When evaluating yourself and your ability to have your own and run a martial arts program, you need to be able to evaluate yourself in the different roles that you have. You are both an instructor and a school owner simultaneously! Your business skills AND martial arts skills matter.
Sometimes you will have 5 people in your program and run very good classes. Other times you will have 50 in your program, but lessons may not be conveyed properly. Knowing where to self evaluate yourself is an important skill just as how to self evaluate yourself.
Do not allow yourself to believe that you are bad at teaching if you have the former situation or believe that you are good at teaching in the latter situation of a large program! Likewise, do not allow yourself to believe that you are good at marketing and selling your program in the former situation or believe that you are bad at marketing your program in the latter situation. Certainly in either situation there is work to be put in, we just need to discipline ourselves to actually do that work to improve our shortcomings.
I began my life in club ownership where selling myself and my program didn’t matter. I was teaching college students and I did not care about how many people came to class. When I opened my second club at a health club where the number of students that I had DID matter, I was faced with a rude awakening! There was a lot of paperwork and marketing that went beyond teaching that I had to do if I wanted the program to be successful and I had to allocate time to do that work. This seemed like extra credit at my first club, but it rendered itself very necessary. My second program didn’t end up working out, but I was able to apply the lessons that I learned from it to grow my student base at my original club to the point that it had enough students to reach studio status with the World Tang Soo Do Association, something that is not that common for programs based in a university setting.
Sometimes there are things that may seem like they are extra and not needed, but in the end, pushing ourselves to do the extra work will help us to develop ourselves and eventually progress. This could be learning a new skill at the office or volunteering for new responsibilities. Take the leap and push yourself. The new experience might not be what you expect, but it will be healthy for you in the long run.
