Geeks in Gis

Last week I had the chance to try my hqand at teaching for the first time. Just a few simple concepts, and under the watchful eyes of Sensei and a few Sempai, but teaching all the same.

The girl I was teaching asked me a few questions about sparring. She seemed nervous about it, and when I asked her why she suprised me with her answer.  She’s from a karate-mad family, and she’ll have seen her older siblings come away from tournaments with bruises, so I assumed it was fear of getting hurt that was putting her off.

Her answer, though, was “It looks really hard and I don’t think I’ll be good at it.”  – this coming from a girl who is picking up kata and kihon pretty well. She’s not the most athletic student, but she has a good memory and is really attentive.

I think it’s sad when people don’t want to do something because it looks hard.  I didn’t want to get into any philosophical lessons with her – not this early on in her career anyway – so I just offered some words of encouragement and told her that I’m no good at sparring either, but I do it anyway because it is fun, and it feels really good when I do a little better each month.  Her response made me think that she’s only ever done stuff she’s been good at, so she doesn’t yet know the joy of starting out slow and clumsy, and suddenly realising – months (or years) later, that you aren’t terrible any more!

I’ll discuss the whole fear of failure thing with our Sensei-gata.  I expect they’ll have a better way of addressing it than me, but I’d love to hear some thoughts from those who teach regularly.  Dom you encourage, cajole, or just tell your students to work through it and let them discover the joy of succeeding at something difficult for themselves?  I think each approach is valid for different groups of students, but finding out which group a particular student is in is the trick:

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