Get rid of the weeds in your life and let your plants grow!
There are times when you are teaching or training that you will need to polarize your self or polarize your student. Mr. Miyagi is known for saying, “Karate yes or karate no, karate so so…. squish just like grape.” The Bible kind of disgustingly says, “Since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” Rev 13.6
What these quotes tell us is that sometimes in life we need to give ourselves or others an ultimatum. We need to give this ultimatum with the self esteem that we do not care about the outcome of the ultimatum only that we have the ability to stand up for what we need in class or training.
A couple weeks ago I fired a 3 year old student. The student could not pay attention, was running off his tape and was about to get hurt by running into other students’ techniques. Sure it was difficult to do this, but I had exhausted a lot of strategies to get this student focused. Especially for three year olds, there are times where folks just are not ready to learn karate. Once I did this, the rest of the class was able to focus better and perform.
This can also happen with older students. When you teach college students, you often teach them for free. In some cases you need to push a student to either commit or leave to help the health of the group. The students are not paying for classes so you do not owe them anything. You have the right to push them to either rise to expectations or leave.
I’d rather have a student quit than waste my time or theirs putting in 50% of their capacity. Sure there are students that have different circumstances that have a lower capacity, but they still give 100%.
When you try to polarize people that you have relationships with you will eliminate those that will not be in a healthy relationship with or encourage those that will form a healthy relationship to do more.
The important and mature thing to do however is make your expectations abundantly clear up front. Don’t pent up anger or resentment for something you did not explain to others. Get rid of the weeds in your life and let your plants grow!
