Recently on an internet forum someone (a troll) was making comments about how certain Thai Boxing shows are better or more successful than the K-Star shows that I have run for the last 17 years at The Tower ballroom in Birmingham.
As it was a troll, I ddin’t think it was worth responding to them as it would only fall on death (and ignorant) ears, but I thought that it would make for a good blog post to share my philosophy on ‘feeling’ successful.
In this blog I will share with you how you can feel successful and use this feeling to motivate yourself to even greater things.
Notice that i said ‘feeling’ successful as many people are successful by ‘normal’ standards, but still don’t ‘feel’ successful and everyone else is amazed when they find out that they don’t feel successful. The reason for this is because of the goals, rules and standards that they have set for themselves are very high. They haven’t met them, so the don’t feel successful.
The person on the forum was comparing my shows to another show and insinuating that the other show was better or more successful. Maybe on the outside that may appear true, but firstly , they were two completely different type of shows and secondly, MY shows meet MY goals.
Let me explain, the other show features lots of top Thai boxing stars from gyms all around the country, what we call ‘A Class’ fights, where as my goal for my shows is to highlight my own gym and my own fighters and mainly features what we call ‘C and B class’ fights. I am in NO way competing with these shows. So this person (not the promoter by the way) should really be comparing them with like for like. So the big A Class show should be compared with other A Class shows such as MSA Supershows, The main Event, Xplosion by Semtex and Supershowdown and Power of Scotland up in Scotland. Is it better than those shows? I don’t know.
All of the above shows are better than mine in one way, but I am not trying to compete with that.
Let me explain a little more about what I mean when I say how successful you feel depends upon the goals you have set for yourself. Imagine being a British Champion at your favourite sport, Imagine being a Millionaire, Imagine loosing 10 pounds of body fat, Imagine having your own 5 bedroom house, or brand new BMW etc All pretty great achievements and I am sure that most people would feel pretty successful if they achieved any of those things. BUT what if you wanted to be World Champion and was ‘only’ a British Champion? You wanted to be a Billionaire, but was ‘only’ a millionaire, wanted to loose 15 pounds of fat and have 6 % bodyfat, but ‘only’lost 10 pounds, what if you wanted a 10 bed room mansion or a Ferrari etc? Now you might not feel so successful, because you hadn’t achieved what you wanted, even though by most standards you are .
So. I thought that I would share with you, what some of my goals are and why I feel pretty successful in some areas of my life. With my shows, my goal is and always has been to promote my own fighters and gym. This all started out many years ago when I was first starting out running my K-Star gym, at the time I wan’t running shows, so would put my fighters on other peoples shows. As K-Star was one of only 2 active Thai Boxing gyms in Birmingham that often meant fighting on Kickboxing shows. The local kickboxing promotor keep trying to stitch my fighters up by putting them with more experienced fighters, so I decided that I would have to look after my own fighters and put on my own small shows. Which I have done ever since. My shows ALWAYS have several K-Star fighters on (sometimes upto 10) and they are usually in the main event.
I believe that we always have a very exciting show at the Tower, I believe that my shows always show my fighters and my gym in a good light. Over the years I have been able to promote my fighters in a safe and logical manner and I have been able to make sure that they have had the opportunities to fight for the titles that they deserve. Over the years, for my own fighters I have been able to arrange title fights at all levels Area, English, Anglo Welsh, Anglo Irish and British titles. Also for my own fighters I have promoted a few European title fights and 2 World Title fights for Damien Trainor.
Other shows may be bigger but I don’t feel bad about that, as that is not what I am trying to do, so I am not in competition with those types of shows. Good luck to the promoters, who I am sure would not be satisfied with putting on shows like mine. But ….. given what my goals and aims are, I feel that I have done a great job , consistently, over many years, so I feel VERY successful after every show as I know that I have fulfilled MY goals!
When I set up K-Star, I had one major goal and that was to make my students better than I am/was. That was and is my goal and I have certainly done that! I pretty much stopped competing so that I could focus all my efforts into my students. So many of my students have done so much better than I have and as an Instructor, I feel so proud of what they have achieved. It’s pretty hard to measure how good someone is, but I was the BTBC Midland Champion and I have produced Many, many area Champions, English Champions, British Champions and also European and World Champions, so I feel that based on my own ability, I have done an amazing job and as I said earlier, I am very proud of that, so I’ feel’ very successful.
Now days I focus a lot on training my students to be full time instructors in my Muay Thai academies and again my goal is to produce better instructors. I have now trained a lot of Instructors , infact a lot of the most successful Thai Boxing Instructors in Birmingham have been trained by me and gone through my Instructor training programme. I have a brilliant team of Instructors running my current academies who are doing a very good job and I am proud of them and I know that K-Star will get stronger and stronger, so again I ‘feel’ very successful.
How does this help you? Well I will show (in part 2) you how to set goals so that you always ‘feel’ successful at every step of your journey to become a ‘successful’ Thai boxer/ nak muay or whatever you want to be.
