The POWER of the MOMENT

I’m Tom Callos –and I am an educational activist, working in the martial arts industry.

For the most part, I teach school owners, instructors, managers, and their staff members how to run martial arts schools in a way that is efficient, effective, fun, rewarding, and profitable.

There are a number of other organizations and consultants who do this kind of work too.

However, I have a very different slant to my advice and methods than do my contemporaries in the martial arts world.

I focus on business practices and concepts that are about raising the social consciousness of the owner, the staff, and students; I promote a kind of martial arts education that deals with issues far beyond the scope of what, traditionally, has been dealt with or discussed in martial arts schools.

I teach my clients how to embrace self-defense in a way that is relevant to today. I help them learn how to teach things that reside outside of the realm of kicking, punching, and grappling; things that people living in today’s world need to know about protecting themselves, their families, and their communities.

While most consultants, including myself, will deal with business statistics, sales procedures, promotional strategies, and all of the other obvious and basic necessities of running a business, I believe in a kind of martial arts that is an authentic path to mastery, a kind of martial arts that transcends the profit-and-loss statement.

The Power of the Moment

My clients and I have launched an authentic and experiential leadership training program –as until now, many schools claim to teach leadership, but very few have a sound method or curriculum to do so. We are championing the first-ever anger management teacher-training program in the martial arts industry. People might think that martial arts teachers know a lot about anger management and teach it to their students, but until now that has not been the case.

The martial artists I work with are coached in a new kind of Intelligent Curriculum®, a new kind of educational mission for their schools, and we craft a new stance, a new position and role for the martial arts school in the community.

A martial arts school, as I see it, should be a place where the student learns as much about peace, as she learns about the opposite of peace. Students should be inspired and directed to take their martial arts out of their dojo (school) and into the world. Anger management, environmental self-defense, dietary self-defense, community involvement, meditation, empathy training, and sustainable living represent a part of the new kind of “self-defense lessons” taught in schools that recognize what I call the power of the moment.

That moment is the opening that comes every so often; that moment when the young and impressionable student is listening to his or her martial arts teacher like only a child can –with that wide-eyed acceptance, that fully open mind, ready to grow, instantly absorbing, and highly impressionable.

When that moment comes, as I have seen it come so many times, my job is to make sure the teacher knows what power his or her words, influence, actions, and position wields.

It is at that moment that we want our hero at the front of the class to speak not about defeating an opponent or striking another human being or winning a tournament; we want to hear words and ideas that inspire compassion, awareness, respect for self, for family, for the community, for the global community, and for the planet.

We want a seed planted and/or watered at that moment; something that has the potential to sprout into a kind of wisdom and happiness that is uncommon, but the deepest wish of every mother and father. My clients are the kinds of teachers who are acutely aware of the power of the moment; they live to create those moments –so that they might make a true contribution to a better and more peaceful world.

We consider this “our business.” We spend only the smallest amount of time necessary working on how to run our businesses so that we can pay the bills and have money left over (like all business owners); we spend the majority of our energy on coming up with the most innovative, creative, interesting, and powerful ways to create moments of deep learning, constructive and useful attitudes, and the kind of awareness that promotes peace of mind –and peace in action.

Engaged Martial Arts

In my programs, the teacher must transform himself into someone who makes the pursuit of genuine martial arts mastery a deep, personal and spiritual daily practice. You can recognize my clients because they are training to be in the best shape of their lives; they are eating and living with full consciousness of what they consume; they define and engage their heroes; they practice meditation; they read; and they take on projects with their students that benefit their respective communities; projects that show, firsthand, how to apply their training principles to life —off of the mat.

My members are grounded, real –and exuberant people.

Among our ranks is an Academy Award winning filmmaker; there are songwriters, environmental and civil engineers, artists, attorneys, authors, world champions, school teachers, counselors, journalists, grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers—and all of them are martial artists with a desire to make a difference, here and now, through what they teach and how they teach it.

That is the mission of this work, which is now made up of my work and the work of my clients.

It manifests itself in all sorts of interesting projects, such as (to name a few):

The Alabama Project
Each year we build and/or remodel a house in Alabama with housing activist Pam Dorr (click on the link to see her video-profile from the Hallmark Channel) and students from the famous Rural Studio. In 2009 we will be renovating a two-room schoolhouse in Hale County, Alabama, one of the last remaining Rosenwald Schools in the area.

I use these projects to empower martial arts teachers to step out of their schools and engage their communities in all sorts of unique ways.

Our involvement with architects, artists, engineers, and activists is my intentional training program to show teachers how to break down the barriers between disciplines. Participants in these projects inevitably return to their own communities and begin to engage in activities with their students that teach lessons far beyond blocking punches and breaking boards.

Peace is More Important than Punches
One of my most important missions is to help martial arts teachers teach Peace Education to their students. In 2007 I developed a set of teaching flash cards called “Peace is More Important Than Punches.” A number of schools have started using these cards to introduce peace-thinking to students. One of our members, Ms. Debby Young, is helping to have the cards translated into Swahili –for use in the new Kenyan Library System.

The Dietary Self-Defense Program
Several of my clients, members of the UBBT and The 100, are working with a new dietary self-defense program. Components include posters, flash cards, and written lessons meant to be added to the curriculum of all martial arts schools, regardless of system or style.

The Environmental Self-Defense Initiative
In 2006 I called upon all martial arts teachers in the international martial arts community to adopt the Environmental Self-Defense Initiative, which asks schools to require their young students to do 5 to 10 “acts of environmental self-defense” along with their regular belt-testing curriculum to earn their green belts.



MADDCAP™
MADDCAP™ (Martial Arts Defeat Diabetes® Community Awareness Project) is the first-ever diabetes teacher and student training program in the martial arts world. More info may be seen at http://www.defeatdiabetes.org/.



The Veterans in Martial Arts Program
I have called upon all martial arts schools in the international martial arts community to give free lessons for the remainder of 2008 to all returning veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. What is Enlightenment? magazine is the first publication to publish this request, in it’s May, 2008 issue.

The UBBT ECO-Adventure
Each year I take a number of clients on a 4-day eco-adventure along the Pacific Crest Trail, just outside of Lake Tahoe, CA. As a result of this program, dozens of clients are now making outdoor education a part of their programs.

The Anger Management Teacher Training Program
The first anger management teacher training program in the martial arts may be seen at http://www.angercoachonline.com/

The Elder Circle Project
Still in development, this project seeks to involve grandparents in martial arts schools. We are proposing that at least once every quarter, a teacher invites one or more grandparents to come to the school and share his or her life story with young students. We intend to develop this idea for use in all interested martial arts schools.

What a pleasure it is to put all of this in this blog!

Tom Callos
tomcallos@gmail.com
530-903-0286

Martial Arts Philosphy and Our TRAINING

I just wrote a note to someone about...well, “life.” Specifically, I wrote about a current situation, debating the pros and cons about how to proceed in a certain matter, and I wrote the phrase:

“If I fall back on my training...”

That made me take pause –as I had to consider what “my training” had been.

And that made me think of the book Dune, the science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. In Dune, many of the characters had, from early in their lives, received specialized training, which gave them tools that they used to get what they want, to pursue their various missions, and to cope with whatever life threw their way.

“If I fall back on my training...”

Like the characters in Dune, I’ve been “in training” since the age of 11 –and that training, if we look at it from a certain perspective, was aimed to give me certain skills.

Now the question is: What were those skills supposed to be –and what were they supposed to do for me? Were there certain powers I was supposed to be developing? Was the training for a purpose beyond being able to kick and punch? Beyond fighting? Beyond the development of the obvious physical skills?

These questions lead me to what I am today, what I do, and what our potential is as teachers of the martial arts.

What, for that matter, are the martial arts for? And what is the end result we, collectively, desire out of the work we do with our students? What ideology are we imparting? Do we have a collective “mission?”

“If I fall back on my training...”

Looking back, I think much of my training was haphazard; and if not haphazard, then it was simply –and probably unintentionally –trivialized.

Does a teacher teach his or her student how to read books for the purpose of reading books? Or is to unlock the ideas contained in them?

Likewise, do we, as martial arts teachers, teach the techniques of the martial arts just so that our students can execute technique? Or do we teach what we teach to help our students learn something else hidden within the practice?

Does the physical practice, does the time we spend together, does all the history and strategies and philosophy serve some other purpose than the obvious physical aspects of the martial arts?

How well-defined is our mission? Do we have one?

Now forget the past. All of these questions lead me, lead us, to what we are doing right now.

How big is our vision?

And tell me, Mr. and Ms. Martial Arts Teacher, what kind of training are you, right now, imparting to the next generation?

When, 30 years from now, one of your students writes the phrase, “When I fall back on my training,” what training will they be thinking of?

Will you have taught them the power of action? The power of education? Of the spoken and written word? The power of perseverance? The power of teamwork? The power of self-discipline of compassion of simplicity of open-mindedness –and the power of love? Or will you have taught them a bunch of exercises?

All of the above speaks of the work you and I are doing today.

We are educators –and so what is the education we are imparting?

My martial arts, that is, the “training” my students may some day “fall back on,” is about developing oneself as a fully engaged, compassionate, cognizant, participative, human being.

The physical training is for fitness –and to train the mind for bigger things. If we are training “warriors,” then it’s up to us to recognize the “war” we are preparing to fight. In my mind the war is not hand-to-hand combat, it is the battle to evolve mentally and spiritually in the model of those men and women in history who have done just that. It is to follow in the footsteps of ________ (list your most spiritually evolved heroes here).

If, indeed, we are someday held accountable; if indeed we are meant to learn something while we hold this form; then the training we give, get, and fall back on should, ideally, prepare us for that purpose.

This is how I am designing my curriculum. This is the intent I have as I prepare my lessons, as I interact with my students, with their parents, with my community, and with the world.

This is my sense of mission.

This is what makes me look for new lessons, for teachers, and for material for my classes. This is what I think about when I call my class to attention –it’s the mission behind all the movement.

This is our " business."

Now you know the motivation behind the UBBT and The 100 and Six Tasks and The Acts of Kindness Program and Take 5 for Education and Alabama and just about everything I do.

If someday you look back on the time (any time) we spent together, involved in any way, you might consider that the purpose behind whatever it is we did was to further “our training.” The training we “fall back upon” when we need it.