Why the Name Iron Flora – Strength and Gentleness Can Coexist
earworm: [Idina Menzel & Kristin Chenoweth – Defying Gravity (Wicked the Musical)]
How martial arts, gardening and a journey that began in 2006 shaped my approach to women’s confidence, awareness and practical self-protection.
Strength and gentleness in motion — a high mae keage (front rising kick) and a figure-skating spiral, reflecting the balance at the heart of Iron Flora.
Published: 25 August 2026 | Reading time: 7 min | Category: Iron Flora
Empower One. Empower Many.
People sometimes ask me why I chose the name Iron Flora. For many of my friends, though, the name probably came as no surprise. They already knew that I had been practising full-contact martial arts (MA) for many years – and that I always talk non-stop about MA. Haha. At the same time, some have jokingly described me using the Chinese expression 皮包骨 (pí bāo gǔ), literally “skin wrapping bones”, because of my build, while others knew me from my flexibility and dance background.
In many ways, Iron Flora brings these seemingly different sides of me together.
Long before I stepped onto the mats for full-contact martial arts, I trained in flexibility and dance. That surprises some people, but it shouldn't. Bruce Lee won Hong Kong's Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship in 1958, Jean-Claude Van Damme studied classical ballet for five years, and Michelle Yeoh trained in dance from childhood and pursued ballet at London's Royal Academy of Dance before a back injury changed the direction of her career.
Strength and grace are not opposites; they complement one another. Yin and yang. Hot and cold. This balance eventually became part of the inspiration behind Iron Flora.
At the Fight For Life martial arts cancer fund-raising seminar in Melbourne in 2013 – more than a decade before Iron Flora had a name.
Iron represents resilience, courage and quiet strength, while Flora represents growth, gentleness and life. Together, they remind me that confidence does not have to be loud, and strength does not have to be aggressive.
I also genuinely enjoy gardening, so Flora was not simply a metaphor chosen for the programme. Anyone who gardens knows how surprisingly resilient plants can be. They bend, adapt, recover and continue growing, even though they may look delicate.
Self-protection begins before the fight
People often assume that self-protection begins with learning how to fight, but I think it begins much earlier—with awareness, communication, confidence, composure, good judgement and sometimes simply remembering to breathe.
If a confrontation can be prevented or calmly de-escalated, everyone has already won. In Iron Flora, the principle is simple:
Escape → De-escalate → Defend.
Physical techniques matter, but they are not the starting point. They are there for situations where the first two options are no longer available—perhaps in an enclosed space, when your back is against a wall, or when you are travelling alone and help is not immediately available. I understand some of that reality because I have travelled alone for both leisure and work myself.
Even when physical self-protection becomes necessary, the objective is not to stay and fight. This is not a film set. The objective is to create enough space to get away and reach safety as quickly as you can. You don't know whether the other person has friends nearby, whether there is a weapon, or what other variables you haven't seen.
More importantly, I want women to learn how to recognise and work through the freeze response, so that they can breathe, think, make decisions and act when they need to.
To me, empowerment is not about teaching women to fight. It is about helping them live with greater confidence, awareness and choice.
Winding down together at the end of an Iron Flora session.
Physical self-protection can involve moments of intensity, but I also wanted participants to know how to come back down from them. My background in Yin Yoga influenced how I thought about the rhythm of the sessions, so we ended with stretching, gentle movement and breathwork, giving participants time to slow down and leave feeling calm.
In many ways, this reflected the same idea of yin and yang that inspired Iron Flora in the first place: exertion and relaxation, strength and gentleness, action and calm.
Confidence is an everyday skill
Self-protection doesn't begin and end in a training room. Sometimes confidence is as simple as standing a little taller, rolling your shoulders back, making gentle eye contact, keeping your face and body relaxed, speaking clearly, or knowing when to say “no.”
These are not only self-protection skills; they are life skills. They matter during workplace presentations and job interviews, difficult conversations and unfamiliar social situations. They matter on solo trips, overseas work assignments and first dates.
You may never need to use a palm-heel strike or escape from a wrist grab outside a training session, and I sincerely hope you don't. However, awareness, composure and confidence are things that you can use throughout your life.
The roots go back further than I realised
Iron Flora did not suddenly appear in 2026.
Around 2006, I was already looking for women self-defence classes myself. By 2009, I had begun teaching them.
Recently, while looking through my old Google Drive, I found lesson notes that I had created with one of my Jujitsu coaches in March 2010. By then, I already had several years of martial arts and self-defence training behind me, but I also realised that knowing how to perform and teach individual techniques was not the same as knowing how to design a coherent curriculum.
Teaching at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. I didn't know it then, but the years I spent learning how to teach, design curricula and assess learning would eventually find their way back into Iron Flora.
So, over the next decade, I deliberately built that other side of my expertise. I trained and worked in education, learnt how to design curricula and lessons, completed professional training in adult education, and eventually pursued a Master of Education (Educational Assessment), including a 10,000-word dissertation on “Examining Online Formative Assessment in a Digital Literacy Module Using the Rasch Model”. Along the way, I learnt about learning outcomes, assessment, facilitation, learner needs, and how the different parts of an educational experience fit together.
Being able to do something and being able to teach it well are two very different things.
Looking at those 2010 notes now, I don't see something that was inadequate. I see the beginnings of an idea for which I did not yet have all the educational tools to build.
More than a decade later, I do.
The seeds were already there. I simply spent the years in between learning how to help them grow.
With participants and organisers at an NTUC U Sports self-defence and fitness session around 2015. Participants’ faces have been blurred for privacy.
Participants practising a self-defence technique in pairs during an NTUC U Sports session around 2015. Participants’ faces have been blurred for privacy.
Around 2015, I taught an earlier version through NTUC U Sports as a Fitness Ambassador, where the sessions combined self-defence and calisthenics. Some of you may even remember the classes at the Kallang Stadium 100PLUS Track. Looking back now, I realise that those sessions were another step towards what Iron Flora would eventually become.
Explaining a self-protection scenario with a participant during the first Iron Flora workshop at SIT on 18 March 2026.
More recently, a one-hour women empowerment workshop at Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) became an eight-session programme, bringing together awareness, communication, confidence, composure and practical self-protection.
By then, I had spent years training in martial arts and self-defence, while also teaching, designing curricula and assessments, working with learners, and studying education. I finally had the experience to bring these different parts of my life together and build the kind of programme I had been looking for all those years ago.
I couldn't find exactly the programme I was looking for, so I decided to build it.
Iron Flora is still growing
Iron Flora is not intended to turn every woman into a martial artist. You don't need previous martial arts experience, and you don't need to be particularly strong, athletic or flexible. You certainly don't need to become aggressive.
The aim is much simpler: to help more women feel aware, composed, confident and capable, with a few simple and effective self-protection skills available if they ever need them.
Bring Iron Flora to your community or organisation
If you're an educator, community organisation, corporate HR or wellness professional looking for practical confidence, awareness and self-defence training for women and girls, I'd love to explore how Iron Flora could support your students, staff or community.
Iron Flora programmes can be adapted for different age groups, needs and contexts while keeping the same core focus: developing greater awareness, composure and confidence, together with simple and practical self-defence skills that participants can remember when they need them.
Empower One. Empower Many.
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