#128 DO YOU REALLY KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU SERVE

All right guys, so how well do you know the people you serve? How well, you know, recently we did an episode on personable, but not overly personal, right? And just kind of making sure we have cautious boundaries, professional distance, professional boundaries between ourselves and our clientele, the students on the mat, et cetera.

but we do need to know our people, right? We need to know them for several reasons.

And why, why does that matter? You know, and not just small talk like, Hey, how's the weather and passing is enough.

Sometimes we need to know our people.

And again, not personable, not overly personal.

So what do I mean by that? You know, sometimes in our martial arts schools, you know, we're trying to find ways to serve as many people as possible, right? And if you're just looking at this, you know, kind of objectively from the outside and you're going, well, yeah, you have a business, you just want more people in your business.

And then you look at it from my perspective and you go, well, no, I feel like this is where God put me.

This is my calling.

It's what I'm supposed to do.

I want to reach as many people as possible through this ministry we call martial arts, our platform to serve people, right? And then there's a happy medium, I think, that falls in the middle.

And inevitably, we would like to be able to make a good living in doing that.

And the better the living we make, the more people we can support, the more we can serve, the better we serve.

So it's, you know, so I think there's kind of a happy middle ground there in ways.

But again, if you're looking from the outside, you're like, yeah, you just want more people in your business.

But if you're, again, my perspective is yes, so that we can touch as many lives as possible in a positive way.

to try to benefit our community our society etc so it's important that we know our people what i mean by that is a lot of times in our school we're trying to think of ways how do we contact more people how do we educate more people about what we do so they can have the aha moment i don't know about you if you're a martial arts school owner operator out there I can't tell you how many times in my over 40 years of martial arts and over 30 years of operating our school, we've had a school teacher of a student come by the school, superintendent, principal, school counselors, for all different reasons, pop into school to visit.

And we're like, hey, it's great to have you here.

We take them in, you know, you check out one of the classes, they sit and they watch part of a class or we tour them through the facility and they come out.

I cannot count how many of them go, holy cow, I had no idea you guys did this here.

And what are they talking about? The structure, the atmosphere, the discipline, how hard people work on the mat.

Like people just think karate.

Oh, y'all are just playing karate, playing a game.

You know, I remember many, many years ago, uh, My wife telling somebody about, hey, doing martial arts, they were asking what do you do for a pastime, something like that, kind of learning something about them.

We're going to get to this in a minute.

And she's like, yeah, I do martial arts.