How the UBBT Works

For Kelley, Kelly, Chan, Angelo, all Team 5 members, and to anyone interested…

You seek to be…
· Real / authentic
· Successful
· A good teacher
· A good student
· Effective
· Important
· Enlightened
· Productive
· Esteemed for your work
· Recognized for the value of what you do
· Efficient
· Wise
· A contributor
· A “Master” of your chosen profession/passion
· A mentor / role model
· Respected
· A good human being
· A smart business-person

You may relate to some of the above –and perhaps you could add a few of your own? Let’s just say that if the UBBT interests you enough to even read this, then you are a part of a group that seeks to improve, contribute, evolve, and BE / DO something different (or if not different, then at least “effective”).

I am a consultant to the martial arts industry. I have spent the last 15 years thinking about the “business” of the martial arts –and how to make it better (better for the student/customer, better for those that teach, better for the “industry”, and better for the world). I have produced seminars, reports, audio, and video on almost every aspect of the business of martial arts.

The UBBT has come out of all of my experience and ideas; it is my answer to some of the following questions:

· How do I make more money?
· How do I keep from getting burned out?
· How can I be a better teacher?
· What is a master?
· How do I effectively advertise my business?
· How do I motivate my students?
· How do I test my students?
· How do I produce better black belts?

The UBBT is not THE answer to all the questions a student, teacher, or school owner might ask –as there is no single source for all answers. The UBBT is my statement about how I believe you can make your practice, your business, and your life/motivation/mission/purpose more meaningful, more successful, and more satisfying.

The 28 tasks that make up the UBBT’s curriculum are built out of the raw material I believe a school owner/teacher should teach and promote to his or her students. If your school and/or “public offering” of martial arts lessons were a book, then the UBBT’s curriculum is what resides in-between the cover. The curriculum is the heart and soul of what you SELL. It is what has value. It is what people will pay for. It is what, in the end, lifts you above the status of “vendor” and makes what you teach, what you have spent your life studying, what you know and believe –something wise, of value, something you can give your life to –and not regret it.

The UBBT’s curriculum isn’t something you were given, something you bought, something you saw at a seminar, something you spent a weekend learning. The UBBT’s curriculum is something you live; and there is the key. You live what you teach –and by living it you become authentic, you become the student and the teacher as the same time, you reap the benefits of what you do and know, you teach by example, you learn through your own failure/success.

The UBBT is made up of things that make sense:

· You write your goals because writing your goals has power. You don’t teach your students to write their goals down by giving them long lectures; you write your own down and then show them how they work for you.

· You journal once a week NOT for yourself, but to show your students -in the here and now –what THE JOURNEY is really all about. You journal to show your students the POWER and PURPOSE of journaling. You don’t stand at the front of your class telling them about it; you DO IT –and you show your students what journaling is for.

· You document and seek to achieve 10 PERSONAL VICTORIES to show your students how you apply your training, your experience, and your wisdom to things outside of the realm of kicking and punching. You SAY to them, through your actions, that it is important to BE MORE THAN A FIGHTER or a “martial artist.” You show them the power that declaring goals, publicly, gives to the person doing it.

· You do 10 public performances to show what that kind of action does to the performer. You show your students how to improve, how to present, how to perform, and how to put “it” on the line for the sake of personal improvement and mentoring.

· You attend the UBBT’s events because you want your students to attend your events. You show them how you USE your own activities to evolve, grow, learn…

Are you getting the drift? Do you recognize that you DO what you teach? You DO what you think your students should be doing?

Things like:
· Writing down their goals
· Keeping a journal
· Mending their broken relationships
· Hanging out with people WORTH hanging out with (heroes)
· Exercising more; putting down the car keys and WALKING to see, to slow down, to experience, to put the breaks on the rush, rush, rush…
· Meditating (focusing on the now)
· Reading, seeking out wisdom
· Doing for others
· Caring for the environment
· Supporting teammates

In the UBBT you seek to LIVE the philosophy that you SELL. You say, “Here’s what I think is important –SO IMPORTANT, in fact, that I practice it. You have, effectively, turned the “talk” into action. YOU turn it into action in your own life –because you are going to ask your students to take action in their own lives…

The UBBT asks that you transcend the PACKAGING OF THE MARTIAL ARTS; that you go beyond the established “dialogue” of the martial arts business community; that you stop mindlessly repeating the sales talk that has been passed onto you from people who were trying to sell the martial arts to paying customers –but who didn’t have the resources that YOU have here, today –in the “right now.”

To make your “product” more valuable , more sellable, more appreciated, easier to “market”, better “understood” by the “general public” –then I suggest you try living it like an Olympic athlete prepares for the Olympics, like a triathlete prepares for the Ironman, like an award-winning novelist prepares his or her manuscript for a publisher.

My opinion is that if you actually LIVE the training –the philosophy –of the martial arts, if you put into action ideas that you can then help others put into action…then you are crafting a very, very valuable product/approach.

The UBBT asks you to take a heroic journey –something that makes you disconnect from the trivial, from the tabloid-culture, the media, the feeding frenzy of want, want, want and work just to supply the want. The program asks you to apply yourself at 1000 percent, so that you can talk like an expert to your students about living at 100 percent. It asks you to show your students how you can take the raw material of your life – and turn it into something magic.

· Push-ups and crunches are self-discipline
· Mending wrongs is humility and wisdom
· Reading is mind-exercise and respect for knowledge
· Walking is slowing down in a world of needless rush
· Acts of kindness is awareness and a spiritual practice
· Profiling living heroes is self-improvement
· Declaring that you won’t quit is courage

The UBBT Works by connecting you to a community of people who have grown out (or of the box, out of the history of our industry, out of the less-than-effective and/or useless rituals of MA business and advertising, out of the established “effectiveness” of what has worked, what usually works, and what’s working now . The UBBT works because it connects the participant’s growth to the student’s growth to the school’s growth –as they all co-exist. The UBBT works because it create authentic experience out of ideas. We used to sell ideas –now we sell experience.

The UBBT works because it asks its members to DO –and sometimes it’s DO THE IMPOSSIBLE. In DOING I believe the school owner and/or teacher creates a kind of “business” strategy that is impossible to beat. In DOING the teacher creates all of the raw materials of a magical, moving, authentic, experiential experience.

Beyond making a product to sell is spending time making a difference in the world. Beyond business is passion, purpose, mission, and meaning. The UBBT is built around the expansion of passion, purpose, mission, and meaning for the martial arts teacher/practitioner. The UBBT embraces the idea that there is more to the martial arts –to being a “martial artist” than is currently “celebrated” in the martial arts community.

When you join the UBBT, you seek to make this a reality –and by doing so you CREATE a better, more unique, more valuable, more relevant-to-today PRODUCT; Something really valuable to “sell.”

That’s how the UBBT works.