Martial Arts Professional Asks… Zig Ziglar, Legendary Motivational Speaker and Author

You must have someone to lead before you’re able to lead. You must determine what your students want from life, and then try to help them. That’s the underlying purpose of the martial arts: enabling your students to be more effective when working toward their goals.

You’ll find that leadership is defined more by character than by any other quality. People must trust you, before they will follow you. In business, employees who do not trust the leadership of their company will look for other jobs. On the other hand, those who trust the leadership will undergo many difficulties if they know that the company is being straight with its employees.

Dr. Dean Ornish of Harvard University said that our relationship with the people we love [and lead] is more important to our physical health than the food we eat, our exercise program or even the genetic traits we have inherited. All of that simply is to say, the relationship you build with the people you are teaching and leading is a key to attracting them.

If your students are simply clients, customers or participants, then that’s one thing. If they know, however, that you genuinely care about them and want to do the best for them, then it’s a different story.

Let me illustrate my point with a story. Years ago, I wanted to buy a new car, a Cadillac. I knew the exact model I wanted and had already visited a number of dealerships. Then, a friend said, “Don’t do anything until you go see Chuck Bellos. You can absolutely depend on what Chuck tells you.”

I went to see Chuck; and, although I did not know him or had never spoken with him, we completed the deal in 15 minutes. The reason we made the deal so quickly was because Chuck had been working on me for 23 years. How was that possible, since I had just met him for the first time? When Chuck started working at that car dealership 23 years earlier, he had made a commitment that he would finish his career there. He said to himself, “This is my last stop. To stay here, I must deal straight with people in a way that they will come to trust me, like me, bring me their repeat business and send me their friends.”

I bought a Cadillac from Chuck because he had been working on me by following that same philosophy for 23 years.

It’s the same story for martial arts school owners and instructors. When your students trust you, when students receive the instruction they need, the encouragement they need and the relationships they want to build, then they won’t go anywhere else. It echoes what I’ve always said, “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”