Your Inner Voice Will Guide You To Achieving Your Dream
Is Becoming A Martial Arts Teacher Your Calling? Are You Listening To YOUR Inner Voice?
It happened to me one day recently during Taekwondo class. It starts off small, but when you hear it whisper and you begin to listen, that little voice grows.

It speaks of wisdom…of things you already know deep inside but up in your mind you may not have admitted to yourself yet. It speaks of guidance on a path you cannot see. It speaks with energy…energy that you can’t put words to but can feel taking you in one way or another.
This little voice speaks volumes in ways that you directly cannot understand. You couldn’t open a book and read words and understand how this little voice works.
No, you have to hear it speak. It is calming your fears and destroying the doubt. It calls. It calls for you to grow. It calls for you to heal old wounds. It calls for you to let things go.
It calls for the things that will help you continue to move forward in your life and lay to rest the things that have happened in the past. This little voice of wisdom can be so loud at times when you take the time to really hear it…to acknowledge it…to respect it.
My voice…you have always been there for me. The voice is guiding me toward my dream of becoming a martial arts instructor. The voice is teaching me, guiding me, sending me on the right path when I didn’t know which way to go. I used to manifest my own ways out of doing things but not out of faith but rather fear.
I believed that if I didn’t control it I would suffer in the long run… Only to realize that it was the controlling itself that was causing the suffering…
So I let that go, and listened to you. I listened to what you had to say to me and more importantly…how you were saying it.

And here I am, little voice…asking you, “What’s next.” Step one of the journey was telling my instructor how I felt and he showed me the requirements that I would have to meet if I wanted to make my dream of becoming a martial arts teacher come true.
I asked my voice “How will I do it?” You’ve already answered that this morning in a few different ways as I’ve made the transition into a new routine. I’ve come out of an old way that served me in an accomplishing of a dream but you have requested that I change things up…to birth a new one. Working on my Nursing degree keeps me from attending regular class times so now I take private lessons with a Grand Master who reviews the checklist with me and trains me on what I must know. He gave me an Instructor’s course manual to study. He showed me that becoming a real martial arts instructor is a true academic field of endeavor with history and philosophy and teaching concepts and principles. It includes leadership training and character development in areas that are important to martial arts study.

While I study my inner voice leads me. You have me sitting on the kitchen floor under these incandescent lights writing away dreaming, building, pouring it all out like I have for years. The floodgates have opened, and the guidance is there.
I’ve ignored some of the things you have said to my own detriment, and you stand there looking at me like “What did you expect? Did you think I was going to send you in the wrong way?”
I apologize. It was my fault. But here I am… listening again. Listening to you whisper away words into me because I know you have my back.
You’ve always been looking out for me. So, I’ll ask you again…”What’s next?” I’m enrolling in the next Instructors course in Korea. When I finish, I will write about that journey. My inner voice, I’m still listening to you and will let you lead the way.

About the author: Xiao Ma is a 2nd Degree Black Belt in the Korean self-defense art of Hapkido and a 2nd Dan in Traditional Taekwondo. She is a professional sports and fitness model and full time Nursing student. https://kmaia.org