Joe’s own account of his personal journey.
I only started at it last year. It was when school went back after the summer holidays, there had been a recent tragedy, a death, that everyone was talking about around school, around Merseyside. It was hard for me as it was my mate’s younger sister and I used to play with her as a kid. It had left me easily riled and on edge because everyone was talking about her like she was close to them, but they didn’t really know her.
And it didn’t help my mood in school that because of my dyslexia I was usually last to finish tasks set by teachers. (I hated school at the time). The only help I really got in school was a laptop, but I never got the help I genuinely needed so I didn’t understand the task set and would just sit on games and would write the occasional word; no teachers noticed. One day I was sat in class with my head down and someone in the class was making noises and because I only had a little work done the teacher pointed the finger at me. I ended up storming out of the class in anger and rampaging round the school hitting walls and lockers. I was causing pain to myself to be honest, but it was the only way that I knew how to deal with my emotions.
Before this, in primary, I had problems with my anger but then I started seeing my tutor, she helped me find ways to cope with this. But because I’m more emotional now in my teens I have discovered that my training in martial arts has probably helped me more.
Back to how it all started last year – on my rampage one of my teachers pulled me onto the yard to have a word with me. She sat me down outside, spoke calmly and asked me if I was okay, instead of dealing with it like other teachers have in the past by screaming at me to, ‘Get to my office!’ and saying, ‘You’re an embarrassment to the school when you act up!’ She gave me good advice and didn’t force her opinions on me, she asked me what sort of things I was into and recommended an option. From what I told her she mentioned someone from her tutor group that took up boxing to deal with his anger and said that maybe I should try it out.
When I got home, I asked my mum about taking up boxing, but I was side-lined into Tae Kwondo as my little brother does it.
At first you don’t need any expensive equipment. The only thing you really need is a gum guard but that’s when you start training in fighting. Usually, you can use bodyguards and headguards from your place of training, these are for safety. If you really want to enjoy Tae-Kwondo you need to have discipline and respect, you need to push yourself to your limit. At the time I didn’t have discipline and had very little respect for others, but as I trained more and more those things started to build. I learnt discipline and gained respect both for and back from people in general and from my coaches where I train. These are all positive things that have helped me deal with the negativity of anger.
Tae-Kwondo requires me to concentrate on coordination. I am beginning to feel some benefits from studying Tae-Kwondo. It has helped me cope with my dyslexia. The main benefit is it helps me process speech. Dyslexics often struggle with following the sequence of instruction in general. For example, in Tae-Kwondo I struggle to remember what order my patterns are and that is what is keeping me from doing my next grading. But I am determined to progress and move on to my next grade. I have never been so dedicated to anything in my life before. Because of this it takes away the pressure of living with dyslexia and everyone thinking you’re some dumb kid when really you are smart, but you just can’t get what you want to say out of your head and down on paper! Tae-Kwondo is certainly a positive influence in my life. It has given me ambition. It has given me goals; it has given me achievable targets.
There’s a definite progression route with Tae-Kwondo. There are no short cuts to success. Each colour belt is achieved by demonstrating that you can physically perform the movements. To achieve these requires physical training as poor interpretation of them could have consequences if used in a spar. By this I mean if you were to mess up a block whilst you were fighting you would probably end up giving your opponent a free point. This is a discipline sport and because of this it has taught me to deal with certain situations. It has taught me to keep myself under control and has given me a way of releasing my built-up anger instead of taking it out on walls. That behaviour would usually end up in a hospital trip and got me labelled in school as, ‘the kid with anger issues.’
I am now at the stage of wanting to change where I train. This is because the gym I train at now focuses only on taekwondo and I would like to take up MMA. I have discovered where my strengths are and what I need to improve on. I suppose ideally it would help me more if I went to both gyms and trained both fighting styles as taekwondo would help with what is called ‘standing sparring’ in MMA. All of this gives me a focus and an outlet and is helping me to cope with my dyslexia, my anger issues and life in general.
