This is aimed mostly at professionals. There are three general kinds of people that will require force. The three types don’t fight for the same reason or use the same tactics, and your skills may not work the same. Honestly, most of the time, if you are in enforcement or corrections or especially bouncing, you … [Read more…]
Not sure where I’m going with this. Bear with me. You can look at almost any human interaction as one of these three things. From conversation to a fight, I am either trying to learn about you, influence you, or control you. There’s some overlap, primarily in that gathering intelligence should be an ongoing and … [Read more…]
It is not the student’s responsibility to understand you. It is your responsibility to make yourself understood. It is rare in martial arts or self-defense that junior instructors are given any training in how to teach. You earn your black belt (sometimes not even that) and you step into a teaching role. (Part of … [Read more…]
How you tell a thing is at least as important as what you tell. http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2011/06/tried-by-twelve.html Preface– I am not an attorney. I am a Use of Force instructor. Don’t construe this as legal advice. It might surprise you, but I don’t teach SD legalities as a decision making course. Truth is, things are likely to … [Read more…]
How you tell a thing is at least as important as what you tell. You can be 100% right, and tell the story in such a way that it alienates the jury, or the media, or your prospective customers. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCj0IfpFjqY A group I am a member of put out this video for … [Read more…]
“From my place at the front of the room I have complete responsibility to speak clearly and with fearless honesty. I accept full responsibility for communicating with my students and for seeing to it that the message does get through. But that 100% responsibility on my shoulders does not lighten the student’s responsibility at all.The … [Read more…]
Most people can’t fight ‘cold’. They need the emotional edge of fear or anger to get over the taboos involved in hurting people. Not everyone, but almost everyone. Even very experienced fighters, whether good guys or bad guys, want to be “in the zone” just like any other athlete. Part of being in the zone … [Read more…]
There are no experts here. To recap the last post and the comments on the last post- A “High level conversations” isn’t a matter of knowledge or experience, not in this field. Knowledge and experience never hurt of course. Not ‘never.’ If the experience is overblown or misremembered or poorly extrapolated it can go bad. … [Read more…]
I’m going to try to integrate what Marc and I have been saying. It may be simpler than we thought. Three concepts first: The three stages of a fight; Fight-Flight-Freeze-Posture-Submit (FFFPS); and predatory versus social violence. Three Stages: Being on the receiving end of an unexpected attack you will go through three stages. The OC … [Read more…]
Don’t be the kind of person that someone else would want to stab. Marc MacYoung likes to say that the two best knife defenses are to avoid are: 1) to avoid the drug culture and 2) don’t sleep with other people’s mates. Almost every stabbing I could think of was over something, and it was … [Read more…]