Stop Making Them Picture a Fight

Updated October 26, 2026

Here’s something that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand: the people walking into your school do not equate self-defense with being in a fight.

You do. Your instructors do. Every martial artist you know does. But the mother standing in your lobby holding a car seat has something else in her head entirely — something closer to a mystical aura of safety. Her kid will simply be fine. Nobody will bother him. The situation will never arise.

And in a real sense she’s right, because the best self-defense any of us ever practice is awareness and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody once asked Jhoon Rhee at a seminar whether he’d ever been in a fight. His answer was that he just doesn’t go places where he might get into one.

The Friday Role-Plays

Years ago at the Jhoon Rhee Institute we ran role-play sessions on Fridays. Instructors would take turns delivering an introductory lesson in front of the rest of the staff, and then the group would tell them the truth about it.

Two of those sessions have stuck with me for forty years.

The first was a very nice Iranian gentleman with an absolutely incredible lineage — a legitimate, verifiable line back through people you’d recognize. He sat his imaginary prospects down and talked for thirty minutes about it. Where the art came from. Who taught whom. The whole genealogy.

The verdict from the room was unanimous and unkind: nobody cares about that.

The second was a professional kickboxer, a genuinely excellent fighter, who taught his introductory lesson the way he thought about fighting. First you break their nose. Then, when their hands come up, you break their jaw. He was completely sincere and completely technically correct.

He was also, in about ninety seconds, going to lose ninety to ninety-five percent of any real audience he ever stood in front of.

Why the Graphic Version Backfires

This is the part that owners resist, so let me be precise about the mechanism.

It is not that violence is off-putting in the abstract. It’s that the worst thing you can possibly do during an introductory lesson is get a prospect to picture themselves in a vicious fight — and it does not matter one bit that in your version of the picture, they win.

You’ve just put a person who came to you for confidence into an imagined scenario where they are terrified. You’ve made them feel the adrenaline, the fear, the physical stakes. Then you ask them to sign a twelve-month agreement while their nervous system is still sorting that out. Whatever rapport you built in the first ten minutes is gone.

The same logic applies physically. Don’t put an adult man in an emotionally uncomfortable position during his first lesson. Don’t choke him. Don’t put him on the ground and grapple him. Don’t hand him a kicking shield and light him up so he can appreciate your power. He will smile, thank you, and never come back, and he will not be able to articulate why. Putting somebody in an emotionally uncomfortable position while you’re trying to build a relationship is a bad idea, full stop.

The Twenty-Minute Talk

There’s a related failure I see constantly, and it’s the opposite error made with good intentions.

An owner gathers everyone up for the first introductory class and then talks for twenty minutes about the benefits of martial arts. Character development. Confidence. Discipline. Focus. It’s all true and it’s all relevant and the parent might even tolerate it.

The kid will not tolerate it. And here’s the thing — the parent doesn’t actually want it either. What the parent came to see is her child doing something. Standing up. Trying. Succeeding at something she didn’t know he could do.

So don’t stop the class to explain the benefits. Explain the benefits while the class is happening.

Teach a front kick, and while they’re doing it, tell them what it’s doing. We’re developing the hip flexors. We’re developing the abdominal muscles. We’re building the strength and the balance to stand on one leg under control. We’re working on posture, and more importantly on awareness of posture. We’re building core strength. We’re building focus, because you cannot do this correctly while your mind is somewhere else.

Now the parent is watching her kid throw a kick and simultaneously hearing an expert explain that this is building her child’s core, balance, posture, and concentration. That’s a completely different experience than watching her kid stand still for twenty minutes while an adult talks.

Both People in the Room

There’s a frame I use for this that makes it easier. Every adult contains both a child and a parent, and you have to sell to both of them.

The child side is asking: is this going to be fun? Will I look forward to coming here? Am I going to learn cool stuff?

The parent side is asking: what am I actually going to develop here — emotionally, mentally, physically? Is this worth my time and money?

If you only address the fun, the adult side never gets a reason to commit and the enrollment is fragile. If you only address the development, you’ve bored everybody and nobody’s excited to come back Thursday.

Enrolling an adult man, an adult woman, or a seven-year-old is fundamentally the same job. When there’s a child involved it’s actually easier, because you’ve got two distinct people sitting in front of you and you can address each one directly instead of guessing which side of one person you’re talking to.

Language Is a System

Dr. Moody made a point on this call that I want to leave you with, because he was pushing back on me a little and he had it right.

I’d asked him whether martial artists as a group run about a nine out of ten on ego. His answer was that we train that into people. It’s not an accident and it’s not a personality type that happens to be attracted to the arts — it’s an output of what we do, the same way the military builds it deliberately. And like anything you build on purpose, it can be pointed in a good direction or a bad one.

The language you use on the floor is the same. Every phrase you choose is training something. “When you’re in a fight” trains one thing. “When you need to stand up for yourself” trains another. Neither one is dishonest. They just produce different students, and one of them produces students who stay.

Go listen to your own intro lesson this week. Not the curriculum — the words. Count how many times you put a fight in somebody’s head.

If you want the whole system, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com — or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.