Your Third Place Needs You Too
Most of us have a first place and a second place. Home is the first. Work or school is usually the second. Then there is the third place, the one we choose to return to because it has become part of our lives. It might be a coffee shop, a church, a neighborhood bar, a gym, or a martial arts school. You don’t live there and you don’t work there. You belong there. For many people, KME has become that place.
I want to write about what it takes to keep a place like this alive, because most of us only ever see one side of it. We experience a third place through what it gives us. We rarely see what keeps it running, or how our own presence shapes it. A third place is shared, and once you see it that way, your relationship to it changes. That is the whole of what I want to say here, and everything below is an attempt to earn it.
People come through our doors from different professions, cultures, ages, religions, personalities, and physical abilities. Most aren’t trying to become competitive fighters. They want to become more capable, understand conflict, protect themselves and others, challenge themselves, and learn how to walk through life with greater peace. They train at their own pace and for their own reasons. Over time the school becomes part of their lives. Friendships form. Instructors watch people grow. Parents train while their children grow up in the same school. Someone you may never have met anywhere else becomes the person you trust to punch you, choke you, throw you to the ground, and help you back up afterward. There are difficult rounds, bad jokes, frustrations, breakthroughs, disagreements, celebrations, and thousands of ordinary moments that slowly turn a building into a community. Keeping that community healthy takes more than keeping the doors open.
You See the Place Today
When you enter an established community, you see what exists now. You rarely see what created it. A rule may seem unnecessary. A class structure may seem odd. A policy may feel rigid. The reason usually goes back years.
Organizations develop through experience much the way people do. A mistake changes how you approach the next decision. A difficult situation leads you to set a boundary you never needed before. A school develops the same way. Policies carry the memory of situations that came before them. Boundaries come from injuries, conflicts, and repeated attempts to solve the same problem. Experience becomes structure. New experience can also show when that structure needs to change, and knowing the difference between a boundary worth holding and one worth adjusting is most of the work.
Take something simple. We don’t let students enter class once the warm-up has started. The warm-up begins the lesson. It prepares the body, introduces the movements the class will build on, sets the pace, and gives people time to bring their attention into the room. Someone who arrives late enters a process already in motion. Their body is still cold, their attention is still on whatever happened outside, and their partner has to adjust around them. I have seen enough close calls over the years to stop treating this as a small thing. Being turned away after making the effort to come is frustrating, and I understand that. The rule still has to be consistent, because once a boundary depends on who asks for the exception, it stops being a rule. The person inconvenienced by it today is protected by the same standard tomorrow.
Rules Make Community Possible
A community brings different people into the same space, and that takes structure. People arrive with different expectations, abilities, and ideas about what is fair. What works well for one person can create a problem for another. Rules give everyone a shared framework. They set what people can reasonably expect from instructors, staff, training partners, and the school itself, and they keep any one person’s preference from becoming the standard for everyone. A policy can feel unnecessary when you only meet the part that touches you. Its purpose often comes from experiences you weren’t there to see, or from people whose needs are different from yours. We each experience our own part of a community directly. Seeing the whole takes a wider view than any one of us has from where we stand.
Someone Has to Keep the Whole in View
This is where running a school and teaching self-defense meet. In self-defense you learn quickly that a problem looks different once you are responsible for the outcome. You work with incomplete information, make the best decision available, and adjust as the situation changes. I often tell students that everyone has 20/20 vision when they don’t have to make the decision.
Running a community asks for the same humility. My instructors, staff, and I are responsible for the environment. We hold the person taking a first class and the person who has trained here for fifteen years in the same view, along with children, parents, curriculum, safety, standards, and culture. My responsibility as the owner also includes the plain reality of keeping the doors open. Rent, salaries, insurance, equipment, and maintenance are what allow the visible community to exist, and a community needs a structure capable of carrying it over time. We get decisions wrong sometimes. When we do, the responsibility is to understand what happened, adjust, and carry the lesson forward. Having the authority to make a call is not the same as being right about it, and forgetting that is how anyone in my position goes wrong.
People Change
Strong communities create strong relationships. Students become friends. Instructors become important figures in people’s lives. Staff become part of the character of the place, and some of those relationships last many years. People change during those years. Priorities shift. Needs change. The school changes too. Sometimes a relationship that worked well for a long time reaches a point where it no longer works in the same way. That doesn’t erase what came before. A student may find another school fits them better. An instructor may choose another path. KME may evolve in a direction that changes the relationship. A healthy community needs room for people to arrive, contribute, grow, change, and sometimes move on. Change is part of the history of the place, not a break from it.
Belonging Comes With a Role
Here is the part that asks something of you.
Once you belong to a place, you affect it. How you train affects your partners. How you treat staff affects the environment. How you speak about instructors affects other students. How you respond to a rule or a change becomes part of the culture around you.
None of that means silent agreement. If something bothers you, bring it to me. I will listen, and your experience may show me something I haven’t seen. Listening isn’t the same as granting every request, because your view becomes part of a larger picture that includes other people, past experience, and the long-term health of the school. But it gives the problem a real chance to be solved.
The alternative is quieter and more costly. Shared frustration builds faster than shared understanding. When we only talk about a problem sideways, among people who already agree, the room slowly changes. People grow suspicious of ordinary decisions. Staff become guarded. Small frustrations start carrying more weight than they deserve, and a place built around learning and challenge and friendship becomes less enjoyable for the same people who value it most. That erosion doesn’t come from any single decision. It comes from how we choose to carry the ones we don’t like.
So the better path is simple to name and harder to practice. Bring the problem to the person who can act on it. Ask what you might be missing. Say what they might be missing. Then give the answer enough room to be understood. That doesn’t promise agreement. It protects the thing you’d be complaining about in the first place.
A Place Worth Keeping
KME has changed many times over the years, and so have I. Thousands of people have contributed to what it is. Students, instructors, staff, parents, children, friends, and people who stayed a short time have all shaped it. The people here today inherited some of what earlier people built, and we will change it too. The goal was never a perfect version of KME, because there has never been one. The responsibility is to preserve what makes the place worth returning to: a room where different people can train together, challenge themselves, express themselves through movement, learn at their own pace, and treat each other with respect. A place where you can study violence without building an identity around fighting, and become more capable while still pursuing the reason many of us walked in to begin with, which is to walk in peace.
So here is the takeaway, said plainly. A third place does not maintain itself, and it is not maintained only by the people who run it. It is carried by everyone inside it, in how they train, how they treat each other, and how they handle the things they wish were different. You inherited a culture someone built before you. You are shaping it right now, whether you mean to or not. And one day someone new will walk through the door and inherit what you leave behind. If this place has become part of your life, that is worth carrying well.
Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh
Founder & CEO
Krav Maga Experts
Related Articles
What Makes a Place Feel Like Home? — A home is built by how people show up for each other, not by the walls around them.
Why Advanced Martial Arts Students Still Need Beginners — Every advanced student still needs beginners to keep their training honest.
How Do You Find Your Personal Purpose? — Purpose begins where your ability meets real pain in the world.
