We recently connected with Shirley Chock and have shared our conversation below.

Shirley, appreciate you joining us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

COVID has drastically changed my industry and I believe most Tai Chi and traditional martial arts school owners are not prepared for the change. Sadly, many martial arts schools did not survive the COVID economic downturn. Of the businesses that survived, many owners do not realize that COVID has permanently shifted people’s lifestyles, habits and choices. Many of my peers are seeing their weekly student numbers decline and are assuming the low enrollment is due to lingering COVID anxiety and are waiting for things to “get back to normal”. I have been advising other martial arts business owners that this IS the new normal and they must update their business models and practices to reflect the changes in people’s behaviors and expectations.

Traditional martial arts businesses have been operating with a business model assuming people place an intrinsic value to traditional martial arts because they have always held an important place in traditional society. Their main marketing strategy is offering free trial classes and then naturally a percentage of those who try classes will sign up. Unfortunately, this business model no longer works. In today’s busy world with so many competing priorities, people value their time more than their disposable income. Unless you have a strong digital presence enabling people to easily find you online so they can see and understand exactly what you’re offering, they won’t even bother coming in to try that free class. People are less and less willing to invest their time in something that they can’t immediately see value in.

I am leading the way in bringing Tai Chi and traditional martial arts into the digital era and showing other school owners how to incorporate technology and content into their business model. Many martial arts schools have outdated websites that are not mobile friendly. Businesses that have invested in simple and clear websites that are mobile friendly and easily enable users to self-serve actions to completion are dominating their less technologically savvy peers. Another significant change in our industry is the adoption of digital content into the business model. Businesses that view digital content as an add-on enhancement to their offerings are falling behind their peers that have integrated content as a key part of core offerings .

We are at a watershed moment for the traditional martial arts industry. I predict businesses whose owners are still waiting to get “back to normal” to pre-COVID times will not survive. However, those who are able to successfully incorporate digital media into their core business model will thrive beyond what was possible pre-COVID because they will be able to expand their reach far beyond the local community they used to operate in.

Shirley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hi, I’m Shirley Chock and I’m known as The Stressbender. I own Aiping Tai Chi in Connecticut, a school that teaches Tai Chi authentically as an internal martial art, founded in 1996 by my master, Grandmaster Aiping Cheng. I have been her disciple since 2001 and took over the school when she moved to Austin, TX in 2017. Taking over the Tai Chi school and becoming a small business owner and full time Tai Chi instructor at that moment was not in my plans. In fact, I was on track for the absolute perfect plan that would ensure financial wealth and also allow me to teach Tai Chi as a leisurely activity in my early retirement… in another 12 years.

Let me rewind a bit and share some of my backstory. I graduated from the University of Chicago with an undergraduate degree in economics and had a very successful finance career in various finance and administration leadership positions. When I was 25, I was the Controller of Heavy.com in New York, one of the only media start ups from the original dot com boom that is still in business today. In my 20’s I only had two interests: advancing my finance career and advancing my martial arts training. I was training extensively at a mixed martial arts school and was training 3-4 times a week in various styles of martial arts. I moved to Connecticut in 2001 and began my 15 year finance career at Yale University. That was also when I found Grandmaster Aiping Cheng, one of the world’s most renowned experts in Chinese Martial Arts.. She introduced me to Tai Chi as an internal martial art and I fell completely in love with it. It is an enigma of fluid simplicity that you must slowly uncover through many layers of depth and complexity. My Tai Chi training advanced and I won many grand championships in national and international competitions, including the 2006 U.S. National championship. At the same time, my finance career also advanced and I was promoted into senior leadership positions at Yale University and was named their 2012 Working Mother of the Year, sponsored by Working Mother Magazine. Because I was serving as the longtime unofficial trainer for Yale University’s finance employees, they created a new position for me as Director of Finance Training and Development and I launched their Finance Leadership Development Program for young professionals.

As my Tai Chi training advanced alongside my finance career, I noticed that my stress levels were always significantly lower than my peers. My peers would get burnt out and emotionally drained from conflict situations and they often got physically sick. They seemed to always be struggling uphill and getting exhausted along the way. On the other hand, I seemed to always float with the currents, was able to dissolve conflict situations, kept getting promotions, and always had plenty of energy and stamina at the end of the day. This was when I realized that I was utilizing my Tai Chi training in my work and life situations and everything that applied to Tai Chi as a martial art also applied to daily life stresses. Because in my Tai Chi training I learned to keep my body free of tension enabling me to redirect my opponents’ physical forces, I was also able to apply that ability to non-physical forces in work and life situations. I realized I discovered the secret scroll to making life easier to live.

My original plan was to reap the rewards of this secret scroll I discovered and work at Yale until I could take early retirement at 55 with full pension and full benefits. By that time, my master would retire from teaching and I would take over her school as a leisurely activity in my early retirement. But the best plans often don’t work out as you envision. Grandmaster Cheng’s daughter settled down in Austin, TX and started her family there and where the grandkids are, the grandparents follow. Grandmaster Cheng decided to move to Austin in 2017 and asked me to take over her school. My perfect plan crumbled in an instant. I made the insane decision to quit my finance career to take over Aiping Tai Chi. Insane because I walked away from $5 million in future salaries, pensions and benefits. In both finance and Tai Chi, I have a gift in teaching people very complicated concepts and breaking them down into digestible and understandable components. I believe it is my purpose to utilize this skillset and translate the secrets of the ancient and esoteric Tai Chi teachings so modern day people in our stressed out society can learn how to make life easier to live.

I often say Tai Chi will save the world. My students’ ages range from 12 to 90. We have an even split of male and female students and they span across the political spectrum with liberals and conservatives coming together in a joint community, taking classes side by side. I don’t know any other modern day activity that can bring together so many diverse people. Stress and its toll on our physical and mental health do not discriminate against age, gender, or affiliations. I am extremely proud that in our ever more divisive world where people retreat into their smaller and smaller like-minded tribes, we bring so many diverse people together in a common goal to learn this ancient art.

My mission is to transform the industry by making the ancient art of Tai Chi accessible and relevant to today’s busy person dealing with the ever increasing stresses of modern life. I have fully embraced the world of content creation and was Twitch’s first affiliate streaming internal martial arts content and grew our YouTube channel into partner status. According to VidIQ, a YouTube analytics program, I am currently the top YouTube creator for the search term “Tai Chi”.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I owe my reputation to my master. I trained for 20 years under one of the most renowned Chinese martial artists in the world, male or female. Being Grandmaster Aiping Cheng’s disciple and chosen successor brings with it a certain latitude of respect. She is not just my master but she is like my second mother because her own daughter didn’t have any interest in learning the art. She not only passed on her technical knowledge to me but she also passed on invaluable advice about her lived experiences as a female martial artist rising to the top in a male dominated field.

My accomplishments in Tai Chi tournaments have also bolstered my reputation. The Tai Chi internal martial arts community is fairly small, especially the competition circuit. Some remember me as the winner of the 24 Form routine at the very last A Taste of China All Taijiquan Championships in 2006. This was one of the most respected Tai Chi tournaments where everyone competed against each other, not separated by age or gender or experience level. The 24 Form is the most widely practiced Tai Chi form and it always has the most competitors. My very first time competing at this tournament was also the very last year this tournament was held. I won the gold medal for 24 Form and was also the only female to place in the top 5.

However, I think what has really earned my reputation with the traditional martial arts community is they can sense my genuine respect and devotion for our authentic art. I want our art to flourish in all its depth because it’s in the depth where you’ll find the secret scroll. In our fast food and fast fashion world, we need to preserve ancient teachings that only bear fruit from uncovering and exploring them slowly and deeply. I have taken a very public stance to call out the proliferation of online and weekend Tai Chi instructor certification programs that undermine everything we are trying to accomplish as teachers of the authentic art.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

COVID caused everyone to have to pivot. Every fitness and movement instructor went online, teaching Zoom classes. I always had an affinity for technology and was a big gamer when I was younger. When COVID hit and everyone else went onto Zoom, I decided to try something completely different. I personally did not like the user experience of most Zoom Tai Chi classes and didn’t want to offer a class I wouldn’t personally want to take as a student. I decided to start a Twitch live streaming channel because I could enhance the user experience on the Twitch platform. I knew my students would follow me onto Twitch but to my surprise, others in the Twitch community really connected with my content and my channel kept growing. I became Twitch’s first affiliate streaming internal martial arts content. Being on Twitch enabled me to quickly grow an international community and introduce Tai Chi to people who never knew about it before. The recordings of my live streams became my digital assets that continue to earn me passive income today. The Twitch content has been edited into instructional videos that are exclusive content for my Patreon subscribers and also available for purchase on Vimeo. The same Twitch content has been edited into shorter form YouTube videos which performed well enough to get my channel partnered and I’ve been earning ad revenue on those videos.

Now that my peers are abandoning Zoom, I am tackling Zoom to produce an online Zoom class I would personally want to take as a student. I have doubled down on investing in technology to give people the best possible online Zoom class experience. My Zoom classes bring in my students around the world into our live group classes so they can be a part of our group energy. I believe people are seeking connection and community and the best way to connect with our group energy is to see us practicing together in the same space, experiencing the immersive feeling that they’re a part of us, even if they are on the other side of the globe.

Another pivot I’ve made is putting content front and center in my core business model. Every class we offer online is recorded using high quality recording software. Those recordings are then made available to all students who attended either in-person or online so they have reference material to use in their practice. This is a resource we could never offer pre-COVID. These recordings will also be added to my digital asset library so they can be edited and monetized as content across my different platforms.

It took me a long time to shift my mindset to accept that I am not only a Tai Chi instructor but I am also a content creator. Now I truly believe that the content I create is invaluable in growing my Tai Chi business. My next pivot is to start a new YouTube channel to help other Tai Chi and traditional martial arts instructors make that mindset shift for themselves and teach them how to become content creators. I believe the more I can help traditional martial artists adapt to the changes in our industry, the more I can help keep the authentic art alive and help it thrive in the 21st century.

Contact Info:

• Website: aipingtaichi.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/aipingtaichi
• Facebook: facebook.com/aipingtaichi
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/shirleychock
• Twitter: twitter.com/thestressbender
• Youtube: youtube.com/aipingtaichicenter
• Other: Twitch: twitch.tv/aipingtaichi Patreon: patreon.com/aipingtaichi