making room to grow
Hi! I’m Kajetan “Kaja” Sadowski, a martial artist, writer, and consultant in Vancouver, Canada.
I can teach you how to fight with blades and empty hands, to connect with your body, and to find joy in your strength. I can help you build a training community that brings out the best in you, your peers, and your students.
Join me to discover just how much you can grow when you’ve got the right tools.
One-on-one support for martial arts, self defense, and fitness professionals. Learn the soft skills of community management and get help writing effective policies. Build a new curriculum or revise your current one. Get a second opinion on thorny culture issues or weird problems. I’m here to help!
Bring my skills and knowledge right into your community. You can throw me in the mix at an event, or get an afternoon or weekend workshop tailored to your students. Discover a new martial art, dig into a favourite topic, or build important everyday skills. I can make it all happen in person or online!
Dig deeper into my teaching approach and steal the bits that work for you. My first book, Fear is the Mind Killer: How to Build a Training Culture That Fosters Strength and Resilience, has helped instructors and students around the world re-evaluate how they train. It’s a practical guide to building strong, sustainable, and inclusive training communities. Get it now in paperback, hardcover, or e-book!
Kaja’s excellent blog posts, videos, book, and random social media thoughts on martial arts have been a go-to for me for years now. They have a wonderful way of pushing my thinking past the overwhelming wall of ‘stuff’ when thinking through martial arts and instead breaking down my views on instruction and personal training into small, USEFUL, chunks.
Every teaching or school culture change of theirs that I have implemented has been a resounding success for both myself and my students.
The idea that you can and should make a space that’s welcoming and accepting and feels like home, while at the same time producing *better* results than many of the “hardcore” (which is usually a trapping, not a truth) schools, should not be revolutionary, but is.
The top predictor of longevity and quality of life is almost certainly having a strong and supportive community, which makes it shocking how often self defense folks take a hardline “lone wolf” mentality, and completely miss what actually leads to human thriving.
Kaja is a forerunner for creating systems and communities that show you can be happy and healthy and a bunch of badasses, and they are one of the best folks I know for showing that you can take your work and training seriously without taking yourself seriously.
