The Progress Check – One of the Most Important Days in Your Child’s Life with Dr. Greg Moody and Sr. Master Laura Sanborn
The Progress Check – One of the Most Important Days in Your Child’s Life with Dr. Greg Moody and Sr. Master Laura Sanborn
In today’s Success Training conversation, Senior Master Sanborn and I break down one of the most critical moments in a student’s journey at KarateBuilt Martial Arts — the Progress Check.
This isn’t just about technique or passing a test. It’s a structured moment where discipline, effort, and leadership are measured… and where the entire support team steps in. That includes parents, yes — but also anyone responsible for a child’s schedule, finances, transportation, or custody. When the full team shows up, students move faster, stay confident, and set clearer goals for Black Belt and beyond.
In this blog post, you’ll find the full transcript from our discussion. As you read, you’ll see exactly how families can prepare, what to expect, and why attending together matters so much for a child’s success in training and in life.
Key Takeaway:
Show up, bring everyone who helps your child succeed, and be ready to support their next step toward becoming a Black Belt in life.
Sincerely,
Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.
P.S. The Transcript: The Progress Check – One of the Most Important Days in Your Child’s Life with Dr. Greg Moody and Sr. Master Laura Sanborn
Dr. Greg Moody:
Success training today, we’re going to talk about the progress check, which I believe, and we believe at KarateBuilt Martial Arts, could be the most important day in your kid’s life. So Master Sanborn, thanks a lot for being here. I appreciate as always Senior Master Sanborn being here.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
Sir, thank you.
Dr. Greg Moody:
And I wanted to start with a quote. This is from Vince Lombardi. “An individual commitment to a group effort is what makes a team, a company, society, and civilization work.” What we mean by that is, and the reason this quote is kind of relevant, is that the progress check isn’t just about your kid or yourself, if you’re one of our adult students. It’s about how the whole family operates and what they do. So how do you get ready for a progress check? And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Let’s talk about first the purpose of the progress check. The purpose of the progress check is to evaluate where you’re at, as it sounds. But whenever you start martial arts, not like if somebody did soccer, T-ball, baseball, aerobics at the gym, any of those kind of things, you know what that is before you got involved with it. When you’re doing martial arts, as we know from years and years, there’s very few people that know anything about martial arts other than what they see on TVs and movies.
So we need this first couple weeks to evaluate your progress, see how you’re doing, and then help you understand what the next steps are. Many of our students at this point want to set their goal for black belt or they want to set their goal for even higher than black belt, most of our students to at least second-degree black belt. And that’s something really hard to conceptualize on day one, which is when you’re probably watching this video, if you’re preparing for this properly.
What would you add to that about the purpose of the progress check, Senior Master?
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
A lot of people think of it as, oh, what have I already done, versus where can I go with this? You’ve got purpose on here as a word, and it’s not just purpose. It’s, I want to say progress again because it’s a progress check, but it’s the why am I going to get to something else? Why is it not just going to stay the same all the time if I’m doing this? It’s how are we progressing as instructors with your family? And how can your family continue to grow with us and not just stay at the same rate, even if that’s a place where you’re really happy with what we’re doing, but how can it be even better?
Dr. Greg Moody:
Yeah. And we take, I think an important piece of this is the progress check is an opportunity for you to understand how serious this is. What I mean by that is this can be life-changing for all of our students, but part of the way it becomes life-changing is that you set big goals and have really high expectations. We want you to have high expectations for what you’re going to get out of martial arts. We really mean it when people develop more confidence and discipline.
In fact, I was going to bring up our card that our instructors all carry, which has the KarateBuilt charter on it, and the progress check is really going over this, which is that we’re a highly disciplined martial arts school. So up to the point that you’ve, your first two weeks is about really acclimating to the discipline that we ask for. And that’s not us yelling at you discipline. That’s just knowing what to do, doing it when you’re expected to, and that we’ve done a good job of helping you with that. And then you’ve done a good job of acclimating to it, whether it’s for you, and by you, I mean you as a parent, if you’re the parent of one of our students and you’re not training.
And the second thing that’s very important for the progress check is 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 that’s what the next piece of this is, is setting some goals about what we measure. So what we measure up to this point is how you’ve done and really in the discipline part of what we do, so you understand the format of what we’re doing. We’re not expecting you to be a black belt. We’re not expecting you to break bricks with your head or something on day one. Not that we really break bricks with our head on day 10,000. But that’s not something that we’re expecting.
We’re measuring our results, what’s up to this point? And then what we measure for what’s next. And our expectation is that the students, all of our students trained at black belt and beyond. So we’ll talk about that path at that point.
Anything to add there in terms of that next part of the charter and what we measure?
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
No. Everybody’s individual. So we’re not looking for anybody to be as good as the person next to them or necessarily better than the person next to them. We’re looking for that individual ability to improve.
Dr. Greg Moody:
And we’ve had athletes, semi-professional athletes and athletes that are very high level athletes in our school. And we’ve had students that have serious disabilities and from every end of the spectrum. And again, our goal is not to exclude people, although we require people first to be disciplined, but our goal is to help you get from where you’re at to somewhere new that you’ve never thought you could go before. So that’s what we’re measuring right now at the progress check, and then what’s coming up.
Now, next is, it’s really critical. And it’s part of what we mentioned earlier in the Vince Lombardi quote, is that the whole family, the whole support team must attend. So that doesn’t just mean the parents, if you’re a child student, but it means, again, if you’re a child student, both parents and anybody in charge of schedule, finances, transportation, custody, anybody that’s involved at all in your kid’s development.
If you’re an adult student, then it would be you, but it might be your spouse, it might be other people that are supporting you. Anybody that’s supporting you in your development needs to be at the progress check. They don’t need to come to every class, but at this one time, this progress check, they need to be there. If they’re all there, then they can understand what’s coming up, what’s next, and get all the value that we want you to have from KarateBuilt Martial Arts.
Anything to add there, ma’am?
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
No, but when we say things like transportation, a lot of people forget that the nanny or just somebody that they’ve hired to help them, or a friend who’s helping with their driving. If two kids live next to each other and one mom is always driving both her kid and the other kid, that parent might need to be there too, or actually does need to be there because they are a support system for that family. And if the schedule’s going to change, they’ve got to be a part of that if they’re the transportation. The nanny is not just babysitting. They are a part of what happens with the family. A parent who no longer lives in the same household, they are involved.
So it is a team effort, but it’s a team effort of a lot of people that some people just think, “Well, mom is the one who signed him up. Mom is the one who brings him. Mom is the one who signed all the paperwork. So mom’s the one who’s doing this. It’s not the family.” But it is the whole family. Sometimes it’s just an older sister who brings him sometimes.
Dr. Greg Moody:
Well, and if a mom enrolls a child or a dad enrolls a child and the mom is, the other spouse isn’t involved, or if it’s a divorced family, the other spouse isn’t involved, then the child’s not going to get as much out of the program and then the other person’s not going to be as supportive of you. So what we’re doing is also helping you work with your whole support team.
We just recently had somebody where the grandma wanted to do this as a gift for their kid. So they were paying for the classes and they were, but mom was bringing them. And we would have, maybe the grandma’s out of state, they live in Ireland, and we could connect them through on Zoom to the progress check so they can really understand what’s going on.
What we find is 100% of the time when you forget one of the support team, they will have questions and important things to bring up that we didn’t think of. We try to cover everything, but you guys might have questions. But they will a hundred percent of the time have questions. And if you don’t believe me, think about anytime you’ve been somewhere and your spouse didn’t come and you went home, they had a question that you didn’t think of or something that you didn’t cover. And it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just we want to have everybody there.
The next thing … So that’s critical. How to get the most out of the progress check. What we’re going to go through in the progress check is how they’ve done and what’s coming up. So to be ready for it, number one, get the whole family there, the whole support team together for it.
But number two, be thinking about what the benefits you’d like to get out of martial arts are. There’s a lot of things that we talk about and it’s different for everybody. Some people want their kid to be able to speak in public and be confident enough to be the CEO of a company someday. Some people want their child to be a high level athlete and learn all the additional skills. Because we do so many different things in martial arts, there’s so many coordinations that you have to have compared to other sports, that it really helps other sports. Some people want to, some of our adult students want to lose weight.
One of the things that you want to have happen not just in the next couple weeks, but over the next few maybe years of doing martial arts, what would you like to have as an outcome? Because if you have that in your mind, it’s much more likely to come true. And then we can help you with that.
Anything to add there in terms of getting prepared for the progress check?
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
[inaudible 00:09:52] look at the future of your child. What did you have in mind when you first came in? Was it something like, oh, he just never does what I tell him the first time I tell him? But are you thinking ahead to the point of what will they be like if they continue that way and how do you need, what do you need to do now to make that happen?
And KarateBuilt is one of those ways to help with that. We create independent adults who can do things on their own, who maybe when you saw them at six, seven, eight, you were like, “Yeah, they’re never going to be out of the house.” But with a push now as a young kid or push at any point, they can do more. They can be out there on their own and you’re looking at your kid going, “Look at my kid. He’s a success. He’s out of the house. He’s doing what he’s supposed to do. He does it on his own.”
And those are the kinds of things that we encourage as we go along. Even just the goal setting. Just yesterday when we were setting goals for people, helping parents set goals for their kids, you’d come across one who’s just, “Oh, I want them to be happy,” but they don’t even know what that means. Or that, yeah, kid’s going to be happy one day, but not happy the next. You’re never going to get that happy every day.
But you want them to be successful. All right, in your household, what does success mean? Does it mean they can cook for themselves, they can get their laundry done and do all this stuff? And that’s what we support and encourage, is that you have a plan for your child to be successful as an adult, as a teenager, as a kid in college. But you have to be, somebody has to help guide you to understand exactly what you mean by success for your family. Because we’re not trying to make everybody the same.
Dr. Greg Moody:
Yeah. And that’s, again, another reason why the whole support structure needs to be part of it. And if you’re an adult student, then what’s your support structure? If you’re a kid, then what’s your support structure?
That’s another reason we encourage families when they do their first couple weeks of lessons, that the whole family does it, not just the child. If you’re focused on your kid doing lessons, that the whole family does it so they understand what is possible and what’s possible in the first day that you start martial arts at KarateBuilt Martial Arts versus after a couple of weeks and you really understand a little bit of what’s going on. I know it’s only a couple weeks, but it’s enough so you’ve had some classes under your belt, literally, and you can understand what happened in the past, what’s happening now, and then these larger, bigger goals for the future.
So that’s why we do that. And what may happen at your progress check is we may do an evaluation. There’s lots of things that we’ll talk about, and we might in some cases recommend that you do black belt training. Now, not everybody qualifies for black belt training, so we might, if you’ve been doing well and you have some strong goals, then you might qualify and we’ll talk to you about the steps if you didn’t qualify at that point, what the steps are so that you can get there.
Okay, that’s the main part of our progress check and what we want to do. The last thing we’ll wrap up with is we really mean that [inaudible 00:13:04] we’re really a bunch, but because I think that in many activities you do, they talk about confidence and discipline and all this stuff, but they’re not literal about it.
We are literal about our kids in the last part of our charter is that KarateBuilt black belts take responsibility to lead with integrity. And one thing that we say is all of our students are black belts when they start. They haven’t earned their black belt yet, but we expect them to behave like black belts. And that means that they’re looking out for other people. They’re showing leadership externally and internally so that they push themselves to higher goals and higher goals.
And I think as parents, that’s what we want for our kids. Our job isn’t to push them. Our our job is to teach them so that they can push themselves, that they have enough confidence to push themselves, they have enough discipline to push themselves, and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with all of our black belts at the school.
I think that’s about it, ma’am. For anybody coming to their progress check, you hopefully you’re watching this video after your first class and that you know what it entails. Be prepared. Have the whole support team together. And we’re going to really be excited about talking about some really exciting and big goals in the future.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
Yes, sir. That’s…
Dr. Greg Moody:
All right. Thank you, ma’am. Thanks for being here, and we look forward to seeing you at your progress check.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:
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.
Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and men’s issues.
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