Martial Musings with Grant Buchanan of Mile High Karate and Youngforest Tai Chi

Having recently been promoted to the heady heights of sixth degree Black Belt, I have had many congratulations from my friends and students at achieving this high level of qualification.

It certainly has been a long and extraordinary challenging journey. An older student commented to me, that young people today need to learn to work hard rather than his perception of a world full of ‘cry babies' trying to whine their way to the top.

On reflection, and as a father of four, I have a different view on being babied. Take a lesson from yourself; we were all babies once and wow did we have a great attitude. Watch the baby, they fall down a 1000 times, but get up 1001 times. Thankfully you won't hear parents say 'oh baby, you have fallen so many times, you've worked hard, let's try something else, how about crawling?”

It's hard to imagine a parent saying this, we would see it as cruel, yet this is often what we do to ourselves and our children when we perceive the challenge is too hard or we have tried enough.

We can often dream and even stake out our goal, but along the way we make mistakes and we fail. We take these as signs that we ‘cant' – not true. Some give up after the first mistake, but the masters, the champions, those who are successful in any field, will keep going 1000 times. They may stumble, but 1001 times they get up again.

We must place ourselves in a success environment and then we can work miracles. Give a person a success environment and you can make the average, the non-gifted and the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Teach them to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacle and watch them grow as they learn to get up again and again. In any endeavour, we all start as babies.

That's how an asthmatic teen needing double knee reconstruction got to be a sixth degree Master.