Dear Students, Teachers and Parents,

Next weekend is the big weekend! You may begin seeing some of our
senior guest black belts showing up and visiting the main school or
our clubs. The weekend's activities will begin with the black belts
testing on Friday night at 6:00 pm at Timberview Middle School.
Invite your friends to come on out and help cheer our candidates on
as they earn their black belt or get promoted to a higher degree of
black belt. The test should last a couple of hours and then back to
the dojo for a pizza party to celebrate.
The following day, starting at 9:00 there will be seminars going on
with some of the top teachers in the country. This is your chance to
enhance your personal growth by training with some of the best
around. The seminars will last till around 1:00 and then we will take
a break before the awards dinner that will be held at the Candlelight
Suites off Academy just south of Dublin Blvd. The dress is semi-
formal and David Chen from the China Restaurant is providing us a
great dinner.
To sign up for the dinner or seminar, please see your Sensei or talk
to Mary Britton. I believe the cost is $50 for the whole weekend,
which helps pay our hard costs and all the expenses of our out of
town guests. I hope to see you there.

Lesson Of The Week

Karate, Black Belt Excellence, and Self-Esteem

Last Friday I witnessed several of our black belt candidates go
through the sparring part of their black belt test. After 30 years of
watching these tests, I still get emotional when I see someone hit
the wall and their mind and body tells them to quit, and yet they
keep going. Their belief in themselves grows to a new level as they
know, if they can endure the physical and spiritual challenges of a
black belt exam they can handle anything they run up against for the
rest of their lives.

Many people have questioned our unique teaching style of blending
positive reinforcement teaching tactics with classical martial arts
principles, but our track record speaks for itself. We have
identified many of the real threats to us and our children today are
really internal threats. Drugs, gangs, improper health, etc., are
based on one having a low self-esteem and therefore correcting this
variable may just eliminate these threats from our students lives.
From the way we teach, to the way we award belts is all designed to
build the self-esteem of our students.

The self-defense qualities, physical growth and health benefits are
indeed important benefits from martial arts training, but it is the
rise in a positive self-esteem that opens the door for many of the
future successes our students obtain year after year. They have high
expectations of themselves, and achieve more in a short period than
most people accomplish in a lifetime.

Your self-esteem is probably the most important part of your
personality. It precedes and predicts your performance in almost
everything you do. It is the energy source or the reactor core of
your personality, and how much self-esteem you have determines your
levels of vitality, enthusiasm and personal magnetism. People with
high self-esteem are more positive, more likable and more effective
in every part of their lives.
Everything that you do or say or think will affect your self-esteem.
Your job, therefore, is to keep your self-esteem high and positive on
a continuing basis.
Probably the best definition of self-esteem is this: the level to
which you respect and value yourself as an important, worthwhile
person. People with high self-esteem feel terrific about themselves
and their lives. When you feel really good about yourself, you tend
to be the very best person you can possibly be. To witness this first
hand, come see our new black belts after they have earned their new
black belt.
Your level of self-esteem is really your level of 'mental fitness.'
It's a measure of how healthy, hardy, and resilient you are in
dealing with the inevitable ups and downs of daily life. Your self-
esteem determines how much peace of mind and inner contentment you
experience. It is also closely linked to your health and levels of
energy. People with high self-esteem are seldom sick and seem to have
an inexhaustible flow of energy and enthusiasm that progressively
moves them toward their goals.
How much you like and respect yourself also determines the quality of
your relationships with people. The more you like and enjoy yourself,
the more you will like and enjoy others, and the more they will like
you. In fact, when your self-esteem is hurt in any way, the very
first thing that is affected is the way you get along with people. To
perform at your best and to feel terrific about yourself, you should
be in a perpetual state of self-esteem building and maintenance. Just
as you take responsibility for your level of physical fitness, you
need to take complete responsibility for the content and quality of
your mind.
How much you like and respect yourself is directly affected by your
goals. The very act of setting big, challenging goals for yourself
and making written plans of action to achieve them actually raises
your self-esteem, which causes you to feel much better about
yourself. Self-esteem is a condition you experience when you are
moving step-by-step toward the accomplishment of something that is
important to you. For that reason, it's really important to have
clear goals for each part of your life and to continually work toward
achieving those goals. Each progressive step causes your self-esteem
to go up and makes you feel more positive and effective in everything
else you do. This again is evident in going up through the belt ranks
and making the coveted black belt.
The second element in self-esteem building is having clear standards
and values to which you are committed. Men and women with high self-
esteem are very clear about what they believe in. The higher your
values and ideals are, and the more committed you are to living your
life consistent with those values and ideals, the more you will like
and respect yourself, and the higher your self-esteem will be.
Although our students are recognized world wide for their technical
abilities, it is their character and respect that sets them apart
from others.
Lasting self-esteem comes only when your goals and your values are
congruent-that is, when they fit into each other like a hand into a
glove. Much of the stress that people experience comes from believing
one thing and trying to do another. But when your goals and values
are in harmony with each other, you feel a wonderful surge of energy
and well-being, and that's when you start to make real progress.
Another element in self-esteem building involves having success
experiences. Once you have set your goals and standards, it is
important that you make them measurable so that you can keep score of
your small and large successes along the way. The very act of setting
up a goal, breaking it down into smaller parts, and then completing
those parts makes you feel like a winner and causes your self-esteem
to go up. But remember that you can't hit a target you can't see. You
can't feel like a winner unless you clearly lay out the standards by
which you are going to measure your success and then achieve those
standards.
The next element for self-esteem is recognition of your
accomplishments by people whom you respect. To feel really great
about yourself, you need the recognition of people you look up to and
admire, such as your boss, your Sensei, your coworkers, your spouse
and people in your social circle. Whenever you are recognized and
praised for any accomplishment by someone whose opinion you hold in
high regard, your self-esteem goes up, along with your eagerness and
enthusiasm to do even better on the job. You will get to see this
when our black belts test in front of some of the top instructors in
the country next Friday.
I hope everyone gets a chance to come observe, train and celebrate
with us next weekend.
Respectfully,
Terry Bryan