Evolving

I have been preparing myself to start the Ultimate Black Belt Test for about a month and a half now. We talked to our teen/adult class about it to get feedback on the idea (which was positive). This week at our graduation, I am going to make the announcement to all of our students and their parents. This is exciting for me and I believe that it will be exciting to others. There will undoubtedly be changes at and in our school over the next year. I also believe there will be changes in myself as well. I think that this possible change is what excites me most. Evolving as a man, a martial artist, and a human being.

Bully Prevention Resource Website

This past weekend, we began working on the Bully Prevention Resource Website.  We traveled to the bookstore and spent a couple of hours looking through books.  On our website, we will keep a Suggested Reading List for kids, parents and family. Also on the website will be general information that we have gathered with links and ideas for the community to help solve the problem of bullying.   Our intention is to bring out the truth about bullies and present various ways to deal with them.   It is the time to help the children in our community learn to deal with the bullies in the world.   All parents are concerned for the safety of their children and bullying is one problem that parents can help their child with.   Parents, Guardians and Educators play a key role in helping children learn to prevent and stop bullying.  Everyone can help prevent and stop bullying.  Adults have the responsibility to protect kids.   Adults have the responsibility to be a role model for kids, teens, and young adults.   Adults need to know about the ways to intervene and help the person being bullied.  At Triple Black Belt Academy, we are also working on a Bully Defense curriculum that will be taught to all of our students.  Watch for more details to come.....

Starting the journey that will change my life forever.

I am starting a new quest, a challenge, a journey that is going to push me to my limits and maybe even beyond. You can achieve nothing without risk, all our successes and all our failures start with risk. So I decided to take the risk, talked my wife Michelle into joining me and here we are. We are starting the UltimateBlack Belt Test which is a year long test that will push us physically (50,000 push ups, sit ups, squats 1,000 miles walked, 1,000 rounds of sparring, 1,000 reps of a form just to name a few) and mentally (daily meditation, weekly journal entries, designing curriculum, and leading a large number of community projects and environmental projects) but in the end it will be worth more than any test that I have ever taken. I am ready to change for the better, to take the first step on a new adventure. I hope that people will be willing to assist us and encourage us through out this year-and-a-half long test. And in return I hope that we will encourage and inspire you to take a risk. To try things you have been putting off or things you thought were too hard for you to do. Even in failure there are lessons to learn. If you learn from your failures or mistakes then you turn your failure into success.

Talking to Tom Callos

Today, Clay and I finally got to talk to Tom Callos.  He is currently in Greece so setting up a time has been a challenge.  After a few attempts, we successfully figured out video chatting.  One interesting thing that Clay brought up was the fact that the HanMuDo student creed kind of goes hand in hand with the Ultimate Black Belt Test philosophy.  This creed has been guiding our lives for many years and we are excited to start this journey.  Part of what we plan to accomplish this year, is share our eating habits with you.  Last spring, we read the book, The China Study.  We have drastically changed our eating habits since reading this book in April 2011.   We are what we like to call 90% Vegans.  Maybe 80%... We have tried for years to increase our vegetable consumption but it was hard.  Part of our plan that we follow now, is vegan with lots of vegetables and whole grains.  In the past we found it hard to eat lots of vegetables when we had yummy meat on our plates.  So, cutting out animal based products made it possible to made the vegetables the focus of our meals.  My weakness is shrimp and cheese.  When we first started eating this way, our son was totally against it... said he would never drink soy milk.  So, I bought a small milk for him and unsweetened soy milk for us.  Next thing we knew, he was using soy milk on his cereal instead.   We continue to research and discover information about healthy diets.  Our goal is to live a healthy life for as long as possible.

Deciding to embark on this journey


The decision for me to devote the next year and a half to the Ultimate Black Belt Test was not a hard one.  Clay has been debating over this for several years and finally decided that he was ready to make that commitment.  He started doing push-ups two months ago.  During the month of September, he asked me to join him on this journey.  I thought it over for a few seconds and said absolutely yes.  It never crossed my mind to say no.  On the nights that we have classes, it is easy to get our push-ups in.  We have told the students that they are helping us reach our goal of 150 push-ups a day.  September's lesson was on goals and goal setting, so it was easy to work this into our mat-chats.  When we shared our goal with the teen/adult class, they got nervous.  After we had to pull their jaws up off the mat and explain that they were not the ones that had to do 50,000 push-ups and 50,000 sit-ups, they felt better about helping us.  Just for fun, we added 50,000 squats and I added 50,000 calf muscle exercises.  Walking the 1000 miles won't be too hard, since we both walk a lot on our jobs… over 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day.  Clay has been known to walk 13,000 steps in a day.  

Over the past 6 months, we have completely changed our eating habits, so eating healthy won't be an issue either.  Both of us have been on a quest to be at our healthiest weight.  Although, I must say, that Clay is winning... probably because men generally lose weight easier than women and he is younger.  I would say that is cheating but I guess he can't do anything about his gender or his age.