Richard Diston owns two schools in North London and teaches Freestyle Karate as well as modern military combative systems. He is a co-founder of Be Your Own Bodyguard and has performed several well received addresses on personal safety and self development.
I recently placed an ad on Gumtree.co.uk advertising my Certified Instructor Training course, and in the deluge of responses I received, I got one in particular that I thought worthy of discussion.
The sender advised me that I was being discussed on a web forum for traditional martial artists and that they thought it was a disgrace that I was charging a large sum of money for an ‘all in’ Instructor programme. I was challenged to explain myself and the inference was that I was a ‘shamurai’ – a quaint little term coined by their online community.
Now, while I felt no initial need to answer to this group (I know I run an ethical business) I was aware that anyone deciding to Google my name in the future might indeed come across this online discussion and leave me in a bad light, possibly affecting future business. So, ego firmly in check, I signed onto the website and put myself into the thick of it.
What became very clear was the massive gulf between the people who view the martial arts as the valuable tool for positive social and socio-economic growth that it is, and the ‘flat earthers’ who believe that we are wrong to bill monthly, charge graduation fees and generally make a living out of something that we love. The main protagonists in this debate avoided one very simple fact; that none of them had actually contacted me to discover the course content, terms or curriculum before publicly attacking me on a globally accessible platform. When people question our integrity, morals and motivations, it is more often than not from the comfortable saddle of a high horse called Ego – something that we as Martial Artists should be above, right? While I may rightly or wrongly be accused of running a ‘McDojo’, I have enough integrity and courtesy not to attack the way other people want to conduct their lives and businesses with the proviso that they are not hurting people. For me anyway, the principles I teach are more than a simple ceremony we go though at the start of a class.
The discussion went on and on, with various participants making some valid points about teaching, history and the ethics involved in teaching MA. I am sure that we all know of instructors and organisations who we feel should not be teaching, charging and conducting themselves in whatever fashion but I am sure that we all appreciate that this is their right and we should concern ourselves more with the goal of enrolling more students for ourselves and doing our bit in helping the Martial Arts achieve wider recognition and higher status in the community.
In the end, although we all agreed to disagree, it was mentioned that I had conducted myself with courtesy and integrity and was welcomed into the community. Funny that one of the moderators chipped in at the end and reinforced the point by stating that in ‘the old days’ students paid for everything as the instructor was ‘above dealing with money’. So how un-traditional are we, exactly?
I remember when the industry used to be all about systems. Had websites like this one been around then it would have been martial artists in-fighting about which style was best. Now that many martial artists are opening their eyes to the benefits of other systems and martial arts methods, I hope we can eventually come to a time when this level of acceptance stretches to martial arts business systems as well.
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Instructors and Teaching 
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