I'm going to cover all three of these areas in detail over the next couple of weeks, but today I'm going to start by addressing character education.

CHARACTER EDUCATION, MINUS THE FORTUNE COOKIES

Character education is a term that's thrown around a lot in the martial arts industry. The concept started after the original Karate Kid movie came out in the 80's, and parents started bringing their kids to martial arts schools in droves.

The smarter karate instructors soon realized that parents wanted their kids to learn from a Mr. Miyagi type, and not a John Kreese. Pretty soon, instructors were quoting fortune cookie lessons in class, and BOOM! The modern martial arts industry was born.*

Well, before long instructors also realized that people were actually paying attention to what they were saying in class. I suspect that this is what led some instructors to develop a more formal structure for teaching character values in their classes.

Many of them would simply use whatever guidelines their style or system already had in place. Shotokan and other systems had their "dojo kun" and tae kwon do had their tenets of tae kwon do, and so on.

ENTER THE INFOMERCIAL

The problem was that material doesn't go very deep. So, many martial arts instructors turned to personal development materials (Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins are two that I've seen quoted time and again) for deeper lessons.

Well, that's one approach. The only problem with that is that the people I've seen who went down that rabbit hole often never came back out again, and before long they started looking and acting like mini-infomercial gurus themselves. 

I DIDN'T ZIG, I ZAGGED

Don't get me wrong; I really like Zig Ziglar's stuff. Robbins is a little too woo-woo for me, but I think guys like Zig, Jim Rohn, and Brian Tracy are great.

It's just that a lot of their material isn't geared toward teaching kids. And, I didn't want to look or sound like someone who was just spouting truisms and platitudes at the end of every class.

Also, I wanted the kids in my programs to actually LEARN something that would help them succeed in life. So, I created my own character education program.

It started with just deciding on character values that I most admired in the people I looked up to (and yes, I based my lessons on Judeo-Christian values). However, over time the lessons I taught evolved as I learned how to convey these very abstract concepts in concrete terms kids could easily understand.

This happened over the course of maybe 5 years, and I continued to refine those lessons for the next 5 years or so. And that's what eventually became my Character Education Lesson Plans book.**

But something unexpected happened while I was going through that process...

SURPRISE - IT ACTUALLY WORKED!\

And in ways I never expected.

For one, I noticed that parents started listening to the lessons and repeating them to their kids outside of class. I realized this was happening after hearing parents echoing snippets of the lessons in order to remind their children to behave. This happened on multiple occasions.

Second, I noticed the kids in my classes were absorbing the material and lessons. They'd come back to me and relate how they used what they had learned to defuse some situation or make a certain moral decision that had a positive outcome. 

And third, I noticed that my referrals increased. And I'm not just talking referrals by my own students - I also got more referrals from people in the community who were influencers.

Originally I started teaching character education lessons because I thought it was the right thing to do. But, it ended up helping my students and my school in ways I'd never anticipated.

Now, this is all well and good. But tomorrow, I'm going to talk about the flip-side of teaching character education lessons that most instructors don't take into account. Stay tuned.