By: Matthew Kayser
Long before Jan Raeder built a framework or wrote a book, she spent more than 10,000 rounds sparring on a mat. Thirty five years of it, most spent running two martial arts locations herself.
“Don’t duck. Don’t flinch,” she says. It’s the line that anchors one of her signature keynotes, and it didn’t come from a psychology textbook. It came from the dojo floor.
Corporate wellness audiences battling burnout hear that same line now, usually right before Raeder asks them where in their own week they have been ducking instead of standing their ground. It lands harder coming from someone who has actually taken the hit.
Raeder is the SelfCare Sensei, a wellbeing educator, keynote speaker, and author behind the M.O.R.E. framework, her plain-language translation of positive psychology research. Before any of that, she was a National AAU Karate gold medalist and senior instructor at US Budokai Karate, building a business on the mat for decades before she ever wrote a page about wellbeing.
She retired from competitive martial arts in 2018. What she carried out the door wasn’t a trophy case. It was a way of handling pressure that later became the backbone of everything she teaches.
On the mat, the moment a fighter takes a hit personally is the moment they lose their center, she says. Off the mat, the principle holds just as well, whether the pressure is a sparring partner, a difficult boss, or a bad morning.
“How’s that working out for you?” is one of her most repeated lines, aimed at anyone still fighting a battle that stopped serving them a long time ago. It’s blunt on purpose. Raeder built her reputation on being direct, not comforting.
That same refusal to look away shows up in one of her clearest stories. Raeder defended her master’s thesis over Skype, in front of three professors. Two of them left only their photos on screen, cameras off, for the entire defense.
“If you don’t want to be here, why are you here?” she remembers thinking. “This was a lot of work to do what I did.”
Half attention was never good enough for her, on a screen or on a mat. That standard is now built into the engagement pillar of M.O.R.E., her framework drawn from Martin Seligman’s positive psychology research. Engagement, in her definition, means showing up fully, the same discipline she once drilled in sparring, just applied to everyday life.
Running two dojo locations also shaped how she prices her own work today. Raeder describes the old model as community college prices for an Ivy League education, high value without unnecessary cost, and she says that same standard now shapes her book, her keynote fees, and every program she builds for corporate wellness clients.
She earned that thesis the hard way. In 2013, while running two dojo locations, raising a family and working another job, Raeder went back to school. Her first semester alone carried 19 credits. She finished both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in four years.
“You do the work you have in front of you,” she says. It’s the same instruction she gives every audience now, whether they are new to a mat or new to a boardroom.
That discipline followed her out of the dojo. After she retired from competition, Raeder began teaching a college course built on wellbeing theory, then turned it into Strive for M.O.R.E., a 139-page book available on Amazon built to work for a high school senior and a PhD without talking down to either.
That instruction is also why Raeder refuses to aim her message at one type of person. In the dojo, she watched four-year-olds figure out which hand goes where and eighty-four-year-olds light up over the exact same small breakthrough.
“You can’t put it into words,” she says. “It’s an energy you feel from the person. All I’m doing is giving them the information. They’re the ones doing the work.”
From four to 84 has become her shorthand for a simple belief. Wellbeing is not a demographic. It’s a daily practice open to anyone willing to do it, whether they’re stepping onto a mat for the first time or stepping into a boardroom already worn down.
Discipline beats motivation every time, she says. Motivation fades. Discipline holds up under pressure long after the feeling that started it is gone, like a technique drilled ten thousand times holding up under a real hit.
That is the resilience piece most burnout advice leaves out. Raeder tells every audience the same thing before they leave the room. The mat never cared about excuses, and neither does a Tuesday morning with a full inbox and a hard conversation still waiting.
The uniform came off in 2018. The discipline didn’t, and neither did the standard behind it: show up fully for whatever is in front of you, then do it again tomorrow. That’s the only black belt anyone actually needs.
To learn more about the M.O.R.E. framework or book Jan Raeder to speak, visit selfcaresensei.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.
