Do you have a plan when you mentor martial artists in your dojo?

I have witnessed and actually performed instruction to practitioners with no plan, procedure, or process but to "shoot from the hip" when I walk onto the dojo floor. I was using bad form, bad instruction, and bad etiquette.

I have discovered that many of those dojo that seem to provide knowledge and experience in martial arts usually follow this way of passing that knowledge and experience on to the deshi. It is a wonder that these types of efforts continue and flourish.

I can say that my luck, my karma, was good when running a dojo. I actually started to see and hear things that led me to research and change my ways. I only had this epiphany because I had a lot of experience teaching Marines where you didn't step in front of a group without a plan, procedure and process.

In my work today, in the technology field, I am seeing a greater misdirection than ever before in my career. It is driven by customer and technological requirements. Both are now driven by a need for instant gratification, instant profit, and instant need to technological bells and whistles. What do I mean?

I mean that our humanity is far outdistanced by technology and our humanity has no chance to evolve and catch up with technology. The next best greatest technological bell and whistle pushes humans into a need to get the latest and greatest and bestest of technological wonders. It runs us instead of us running it.

That same technology pushes us to ignore the natural order of nature and humanity to achieve things that seem to be good and end up being not so good and thusly discarded quickly.

We tend to put the cart before the horse. My work is pushing out services with out a plan, procedures, and processes. It looks great, it comes quickly solving the instant gratification needs driven by those services and technologies. It then fails to go the distance when services in support of those services fails to deliver simply because no one plans, implements procedures and processes to support that model.

In the dojo the same thing happens. Practitioners push hard to get to the so called good stuff. They allow ego and pride and the excitement of such things as MMA to say in their perceptively governed mind, "Hey, I gotta be just like them and I gotta be them right now!"

It then promotes lessons and training and practices that quickly gloss over the fundamental principles of martial systems and those basics along with things like kata to get to the good stuff. The good stuff is simply a few combinations that may or may not win a competitive event to either gain fame and glory fast or hit that wall where many, many just quit.

The moral of this post, there is no short cut, no instant gratification that will last, and no way to become skilled in a martial art regardless of its classification, i.e. sport or combative.