In the article “My Updated 7 Rules for Instructors” Alex Bourdas wrote:
Few HEMA instructors are professional in the sense that they are paid for being a HEMA instructor, but despite this, I think that HEMA instructors should act as if they are being paid.
This wasn’t especially earth-shattering to me, as it was more or less what I have always done. But I have never articulated it so clearly. Good advice. But that’s not what this article is about. (I was going to say “go read that one if you want information on professionalism”, but it doesn’t look like it is online anymore. I’m assuming it is part of the published Encased In Steel Anthology.)
This article is about “getting paid”. That doesn’t necessarily mean financial compensation. The vast majority of HEMA coaching occurs on a volunteer basis. And when money is involved people display some capacity for self-reflection as to whether the compensation is worth their time. Estimating the time value of money is an everyday life skill. And if you don’t have it there are lots of non-HEMA people out there who have published on the topic.
This article is about recognizing why you are such a sucker – putting in dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to teach people for no financial remuneration.
Why coach at all?
There isn’t one good answer, because we all have different reasons. I’ll share mine: I take great satisfaction in seeing people be good at HEMA. So how do my students compensate me for my time? By getting better and kicking ass.
That may sound like a stupid example, but it’s more meaningful than you think. What if my students were all very casual in their training, didn’t show up regularly, and none of them worked very hard? There is nothing wrong with approaching HEMA in a relaxed way, this is a hobby and we should enjoy it on our own terms. But I would need to ask myself: when coaching in that environment am I “getting paid”? No, not really.
Imagine an employee working (a real non-HEMA job) at a company that significantly under pays them. It is not a stretch to imagine they will soon grow frustrated and leave. And it is the exact same with volunteer coaching. Of course your lack of “pay” isn’t going to manifest itself in slamming a rudely worded two weeks notice onto the floor of your training hall. But if you aren’t “being paid” you are burning yourself out.
“The satisfaction you derive from coaching should be in proportion to the effort you’re putting in. Anything else is not sustainable.”
The first step is to understand what joy HEMA brings you. You can’t get paid if you don’t know what you want to be paid in. Do you just love being passionate and talking about your hobby? Are you looking to develop people that can be good training partners for you? These two different motivations can have a significant impact on the way you set up your club and/or run practices.
(If this was SwordSTEM I would make the effort to create a version of the ‘this sparks joy’ meme to put here.)
Personally I, as mentioned above, derive satisfaction from seeing students improve. Which means I’m going to structure things in a way that pushes them. If there’s a mismatch between my goals and theirs, such as having a group of students who are not passionate about hard work, something’s going to break. Either the students quit because they are not having fun, or I burn out because I’m not having fun. In this specific case it can be helpful to try and cultivate a culture of performance, or seek recruiting efforts that bring people in with that specific mindset.
Note that your ability to work around these issues is also contingent on your role in your club. If you are the clubhead, you have more flexibility. (Don’t go nuts, or you’ll alienate your existing student base and have to start from scratch.) If you are only one of the instructors, then a little more collaboration is required for any changes. Which is a whole other topic.
This applies in many different contexts, for instance think of the last time you had to organize, or help organize, a HEMA event. Financially speaking most of the time people are lucky to break even. Then why do you do it? For running a HEMA event there has to be something that you “get paid “with, and I imagine that for most people it is the satisfaction of the participants having a good time. But… good times are relative.
If I host a Hema event where everybody:
- Goes out to party.
- Gets drunk.
- Can barely stand the next day to do any sword work.
It sounds like they had a good time; however, this is not something that I would consider rewarding to me. If this is how it ends up I will not host the event again in the future. (On the flip side, my idea of an excellent event might strike many people as no fun, all work and no play.)
Construct your events in a way that will give you satisfaction from running them. It might not be exactly what everybody wants out of an event, but if you’re aiming to please everybody I have some bad news for you. The important part is that you will have gotten something out of it, even if it doesn’t become the biggest event in the world.
I have seen event organizers burnout both in and out of HEMA, and it is just about always because the event strayed from what the organizers enjoy doing. I don’t even need to be hypothetical. Longpoint, the biggest HEMA event in the world, went down exactly for organizer burnout.
Trying to do the “ best event possible” doesn’t help anybody if you have to stop doing it after a few years.
In short: you should periodically ask yourself what you are getting out of what you are doing. This is not to decry the volunteer mindset, anybody who’s worked with me knows how much of a sucker and how much free time I give up. But I do it under my own terms because I am enjoying what I’m doing, and the results that are coming out of it. The reason I can keep spending so much time is because I am not burning myself out. As coaches we are very selfless, but have to remember to take care of ourselves.
Make sure that you are always “getting paid” in whatever it is that you love about HEMA.
Actionable Items
So, as a coach what are the actionable steps that you can take based on this amazing insight I’ve wowed you with? The following is written from the perspective of a coach, but it is a good activity to go through for any athlete or volunteer.
1) Identify why you like HEMA. What parts of it speak to you? This is an often overlooked step that anyone who is serious about any hobby should do.
2) Look at the activities that are directly a part of #1. We will call them Type I activities.
3) Figure out all the things you need to do to facilitate all the goals from part #1. These are Type II activities. They are important, but only inasmuch as they help you get to your actual goals. Figure out how they map to things you actually want to do, so you can be as efficient and spend as little time as possible. (Stuff like managing membership dues is a Type II activity.)
4) Figure out everything that you are doing that is not facilitating something from part #1. This is a Type III activity. Stop doing Type III activities.
Examples:
Alex wants to be the best. They want to train hard, and crush all opposition. Naturally Alex has had to start their own club, to grow training partners. And the better the training partners the better Alex can become.
- Type I: Practices they can participate in, students kicking ass, fighting in tournaments.
- Type II: Running beginners courses to attract new students, publicity, studying sources and sports science.
- Type III: Random sparring with different weapons, attending random workshops at events, Facebook Drama.
Jessie loves sharing their passion for HEMA with the world. The more people that they can show off to the better, and the more obscure sources and weapons they can pick up the better. This is a hobby for recreation, and not a sport to try to excel at.
- Type I: Publicity, intro courses, random workshops at events, studying sources.
- Type II: Improving teaching and communication skills, figuring out a curriculum and skill progression for students.
- Type III: Studying sports science, fighting in tournaments, Facebook Drama (notice a trend here).
Finishing Notes
These came up as clarifications to some of the statements I made in the article, but didn’t really fit without disrupting the flow.
- The “get paid” concept is not about making sure that we are all prima donnas and get everything we want at any given moment.
- This is 100% ABSOLUTELY NOT about undercharging for your school/group. Having people pay money makes them value the service and build the group up. The fact that HEMA groups stupidly undervalue what they are delivering is another topic I need to get to in another article.
- You can make the event whatever format and quality you want so long as everyone knows what to expect, and can make an informed choice on if it is a fit for them before they go. You are well within your rights to put together a poorly organized event if you want to. Others are also well within their rights to complain and not attend.
- Having pride in what you are delivering, beit coaching or an event, will also help you ‘get paid’. So don’t think I’m advocating doing a bad job. Just keep it in perspective so that feedback or criticism doesn’t become a personal affront.
- On the subject of clubs/events going down because of burnout. People cycling through and moving on is a natural part of life even in healthy club cultures. If everything is tied to one person, instead of having multiple people who can take over, the group or event death is inevitable. Succession/turnover is another topic, and you also may decide you don’t care.
- In sport psychology lectures dealing with the issue of burnout I’ve heard of this concept referred to as “topping up the tank”. The idea that you have a certain volume of motivation / energy / enthusiasm which must be continually topped up or it will run dry.