The Truth… Helps

How Embracing the Truth is Essential to Your Martial Arts Business Success

Ever hear any of these sayings?

• “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
• “The truth hurts.”
• “The painful truth.”
• “The cold hard truth.”
• “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
• “Tell a white lie to cover it up.”

Why do we have these sayings in our vocabulary?

Obviously, it’s because people tend to want to avoid facing the truth.

A Different Perspective

But here’s a different perspective, and one that I know to be especially relevant for business owners:

• “Knowing the truth sets you free.”

Ask yourself – is that statement scary, or refreshing? If it’s scary, that may be because you’re living within a paradigm where hidden things are desirable, and where your external world never, ever matches your internal world.

This is a dangerous place to live for business owners, because we swim in the sea of what we can see, touch, hear, and feel. Numbers and facts are our playground. Data makes us run.

And, my fellow martial arts business owners, that is because successful business owners base their decisions on facts; i.e., the TRUTH. You see, avoiding the truth is just another way to keep your head in the sand and avoid seeing things you’d rather not face.

Does This Describe You?

Here’s a perfect example of this concept in action:

• School owners who fail to track and maintain proper stats and numbers typically fail to thrive.

So, does this describe you?

If I asked you, “What’s your current active enrollment?” or “How many students do you have on contract right now?”, would your answer start with the words “about” or “approximately”?

Hogwash! There is no “about” or “approximately” in business!

You are the business OWNER, and you should know, at any given time, PRECISELY how many clients you have, what your total accounts receivables are, your exact fixed monthly expenses, your estimated variable monthly expenses, and various other vital numbers and statistics that determine your success or failure.

Knowing these stats and numbers provides you with a way and means to measure your business performance, as well as your progress toward your goals. By not tracking them, what you are really doing is avoiding the possibility that you are under-performing in your business.

Get Comfortable With the Truth

Now, if that makes you uncomfortable… stop being uncomfortable with it. Guess what? You can’t change your current circumstances one bit. All you can do is take an inventory of your current circumstances, decide how far where you are now is from where you want to be, and then create and follow a plan to get you to your goals.

(And, if you don’t even have written goals – STOP. Pull out a piece of paper or whatever digital device you take notes on. Write them down, and be specific. Look at them every day. Simply choosing a destination is a prerequisite to getting there – do this or be stalled in your business eternally. You’ve been warned…)

So, the “truth” really is that the truth sets you free. That’s because when you’re living in a fantasy world of make-believe, nothing you do has any real measurable impact on your reality.

However, when you embrace the truth and start dealing with the cold hard facts routinely, soon you come to realize that those “cold hard facts” are your friend…

And at that point, you start warming up to each other.

Improve your relationship with the TRUTH, and you will improve your dojo financially.