Here’s two of my favourite quotes;
“You can use statistics to prove anything!”
“32% of statistics are made up, but only 12% of people actually know that.”
I have a lot of favourite quotes; maybe because my dominant learning style is ‘Theorist’, and we love to boil concepts down to their base elements...
Here’s another;
“Only 10% of people that join a martial arts school will stay for more than a year, only 1% for more than three years. Of those remaining students, only 10% will make it to black belt, and only 1% will study beyond that.”
Clearly, those numbers are made up. But it feels true; the concept and sentiment are really quite sound.
What is it that keeps only the few going?
It’s something I think about from time to time. It’s not really important; the answer doesn’t change my journey, but I think about it nonetheless. Along with a lot of other random questions; I love thinking about what makes us who we are, about the journey’s we all take and the paths that lead us to better know ourselves. There’s so many ways to look at what drives and motivates us; at what informs and inspires us to become the complex individual’s we are.
I asked the upper echelons, the masters and leaders of Han Mu Do, to take a test that identifies learning styles within four recognised and distinct types; Activists, Theorists, Pragmatists and Reflectors (Honey & Mumford 1986). This test is widely recognised and is used to help individuals develop learning opportunities whilst improving their skills and awareness. The results of the test split your responses by percentage point into each category, showing you how dominant each learning style is for each individual.
I wanted to use it to identify whether there’s a dominant type of person that is drawn to the martial arts. I figured it would be the activists that hung around; the people who liked to ‘do’. That was my presumption.
I was wrong.
When I asked friends to do the test, they said to me, “I guess you’re 100% activist!?”.
As it turns out, officially, I’m really not. In fact; I didn’t get a single percentage point in that category.
I know why friends would make that comment, after all; I do ‘do’ more than most. But behind the ‘doing’ is a lot more thinking, and I guess that’s harder for people to see and harder to quantify.
What I should also mention, is that the tests are not ‘personality tests’ as such; they’re merely designed to identify your learning style, and those are very different things. Although I’m a very active person in terms of my personality, my learning style is somewhat more considered.
Also, I remember doing the same test about 15 years ago, in what I’d call my ‘formative years’, and the activist style was dominant back then.
I’ve changed; I already knew that, and I could quantify those changes to my style and personality in a myriad of ways, but it’s interesting to see it reflected on paper.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could all see how our journeys change us, after all; we don’t always know how the path we choose will affect us. We don’t get to know how the ‘butterfly effect’ of the choices we make now, will alter the person we are to become.
I know that the martial arts have changed me and taken me down a very different road. Every aspect of my life has been channeled, altered and led by the warrior way. With this test; I set out to see if I could evidence a wider affect within my black belt brethren.
After I had the test responses back from the Han Mu Do leaders, I sought a wider pool of data from non-martial artists to see what notable differences might exist. (I made the rank of black belt the cut-off point to distinguish between the two groups)
On the basic data alone, the first slight surprise came with a 6% drop in the activist style, whilst the other styles were largely unaffected. (Figure 1) Then something really interesting happened when I started to develop the data. When you look at where the primary dominance lies in each individuals results (rather than simply taking the average values), there is a statistically significant drop in the prevalence of the activist learning style; a drop of 15%, as well as a 16% drop in the Pragmatist learning style. (Figure 2)
Conversely, there is a significant jump in the dominance of the theorist learning style; up 21%, whereas the numbers of people dominated by the reflector style remained largely unchanged (a 1% increase).
So, at black belt level, there is a statistical bias amongst practitioners towards the theorist style and a significant lacking of activists and pragmatists when compared to the general results.
Perhaps that’s not as surprising as it seems. Activists are easy to spot because they stand out; we notice them more because they like to get their hands dirty and dive in with both feet; they’ll be at the front of the line every time.
And although they’ll give anything a go, activists tend to become bored more easily and shy away from repetition. Of course, martial arts practice is all about repetition; it’s a long-term study, not a quick-hit hobby; that could explain why there aren’t as many activists in the upper echelons.
Then there’s the 16% drop in the prevalence of those with a leaning towards the pragmatist learning style. Statistically, there are still an awful lot of them at black belt level (47%) (Figure 2), it’s just that there are less of them than is generally reflection in the average population; at 63%, pragmatists generally dominate the world!
This category is generally thought of as the practical and down to earth group; they love experimentation and will work hard at testing the application of ideas. In the dojang, they’ll be that useful instructor who gives you all those fun ‘extra bits’ that can alter and adapt techniques to really bring the pain! But, like activists, they will tend to stick to what interests them; having a desire to extract the working components and move on. Pragmatists don’t have the same desire to analyse and interpret everything as theorists do, but they excel and thrive on solving problems, of taking what works in both theory and action, and putting them to use in a real world environment.
Theorists, by comparison, learn by understanding the theory behind the action, they love in depth analysis and systematic approaches to study. They are known for having tidy and organised minds, and are capable of assimilating disparate facts into coherent theories. Living in a world of ideas, they seek statistical validity to back up actions and observations. There’s 21% more of them amongst the black belts of Han Mu Do.
After you’ve learnt the basic mechanics and principals of a martial art, it’s the evolution of the theory that will take you beyond, and into the master level. It’s in developing an understanding of cohesiveness; of mind, body and spirit, that martial training is elevated to new levels. And that is the realm of the theorist.
That’s by no means to say that only theorists will progress; that’s not my point. Each of the learning styles drives us forward if we recognise our strengths and weaknesses, if we give ourselves and each other the opportunity, and range of study, to excel and evolve.
If you work the raw data even further, identifying the numbers of black belts who have only a single dominating learning style (rather than a disparate spread of leading styles), only only one learning style shows a significant change; theorists. There are more dominant theorists than any of other learning style, and significantly more than is reflected in the average population (26% compared with 15%) (Figure 3). The table in figure 3 is particularly interesting because it shows the percentage of practitioners who are driven by a dominating style and it demonstrates a dramatic shift towards, and an abundance of, theorists.
The only learning style we haven’t mentioned, because its stays almost unchanged between the two groups during all of the data analysis, is the reflector style.
Reflectors learn by observing, by cautiously collecting and sifting information, working towards a considered conclusion after thorough evaluation. They are mostly quiet and steady people who learn best by letting others take the lead, allowing them to watch and think.
We would all benefit from understanding the different styles of learning, whether we’re teaching or training; recognising peoples abilities and strengths. Understanding that we don’t all learn in the same way and each have different needs, speeds and methods of assimilating new skills.
It’s why one of the most utilised and successful teaching approaches, especially within the martial arts, is to ‘Explain, Demonstrate, Practice and Repeat’. Or, to work it into the learning style terminology; ‘Theory, Reflect, Act and Pragmatise’ (and yes, I did make that last word up). Each of the individual learning style personalities then has an opportunity to utilise their strength, and each student gets to benefit from the structure and diversity of the lesson.
Taking this test years ago; I was an activist, now a theorist. I wonder though; was I always destined for a change in my learning style, or are the distinctive levels of martial arts training deliberately presented as a function of some naturally evolving process of learning?
Either way, time and life experiences shift our perception. My martial arts training has changed my learning style and the way I think; that’s my theory. For sure, now 23 years in, I’m past that initial part of my training; that novel stage that we know activists love so much.
Han Mu Do is a martial arts of depth; of considered concept and philosophy. Our founder, Dr Kimm, is a man of supreme learning and understanding; and embedded in Han Mu Do is a glut of models, theories and ideas. The entire syllabus, built from the bottom up, is structured and organised in such a way as to subtly display the underlying models of its formation, and to subliminally train the practitioners mind to order and system.
I believe Han Mu Do changes people in many ways, but I don’t think it’s always statistically possible to demonstrate the methodology.
Han Mu Do has changed me. The statistics suggest it has you too...
“Of the many called, only a few will enter”
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