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Charles Doublet

Black Belt Leadership

Helping young men to become warriors, leaders, and teachers. Showing them how to overcome fear, bullies, and life's challenges so they can live the life they were meant to live, for more, check out https://CharlesDoublet.com/

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A spinning flywheel beside a sharpened axe, notebook, construction materials, and BJJ training, symbolizing reduced friction and momentum.
Featured Post

You Don’t Need More Discipline. You Need Less Friction.

Flow, Friction, and Flywheels Sometimes getting more out of life isn’t about putting more into it. Sometimes it’s about creating more flow, removing friction, and building flywheels that make the things you want easier and easier to do. We make productivity too complicated. We think the answer is always: work harder, try harder, have more discipline, wake up earlier, grind. And look, there are times you need to work hard. I’ve worked construction most of my adult life. I’m not afraid of hard...

14 days ago • 10 min read
Cinematic collage of electricians studying plans, exploring different solutions, and reflecting on leadership and problem-solving at a construction site.

Your First Answer Is Usually Just Your Habit Over my 35 years as a union electrician, I worked with a lot of different people. Some were incredibly talented. Some were experienced, hardworking, and eager to learn. And some were just plain stubborn. I remember journeymen who’d get offended if you tried to show them anything. “Don’t treat me like an apprentice.” “I’m not a kid.” “You don’t need to teach me anything.” Okay. But here’s something I learned over the years. Having experience doesn’t...

about 10 hours ago • 9 min read
Illustrated collage of a man journaling through life, from a hurried schoolboy to an electrician, relationships, and quiet reflection in later years.

Three Questions I Keep Coming Back To I’ve been journaling for more than forty years, and I have a confession to make. I was not a "journalist" when I started. I was a freshman in high school, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and one of my classes required us to keep a journal for the entire year. Like most teenagers, I wasn’t excited about homework that didn’t have to be turned in every single day. So when I knew the teacher was about to check our journals, I’d scramble to fill in a bunch of...

1 day ago • 9 min read
Tangled paths squeeze through a rocky bottleneck, emerging as a smooth blue stream flowing toward the sunrise.

They Didn’t Tap Me Once Saturday.Here’s Why. Something interesting happened on the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mat this past Saturday. I rolled with somebody I hadn’t trained with in a little while. This person has been at Meraki for about four and a half or five years — roughly a two-year head start on me. And when we used to roll, they destroyed me. Three submissions. Four. Sometimes five in a single five-minute round. Tap, tap, tap, tap. I don’t mean they were cruel. They weren’t. They were just...

2 days ago • 9 min read
Shu-Ha-Ri learning progression illustrated as a chick hatching from an egg, exploring the ground, and growing into a bird flying freely.

The Words Were the Same.The Conversation Wasn’t. Why learning the script is often the first step toward finding your own voice. Back in 2001, early in my relationship with Amy, she moved in with me. We’d been dating for about six months when she moved in with me in Culver City. At the time, she was studying acting at the Meisner Studio in North Hollywood. Every week she’d make the long drive through LA rush-hour traffic to get to class. Sometimes, on days when I wasn’t training hapkido, I’d...

4 days ago • 11 min read
A smaller older jiu-jitsu practitioner using guard and frames against a larger opponent on the mat.

I’m 5’2”, 120 Pounds—and That Isn’t My Only a Disadvantage I can’t be the only person who did this. Especially when I was younger, I’d look in the mirror and see everything that was wrong. Everything I wished was different. Everything I thought needed fixing. And I don’t just mean physically. I did it with school too. If I brought home a report card with a couple of A’s and a C, guess which grade got all my attention? Not the A. The C. How do I turn that C into a B? How do I get rid of the...

4 days ago • 6 min read
Experienced electrician teaching a construction crew how an electrical control system works on a large airport project.

What Construction Taught Me About Problems That Look Like People Problems In 2019, I landed what should have been one of my dream assignments. The First Stage of the LAX MSC Project I was working on the Midfield Satellite Concourse project at LAX, and Mike brought me onto his crew to handle the big AHUs and their Building Management Systems. The pitch was basically: Give Chuck a bunch of big pieces of equipment and leave him alone. Perfect. Each unit had devices to install, conduit to run,...

5 days ago • 7 min read
Three longtime friends talking over coffee at an outdoor café near the beach at sunset.

Your Strength Can Become the Thing That Traps You Last week I met an old friend for coffee. And when I say old, I mean us, not him. We first met in 1992, when I returned to hapkido after taking time away during my electrical apprenticeship. Our birthdays fall in the same week, and about a decade ago—after years of only seeing each other intermittently following Grandmaster Han’s passing in 2007—we decided to make an annual birthday coffee a tradition. Nothing elaborate. We catch up and...

6 days ago • 7 min read
Young apprentice electrician writing in a journal at a café at night while looking out at the Los Angeles skyline.

The Three Questions That Changed My Life One of the habits that changed the direction of my life started, strangely enough, because of a decision I sometimes regretted making. When I started my electrical apprenticeship in the early 1988, I learned I’d also have school two nights a week. At the time, I was training hapkido five nights a week. And for whatever reason, I decided that if I couldn’t train five nights a week, there wasn’t much point in training at all. Looking back, that sounds...

7 days ago • 6 min read
A sweaty construction worker carries conduit while another electrician quietly installs pipe in the background, contrasting visible busyness with real progress.

The Building Didn’t Care How Busy You Looked There was a type of guy you could spot from a mile away on a big construction job once you knew what to look for. He was always sweating. Always out of breath. Always exasperated. And he always had a story. Holy shit, did he have a story. The Hero's Journey You’d ask how something was going and you were about to get the complete Hero’s Journey. First this happened. Then that happened. Then somebody screwed up the material. Then the lift wasn’t...

8 days ago • 8 min read
A hesitant writer with a construction and martial arts background reaches toward a glowing Publish button as hundreds of articles extend toward the horizon.

I Was Terrified to Hit Publish.Then I Did It Over 1,000 Times. One of the safest places you can hide in this world is inside self-improvement. That’s exactly why it’s so dangerous. You can read another book. Take another class. Watch another video. Do another drill. Rewrite the plan for the ninth time. Buy another piece of equipment you don’t strictly need. Get another certification to hang on the wall. And when somebody asks what you’re doing with yourself, you’ve got an answer that sounds...

9 days ago • 8 min read