I have recently taught a couple of seminars and I noticed an interesting thing.

I am fortunate in that I almost always have female students in my courses. The majority of the time, it is more than one woman. The largest number in a single class was five. Keep in my mind that I cap my courses at a max of fourteen, to ensure safety and that everyone gets sufficient attention so that I know that are learning and growing, so three to five is a significant amount.

Two classes ago I had one woman attend, and the most recent I had three. None of them had any time in doing any real kind of empty hand combatives training, and certainly none had any grappling experience.

One thing they all had in common (and I find this to be true across the board for almost any female willing to do the kind of training I teach) is that they had an amazing work ethic, and listened intently during the instructional moments. There was no screwing around, no thinking that they already knew what was going on and had an attitude of just “let’s get on with it”, and a concentrated focus on getting better.

One other thing they had in common was a tendency to put their efforts and performance down. “I just can’t get this” was an often repeated phrase, right after I just watched them perform perfectly and usually against heavy resistance and pressure from their usually larger training partners. All of them would keep insisting that they just were not any good, when the truth was that I needed to spend much more time correcting the male students who actually were getting it wrong rather than any of the women.

I thought about this as I was flying home afterwards. My conclusion as to why this kept happening was not a particular happy one. I think why this is endemic is because on the whole, those of us who formally and regularly teach self-defense, whether it be firearms or H2H have caused it. We have either directly or indirectly, through specific action or lack of appropriate action, have made women in general feel that they are inferior to men’s performances when it comes to combat. And that sucks.

The fact is that everyone, male or female, will have unique aspects to their performance, and the only judge of whether it is good or bad is if they are better than they were from the day before. That is it. Nothing else matters. It does not matter if they get to be the best person in the class, or the best person that has ever stepped in a self-defense course – the only metric that matters is if they as individuals are better than they were before they came to the class. Anything else is just fantasy camp. Implying that after two days of training anyone will suddenly become John Wick regardless of their starting point is ethically bankrupt. The focus should be on start training, and be better incrementally better each day.

So we as instructors need to emphasize that, and make sure that each student is focused on getting better and becoming more capable. And as an exclamation to that, I will say this to anyone reading this who contemplates taking any training course anywhere. If you are in the class, and you feel the instructor is just denigrating you and your performance and not giving you reasonable, workable input into how to correct any deficiencies, than leave, immediately and with as much speed as you can muster. It is not any teacher’s job to criticize any student. It is our job to make them better. Sometimes we need to speak about negatives or failures, but never, ever should those negatives or failures be tied to an individual’s worth as a person. If an instructor has such a hard time getting someone better, than they have zero business being an instructor. It is irrelevant if the student is male, female, young, old, physically fit, or physically broken in some way; a truly diligent instructor will get them better than they were.

Being a teacher is hard. If you are not willing to undertake the calling knowing that, and you think it is about your own ego stroking, or about getting rich, or famous, then you are not, and never will be a teacher. Find something else to get rich and famous at, because helping other people become more than they are is not in the cards for you.