Episode 939 - Ethics in Leadership

In this episode, Jeremy is joined by past guest Brendan Wilson as they discuss the ethics in leadership and how it applies to martial arts and martial artists.

Ethics in Leadership - Episode 939

SUMMARY

In this conversation, Jeremy and Brendan Wilson discuss the topic of leadership and its application in the martial arts. They explore the importance of creating an environment where people can do their best, the role of communication and vision in leadership, and the ethical decisions leaders face. They also touch on the concept of culture in martial arts schools and the responsibility of leaders to set the tone. The conversation highlights the challenges and responsibilities of leadership in both military and martial arts contexts. In this conversation, Brendan Wilson discusses his approach to safety and promotions in martial arts. He emphasizes the importance of creating a safe environment for students and setting high standards without humiliating them. He also shares his principles of Arête (excellence), Agon (struggle), Zenia (guest-host relationship), Techne (mechanism for delivering power), and Arche (foundation). Brendan also talks about his books, which aims to entertain and educate readers by presenting difficult decisions and ethical dilemmas.

TAKEAWAYS

* Leadership in martial arts involves creating an environment where people can do their best.
* Communication and vision are crucial aspects of leadership.
* Leaders face ethical decisions and must weigh conflicting responsibilities.
* Culture plays a significant role in martial arts schools and influences student progress.
* Leaders in martial arts have the responsibility to set the tone and create a positive learning environment. Create a safe environment for students in martial arts by setting high standards without humiliating them.
* Emphasize the principles of excellence, struggle, guest-host relationship, power, and foundation in martial arts training.
* Books can entertain and educate readers by presenting difficult decisions and ethical dilemmas.
* Writing fiction allows for the exploration of complex scenarios and the development of characters that can teach valuable lessons.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:16 Defining Leadership and Creating an Environment for Success
06:22 The Role of Communication and Vision in Leadership
09:42 Navigating Ethical Decisions as a Leader
16:00 The Impact of Culture in Martial Arts Schools
26:36 Creating a Safe Environment in Martial Arts
33:24 Principles for Martial Arts Training
44:15 The Power of Fiction to Educate and Entertain

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Show Transcript

Jeremy (00:43.078)

Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome. It's another episode of Whistlekick Martial Arts Radio and I'm joined by Brendan Wilson. Already been on the show. In fact, episode 654. You can go back and check that out. We'll probably talk about his last appearance. There's a good reason he's on again, but we'll get there in just a moment. To those of you out there, if you're new or even if you're not new, make sure you check out whistlekick .com for all the things that we're doing to connect, educate and entertain the traditional martial artists of the world. And make sure you check out whistlekickmartialartsradio .com.

Brendan Wilson (01:07.668)

Thank you.

Jeremy (01:10.758)

to go deep and get the full experience for this and every episode we've ever done. But Brendan, thanks for coming back on. Grandmaster Wilson, you okay if I call you Brendan? Okay, I appreciate that. If we were in geezer dough box, of course would default to title, but we're.

Brendan Wilson (01:17.196)

Well, Jeremy, thank you so much. You can call me Brendan. That's just fine. So anyway, thank you so much. No, no, the title isn't as important. First of all, thank you so much for having me on again. It was a great time the first time. It is an honor then and it is an honor now to be back. I'm just so glad to be talking to you and I'm looking forward to.

Jeremy (01:44.646)

Yeah, we had fun last time.

Brendan Wilson (01:45.131)

our conversation. We did. We had a good time.

Jeremy (01:47.846)

We had a good time. And you had reached out and you said, there's something I want to come on and I want to talk about. There's this subject and I'm going to use a word, I don't know if you used, and you and Andrew set this up more. I was involved tangentially. I'm going to use the word passion. There's a subject here that you're passionate about that you think more martial artists, whether or not they're school owners, whether or not they're high rank should consider. Is that a fair way of framing it? Okay.

Brendan Wilson (02:14.827)

I think that's fair, yeah. Why are you here? So one of the things I've been doing in my retirement is I've been lecturing and writing on leadership. And when I spoke with Edry, he said, well, can you shape that to talk about how that would be applicable to leadership in the martial arts?

Jeremy (02:16.454)

And what is that? Why are you here? Why are we here? What are we doing today?

Jeremy (02:29.126)

That doesn't sound like retirement.

Jeremy (02:40.294)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (02:41.642)

So that's really what I came here to talk to you about today. I am passionate about it. I don't think anything I'm gonna say is gonna be a surprise to anyone, but sometimes it's good to hear a focus, something that people can grasp onto and perhaps use for themselves.

Jeremy (02:55.558)

And sometimes hearing something in a different way from a different person, right? I mean, you've probably had the same experience. Most of us have had the experience where, you know, we're working on something and a different person tells us, you know, try doing this with your foot or your hand or your whatever. And suddenly it clicks in.

Brendan Wilson (03:12.874)

Yep. And it clicks. Yeah. That's right.

Jeremy (03:16.678)

So where do we start? Where do we start in the idea of this fairly broad topic, right? Because leadership, I think a lot of people think of it pretty narrow. It's whoever's in charge of you, right? For a lot of people, that's what leadership is. But of course, people get entire degrees on leadership. There are, I mean, shoot, how many books have been written on leadership?

You know, it's not like we've exhausted the topic. So how do we start to dig in?

Brendan Wilson (03:51.913)

Okay. Well, for me, I was in the army as an army officer for 25 years, and then I spent another 15 years as a diplomat working for NATO. And so I developed my own theory of what leadership is, what the role of leader is. And if you'll allow me, I will give you an anecdote that caused me to focus on that. So when I was a major in the army, I got thrown into a position.

Jeremy (04:13.126)

Of course.

Brendan Wilson (04:20.488)

on very short notice, where we had six days to get ready to go out from Louisiana to the Mojave Desert in California, and to go through a big month -long exercise. We had to move hundreds of vehicles, lots of people. I didn't know anybody from the unit. I was only put in there because the person that was supposed to do it wasn't available, and they just moved me into that unit early. So we got, we did that, we went out to the desert. It was really busy.

for me. You know, we were just doing one thing after the next after the next. And the unit did very well, mostly because they had been trained well before I got there because there was zero opportunity for me to actually say, do it this way. You know, we just had to work through the issues. And when I got back, the battalion command sergeant major approached me and he said, some of the officers that worked for you did very well. And he indicated that that was a reflection on my leadership. And I said, no.

I said, I haven't instructed them or told them anything. A reflection is on them for how well they did. And he said, that's something I've never forgotten. The role of the leader is to create an environment where people can do their best. That's what you did, right? That's the credit that you take as a leader because you had good people. The role of the leader, the role of the leader is to create an environment where people can do their best. And he said, that's what you did. That is the credit that I'm giving you.

Jeremy (05:36.23)

Can you say that again? Can you say that again?

Brendan Wilson (05:47.206)

And that is the only credit you will ever get as a leader. So, he didn't say that last part. But so for me, the question then is, how does one create an environment where people can do their best? Because especially the higher up you go, the less direction you can actually, you know, but we had to load hundreds of vehicles on rail. I wasn't there for that. You know, somebody else supervised that and somebody else supervised the person that did that or the people that did that.

So how do you actually create that? And that was kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. And then if you're willing, we could talk about how that might apply to the martial arts and the martial arts environment.

Jeremy (06:22.918)

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Right off the bat, just that you're in this anecdote, the piece I asked you to repeat gets really close to my vision of a really good martial arts instructor. Right? Because when we think about someone learning in the early days, there's a lot of hands -on, there's a lot of, you know, detail. You're keeping them from falling over. But at some point, and this happens in every school I've ever seen,

whether it's intentional or organic, eventually at higher ranks, those students are in an environment where they are moving forward. It's less, okay, now that you're a fourth degree black belt, I'm gonna teach you this, that, and the other. Usually somebody gets there and it's the environment that's been cultivated that helps them move forward. And the head instructor oversees or supports or whatever word people might throw in.

Brendan Wilson (07:12.932)

Yep. No, you and I agree with.

Brendan Wilson (07:18.5)

Sure. Yep. So a couple years ago, I got asked to give a leadership thing for the district conference of the Rotary group that I'm in. So I didn't really know where to start. It turned out that my neighbor two doors down at the time is Dr. Keith Krasman, and he is a retired philosophy professor. He has bestselling books on ethics, and he gets called in by corporations to give.

talks on ethics. So I said, he's just out in his yard, you know, so, hey, what do you think about this? And he said something really interesting. He's first thing he said is the same thing you'd heard a million times, but he meant it in a different way. And that is that the leader has to have a vision and has to communicate that vision. I said, yeah, you know, you have a vision statement. He said, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. He said, the leader has to communicate how everyone is going to treat everyone else in the organization. He said, that's the most important thing that.

Jeremy (07:48.358)

No, cool.

Brendan Wilson (08:16.834)

because the people won't work together well and they have to in order for the unit to reach their potential. So he said, how do you do that? Right? So one of the ways that you do that is you present yourself as a honest and honorable person. Right? Because, and that's the baseline for you creating that environment because people will ask a certain question. They'll say, is the boss honest? Because if the boss isn't honest, right, they are not going to be sure about a number of things that they have to be sure about.

in order to reach their potential. So for example, what happens if I screw up? We know from basically every leadership course in the world that a certain amount of failure is a necessary component for success. So you're gonna screw up, everyone's going to at some point. What happens when I screw up? Is that gonna be taken into account as part of me moving forward? Or am I just gonna lose my job and be humiliated in front of everyone else? Well, they're looking to the leader to see,

the cue as to how that's going to be. What happens if I'm successful? If I'm successful, am I gonna get the credit for this? Or is somebody else gonna take it? Or is somebody else gonna push me to the side because they don't want me to have the spotlight? That all comes back with the boss being honest, I think. So to me, creating that environment, communicating that is the most important thing that the leader can do.

And that's why in good organizations, they hold the leader responsible for the success or failure of the organization. Even if the leader, you know, you can't point to one thing and said, the leader did this wrong. If the organization's failing, the boss has the responsibility because the boss could have created an environment where the organization would be successful.

Jeremy (10:03.174)

Yeah, there's a word that I use. You're not using it, but I would call it synonymous with environment in this case is culture. It's a word that a lot of people use. And, you know, whether when I started my school last year, restarted after a long hiatus, the thing that my assistant instructor and I spent the most time talking about was the culture. Cause we knew if we got that right, a lot of other things would happen.

without a lot of effort, they would just naturally move in the direction we wanted. How do we want our students to interact with each other? How do we want them to interact with us? How do we want them to think of themselves on their journey? You're talking about the inevitability of failure. Yeah, I mean, learning martial arts as a martial artist, no matter where you are in your journey, you're gonna screw stuff up, especially if you're really pushing in the way that I would hope people are.

Brendan Wilson (10:57.246)

That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Jeremy (11:00.102)

But how do they handle that? How do other people observe that? When someone sees someone struggling, do they take pride in that? Because maybe it suggests they have a higher place in the hierarchy. Or do they see that as everyone's role to support everyone else's progression because we stand and fall together? I would imagine that, you know, as an outsider, I look at the military and I think, if I'm in there,

and maybe this is just because I've had great leaders. I want everyone around me to be as good as I can because it helps keep me alive. But I've heard enough stories from enough friends who served to know that is not always the case.

Brendan Wilson (11:36.893)

That's right.

Brendan Wilson (11:44.413)

Yeah, yeah, I think you raised a good point there. So I guess the question for me, the way I broke it down was when you come up with ethical decisions, you basically have three categories. I realize these are somewhat artificial, but the easy category is the yes -no decision, right? You've been asked to do something unethical and you just say no. And doesn't mean there won't be consequences for that. You can still get fired for refusing an order from your boss.

But that's a fairly easy decision to make. The example I gave in the paper that I recently written and when I speak is when I was a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division, we were shooting live fire in support of troops in an exercise. And my battery commander, so the person senior to me, but he wasn't experienced in this type of artillery, had said, I need you to, we're gonna shoot the guns right up next to the troops for some sort of,

realistic training, you can do that, but there's some safety regulations that need to be followed. And he said, and we're not going to have an observer. So that's the primer. Anybody that's in artillery will get this. If you don't have an observer, you can't fire safely because if the round doesn't go where it's supposed to go, the observer is the one that tells everybody to stop. But if you're on the guns and there's no one to tell you to stop and you shot in the wrong place, you just continue to shoot according to the schedule.

So I told him, we've got to have an observer. He said, no, we don't have time for an observer. I want you to shoot without it. I said, I will not do it. We've got to have an observer. And I even said, all it takes is for somebody to go up to the hill, the observation post, and call in the mission. My driver can do it. He can go up there right now. We can be ready in 20 minutes. He said, no, we don't have time. I want you to shoot it now. I said, I'm not going to. So he said, I'm going to bypass you and have the fire direction center send the data down to the guns to shoot it. I said, no, you won't.

I am in command of the guns and you can relieve me and do as you please, but you cannot send that data down to the guns. I will put the guns in what's called check fire status, which they can't fire by law. And we need to get this solved. So then his boss comes in, right? So I'm a lieutenant, right? He's a captain. Lieutenant Colonel comes in really, really frustrated. And he says, everybody's waiting on you guys. I got a general officer out there waiting to see this, right? What's the holdup? And he says,

Brendan Wilson (14:07.674)

Lieutenant Wilson's refusing the order. So by that time I got the book out, right? And the book is law, it really is. So, I mean, if you want to see this, if I shoot this mission and somebody gets injured or killed, I'm liable morally and I'm liable legally. I can go to jail for that. Anyway, so before he could say something angry, a helicopter lands and his boss gets out, which is the division artillery commander. And he comes over and he goes, hey, you know what's up, man? Everybody's waiting on this, right? And he says,

Lieutenant Wilson's not willing to do it. So he says, tell me about it. So he was calm and everything. So I showed him the book, I explained it to him, and he goes, he turns to the battalion commander, whose name was Russell. He says, Russ, send somebody up to the hill. Let's get this done. So we did it exactly the way I said we should do it. And the reason I raised that is because that's an easy decision. I couldn't have obeyed that order, period. And I would never have been excused for obeying the order, right, knowing that it was wrong.

and then somebody got injured or killed. My responsibility is to protect the lives of the infantry that's out there. Easy decision, yes, no, we can take most of those decisions without leaving the house, right? And that's what I would say is the very first level of ethical, it's not even a dilemma. You just can't do things that are wrong, yeah.

Jeremy (15:22.662)

Right. The, the ethics are clear. Yeah. And I have to ask your, your, your commanding officer, was there any consequence for him?

Brendan Wilson (15:30.937)

Okay, so interestingly enough, my battery commander wrote on my efficiency report that I was not a yes man. He meant it as a sort of a sideways compliment criticism. It's an unusual comment for maybe it wasn't 40 years ago, but it is fairly unusual. And the battalion commander wrote that I was the best lieutenant in the battalion. So he recognized the fact that I had probably saved them some trouble, even though I had embarrassed him in front of his own boss. But...

You know, they should have sent an observer up and they shouldn't have asked me to do something that I knew was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, to me, you know, the two things in the military, martial arts too, mission accomplishment and safety. Those are the two things that you make sure that you stick with. And if you're setting the example as a leader, everybody watches, right? The soldiers know that Lieutenant Wilson isn't going to do something wrong. Yep, they know it.

Jeremy (16:04.758)

Yeah. Yeah. But good on him to learn the lesson and to recognize the reality. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (16:29.559)

because he just about got his tush kicked by refusing to do something. And they, in the same way, should also, because at the section level, every sergeant has safety responsibilities. And those are not delegable. You got to do it. You're the boss. You're the one that says, no, we're not going to do it, even if it makes us late, even if it makes us look bad.

Jeremy (16:32.646)

Mm -hmm.

Jeremy (16:55.014)

All right, what's the second category?

Brendan Wilson (16:56.694)

Okay, so the second level is the one that's more common. That's the one that we all face, and that's where we have conflicting levels of ethical responsibilities where the decision that you have to take is going to push one or the other, and there's no clear decision that is obviously right. Every decision has negative consequences for you and for others. And the example that I like, my daughter is a doctor. When she was a resident, she was supposed to do like an overnight,

thing in oncology, which she was allowed to sleep. She just had to be there. But when she got to the hospital, they said, no, no, we're short a doctor. You have to be in charge of the emergency reaction team for the whole hospital. So she's doing it. She's a doctor as a second year resident. Yeah. And so she's got a five person team. They're going whatever, you know, somebody crashes or whatever. And then one of her patients was starting to fade. And so she calls up to

Jeremy (17:41.83)

as a resident. Wow.

Brendan Wilson (17:56.021)

the, sorry, my, intensive care and says, I need to put this patient in intensive care. And the resident up there tells her the attending, the supervising doctor will not take this patient unless you do the following tests. And she says, I don't have time. Some of these tests are gonna take hours. I'm coming up. So she comes up and with the nurses and the other residents around, she confronts the doctor. She puts her finger in his chest and says,

Jeremy (18:01.35)

Okay. Sure.

Brendan Wilson (18:25.396)

This patient is going to die. Make up your mind.

He said, I'll take it. And as a resident, you can ruin your life by doing that. And so he, later in the week, asked her out for coffee. And he said, we'd like to offer you a fellowship in intensive care. We like the way you do business. So he didn't hold it against her. And when she graduated, she got the Chairman's Award. Now here's why that's harder. As a doctor, under supervision, and in training.

she is really only obliged to follow whatever order she's given as long as she's not violating any medical ethics, which she would not have been had she said, I'll give you the test. I was told to do that. The patient might have gotten worse. The patient might have died. And so what she had to do was to weigh those things, right, and then decide which one she was gonna take forward and knowing that there would be consequences no matter what she did, right? So that's.

That's the harder decision. And of course, that's the one we all face. I mean, you can't raise a family. You can't run a martial arts business. Nothing without having to say, I'm weighing these different things. How am I going to go forward?

Jeremy (19:29.094)

And that's... Yeah.

Jeremy (19:36.902)

It's constant and we're bombarded every day. Do I do A or B and there's no clear decision or even worse, A, B, C, D, Q, and you can only pick two of them, right? And so that a lot of people get paralyzed under that decision process because there's no clear objective determinant.

Brendan Wilson (19:48.466)

Yep.

Brendan Wilson (19:54.45)

Yep.

Brendan Wilson (19:59.25)

I agree. And one of the things I think that made this clear was the pandemic. We had people raising families who had to decide whether I'm going to keep my family completely safe or am I going to make a living and have enough to eat? Am I going to send my child to school where they might be exposed and then I might be exposed? Are we going to, you know, those are difficult decisions and there isn't a best answer. There was only the answer, the choice that you pick and the consequences that come from that. We would never say you did the wrong thing, Bob.

Jeremy (20:03.622)

Hmm.

Brendan Wilson (20:27.825)

we would have to say, mom, you made the decision that you had to make as a mother to do that. So to me, I think that reflects that kind of thing. Because of course, every parent, every mother is a leader, let's face it, in a very, very important leadership role. They've got the lives of their family that they have to uphold.

Jeremy (20:41.926)

for sure.

Jeremy (20:48.71)

And they're responsible for creating that environment for progress, for growth, for being raised, whatever verbiage you throw in there. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (20:52.081)

Yep. Got it.

So I promise at some point I'm going to get to how this affects the martial arts, but I do it. Yeah, good. Good.

Jeremy (21:01.734)

I'm already hearing it and I suspect the audience is too, right? We're setting out a framework that they can understand. Okay, so is that the end of two? Are we onto the third one? Okay.

Brendan Wilson (21:10.352)

We're on the third, yeah. So to me, the third one has to do with once the decision is taken and the consequences become known, how do you deal with that? So the example that I like to give is Victor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning. He was a physician. He and his pregnant wife were incarcerated at the beginning of World War II in a concentration camp.

Jeremy (21:18.374)

Mmm.

Brendan Wilson (21:36.624)

He was separated from his wife. She was almost immediately murdered. He did not know that until the end of the war, five years later. And he said an interesting thing. When he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he said, the best of us didn't come back. He said, we had to do really, really hard things to survive. And everybody knew it. Nobody was pretending it was otherwise. So that admission to me, and then he moves on and he said, but.

The most important thing we can do with our lives, once those decisions have been taken, is to make a success out of a tragedy, because that's what your life is now. You have a tragedy, what are you gonna do about it? He decided he would just tell people what had happened when he wrote this book. It's hard to read, but it's a good read. And then he went on to practice medicine. He was a psychiatrist. He wrote books, he helped people. And he could have done something else.

They could have just gone back to the house and said, man, I really feel bad. And other people made me do these things. I was just responding, they're the terrible people, right? And I'm gonna spend the rest of my life blaming somebody else. He didn't do that. He acknowledged what happened and he acknowledged his role that he played in that. And he went on to do really wonderful things and help other people's lives. So to me, the hard decision is what you do.

Jeremy (22:46.63)

Mmm.

Brendan Wilson (23:00.526)

once those consequences have been taken. And I'm a little bit ahead of myself, but it's one of the reasons why I write novels. And so when you get to that point, I'll tell you how that works. But anyway, thank you for your patience so far. So I appreciate it.

Jeremy (23:07.366)

You

Jeremy (23:12.838)

Sure, sure, this is good stuff. All right.

So.

I think as we look through that trichotomy of how we look at stuff, I think most of the decisions that we would face day to day in our personal lives, pretty clear where they roll in. But what about as a martial arts school? Because there are, you know, going back to your...

your military experience, the mission is generally pretty clear. It's set out by somebody above you, but the mission of the martial arts school, is it keeping people safe? Is that the most important thing? Is it making sure that you make enough money that the school survives so you can continue to help people? Maybe it's your job as well, so you're staying alive and taking care of your family. Is it making sure that your students...

are able to defend themselves out on the street? Is it that they are advancing in rank? There are, I would see a multitude of missions that most of the time move in the same direction, but sometimes there are certain circumstances pop up and they're in conflict.

Brendan Wilson (24:31.529)

You just stole my next part of my... But I actually think...

Jeremy (24:35.302)

Yes. I would prefer to say unconsciously set you up for your next.

Brendan Wilson (24:40.429)

There we go. No, no, I think the burden for an independent martial arts instructor who runs their own studio is in some ways higher than it would be for a military officer. I mean, if you just look at what the responsibilities are, as you said, if you are running your own school, there really isn't anybody over you to say, here's the book you have to follow. You might be part of an organization and you might have rules that you have to follow for business, but you're the one that's gonna set the tone.

for everyone and those things like what's the level of discipline that we're going to have in this class, right? How are we going to handle promotions? Are they going to be fair? Are they going to be difficult so that when my student leaves here as a green belt, blue belt, whatever, that they can hold their head up when they go to another school or they go to a tournament or something. And then you raise the issue of financial responsibility.

you're a financial custodian. You have to deal with money that your students are gonna give you, their parents are gonna give you, and you have to handle that money in a way that's both responsible and you have to be seen to be doing that in a responsible way. So I would say all the things that I talked about before are important for leadership. And then the other thing that happens is in the Army, we have a procedure for doing everything, right?

I knew exactly how to fire the guns because it's in a book and there's a right way and that's it. There isn't any other way. There's just the right way. But there's not necessarily one way of how you build that environment, like I said, set the conditions for success as a martial artist. So for example, I'll give you some of the things that I used to do. I would always sit down with every new student, every new student, and I would talk them through what their requirements were for classes, how they were supposed to behave, right? And I would...

Of course, I'm big on safety. I haven't figured that out yet. And I would say, here's how we do for safety. If you're not comfortable with what you're doing, you just raise your hand. We'll stop until you are comfortable. We're not going to do something that's going to risk you. If you're injured, I want to see that hand come up. I don't want you to continue if something's injured. But I do need you to show respect for the other students because they're safety. And then I would have them sign it. And if they were a minor, I'd have their parents sign it. Right?

Brendan Wilson (27:03.277)

Not because I was so worried about being sued, but because I wanted to impress upon them, right? This is a serious organization. We're not just coming to the gym and playing basketball with the pickup team. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not what we're doing. We're doing something else. As far as like promotions, now we want to have high standards, but we don't want to bring people into a situation where they're going to be humiliated in front of their family members or other students. What I used to do is before any exam,

I would put the students through a pretest which was harder than the exam. Much harder, especially at the higher levels. Pardon? Yeah, at the higher levels, it was, you know, if you were going up for a red belt or a black belt, you were gonna do that. And for a black belt, they would probably not pass the pretest the first two or three times, right? But it's a pretest. It's not a real test, right? They're not failing. They're just trying to meet the standards. And in each case, I would be very direct.

Jeremy (27:38.086)

Really? Okay. Right. Really? Okay.

Brendan Wilson (28:00.493)

with what they needed to do better to improve. And then when we get to the point where they pass the pre -test, right, then we're going for the test. And by that time, it's opening night. They know what's coming, right? There's not gonna be anybody that's going to fail because they really have already met all the standards under very grueling circumstances. And then when we would do the test, occasionally somebody would really have a bad day. And rather than failing them, they had a long day. So.

I would put another student up there with them. If they were doing forums, we'd go through their forums and then they'd make them do it. I had a green belt one time, wonderful young woman, 45 minutes just by herself, over and over. She was furious by the time she finished, but she passed. And she was really doing it right because she was so angry and having that do it over and over and over again. That was my approach. I'm not saying that's the best approach, but that worked for me.

Jeremy (28:50.534)

I believe.

Brendan Wilson (28:58.541)

I've taught for almost 43 years now. I've never failed a student, right? Because there was no reason to, and I assure you that I am confident that my standards are as high as others people. So that was one way of kind of dealing with this idea of what's the environment that they're coming into, right? Are you allowed to fail? Absolutely. Am I gonna let you fail in front of your parents? No. You're gonna have your act together when your parents come in here to see that test.

And then for safety, you mentioned safety. Is your primary responsibility safety? It is, but if you want to be perfectly safe, close the studio down, right? And I haven't had that many injuries, but I had some. I've had the occasional broken finger. I had somebody get an ACL tear once, the occasional bloody nose. So I just tell you a story. I used to teach Hungarian students when I was in Belgium. They were part of military families. And one of my...

Jeremy (29:50.342)

Okay.

Brendan Wilson (29:53.485)

One of my students, he was about 12 and he got injured. He was rolling around on the floor, you know, hurt. So I called his mother to come get him and she came and she looked at him. She said, I don't see any bone. Get back in there. So that was her view. Yeah, they're they're the Hungarians are tough people. They really are. Anyway, so yeah, that's safety is always going to be a balancing test from what you would like to accomplish.

Jeremy (30:08.39)

That is some old school attitude right there. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (30:22.637)

and how things should be done in a safe environment. The students need to be supervised. If they're sparring, there needs to be somebody there controlling that sparring. They shouldn't be off in a place where you can't see them and have them sparring because you're asking for trouble, at least, might be.

Jeremy (30:38.566)

I would agree.

Jeremy (30:43.943)

How do we balance those things? And how do we make sure that assistant leadership, right? Because leadership in most martial arts schools, even if there aren't paid positions, most of us in the front of the room have people that we lean on. How do we make sure that they're holding to our priorities and helping create that environment where people can flourish?

Brendan Wilson (31:12.045)

It's a difficult situation. Most of my teaching came out of the World Taekwondo Federation style. Assistant instructor had to be a third degree black belt. So by the time you get an assistant instructor that's a third degree black belt, you've got somebody that shares your views and is competent. So I might have like a higher student show another student one step sparring or something, but I wouldn't let a red belt supervise two students.

of sparring, right? If we're going to do things that are a little bit more dangerous, joint locks, takedowns, sparring, breaking boards, that's going to be supervised, in my view, by somebody that is fully qualified and shares my view of how that should be done, knowing that sometimes people get hurt. You know, I had a young woman one time do a jump sidekick like you did with Chung Mu, and she broke three boards. She was about 15 at the time.

And for the one millionth time, almost always the boards just go flying. For some reason, the boards just collapsed on her foot, right? And when she came down on the other supporting leg, it tore her ACL. A freak accident, done it a thousand times. I've never seen that again before or since. And she was out for months, you know? That's an unavoidable accident. It was correctly supervised. Sometimes things just go wrong. So I wouldn't say that. But I do have, you know, I had started my own,

martial arts called the wrist dose, right? Where we had taken the heart style techniques from tang su do and tai kuang do and applied the principles of classical Greece. And to me, that provides some guidance for shaping where the students will go when you talk about it and to try to take that forward in that environment where they can grow.

Jeremy (33:04.39)

All right.

My wheels are turning. I know my role in this moment. I'm supposed to take what you've said and move the conversation forward. And I don't know if I can, because the wheels are turning so hard. So I think I'm going to ask you, maybe I just did it. I think I'm going to ask you, where do we go next?

Brendan Wilson (33:24.479)

Okay, what I would like to talk about, if you'll permit me, is the principles that we applied from classical reese to these hard style Asian martial arts. So the first one is Arate. Arate is the idea of excellence, right? So in its most basic form, Aristotle had this idea is you are what you do, right? If you want to be a musician, if you want to learn to play the flute, right? You can play the flute until you're a master of the flute, but you really have...

Jeremy (33:32.294)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (33:53.695)

changed yourself. You're not just somebody who plays, picks up the flute and plays it. Your musical ability, that ability to create and transmit that to others is now part of who you are. You are a different person because you did to learn, you learned to play the flute as a musician. We try to do that in the martial arts, a rate, and because they can feel it. You know, if they've been there for six months, they're starting to be able to do things they never thought they could do. You know, just the sidekick, which took me a lot longer than six months.

is part of that transition. And what I wanted to communicate to my students was the martial arts isn't the whole world, right? Your life is the whole world, right? When you go out to become a chef, you know, a computer expert, a doctor, a lawyer, a biologist, a police officer, a military, you are going to change yourself because you will submit yourself to the discipline of learning something new, right? And that errata should stay with you as you go forward.

For most of my students who are either in high school or college, that's their studies. They're learning something hard and difficult, and it's changing them, and it's important that they do it to the best of their abilities. So I would sometimes get some good feedback from parents who are saying, Johnny is being much more diligent about his homework now. And they said, what did you do to him? I said, I've never talked to your son about homework, ever. We talk about a rote, excellence.

They're the ones that are deciding to do their homework. And if the exposure to the martial arts is helping them do that, then we're happy to create that level of environment. That's a rade. That's the first one. Next one is agon. So agon means struggle. We use it for the English word agony. And it was just this idea that there's a time to do the hard thing. It's not necessarily sparring. It might just be...

Jeremy (35:34.534)

Okay, a round of 10. What's the next one?

Brendan Wilson (35:51.803)

you're a blue belt. And as you know, a hard style blue belt is like the hardest level because up to then you're just learning things and you're getting all kinds of good feedback. And then you get to be a blue belt and all of a sudden the instructor wants you to do things correctly. I was a blue belt for 18 months going almost every day and I needed it. And that was a hard, hard time for me. I think a lot of people quit when they're blue belts, right? And we wanted to get to them as there was a time.

Jeremy (36:07.014)

Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (36:21.115)

continue, we would call it perseverance. You're exhausted, you're getting lots of negative feedback, other people are passing you by, but there's a time to do the hard thing. And that also applies to other aspects of your life, which it must. No lawyer, no doctor, no accountant, no engineer has ever just sailed through with lots of praise and success. They always have to sit down and say, okay.

I'm not doing this. I need to do something different. What is it that I need to do better?

Jeremy (36:52.678)

And I think that this, whether it's, the folks in the audience think of it as Agon or doing the hard things or, you know, what came to mind to me, I came out of class last night, horse dance, right? Like, why do we do horse dance? Well, we can come up with a lot of reasons, but kind of embracing that difficulty because most of the world has gotten really good at removing.

difficulty and so it's a muscle, the ability to persist through difficulty. I think that discipline is the most important thing that comes out of martial arts. It is the reason I'm able to do the things that I do and it's something that so few people have the opportunity to develop these days.

Brendan Wilson (37:39.865)

Yep, no, I agree with that. The next level that has to do with behavior, so I'll give a little story. When I went to test for my fifth degree black belt, I did it out in Las Vegas and the Kukiwan sent instructors down. And I was a little bit disappointed because it was very, you know, I'm the instructor and you're not. And there didn't seem to be any mutuality. You know, it was very rigid instructor. I was in a place for that, but that's not what I wanted to do. That's what actually...

got me to take a sabbatical from teaching and develop aristos, was I wanted to have something different. What we focused on, what we settled on is zinnias. Zinnias is the Greek phrase, which means the guest -host relationship. So it was originally designed or at least explained when somebody comes to your door and they're seeking shelter. Back in classical Greece, there were no hotels.

Jeremy (38:14.054)

Go to

Brendan Wilson (38:36.407)

you were supposed to treat them as if they were a god, and they would show you the respect that's due to you as the owner of the house. So you have this mutually exchanged obligations for safety, for courtesy, and the instructor is the instructor. You gotta do what the instructor says when you come in to think. But the student is also something, someone that should be respected, always. Even the very first student. They shouldn't be yelled at for doing something that is.

normal for them. You know what I'm saying? They should be encouraged. The standards could be set high without ever disparaging anyone's effort. So we wanted to get that guest -toast relationship, which comes out naturally, you know, the bowing, which is correct. The deference to a senior student. The senior student takes over. If there's nobody else there, the senior student should show the most restraint. The junior student should listen. I think that's a normal type of thing. And then the last two are basically technical things.

We had Tech -Nay, which is the actual mechanism for delivering power, focus, balance, agility. It's what I saw you doing on YouTube when you were doing Chung -Mu, that mechanism of easy, smooth, rapid motion, accelerating to the point of impact. And then you stop it because you don't need to go any further. Either the punch or the block or the kick is gone where it's gone. And then you're ready to move on to the next thing. So we work on that.

to try to get the students to relax, to be able to focus power correctly, and also to be able to control themselves. And then the final one is Arche. So Arche is the Greek word for foundation. It's where we get the English word archaeology. And that's basically we have, we developed one long, it's actually, I didn't develop it, but I adopted it from something I learned. It's a one long form that has most of the very basic techniques included in it. And the students do it beginning and end of every class.

They get used to it. And the reason that that's helpful to me as an instructor is because if we can get RK down with the correct amount of technique down, the students can advance even if they're not 18 years old. If I've got a 60 -year -old student or a student that's heavier or a student that has, for all practical purposes, a limitation on their mobility because of an injury or for weight or for whatever reason, we can still develop them.

Brendan Wilson (41:01.301)

and they can still advance without having to do every single technique that an 18 year old do, that 360 degree turn, which I saw you do, right? That gets to be a little bit harder when you're 60, trust me. And it's not really necessary because we have younger people do that motion because they can, because it challenges them, it forces them to jolene, but it's not really a martial arts technique. You're never gonna do that 360 degree turn.

Jeremy (41:28.454)

I really hope not.

Brendan Wilson (41:30.548)

And so if I have an older student, I'm going to cut out anything that's going to be dangerous or superfluous to them. I want them to do techne and rk, the best that they can do, and all of the forms, the pumse, whatever you want to call them, they can always be adapted for the aptitude of the student within the standards set by those two conditions. And again, that's part of what I think we talked about before, which is setting the environment for people to be successful.

If you're 60 years old, you want to come work out, you don't want to be told, well, in order to get your red belt, you got to jump over three people and break three boards with a sidekick. They're just going to quit. They're not going to come in. And it's not necessary for them to do that. They can still meet the standards without doing all of the fancy stuff. The young people, when they can do it, yeah, we're going to make them do it.

Jeremy (42:21.574)

Yeah, yeah, I see a difference between standards and challenging, right? You're kind of talking about breaking those two out. And I think that that's really important. You know, people have to know certain things, but then we get this opportunity to individualize a bit and make sure that everyone feels challenged with where they are. That's kind of the interesting thing about a martial arts class, right? It's an individual pursuit, but done in a group. And that's another layer of complexity for those of us in the world.

Brendan Wilson (42:39.859)

You're right. That's a good point. Good point.

Brendan Wilson (42:48.275)

No, I like that. I really like that. And then the final thing in leadership that I'm saying the martial arts is what's the role of the very prominent martial artists, right? We're talking, you know, Cynthia Rothrock, Bill Superfoot Wallace. How do you present yourself so that thousands, tens of thousands of people are going to be impacted by your behavior, by your deportment? And I think that's really important. Those are two of my heroes. So we talked a little bit about this before we went on.

Jeremy (42:55.27)

Mmm.

Brendan Wilson (43:17.929)

Cynthia Rothrock, of course, you know, superhero from the time I was, you know, struggling through learning a down block. Hall of Famer back in the 80s, which is amazing, she still makes movies. And she's a very modest and polite and just a good person. And we went out, I met her out when I was out in Atlantic City at this martial arts conference. And...

Jeremy (43:18.15)

to create people.

Brendan Wilson (43:45.456)

You know, we went through, my wife and I went through her seminar. She's good people, you know. She's setting a good example for everyone else, including women who would like to make their way in the martial arts. And then, you know, you're a member of Bill's Superfoot Wallace's organization, SMI, and he is amazing. And my wife and I kind of jumped on him, you know, he came off the stage, we wanted to talk to him, so we jumped on him, we said, hey, hey. You know, and Kay had gone through one of his seminars years before, and just a great guy.

You know, very helpful guy. And, you know, and as I told you before, they both wrote something nice about my new book. So, but they were my heroes, even if they hadn't done that. And so I think that's one step level. When you get to be a certain age, you set the tone for a wider audience of people to reaffirm the positive aspects of the martial arts so that people can take that and it would reinforce what they would like to get out of them.

Jeremy (44:41.158)

Mmm.

Jeremy (44:44.998)

You wrote a new book. Cause you wrote another book, right? Around the time that you were on before. Cause I'm pretty sure it's on my bookshelf. But Battle of Achilles? Is that, is that?

Brendan Wilson (44:46.)

I did? Can I? Yes, I did. So.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And I know you've read it, so I don't need to worry about it. Okay, this is the first book, Achilles' Battle Fleet.

Jeremy (44:58.502)

Okay, hey, I got two other words of the title out of my brain. I'm really proud of myself.

Brendan Wilson (45:01.487)

There we go. And it basically takes 500 years from the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there's another attack, but it's a galaxy wide attack. And Mei -Ling Li is a junior officer in a backwater assignment with a backwater boss. And because of all the casualties and the wartime environment, she has to step up and do things that she has been trained for, but are hard, hard to do. She has to exert her leadership.

And she has a number of adventures. So it's an adventure book. But the second book takes it forward from there. This is Warrior Goddess, book two. It takes Meiling forward from that. And again, it's an adventurous thing. She fights monsters, pirates, non -human species, time travel, all the wonderful things you'd like to get in a sci -fi book. But what I was after, my core after is what happens when you make

have to make difficult decisions. In this case, she's making difficult wartime decisions, you know, and it's life or death. Somebody dies and somebody lives. And how do I weigh the mission against the safety of the personnel involved? And what point do I do something that I wouldn't otherwise do because the stakes are high. And that happens to her in the first book, and she is called to account for it. And then the Navy wants her tried.

They want her to go to jail and maybe even to the death penalty for what she's done. And she's okay with that, right? She'll fight that. But what she has to ask herself is what kind of person am I really, right? Am I sorry for the things I've done? No, I'm not sorry. Does that make me a bad person? Let me think about that. How am I gonna go forward now that I've done something which I would never have dreamed I would have done?

but the circumstances were such that that's what I did. Kind of like Viktor Frankl in the prison camps. So that's kind of what I was after as far as from a literary perspective is I wanted to put people into very difficult decisions and see how they get out of them. And I don't know, I don't have a plot like that. The vehicle is damaged, the missile is inbound, they're trying to get to jump status, they can't. You tell me, I don't know how they're gonna get out of it.

Brendan Wilson (47:23.468)

But by the time I write it, they've gotten out of it somehow. Or they haven't. You'll have to read the book.

Jeremy (47:31.462)

to read the book.

Jeremy (47:35.622)

you're setting out these books to teach, I mean, I imagine to entertain, but also to kind of educate, to get people to think. It's not simply fiction to you. That's kind of, I'm reading between the lines here, am I right? Okay.

Brendan Wilson (47:48.108)

No, I think you're right. In fact, Bill Wallace very kindly wrote, and we used it on the back of the book. He said, you'll come for the adventure and you'll leave with something to think about. So for me, you can be read at any level. If you just want the adventure, that's fine. There's nothing in there that's going to keep you from doing that. But part of it was what I wanted to do. You know what I'm saying? I'm getting this out too, because I have those things in my past where we had to make difficult decisions.

And how do I think about myself too? So you're sort of, it's a little bit of a cathartic experience to write those things out. And I know you've written books too, and I'm sure you've done the same, you know.

Jeremy (48:29.318)

Yeah, it's such a, it can be an exhausting way to teach lessons to a lot of people, right? But how else do you do it? Writing a book is really, really hard work, but I know that your books have sold quite a few copies and as much as we have quite a bit of reach here at the show, you've sold more books than people are going to watch this episode. And you can go in...

more in depth and you can create a not quite real scenario so it allows them to suspend some of what might bog them down as they work through the initial front of ethical dilemma and it's, I don't know, books especially fiction. There's a reason that the oldest forms of chronically information or storytelling, right, that's something hardwired for all of us.

Brendan Wilson (49:25.801)

Yep. It's hard water. Yep, for sure.

Jeremy (49:28.358)

And that's why I love when people take the format of fiction and they do something with it. They don't just, I'm going to throw entertaining words on a page that there's a lesson in.

Brendan Wilson (49:40.36)

Yeah, no, that's right. And you know, one of the things I did is I modeled some of the characters on some of the characteristics of people that I had met, that I admired, and a few people that I didn't admire, but I won't tell you who those are. But one of the main characters is Admiral Jay Chambers, right? He's Mayling's boss. In the second novel, he disappears after a battle. He's believed to have gone rogue. He's believed to have started a criminal empire using his...

special operations skills and so forth. And she has to go undercover to try to find him and try to decide what he's doing, either arrest him or whatever. So that's kind of the thing there. So Jay Chambers is actually the name of one of my high school, actually before high school friends. He is since passed, he was a colonel in the army. When I was in high school, my parents died while I was still in high school and his parents took me in.

Jeremy (50:29.734)

cool. I'm sorry.

Brendan Wilson (50:38.759)

wonderful people, they have since passed. He passed in 2009 and I reached out to his widow and I said, can I use his name for this character? She said, yeah, we're happy to have you do that. But he, and of course nobody can really do justice to a real hero, right? Jay was a real hero. This is a fictional person, so it's not really doing justice to it, but some of those, as a military officer, some of those key characteristics that senior leaders do.

I think we're important to bring out. First of all, say what you mean and nothing else. If you're a senior leader, you're not in the role of explaining things, every decision. You tell people to do it and you expect them to do it. You take care of your people, but you hold them to the standards. So it was a mix of things because it wasn't just what I knew about Jay. I mixed other people's characteristics in there, but I did do that.

for some of the characters actually named for people that I know have high standards, who I think are high ethical standards, and I put them in a difficult situation. So far nobody's complained, but. And anyway.

Jeremy (51:51.782)

How do people find your books? Where are -

Brendan Wilson (51:54.085)

So you can go to Amazon .com. Both books are there. My name is Brendan Wilson. You can find it under Brendan Wilson. You can also go to my website. It's called BrendanWilsonWrites .com. The books are for sale there. If you want to buy a book through that source, I will send an inscribed signed copy out. And that's been kind of fun. So I'm meeting people that way. But I'm happy for them to do it. However,

Jeremy (52:14.758)

cool.

Jeremy (52:18.726)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brendan Wilson (52:22.821)

they would like to do it. Those are the two ways of getting the book.

Jeremy (52:27.382)

great. And are there any other links or anything people should have? Social media, is that a big thing for you?

Brendan Wilson (52:32.293)

You know, Brendan Wilson, I'm on Facebook. You can find me there. I actually have two Facebook accounts. One is for the book and the other one's kind of my personal one. Either one's fine. Both Bill Wallace and Cynthia Rothrock created advertisements, you know, pushing the book, which I was very happy. So if you want to see what they had to say about it, you can see that on Facebook or on my website.

Jeremy (52:53.222)

and all the nice.

Jeremy (53:01.678)

that's great. That's great. And of course, audience, if you want to go deeper into Brendan's martial arts training, we talked about that in a typical interview episode back on episode 654. So you can find that anywhere that you would find any of our other content. In fact, wherever you found this, you can, you can find that. but yeah, thanks for being here. And you can probably see it in my face in the audience. If you're watching this rather than listening, you can see this in my face. There are, there are, there are wheels turning and

It's not every episode that makes the wheels turn for me. And I love that when it happens in episodes. So thanks for, thanks for breaking my brain a little bit.

Brendan Wilson (53:38.211)

Good. Well, I'm working on the third book. It's a trilogy. Yeah, it's a trilogy. But all trilogies can be extended. So let's see how the third book does. But in the second book, I've left quite a cliffhanger at the end. Some people really liked it. My brother, who is a scholar of English literature, said he was disturbed by it. So I don't know if that's a compliment or not. But.

Jeremy (53:40.55)

Okay. Is this a trilogy or are you going to keep going? Okay.

Jeremy (54:01.766)

Okay, that I think it is that to create emotion, right? And I'm thinking about cliffhangers from from two part sitcoms. When I was a kid, right? That was a big thing in that format. And I remember certain ones yelling at the TV. You can't or you start you start watching towards the end, you know, there's seven minutes left in the show and you're going, there's no way they're wrapping all this up and you start to get emotional.

And I think that that's quite a compliment because it means you've created such a connection that people are upset that they have to wait to find out what's happening with these people who do not exist.

Brendan Wilson (54:42.537)

That's right. They don't exist. They don't. But we exist and there are some truth to all of that, isn't there? It wouldn't be interesting if we didn't reach in and touch something that people find important in their own lives. It can't be completely imaginary. It has to be, what do I think about my integrity? What do I think about safety? What do I think about being successful? What do I think about my enemies? You know?

How am I going to deal with them? How am I going to deal with people that I don't like? That's all in the book.

Jeremy (55:20.07)

Well, thanks for being here. Thanks for coming back and we'll have to have you back for book three.

Brendan Wilson (55:23.136)

Jeremy, it is a great honor to be here. I really enjoyed it. And I am very grateful, eternally grateful for you reaching out and giving me this opportunity. Thank you.

Jeremy (55:31.078)

Thanks for spending the time.