Survive and Thrive

Hello, KMA tribe, friends, family, students.

I wanted to come to you today to talk about our mission statement, especially the first part of our mission statement, because our mission is to create confident, competent black leaders prepared to survive and thrive in any situation and empowered to lead where they’re at and into their future.

   The first part to survive and thrive in any situation, it refers to, of course, being prepared to defend ourselves in the real world. And that’s an important part of what we do through the physical curriculum that we teach, our kickboxing and Krav Maga self protection and all the elements of the system that are specifically geared towards the self-defense. We’re preparing students for the worst, which is a violent situation that they have to defend themselves. But there’s so many more situations that we deal with, troubles that we deal with in life, and it’s important during these times that we’ve developed the skills to cope with them as well.

So when we talk about surviving and thriving, we’re talking about the mental, emotional, physical challenges of life. We’re talking about we live in a time right now where so many kids have depression, have anxiety…

     So many people do, and some of us have aging parents, and we’re dealing with the issues that happens as their health declines, their physical and mental health. And so there are always issues. There’s financial issues, there’s professional issues, there’s business issues. So when we talk about preparing to survive and thriving in any situation, we’re not only talking about the technical and physical skills of self-defense, though we do that, but we’re also talking about preparing for all of these other things. And there’s a lot of ways that that happens, right? One most important is how to think, right?

Positive mental attitude as opposed to negative. That life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to what happens, and our mental and emotional coping skills.

But another, quite frankly, is the tribe itself. The fact that we have this positive, empowering, and encouraging community.

     Somebody was talking to me today about what had happened during the pandemic, and it’s amazing. That’s been a few years now, and he talked about how that was a time where so many people were completely isolated from one another, and he talked about how much our tribe had been an important part of helping him get through that.

And so all of that is a piece of it.

And of course, hopefully, if you’re listening to this, you’re part of the tribe and we appreciate that and we’re proud have you, and if not, we’d love to have you.

But besides all that, it’s just important that those things exist anyway. So the advice of the message is getting around the right people, positive, empowering, encouraging people that want to see you succeed. Making sure that we take control of our thoughts, that we take control of our thoughts in positive directions that help to transform us into the version of ourself that we want to be and that we remember even when going through trying times that life is always 10% what happens, and 90% how we react to what happens.

Prepare To Live; Empower To Lead!

Grand Master Stephen J. Del Castillo
Founding Master Instructor, Krav Maga Martial Arts
TampaKravMaga.com         StephenDelCastillo.com