Most stuff in real life can be avoided or de-escalated. If you have been around 100 people today, there was at least one situation you could have escalated. Odds are you don’t even remember it because we are all constantly adapting to and manipulating the people around us. Violence isn’t a normal distribution (Bell curve). … [Read more…]
Some of the tenets of adult education versus childhood education are: In order to interest an adult, you must show the adult the value in the lesson You must tie in what you are teaching with what the adults already know You just fit the new information into the world that the adult lives in … [Read more…]
I’m sure there are more, but for my purposes, there are three distinct modes of teaching and learning: Conditioning Training Play To make this useful, we have to define them. For our purposes, ‘Training’ is verbal teaching, explanation, patterns and repetitions. Almost anything that you learn as a step-by-step process. Practicing basics is training. Going … [Read more…]
Maybe that should be Uncomfortable Safety. Or something else. The techniques that fall under martial arts are basically heinous crimes except in a very narrow set of circumstances. We are playing at causing pain and suffering. You can choose to be mindless about that and see it as a fun hobby. But if your students … [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. 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…]
I am often asked that question. Can someone who hasn’t spent years fighting teach you anything about self-defense? Well aside from the first glaring error that fighting is not self-defense, the answer is “It depends.” It depends on something very specific. Below is my answer to someone who asked this very question.**********The answer lies in the information, not necessarily … [Read more…]
Take a look at many self-defense related intenet discussions and you will see the same thing. Heated threads filled with back and forth arguing about what works, what doesn’t work, what is “real”, what is fantasy. Most suggestions of “what to do” seem to only generate multiple counter-responses of why “that won’t work”, “that is a … [Read more…]