reiterate that concept because if they get up against the challenge and the feeling is, oh, this is hard, therefore I better stop, then when other things are hard, they’re going to have the same response, therefore I better stop. Or if things are really hard or scary, I better run away, instead of if it’s a bear in the forest, that’s a good idea. But if it’s something that’s going to help them and they’re going to be on the edges of growth, then that’s what we need to learn to work through.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

And the limit working through something is not, you have to do it on your own. That’s where we come in as professionals, as KarateBuilt, is we’ve seen it before. We know things that are helping and can help with those challenges. So it’s not teaching them that they have to do everything by themselves and they’re a failure if they have to ask for help. But if they need help, you can get help with something. And that doesn’t disabuse you or doesn’t diminish your ability to go over that challenge. The challenge might’ve been asking for help.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

So you start out as needing help to be capable, but then you end up as being capable yourself. We’re creating independent people because of that change and because none of us are completely independent. I mean, I need help with lots of stuff, but I’m much more capable than I was before I started martial arts, or much more capable than before I started becoming more experienced. So our experiences and our skills and what we know, well, that’s the same as experiences and skills, that was the other thing in here, are what’s going to help us when new things come up that we had similar feelings so we can work through them. And I think skills are just what you learn. Experiences are the feelings that you had when you were learning them. And we’re going to help everybody get through that. And that brings us to the next point as we wrap up here a little bit.

Our instructors at the school and how we teach them to work on kids, students, adults, doesn’t matter, with constant growth from when they start till black Belt. One of the things I’d start with is, we teach all of our instructors when once they… Now students have to finish a little bit of a qualification period before they, number one, on their first day when we do a lesson with them, and if they’re qualified to be a student. Once they do that, but we want to try to include as many people as possible. That’s kind of our first concept we talked about last time. But once they get into that stage, the instructors are really good at handling wherever anybody starts down here in this beginning situation because they are trained in lots of different scenarios with lots of different sizes of people and lots of different types of people.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah. We’re not going to diminish somebody who, if the star athlete comes in and he’s in the same class as somebody who’s not of the same level, we don’t hold that one back to the other one’s level. We’re going to build the other one up as much as possible, but still push that other athlete to continue on growing, not hold somebody back until everybody catches up to them.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, it’s different than sometimes what is a concept in school, they did some research with a… They put four kids in a group, and this kid was the accelerated kid. He had the highest test scores. This kid had the lowest test scores, and then these two were about middle. They were about average. And what they found was is that they put all four of those kids in a group, the average of the whole group went up. But see, to me, that’s not even great, because what happened is the accelerated kid’s test scores went down. The average of the group went up, but the kid that was the smartest, his test scores, he didn’t get as much benefit.

So what we want to do is move all these guys up. We want to push everybody to move to other levels. Maybe the kid’s older or the kid has more innate ability, he’s going to get pushed just as hard as these other ones. And that’s what ends up making it more exciting and fun because then they build the self-confidence and self-esteem out of what they’ve got. And the instructors are very good at recognizing when people are pushing each other. And I think it also reinforces… Our leadership training does that as well, because in leadership, we’re teaching them that they need to push themselves.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes. And not always having the same person be the leader just because they’re good at it.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Right. And that means that I’m learning, if I learn to push myself, but I also have to learn how to push other people. Those two messages go together, and I’m going to push myself harder. I mean have to, if I’m the leader. I have to be an example. So that’s something the instructors in the curriculum, it’s built into the instructors in the curriculum. So what other things did you want to add here? I think we’ve got a lot of things that we’ve covered. I know the other piece of our instructors is that we train them in all kinds of different situations that people may encounter, like kids with ADHD, adults with ADHD, kids with special needs, but also performance athletes. So all the things we’ve mentioned, those are specific trainings that we train our instructors in so that they can push people from this constant growth from when they start to when they become black belts. Anything else to wrap up with or add?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, part of it is just the fact that we don’t allow our instructors to plateau either. Oh, you got to fourth degree and you’re teaching every day and you’re working every day. You don’t have time to train? Yes you do.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Everybody trains. Everybody trains.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Everybody trains.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, everybody trains.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

And everybody trains on the leadership and everybody trains on their instructorship, so that we as KarateBuilt get better, because we’re constantly looking at what we’re doing and evaluating, are we doing the best by our students, and what do we need to do to do best next for them? What do we need to do next for the next person coming up to make sure that that one is as good as everybody else? Not, oh, they’re just 12, 13 years old, they can’t really be an instructor. Yes, they can. We have the expectation. We’re going to train them, we’re going to continue to push them so that they build up to where the next one’s taking over. And then their job is to look at what we’re doing and have the impact input of, oh, what if we did this? Would that make a difference in helping our students?

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

That’s a great way to wrap up. So we’re training, the students are getting better. This applies not just to the students, but it applies to the instructors and it actually applies to our group, our organization of KarateBuilt Martial Arts. That’s what it applies to. I’m looking forward to our next time that we talk together. This book down here that you see the title, that’s the pre-production version of the book, where we’re going to have all of these values and all of these skills in our book so that we’re writing, so that you can also apply this to other pieces of your life and everything else. And the values that we have at KarateBuilt are what helped build people. Thank you very much, ma’am. I really appreciate it.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir. This was great.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

All right, thanks everybody. For everybody listening, I hope you have a great day and we’ll look forward to seeing you next time.

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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.

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

“I have never done anything as great! This is a premier martial arts experience.” – Herman Johnson