IOGKF International Magazine | Page 30

You were talking about black belts who have had time off coming back to training. World wide there seems to be a lot of people who used to train coming back into the organisation. Do you think chasing up the people who have stopped for a while due to family or other commitments is something member countries should be doing? Yes I do. What generally happens is when someone has a week of the instructor tends to notice and if it becomes a fortnight you think ‘I wonder where they’ve gone’? If it gets to a month and you don’t contact them, you can actually lose them. What you should do as an instructor, after a fortnight or so is get in contact with them and just ask how they are, say I haven’t seen you for a while, hope to see you soon, I hope everything is ok. You don’t have to be pushy and say where are you, it’s certainly not that type of thing. A lot of people do martial arts or Karate as a hobby and they don’t what to be pushed. If you ring up saying, ‘where are you? Why aren’t you at the Dojo?’ then it becomes like they feel like they have to turn up. You should never make it like that. But having said that it is a two way street. If you have people showing up every blue moon, they can’t expect to be graded. It’s a bit like a double edged sword if you will. With people who are going to have a bit of a lay off or a break because they’re getting married or they’re off to university, whatever it is, if they do decide to come back, you should provide for them to train. I know that in the past, even in my own Dojo, people have come back after a long layoff and a lot of the other black belts think that is open season on them. This is no good, because they won’t go back. It can also lead to an animosity feeling in the Dojo or almost like there are two groups which isn’t how it should be. You can try to avoid it, but unfortunately it’s not always that easy, all you can do is try and make it friendly for everybody.