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GFRF Kung Fu – on hold for now

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Well the next term of classes for my junior kung fu classes has begun now and after a LOT of thinking I have decided against trialing one of the classes as a give freely receive freely class.

I just don’t feel confident that it would work at this point.  Also I guess I am feeling a bit stretched by how much I am already doing on a GFRF basis.  I am now doing all my clinical work, my qigong classes and workshops and also creating online training courses on a give freely receive freely basis.  While for the most part things have been going ok in these areas, they haven’t been going stunningly well either, in fact some areas have been quite disappointing.  In particular the response to my first GFRF online training course has been much lower than I expected… and I wasn’t really expecting much.

My ideal is to be able to do everything on a give freely receive freely basis… but I recognize that is a high ideal, and for me it is a lot of uncharted territory to get there.  My push to try GFRF with one of my Kung Fu classes was part of my desire to reach my ideal, but it just doesn’t feel right just yet.  I think I am better off being content taking a little step back and ‘consolidating’ my give freely receive freely efforts in other areas.  I think that if I can achieve more success with GFRF in these areas I will then feel more confident in moving forwards and expanding my GFRF into the remaining areas of my work.

Better to go a bit slower and surer than to rush and mess things up and potentially not be able to continue with GFRF in any area.

I still want to make my Kung Fu GFRF, but its going to have to wait awhile for now.

Dick Smith Video on unending growth

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Heres a link of a video of Dick Smith (founder of Dick Smith electronics and other businesses) speaking to a business leaders event about the pitfalls of perpetual growth:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10837865

He has some interesting ideas and I thought it was great to see such a prominent figure speaking about these things publicly.  I agree with him that we have benefited greatly from the economic system we have had in our recent years, but the time has come, or is coming when we will need to change.  We can rethink our ideas about growth, progress and value to create a world which is healthier and happier for all of us.

Worth a watch.

Success Again!

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Someone else has paid something for the ‘give freely receive freely’ qigong course I have put online.  This is only the second payment to come through, and it was a very small payment, but still I see it as success!  More evidence that people will voluntarily pay for something they see as having value, even though they could just take it without paying anything and there would be no repercussions.

For me this is another small piece of evidence that maybe it is possible to live in this way.  I look forward to more evidence in the future, hopefully the payments for the qigong course will become a constant stream as more people hear about it and find the value in it.

If you haven’t seen the course, it is online here: http://longwhitecloudqigong.com/online-courses/qigong-foundation-practices/

 

The next step – Kung Fu

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I have been spending quite a bit of time lately thinking about my next step.  Ideally I would like to try to do all my work on a ‘Give Freely Receive Freely’ basis.  I have already started with my clinical work and also with my qigong classes, courses and workshops, and it has been going ok.  It hasn’t been a massive success, but it hasn’t been a miserable failure either – I believe the idea has potential and CAN work.  This leaves one major area of my work to try GFRF with and that is my Kung Fu teaching.

I have a number of reservations about trying GFRF with my kung fu teaching, one is that while a lot of people love the idea of GFRF there are others who just don’t seem to get it and they feel awkward about it.  My view is that GFRF is the fairest deal there can possibly be for both the provider and receiver, but I don’t want people to shy away from using it because of unfamiliarity or discomfort.  Being faced with making your own choice about price can be quite confronting when you have not spent any time thinking about it and my aim is not to confront, but how else can I introduce the idea?

Another concern I have is that while I have contact with the students attending my classes every week, I often do not have a lot of contact with the parents of students.  All too often I think paying for the classes can be easily forgotten about.  It is a problem I have now with set prices that I have to chase up some parents right till the end of the term to be paid.  This takes a lot of time and effort which quite frankly I don’t have to spare.  I actually wonder if by putting the responsibility on the parent to decide how much to pay, they might also be more prompt in paying and understand better that it is their responsibility to support what I am doing for their child rather than my responsibility to chase them for payment.  It comes down to the idea that under GFRF both parties to the transaction become free givers rather than takers from each other (see my earlier blog post here).  But then again… it may not work out that way in practice.

Another concern is that I think people often underestimate the true cost of providing things (in this example kung fu classes).  There are many overheads to cover: rent, power, equipment, wages, advertising and so on, even really simple things like GST make a big difference.  Also I think people tend to underestimate the amount of time it takes to provide things like classes, looking just at the actual time the class takes when in fact there is a significant amount of time spent on administration, preparation, travel time and so on.  Owners of small businesses tend to be the exception as they have experience with all the things that need to be done to keep something running and what they cost, but for other people I think they often look at things from the perspective almost of the person providing the service receiving all the money.The reality is far from this.  The truth is that many of my classes are marginal with some even running at a loss, but I continue with them because I believe that learning kung fu has a lot of value for people by developing fitness, confidence and social skills (there are some really good studies that show that children allowed to play fight go on to be better socially adjusted than those who are not allowed to play fight).  I also believe that we have a great kung fu syllabus and organization that will grow over time if given the chance.  I can only do so much with the classes if they are not profitable though, and there is so much more that I would like to be able to offer in terms of competition, advanced training and performance, but I can’t until I have more financial resources to support them.

Similar to my concerns mentioned earlier, I wonder if GFRF may actually provide a solution to some of these problems as certainly it would allow any families who cannot afford my current prices to be able to attend at a price that they can afford, increasing class sizes.  Also the GFRF model would allow those who can afford more, to give more if they want to help support the ongoing running and further growth and development of the kung fu organization.

So there are significant pros and cons on both sides.  I guess one final factor is that I want to move to GFRF because I like how it changes my relationships with people.  I have noticed in my clinic work and qigong teaching that whether the client or student pays more, less or exactly the same as they did previously, there is a subtle change in how the interaction feels.  It might sound a little corny, but there seems to be more warmth, love and respect in the interaction from both sides; and that really is how I want to live my life.

I’m still nervous about it though… Due to the overheads and the time commitment involved in running classes it could easily go wrong and make it difficult for me to continue.  I wonder maybe if it is too soon for me to try this, but I also think if not now when would I start?  What I’m thinking of doing at the moment is trying it out at just one location where I have kids and teens classes and see how that goes… but I’m still not even sure about that.   I have a few weeks to think about it before the next term begins.

Support for Give Freely Receive Freely

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I had something really nice happen yesterday.  Someone gave me some money for the GFRF website.  I was very touched.

I know the website isn’t much yet, but I do hope that it provides some inspiration to the people that come across it.  I know that at least a few people have been influenced by what I am doing and my writing about it, and this has given them inspiration to try to do things differently in their lives.  I am always pleased to hear about these stories and hope to continue to hear more in the future.

It is so nice to have these sorts of things happen, whether it is receiving support for what I am doing or hearing about it making a difference to people.

Humanship Horsemanship – give freely receive freely

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A parent of one of the kids who comes to my Kung Fu classes gave me the details of some people who teach horsemanship humanship workshops on a GFRF basis (although they don’t call it that, it is the same idea. They also have other programs that they have set prices for.  You can read their pricing philosophy here).

I am always encouraged when I hear about other people doing the same or similar things.  To be honest I am not finding the journey of converting to GFRF particularly easy and I often find myself facing doubts and fears so finding other people doing similar helps to give me a boost of confidence and encouragement.

So if you’re interested in horses, check out North River Horse and Humanship Centre near Waipu, north of Auckland.

I will also be contacting them myself as I would like to hear more about their experience using their pricing philosophy.  I may be able to interview them and put that on the blog at some point.

Success! – first online payment for my online qigong course

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I’m excited.  The first payment has come through for my online qigong course.  I had hoped people who use the course would start making some payments soon, but had thought I might possibly need to wait til they completed the course (12 weeks) before they started paying.

So this is great.  Evidence that at least some people viewing the course recognize the value in it and are willing to make a voluntary contribution in return for it.  I hope this is the first of many to come.

If you haven’t seen the course, you can check it out in the link below if you are interested.

http://longwhitecloudqigong.com/online-courses/qigong-foundation-practices/

Small update on the GFRF online qigong course

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So I’ve enabled advertising on a select few of the videos for the online qigong course that I have created.  I wanted to keep it advertising free so as to compare returns of putting the courses up in different ways and also just so people wouldn’t have to deal with the ads, but I noticed something from my other youtube channels.  In preparation for putting these courses online I enabled advertising on my old channels with videos I put up awhile ago.  What was interesting was that after enabling advertising my video views went up significantly.  I later found out that youtube actively promotes your videos with enabled advertising, which makes sense as they make more money that way.

While I wanted to keep the course advertising free I also want people to see the course and benefit from it.  So I’ve enabled the ads on just a few key videos that it should not really impact on the learning as they aren’t really the types of videos that a learner would watch over and over.  I think this is a good practical compromise that will lead to more people finding the course and being able to still use most of the videos advertising free.

Positive focus vs negative focus

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I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about different aspects of the Give Freely Receive Freely concept and how it applies to our current economic and political system, and how it can address those problems at a fundamental level.  As I’ve thought about all the different applications of GFRF I have been planning in my head a whole series of blog posts discussing the different issues, how the GFRF relates to dominant recent political models such as communism, socialism and capitalism, why previous attempts to live in ways similar to this have generally been unsuccessful and what I think needs to be tweaked in order for this to be successful in the future.

I have been really interested in the wider implications of groups of people choosing to interact in this way and it has been an interesting experience thinking about these wider issues.  But when I think about writing all the blog posts they seem to stretch out before me infinitely, each one takes a long time to write because there are quite complex issues to address (and even then I am only really giving them a very superficial treatment, I currently have a half written post about greed being the basis of our financial system and why this is not a good thing), and there are MANY different fundamental issues to be looked at.  It seems like it will take me so much time and effort before even getting in to the really valuable stuff, which is my experience with actually trying to make it work in the current environment.

I have just realized that I had fallen into the trap of focusing on the negative instead of the positive.  When you focus on the negative you see endless problems which take infinite work to deal with.  On the other hand, when you focus on the positive, the path becomes clear and simple.  This is what I want to focus on from now on in this blog.

From now on I want to refocus on my own efforts to live in this way and my experiences with it.  I think spending time thinking about the wider societal implications was a useful experience for me, and in a way maybe something I needed to do to convince myself that what I am doing is good and would actually be good for everyone else if it was adopted on a wider scale, because if it wouldn’t work on a wider scale then I probably shouldn’t do it small scale either.  I am satisfied now that I have thought things through far enough to know that it could or would work on a large scale, and if it did, it would create a utopian society that most of us have not even dreamed of (lots of standard capitalist theory indoctrination to work through to get to this point).  I feel like I can now with good conscience put those thoughts aside and focus more simply on my own efforts in the here and now to live as close to the ideal as I am able to.  I may refer to these wider issues from time to time as I go, but at this point I want to set aside all the problems and focus on the solutions which is living based on love, compassion and sharing instead of greed and selfishness.

This is a big shift, and one which I think has been enabled by my experience trying my best to give freely and receive freely.  Little by little I think actually experiencing this has started to change my perspective and reshape me as a person.

I think the true power of GFRF is to change the individual, I want to live this way regardless of the society around me, so I’ll stop worrying about those social problems and get on with living my own life in my own way.

I think I can feel my life getting simpler already 🙂