Man-Splaining My Work In Combat Sports
I feel my heart start to race and my airways constrict every time someone asks "..so what do you do?" ~ it triggers the shit out of me.
One of the main reasons is that this question, in this place and time, is intrinsically linked to your value, but culturally that's not how I roll, and if you want to really know me and understand me the first question is "who are you?"
-- and then I can tell you what mountains and lands know me by name, which river current carries me through this lifetime, which ancestors stand behind me, and the names of the women who raised me, but instead I have to say "...I work in combat sports".
Despite what all the self-help books, sales trainers and business coaches tell you, it really isn't always that simple to explain your work in an elevator pitch. Trying to fit how I work in the world of combat sports into one line is volatile, especially in this industry.
I've never been an amateur or professional fighter.
I'm not a coach or class trainer.
I've had people get mad about that, like what do I know? One of the closest references I can think of is an excerpt from one of Eric Thomas' speeches on your 'why', where he talks about his dealings with the NFL for his son (it's close, but not all the way there).
And who knows, maybe I'll bother explaining it all one day, but that day is not today, in the meantime I might steal a line from the boys and say that I just make things happen, sounds pretty nifty (albeit a little ass-holey).
In my time at The Fight Centre I continue to encounter issues with being a woman in this space, and the better we get at what we do, the worse it gets, issues of race i.e, a brown woman, also play a role, but working with these two men is wild.
I've never known a truly safe space where men are present, not in my whole life, but here I can fully be me behind our office doors, and create really cool shit, and get paid for it and not have to pay the bills for a change haha
There's layers to this and it goes deep, but I wanna stay on topic 😅
My friend Anne says that I'm really good at helping other people to shine, and another friend, Cheryl, a gifted see-er of things (if you believe in that sort of thing) told me that in one of my past lives I used to write the speeches for Egyptian royalty, so I guess I've been doing this a really, really, really long time.
Anyway, the next time people ask me what I do I think I'll just refer them to this little clip from the DojoLife Podcast, even though I feel like Mr Chong Ali aka Minh Nguyen is slightly mocking me for how I always insist on putting a date on your frikn tasks and assigning it correctly... look, how else can we make things happen?
Peace.