Marcie Harding Dacayana UK & Europe
Weblog 1 - The Family Coaches
29 July 2014 The Coaches.
One of the most common comments I get from new students or prospective coaches after they have attended either their first ever lesson or participated in a taster session (for prospective Dacayana UK & Europe Coaches) is how friendly and helpful everyone is.
Now in traditional Martial Arts this is often expected and sometimes happens, but more often than not newcomers are left with the impression that to participate in Martial Arts you have to scowl a lot.
In our Family system the attitude and actions of each practitioner very much comes from the top down. GrandmasterJun Dacayana, the man who devised our fantastic system ( the origins and lineage of which I will discuss more full in a future blog) epitomises the whole approach. Those who have met and trained with him will concur with this. His easygoing, unpretentious and relaxed teaching style creates an environment of learning where students learn masses without really knowing it. Jun is a natural teacher and the system is structured with small building blocks that fit together to eventually build our metaphorical house … again more on the structure of the system in a later blog. The point is though that students come along, have fun, feel relaxed, make friends, develop skills quickly and learn lots of new stuff. If this doesn’t sound like your martial arts school then that’s a shame.
One of the key reasons this happens so successfully is nobody who practises or teaches the Art feels insecure, threatened or too precious about their ego. It boils down to the fact that those that come along to train are quite simply the right people. I am a great believer in this kind of positive association. Once you have a pool of good, positive, open minded, caring (ok non-malevolent for any of you thinking I am going soft) people, newcomers tend to be the same or quickly conform to this ‘norm’ .
By the way if you are reading this and thinking we are bunch of hippy do-gooders that couldn’t punch our way out of a paper bag …. our coaching team are not only massively experienced Martial Artists (many of our coaches have 25 years plus MA experience and one or two 35-40years) but are pretty useful in the ‘Real’ world too. The Ranks of Dacayana UK & Europe Coaches include Prison Officers, Police officers an International Bodyguard, Security Professionals, Door Supervisors, and other ‘frontline’ professionals.
So back to the top-down bit. What binds these above-mentioned people together apart from a love of Martial Arts is that they have genuine desire to learn and share the knowledge without needing to be seen to be ‘Amazing’ or ‘Awesome’ or ‘Hard’ or ‘Deadly’ ….(although many of them are all of those things) . When someone walks in to train at any one of the Dojo’s/Dojangs/Praktisanans/Training Halls of any of the Dacayana UK & Europe family they get to train with good people who just happen to be some of the very best Martial Artists around.
Each Club or Academy will have their own style of teaching but the ethos, the desire to share, the friendliness, the enthusiasm and the smile will be there. Oh, and they are Coaches too, not just Highly Graded Martial Experts, they actually can teach as well. We have our own coaching program that teaches not only the Dacayana System, but how to teach it. Interestingly we have two streams of ‘Rank’ or ‘Promotions’ within the Dacayana Family system of indigenous Cebuano Martial Arts ….Coaching grades and Student grades - both routes are rewarding, but we recognise that teaching and doing are two different things. A Black belt in our system is an incredible achievement but the holder does not necessarily know how to teach the system.
Over the coming months I will be introducing you to some of these amazing Coaches. I may not name them individually but I will share a little of their characters, experiences and backgrounds …it will, I hope, be a very interesting read.
Till the next time, Train and smile while you’re doing it!
best wishes Marcie.