Welcome to Episode #121 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Hero Worship in the Martial Arts.”

We all need teachers and role models in the martial arts… but can following a leader become harmful at some point? Is it possible to show a teacher too much respect?

YES! If we’re not careful, our humility as a student can be transformed into hero worship. Once that happens, it becomes impossible to maximize our skills and build true confidence. And without true confidence, your ability to defend yourself is greatly diminished.

Be careful! It’s happened to me… don’t let it happen to you!

In this episode, I’ll share a couple of stories that not only showed me the dangers of constantly seeking a teacher’s approval, but also helped me figure out how to train with a balance of humility and confidence. As a result, as you may know, I created and awarded myself my own black and white belt! 🙂

Here’s to healthy training habits and learning to become your own hero!

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Hero Worship in the Martial Arts

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome, my friend. Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. This is episode #121 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

Today, heroes, mentors, role models, teachers, we all have them in the martial arts and beyond. But when does following a leader become harmful?

When does admiration transform into adulation? And when does adulation transform into idolization?

Can you show too much respect for a teacher? When does respect transform into hero worship?

Now, yes, I still have teachers. I still seek guidance. That’s what teachers are for.

Teachers can inspire us to get started. Teachers can encourage us to keep going. And teachers can guide us to make sure we’re heading in the directions of our goals.

That’s all good. But I find in the martial arts that oftentimes teachers are elevated into gods. They’re glorified. They’re deified.

And I know this, of course, from my own personal feelings towards some teachers, particularly early on in my martial arts career. I also know this from listening and reading many interviews with martial artists, some famous, some not.

And I also know it from different martial artists that I’ve spoken to in person. You’ll hear people make comments like, oh, I’ll never be as good as my teacher. Or they will describe their teacher in legendary terms.

The stories that you hear are just incredible, unbelievable, often. They’ll say, oh, their skills. I still don’t understand how they could do what they did. It was almost magical.

And very simply, it puts yourself, these stories, in a place of being nothing. Oh, compared to my teacher, I’m nothing.

Now to all of that, I say stop it. Stop. Respect your teachers, of course. That’s not what I’m talking about. If a teacher changed your life, then of course you’re always going to have respect for them. Even a bad teacher.

A bad teacher meaning maybe they cheated you in some way. Maybe you had a difference of opinion and it broke up the relationship. Maybe politics got in the way. There are lots of stories of people falling out with their teacher. But you still respect them. Because if they changed your life, you still carry that lesson with you.

So, this isn’t about respect only. Respect is its own category. There’s a different topic to talk about though. And that’s just knowledge and skill.

I’m asking today, can you be better than your teacher? Are you better right now than your teacher?

Does that question come off as disrespectful right off the bat? I would say no. I would say no because learning is not a competition. Your teacher is on his or her own journey. They have their own stories to tell.

You’re on your own journey. You have your own goals that may be different from your teacher’s goals.

You certainly have different histories. You certainly have different training methodologies perhaps, or the amount of time that you can put into it.

So you’re not on the same exact journey. So it’s not fair to compare them. So I ask again, are you right now better than your teacher at something? It doesn’t have to be everything. But can you find some qualities, some attribute that you have that maybe your teacher does not?

Quick example just for myself, simple. When I was younger, I practiced a lot of high kicks. So I still have a lot of knowledge and some muscle memory of high kicking. And many of my teachers were in styles that didn’t practice high kicks.

So right off the bat, I can tell you, I am better and know more about kicking high than several of my teachers. It wasn’t worth talking about at the time. And they certainly never pointed it out, because that’s not why I was there learning from them. It was not the appropriate topic to discuss, and it wasn’t a competition. So it didn’t matter, irrelevant.

But what about you?

The reason I’m asking is because in your training, if our goal is to be the best we can be and to have a happy life, to be fulfilled, to get the most out of your training and your life, we have to reveal any self-limiting beliefs. I cannot walk around always thinking that I’m not as good as someone else.

Maybe, yes, of course, if there’s someone who is a professional martial artist and they’re training full-time and they’ve been doing it for decades, and maybe you’re a hobbyist and you only train for a couple of hours on a couple of things, well then sure, there will always be a long list of skills and attributes that you can say, yeah, my teacher is better than me at a lot of these things, all of these things.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not room for you to still be great or to achieve a higher level of skill than your teacher at at least one thing, something. That’s of course up to you to figure out what that would be. But I just want you to have the possibility in your head that as you train, that you’re not always lesser than, you’re not always a weaker, watered down version of your teacher.

And the reason for that is because self-defense is rooted in confidence. How can you possibly defend yourself if you don’t believe in what you can do, if you don’t believe that you have some skill? That’s not healthy.

There is ego that we need, healthy ego that says, I can do this, I can beat that guy, I am good enough.

Quick little story, I remember training with a guy and at that point we were both senior students in a style. And at one point we were doing pretty well, we had a good flow going, we felt pretty competent, you could feel good momentum coming on.

And he broke it. He broke the momentum by saying, I don’t know, he was saying, man, you know, that was good, but can you imagine how this would never work against our teacher?

And I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, like, what are you talking about?

He said, well, you know, I mean, that’s a really good move and, you know, we did it well, but if you imagine, can you imagine trying that against our teacher? He’d kill us.

And I just remember thinking, are you crazy? How ridiculous. What a crazy thing to say.

So you’re telling me if you went home right now and your teacher, the teacher, was beating your wife or beating your chil