ETHS™ was born from questions that refused easy answers
Identity. Purpose. Character.
From Korea to the United States, from Taekwondo to the inner life—ETHS emerged from decades spent examining why we expect Martial Arts to form the discipline, confidence, focus, and character. And why that process so often remains undefined.
these were questions i could not reject
ETHS was born from questions I could not reject.
Who am I—and why was I born in Korea in this era, only to spend my life teaching Taekwondo in the United States?
Why do people believe Martial Arts should produce discipline, focus, confidence, and character—while lacking a clear way to explain or verify how that transformation actually happens?
These were not abstract or philosophical questions. They followed me into the dojang, into classrooms, and into leadership roles where others trusted me with their development. Over time, I realized that these questions were not merely personal. They were embedded in the expectations students, parents, and instructors quietly carried with them.
ETHS did not begin as an idea. It emerged from decades of lived responsibility inside those questions.
the turning point: trainee instructor manual & guesswork
In the 1980s, I served as Chairman of National Instruction under my late brother, H.U. Lee, in the American Taekwondo Association. I was asked to write the Trainee Instructor Manual—clear, transferable instructions for training instructors across the organization. The task was not to inspire or motivate, but to make inner development teachable and repeatable. At the time, I modeled the structure after the best educational framework available to me: the Program for Effective Teaching (PET), which was widely used and endorsed by the state of Arkansas.
PET was strong in organization, communication, and classroom management. It improved how instructors taught content. But as I worked through the manual, a critical limitation became impossible to ignore. PET, like the broader education system it represented, had no answer for training the human mind itself. It could structure lessons, but it could not explain how attention forms, how judgment matures, or how character develops from the inside out.
That realization was unsettling.
I was being asked to produce exact instructions for developing instructors—yet the educational tools I relied on stopped short of the very thing Martial Arts is expected to cultivate: discipline, focus, confidence, and character. When the task demanded precision—when it demanded a method that could be trusted beyond my own presence—I discovered that much of what I had been doing rested on experience, tradition, and intuition. It often worked, but it could not be verified. Beneath it all was guesswork.
What struck me most was that this was not a failure of effort or sincerity. It was structural. If the education industry itself had no disciplined way to train the inner life, then Martial Arts instructors were quietly expected to accomplish what schools, universities, and professional training systems could not. We were relying on experience to do the work that disciplined knowledge had never been developed to do.That moment changed how I understood my role. I was no longer facing a personal limitation; I was confronting a systemic one. And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
insight of the organon: Naming what was missing
Once I recognized the gap, the problem was no longer technical. It was personal. I could have continued teaching as before. The results were often good. Students improved. Parents were satisfied. Instructors followed directions. From the outside, nothing demanded change. But internally, something had shifted. I now knew that much of what I was relying on—however sincere—could not be examined or verified with discipline. And I knew what that meant: I was asking others to trust methods I could not fully justify to myself.
That realization carried a cost.
I could not live with pretending certainty where there was none. I could not speak with confidence while quietly accepting that guesswork filled the gaps. Especially not while teaching others, and especially not while shaping instructors who would go on to influence hundreds more. Integrity would not allow me to ignore what I had seen. The difficulty was that I still did not know what was missing. I knew there was a problem, but not its name. And not knowing what I was missing turned the search into a long one. I continued teaching sincerely, observing carefully, reflecting deeply—yet without the right tools, progress depended on time rather than clarity. In hindsight, that blind spot alone cost me decades. Not because I stopped searching, but because I did not yet know where to look.
There is a particular burden that comes with responsibility: once you see a problem clearly enough, you are accountable for it—even if no one else notices. That burden stayed with me. It shaped how I taught, how I questioned my own assumptions, and how seriously I took the task of inner development. I was no longer searching for better techniques. I was searching for a way to teach without pretending.
That internal pressure did not resolve quickly. But it refused to go away. And it ultimately forced a deeper question: if disciplined knowledge existed for the outer world, why had it never been developed for the inner one?
The Civilizational Question
Why Inner Development Lagged Behind
The breakthrough did not arrive as an answer. It arrived as recognition.
I began to see that my struggle was not unique to Martial Arts, or even to education. It was historical. In the outer world, human progress accelerated when we learned how to examine claims, verify results, and correct errors with discipline. Tools made truth transferable. Knowledge no longer depended on personality, position, or tradition. But the inner life had never undergone the same transformation. Attention, intention, judgment, character, maturity—these were treated as personal qualities to be admired, not functions to be examined. Inner experience was accumulated, reflected upon, and passed down, but rarely examined to verify its reliability. Over time, experience quietly became a substitute for disciplined knowledge. What worked was repeated. What failed was explained away. And guesswork survived under the appearance of wisdom.
That realization clarified something decisive: the problem was not lack of insight or sincerity. It was the absence of instruments.
What had been missing was an organon—a set of tools designed not to inspire belief, but to examine the inner life with discipline. Not philosophy, not tradition, and not authority, but a way to observe, compare, verify, and refine inner experience so that growth could be understood rather than assumed. I began calling this missing instrument the Organon of Spirit—a practical framework for examining the inner life with the same seriousness we apply to the outer world.
This was not about replacing faith, culture, or Martial Arts. It was about giving them something they had never been given: a method that could reduce guesswork without denying meaning. A way to respect experience without letting it stand in for verification. A way to teach the inner life without pretending certainty where none existed. For the first time, the search had a direction. I was no longer looking for better explanations. I was looking for tools.
That insight became the foundation of ETHS.
an invitation to examine, not pretend
If any of this feels familiar, you are not alone.
Many people sense the same tension—between what we expect inner development to produce and how little we can clearly explain or verify about that process. We work hard. We care deeply. We accumulate experience. Yet something essential remains undefined, and too often we are asked to accept confidence in place of clarity.
ETHS is not an answer to be accepted. It is an invitation to examine.
If you are a teacher, instructor, parent, leader, or student who has felt the cost of pretending—who has sensed that sincerity alone is not enough—then this work may resonate with you. Not because it promises certainty, but because it offers tools to reduce guesswork.
You are free to explore at your own pace. To question. To test. To disagree. ETHS does not ask for belief or allegiance. It asks only for the same discipline we already accept in every other serious domain of life: the willingness to examine experience, verify what we claim to know, and correct what does not hold. If that orientation matters to you, you are welcome to continue.
If you wish to continue exploring:
