Keep it Simple

This past week I was sitting down and having a mat chat with our Little Dragon karate students about different levels of success that one might have in areas of their life. This talk was a little bit on the mature side, but when we put it into perspective with our students you could see from their eye contact and body language that they understood the message.

We talked about the importance of an idea, goal, or something we might set out to do. When I questioned the kids for feedback on how they might achieve this idea they gave me all the right answers to fill in the blanks. At the end of the chat, we came up with a pretty good formula and or recipe for success that seemed to resonate with every student.

At the ages of four and five, these students knew that having an idea was not enough to make things happen. They understood that it took a lot of hard work to achieve their goal and knew that even that might not be enough. We then discussed the times when motivation might not be high and this is where the students understood that the concept of discipline needed to be a part of the equation.

After a few minutes, you could see the students were taking the message to heart and relating it to their black belt training in class. The last piece of our puzzle was this thing called time and how it might impact the goal. The Little Dragons recognized that sometimes kids at their age might be impulsive and/or unfocussed so we worked out that doing something once or twice wasn't going to be enough. They truly understood that doing something sporadically would generate a mediocre result whereas doing the same action over a longer period would generate a superior result!

So, there you have it from a Little Dragons class a simple recipe for success. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best and from a kid's perspective it seems all you need is an idea, followed up with hard work, a little bit of discipline, and time.

As Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well!”

Sensei Chris