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Sensei Chris Rowe

January 03, 2020

When I started karate I was your average shy child who would stand off to one side of the room and just try to be part of the class I wouldn t talk to people unless they talked to me I never went out of my way to talk to anyone because I just wasn t comfortable with it but if you look at me now it s a completely different story I am teaching hundreds of students every week competing all over the nation on the number one martial arts demonstration team in the nation I have performed on ESPN and have successfully competed against people from all over the nation I m talking to people who I don t even know everyday just because I want them to see how amazing martial arts is and have them share in my passion If it wasn t for martial arts I wouldn t be talking to you right now I d probably still be like that shy little boy but you know I ve gotten so much out of doing martial arts that I wouldn t trade it for anything in the world I mean I now have the confidence to try out new activities go places I wouldn t normally go talk to people I normally wouldn t talk to and I know I got all of this from martial arts Once I had to stand in front of my students their parents and talk to them about different qualities of an impactful leader These are qualities like service respect integrity and so on and I thought talking about this was terrifying I got up in front of those parents and stumbled and mumbled my way through talking about these ideas continuously looking back at my instructor for the ok that he would take over Now I look back on this event and can laugh because just a few weeks ago five years later at a staff meeting that same instructor had asked me to talk about being dynamic teaching while he left the room and without hesitation I jumped up and just started talking to people that were younger older and the same age as me about how to control the energy in a classroom If it wasn t for my instructors at Integrity teaching me all about leadership and helping me build my self esteem by putting me on the spot so many times and teaching me to have the faith if I started talking the things I wanted to say would come out I could have never spoken so confidently out-of-the-blue like that If my performance instructor didn t have the confidence in my ability with a sword to invite me on to his competition team and tell me I m ready to compete on my own and tell me that I could hang with the best in the nation I would never have none such a good feeling about myself Another story is from the first time I competed on the competition team we got to the tournament floor about 3 hours early and I was so nervous I was getting sick to the stomach but if I had never had to overcome any of my fears like I was challenged to do at Integrity before I probably couldn t have gotten up there and done the show It was because I was pushed in to situations I was uncomfortable with before that that made this easier to overcome I believe in my heart that the only reason I was able and am able to do all the things I have is because I trusted my instructors to lead me in the direction that would help me unlock everything I was hiding by being shy and knowing that they cared I ve come to realize over the past couple of years that lots of karate instructors are not liked by their students but I only found this out when I started traveling the country and talking to these students because I guess I was lucky to join the a school where the instructors are cool people and truly care about their students I first started karate like some students do because my parents told me i was going to do karate I had no problem with this i was age 9 and it was something totally new and had no clue what i was doing but it was fun so i stuck with it after a couple of months i realized that hey i really enjoy this and i set myself a goal of achieving my black belt now at this time I had a few friends and i still wasn’t very outgoing I was still very shy like when I first started and I was ok with that i didn’t want to be the number one student in class now fast forward 4 years and I just achieved my black belt which was an amazing feeling and my close friends were with me the whole time even though they weren’t on the test with me but now I really wanted to get on to the cool new leadership team that most of my friends were on just because they were on it so I could spend more time with them plus the free pizza so my instructor Jonathan knew that I was not very outgoing and he needed to give me a project that i needed to complete to get on to the team so he made me do a social event that I was terrified to even think about and what I had to do was get my friends together and hang out you may be thinking oh that’s not a hard project but for me at the time I lacked the courage to get people do anything outside of karate that project propelled me to start having more confidence and be outgoing I stayed on that leadership team for 3 years and some times it was easy and fun and others it was hard and scary because i was being forced to do things I wasn’t comfortable with but that’s exactly what i needed

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