Dear Students, Teachers and Parents,

As many of you know, we are blessed to have a Master of Chinese
martial arts visiting us, and I can't tell you how wonderful watching
America through his eyes has been. Coming here from main land China,
he said that most of the government controlled TV shows all the
negative things about America. He was amazed after several days and
hadn't seen a murder yet. He told me that he loves being a martial
arts teacher, (he is one of the national coaches and teaches full
time at a university), but several times in the past, the government
has taking all the teachers and killed them. While I think it is bad
that our teachers don't make much money, at least here we don't take
them out back and shoot them. Gu Ping is a master of 5 separate
styles of Tai Chi Chuan and many hard styles as well. Tai Chi has
been used for centuries for health and self defense in China. Some of
the information that Gu Ping is bringing to us will be the taught
outside China for the first time. He will be offering classes at the
main school very soon. We are working on getting the downstairs fixed
up so parents may be able to study Tai Chi while their children are
training. We will have a new schedule within a week. We are looking
at having early morning sessions and evening sessions available.

Our lesson of the week is of goal setting and staying on the path. In
Chinese this path is called Tao and in Japanese it is called Do
(pronounced dough). Setting goals and staying the course we call The
Tao of Kaizen. Kaizen means constant and never ending improvement.

A true warrior always knows where he is at and where he is going.
Since we live in a rapidly changing world, our targets are usually
moving. A wise objective today may be a fool's goal tomorrow. Perfect
accuracy on the wrong target is a waste of skill and resources. The
warrior constantly updates objectives and targets.

Vague goals are notoriously hard to hit. A true warrior is very
precise and accurate in target selection. The warrior never
encounters problems, but opportunities for growth based on proper use
of strategy and tactics. He lives on the cutting edge of creativity,
and using positive, active and growth oriented tactics bring his
future to him as he has already determined it should be.

All successful people are obsessive goal setters. Once we set a
specific written goal, the subconscious begins immediately on actions
to bring that into reality. In fact, 80% of all clearly defined and
written goals come true however, currently less than 5% of people
have goals and less than 1% write them down. If goals are so
important, why don't more people use them?
1. They don't understand the importance of goal setting,
2. They don't know how.
3. The fear of rejection
4. The fear of failure.

Successful people know that to truly reach their potential they must
reach out of their comfort zone and experience some risk. Most super
successful people did so after their worst failure. Tomas Edison
after failing over 5000 times in his attempt in creating the light
bulb, stated that he had successfully identified 5000 methods that
did not work. Black Belt Excellence implies that you see all failures
as challenges for self-improvement and set high goals for yourself.

In baseball there are 3 strikes and you are out – in the game of
life you can have as many swings as you want as long as you keep
trying. Self-discipline is persistence in action. Our goal – Black
Belt Excellence!

Speaking of goal setting – remember belt testing is September 8th
since we are not having classes on the 3rd due to the holiday.

Respectfully,
Terry Bryan, Kyoshi