Everyday Wear

"Nancy" and "Anne"

Welcome to Examining Competence! I’m glad you’re here. But if it’s your first visit, I suggest reading chronologically. It might make more sense.

The two skills I’d like to bring up next are uniquely suited to the people I’ll be writing about. Women martial arts instructors. One skill in this article, the other in the next. I’ve rarely seen these skills demonstrated with such strength as I have by watching women leading in this almost exclusively male role. I’ve also seen it in one school run by a man. None of the skills I’m discussing need to be gendered in any way and I don’t mean to suggest it. I also think these can be learned. I’m giving you my own observations with my limited set of people to observe. I have also seen this skill crop up in IT leadership once in a while. It’s not about the martial arts. But I’ve had a lot of time to watch and consider how women martial arts instructors are often categorically different than most of their male counterparts. Distinctly different. Let me tell you a bit about that.

In this article I need to describe two people I no longer have a way to contact, so I won’t be using their real names. Let’s go with “Nancy” and “Anne.”

Many years ago, I was training and teaching regularly in my primary martial art. I wanted to take some classes in something different, and was looking specifically for women instructors. At the time I hoped to help my school do a better job of providing women’s self-defense training. Also, it can get a little tiring spending all of your time in a “guy” school (which nearly all MA schools are).  I live in an area with a wealth of different styles to study, and I found one that was exactly what I was looking for.

I had studied a variation of this school’s art for a couple of years in college, so a chance to revisit it was welcome. And the school didn’t just offer, but actually required students to take their women’s self-defense curriculum at some point in their training. So I signed up, and I went out one or two nights a week to this little storefront in an out-of-the-way strip mall to train.

Many things there differed from other schools I’d visited or trained in regularly. First of all, it was quite a bit older. If you know anything about how hard it is to run an MA school, and the frequency of schools failing, any “old” school is something to pay attention to. If memory serves, they hit thirty years while I was there. This school was also quite independent. It was of a lineage (more on that later) but not tied directly to any other school or “more senior” person.

Nancy and Anne had started it, and were still running it all those years later. They weren’t wealthy, they were just martial arts instructors. So at any of the several economic downturns in those decades, their school could have failed. While those of us dedicated to training might not think of it this way, technically speaking “paying for martial arts classes” falls into “discretionary spending.” When people have financial pressure, that’s often one of the first things to come out of a budget. Schools are always at the mercy of commercial landlords, insurance companies, a single newsworthy negative event or determined media-savvy detractor can destroy any business, but martial arts is a reputation-based business. If “becoming a better person” is what you’re selling, reputation matters. Of course students often leave when they’re injured, or when things are just too hard to keep going, which can cause bad feelings. All of that to say, keeping an MA school running, especially through any economic downturn is a challenge.

One true thing about loyal students is that they keep old MA schools running when times are hard. Check the ones in your area that have survived the pandemic and I bet you’ll find that. People who don’t practice their martial arts full-time, ones who have outside income, are the lifeblood of an MA school (well, that and the children. Children keep the lights on.)

But importantly, most people don’t practice an art for decades. Or even for one decade. Most people who stay longer than the intro trial period stay for a couple of years. It’s a precipitous drop. So when bad times happen to a school, if there’s rescue to be had, many schools have to rely on super-enthusiastic new people to do the rescuing. The number of long-term people who are still paying full price in most schools is slim. Super-enthusiastic (like “keep your MA business running” enthusiastic) new people are notoriously rare.

That, right there, is why schools fail so much. There’s no one to carry them when times are rough. (Lots of other reasons of course, people who get punched in the head a lot aren’t known to be good at running a business. Personal failings of the owners. People who think running their own school would be fun, and find they’re woefully wrong. But for those who have the minimum needed to run a school, I think this quality of loyalty is the difference between carrying it through a recession or pandemic, and not.)

Let’s talk about martial arts culture for a bit. At the feet-on-the-mat level: human beings who practice fighting (this may come as a shock) once in a while they don’t like each other. Eventually almost everyone leaves a school, and surprisingly often it’s on bad terms. 

Ego in martial arts is…a problem. So when you see a senior person still training with their teacher ten, twenty, thirty years in, that’s a rarity. Doing it in their teacher’s school for a class or more every week, even as an employee is impressive. It’s enough of a rarity to make it worth watching, listening, and trying to figure out why.

When I walked in the door for my first class, half of the people there were very senior students, some (not one or two, several) had been with these instructors, in this school, for decades. Happily. These were not people going through the motions, these folks were fully present and happy to be there. Still engaged, still learning.

Understand, it’s not incredibly rare for long-term martial artists to show up for a seminar once or twice a year to keep in the running to be the next “most senior” person, or to pick up any skills they might not have been offered yet, to hang out with other senior folks for old time’s sake or to have a training partner at their level. That’s usual. But for someone with decades under their belt to still train in their teacher’s school, weekly, is incredibly rare. I was floored when I saw that it wasn’t just an oddball old student in Nancy and Anne’s school, it was many senior students. 

Over the two years I trained with them, I got to know those senior students. I shamelessly asked questions. I also watched their dynamic with Nancy and Anne. On and off the mat. I saw a great deal of affection and respect, naturally, but I also didn’t see things I expected to see. I didn’t see a breakdown in hierarchy or informality at those higher levels. They obviously knew a lot more about the senior black-belts, but no one was informal on the mat or anywhere in the school. It wasn’t movie-style formality, it was genuine mutual respect and consistent, structured etiquette. These instructors were friendly, interested, and engaged with their students from the first time they walked in the door, and didn’t perceptibly change that demeanor over many years of knowing them. I can’t speak to any outside friendships, but in the school these two modeled what they expected from us and how senior martial artists should behave with their subordinates.

Let me jump back to “lineage” for a moment. Lots of arts have a most-senior person who all others practicing derive their rank from. Often that point-of-origin person is no longer alive, and the art has fractured. There are many “cousin” arts who all point back to the person. That’s the 30,000 foot view. Many MA schools are part of a network. That might not provide much financial support, but it helps a lot with marketing. Anyone looking for a “BJJ” school for example, will be able to find one and validate the pedigree of the instructor. Because it’s a big art, it’s self-perpetuating. Lots of people look for it. Same for TKD, and some big forms of Karate, Judo, and others. Styles come and go in popularity, but we’ve all heard of the big ones.

This school did have a lineage, the instructors certainly didn’t buy their belts on Amazon. (That’s a thing…no one regulates martial arts schools, anyone can hang up a sign and teach whatever nonsense they learned on YouTube.)  Nancy and Anne were brilliant at their art, well-trained, and with decades of experience. But they were independent, they learned their style, and then taught it. But they were unlikely to get students looking specifically for what they taught. In fact, they named their school with a made-up English word. You had to look under the hood to find out what specific “lineage” style they taught.

So how does a school like that survive? When I say that these folks displayed Competence, to start and run a school on a shoestring, with no peer support, no wealthy backer, no glitz…and to keep it up for so long. That’s a great question. I’m not sure it would even be possible without Competence. And in their case, a surplus of this “bilateral” loyalty. The consistency they provided, and the respect and support they received.

When I think of Nancy and Anne, I could see them as examples to flesh out a description of almost any Competence attribute. But the one that comes top of mind is a very specific form of loyalty.

Here I’m talking about “Loyalty” as a verb. Loyalty as a skill. Not a high-school “what does Loyalty mean to you?” essay prompt. This is nuts-and-bolts living “loyally.” Try to step back to picture what I’m describing. Give it a different name if your own concept of loyalty might get in the way.

Nancy and Anne didn’t have a big school. Their school was “enough.” It was self-sustaining. It wasn’t more than that. But their rank distribution was interesting to me. 

Usual attrition in martial arts makes an odd curve in the rank distribution of most schools. Lots of new people, rapidly dropping off to extremely few not-quite-black-belts. Then, the ones to look at, the people who don’t leave. That’s where things get interesting. Every school has the low-rank attrition. Far more people think “I’ll try a martial art” than continue with it. Some arts have a steeper drop, some shallower, but it’s a big drop. Where things are interesting is in the high ranks. What happens long term?

This school had the normal low-rank distribution, it was healthy, it had a pipeline of people joining and enough of those didn’t wash out after two months to keep partners available at all levels. Black-belt in this school wasn’t cookie-cutter four years. It seemed to take most people around twelve.

They then had a (predictable, usual) divot in the ranks (Many people get it wrong. They train until they get to black-belt, as if that’s a destination. It is not. But it feels like one, and can mark a natural end for people who just don’t want to keep on). So they only had a couple of folks within five years of their black-belt when I got there. But that’s where this school started looking uncharacteristic to me. They had a lot of black-belts with more than five years in rank. Which is odd for several reasons. Those ranged in years of experience right up to the period these folks started their school. No big gaps. In other words, Nancy and Anne consistently inspired loyal students for as long as they were teachers. They started as people who had this quality I’m (I promise, getting to) telling you about.

Let me start by describing this pair. When I met Anne and Nancy, they were in their (best guess) late 60’s. Neither was tall. I topped them both by a few inches. My best description might be “nondescript.” Neither one had particular “charisma.” They had strength, backbone, character. On the mat they could show physical, verbal, and flat-out-force-of-personality intensity that would drive a smart person backpedaling out of the way. But most of the time they seemed more likely to offer you cookies than a wrist-lock. They didn’t have public speaking tricks that hook listeners into cult-like attachment. Their school didn’t engage in modern sales methods to retain students. They didn’t sell much “stuff” at all really.

I’ve trained in dozens of schools. Regularly or just visiting. I’ve been to seminars in all sorts of styles. I’ve met and learned from renowned figures in the industry, and with hidden gems, and (most often) with instructors I wanted to learn from in spite of their woeful inability to teach. Nancy and Anne were…ok. They had immense experience, and were competent (small-c) instructors. Probably anyone could learn from them, and improve with even a little application of trying. So that’s better than “ok” really, it’s unusual. But they weren’t stars. Their classes were not exciting. I learned a lot, and was happy to be there, never bored. It wasn’t a magician pulling fancy techniques out of a hat to wow us, it was earnest love of a subject and ability to convey it to people who chose to be there.

Another quizzical thing, theirs is a style I think of as “closed.” The self-defense classes were their own design, and taught separately, but the MA classes were of an art form where the goal is to learn very specific sets of movement (“kata”) and practice them. To spend a lifetime refining those movements to an unattainable perfection. They did also spar, which adds something. But mostly it was kata and fundamental skills (lots of punching and kicking and movement drills).

When MA people debate the worth of their apples-to-oranges arts, this one had a reasonable dollop of “would help you in a fight” and a fair bit of “traditional art form.” But I’d have to call the art itself, like the instructors, “nondescript.” Not the lunatic fringe of Krav Maga, or the artful motions of Tai Chi, not “find it on every streetcorner and you have seventeen friends who grew up studying” Tae Kwon Do or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Not “only five people in the world study this hidden art.” Just…somewhere in the middle.

So how did they cultivate loyal students? What happened?

In most schools, people get sick of their instructors at some point. Bottom-line, martial arts is hard, often boring, frustrating, designed to make you hit your limits, it’s easy to blame an instructor, or just get tired of one. Egos get in the way. Many people who get senior in an art want their own students, their own school or at least to lead their own training group, which usually means leaving. (The one male instructor in my primary art who has a school and long-term students like Nancy and Anne’s still has his senior students with him every Friday night, though some of them have had their own school for many years. That is not the norm.) Egos very rarely allow people to share the same mat forever.

So what would it mean to have a school where that wasn’t the case? Let’s (finally) talk about loyalty.

There are bad versions of it. Charismatic leaders who inspire their followers to ignore foibles or worse. Exploited people who are “loyal” to their abusers due to the dynamics of abuse. Even just “my life is miserable but I’m sticking out doing whatever I’m doing because I’m ‘loyal.’” There’s friendship-bff loyalty, married forever loyalty. Loyalty to nation or religion or sports team. I’m talking about none of that.

Competent people do loyalty differently. I posit that “Competent people engage in loyalty actively with others.” (Feel free to say that differently and tell me in the comments what it should be!) If you think about “fealty” instead of “loyalty” you’ll get closer to what a Competent person is actively doing. Fealty has an implication of a contract. Service in exchange for protection for example. Competent people are not objects of loyalty they inspire in followers, they are active participants in loyalty they elicit from others and exchange for their own. Loyalty as verb.

This is one of the most complex skills in the Competence portfolio. It’s built of other meta-skills. Loyalty is a long-haul activity. You may also have realized I’ve not specified whether it’s the Competent person who is loyal to others, or others who are loyal to them. It’s both. But it’s the Competent person creating that dynamic. People engaged with them aren’t blinded or awed. Long after the glow of charisma gives way to years of reality, this loyalty is still quietly and pervasively present. When a Competent person exhibits loyalty, they draw it out of others in kind, and they do it every day. 

So what might make long-term martial artists happy to stay in their teacher’s school, basically forever? I was driven to find out. I saw a number of factors. Go through the articles of this series, and every attribute I described came up. But comprising this loyalty a few stuck out. Engagement is one. I never saw, any day I was there for two years, even one single time when a senior student could feel taken for granted. Could feel ignored, sidelined, or uninvolved. Asked to do more, yes. Given some autonomy with junior students, yes. Had their own training put to the side in favor of new students? No. It must have taken a huge effort to juggle the training needs of people who just walked in the door in the same class with people with thirty years of experience and make everyone feel seen, keep everyone engaged, but Anne and Nancy did it. 

In a workplace that would look like a manager who knows how busy everyone is, knows when they need more, knows when they need less. Providing mentorship opportunities. Delegating, but not by putting the manager’s own job onto subordinate shoulders. Eyes in the back of a manager’s head always knowing what’s needed next.

What else? I think there’s a component of this skill to making people feel both needed and wanted. It was subtle. It wasn’t shameless asking, it was presenting a need that could be noticed and filled. Nancy and Anne were the owners, proprietors, teachers. It was fully “their school.” But they had created a sense of community that had places and roles, a niche for everyone. The school was at all times what I would call “comfortable.”  Not in the sense that you’d go without being punched. You had to be on your toes as they expected you to rise to your potential. But things were ordered, easy to belong, easy to know you were wanted.

In my regular MA school we entered the mat through a Torii gate. We were advised to leave the world outside the gate and be present for training. That’s not easy. Anyone with a hint of empathy could tell that instructors were bringing their baggage, and students did too. In Nancy and Anne’s school, baggage seemed to fall off. There was an “unruffled” atmosphere there, and it stemmed from the instructors.

Maybe that’s just the nature of women who have hit their sixties, have seen everything teaching a martial art (and life) can throw, and who can really focus. But that doesn’t explain how people in their thirties could start such a school, and carry it forward with them for so long, with many original students still present.

Another component of this “shared” model of loyalty is a kind of “watching out for” or caring. One huge cause of attrition in a martial art is injury. I was one of very few folks around me in my primary art to make it to black-belt without an injury that required surgery or at least long-term medical care or PT. Not for lack of trying. Looking back as an old person, that was fully and entirely luck. Martial artists who train in hands-on fighting arts get injured. That’s the nature of the beast.

Loyalty may imply a certain degree of care. There’s a sense in martial arts training of the trust we place in our partners because we’re essentially loaning our bodies for partners to practice on. We want them back in not-degraded condition. Nancy and Anne taught an art that included sparring. Their methods of teaching, their demonstrated care for themselves and their students, and again, the whole aura of the place, all made injury a forbidden thing. Not, like many schools, only a taboo topic where everyone pretends injuries don’t occur and students quietly disappear from the school after an injury, as if they were hauled into an unmarked vehicle and taken away. But rather, here discussion of injury wasn’t forbidden, causing an injury was unconscionable. How do you get sixty-year-olds still training hard? You don’t break them when they’re 20, 30, 40, or 50.

I’ll give you an example. Most schools don’t allow jewelry on the mat. It’s really pretty stupid to wear something that could injure a partner, or get torn out of an earlobe/nose/other, or otherwise make a mess. It’s easy to just not wear it (or tape over pieces that can’t come out). In almost every school I’ve even visited, I’ve seen jewelry on the mat. A ring here, earrings there, an occasional bracelet or anklet or toe-ring. So much so that I got used to keeping my wedding band on. It’s super thin and snug. I couldn’t imagine a way of injuring a partner wearing it (and I can turn almost any object into a weapon). It’s soft enough to be cut with scissors if I should jam my finger, and I like to keep it on at all times.

A few weeks into my training at this school, I was running a little late to class, wasn’t trying as “new student” hard to follow all of the rules as I had my first classes, and I left it on. Before I went anywhere near a partner in class, Anne quietly, as an aside, asked me to put it in the changing room. She reiterated not just the rule, but the “why.” When she said it, it resonated, but I didn’t feel foolish or singled-out. She used “we” language. She didn’t condemn. She just quietly and with no awkwardness or heat drove home the message that we protect each other. Effectively enough that I also stopped wearing it to train anywhere else. Even in Tai Chi classes where any partner work might occur but injury couldn’t possibly I habitually take off all jewelry to train. The “sense for other” she inspired carried forward to people beyond her school. It was pervasive there.

That kind of attention to detail is how you keep someone training intensely for thirty years without a career-ending injury.

My memory of that couple of years training with Nancy and Anne is that they were constantly thinking of “other” rather than “self.” Not in a foolish or un-pragmatic way, because these two were nothing if not pragmatic. But in a way that inspired the same. By caring for their students’ success and wellbeing, students cared for each other and for the instructors in the same way. It all created a sense of belonging, of place, and of safety. There was a quiet caretaking there.

I think you can keep going on your own considering behaviors that would comprise this bilateral loyalty: Transparent honesty. Delivering on promises. On and on. Even just creating a vision of a school where people felt “expected to be there” in a way you might be expected at a restaurant where you go for lunch once a week. You know you’ll be met with your usual, and you want that usual. Think about comparable situations, workplaces with good employees who stay because they choose to. Businesses with regulars for many years. Then expand to consider friendship and romantic relationships. The lessons of Competence apply in all areas of life.