Erik Kondo – Page 35 – Conflict Manager

Walking the Walk – Bob Davis

I have written a short article on the back of a Facebook post I made a while ago based on the idea of a MA/Self Protection instructor having had to have “walked the walk” to have anything valid to offer. To be honest I was only trying to rattle a few cages and see what popped out at the time but here goes.

Firstly (as no one will have any idea who I am) just a brief intro’ to myself, it is not just to talk about me but is to clarify the position I’m coming at this from.

I have been involved in MA since 1978 (with some breaks), mainly via Karate but with some short forays into traditional Jiu Jitsu and more recently the Gracie style JJ. Over the last 5 years or so I have also spent a significant part of my training time searching out instructors who have “Walked the walk” to expand my knowledge of the “real” world. Having said that I have succeeded in reaching the age of 57 (in my adult life, at least) without ever having been involved in a conflict that has turned physical. I am your typical bog standard karate instructor that you’ll find in any town with no pretentions to be anything more (I just happen to have an interest in the more pragmatic side of self-protection).

There seems to have been a move (at least in the UK) over the last 5-10 years towards practical martial arts, or perhaps I have just become more aware of it, and on the back of that there has been a big growth in schools offering “street lethal” martial arts. As a part of this there has been a lot of talk about having to have “been there” or “walked the walk” in order to be able to teach anything worthwhile. The general statements being that if you haven’t regularly faced violent confrontation then nothing you say can be in anyway valid and this is used as a stick to beat us (the non-fighters) with if we dare to teach martial arts with any sort of self-protection element. The upshot is that the picture that is being painted is that we are a complete waste of time and only they (the fighters) are worth training with.

Now I am not trying to be disparaging with the “fighter” label, I do understand that a lot of people have to face violence, or the threat of it at least, on a virtually daily basis as part of their work and I have a great deal of respect for those willing to do that. It is just a differentiator for the two classes of instructor.

It is commonly stated that “If you’ve never faced real violence you don’t know how you will react” which I fully appreciate, pressure testing (not matter how hard) will never fully replicate real violence, you always know that apart from a few bumps and bruises and maybe a few cracks and breaks (now I have been there and done that 🙂 ) you are basically safe. You can go a long way towards replicating the physical but the mental side never really approaches the real thing (and if it did I very much suspect that students wouldn’t train for more than 5 minutes and that you’d never see them again).

We are also told that “everyone is different” in these situations which again I fully appreciate.

This, however, is where I start to struggle with the logic of the argument, if you “don’t know how you’ll react” and “everyone is different” then how can the experience of the fighter tell them anything other than how THEY THEMSELVES will react.

The logic appear to indicate that they can’t really pass on this knowledge and so are no better able to transmit this understanding than the rest of us. It also, if you follow the logic, means that training with them is of no value to the instructor who wants to pass on this knowledge to his own students as, even if he teaches exactly what he has learned in the same way as he (or she) has learned it, their lack of real world understanding makes it a “waste of time”. I don’t really believe this to be the case, if I did then I wouldn’t spend so much of my time seeking out these people and training with them, I’d much rather piggy back off of their experience and learn as much of the theory at least as I can. I’m quite happy to spend the rest of my life without ever having any real world experience if that is at all possible.

I am well aware that there are many schools, including those who profess to teach self-protection, who teach fanciful fairy tale self-defense (10 minutes on YouTube will provide all the evidence you need, in fact they seem to be in the majority there) but there are also many of us who take the subject seriously enough to do proper research so we can avoid passing on bad advice and comic book techniques.

I think it’s more a question of honesty (on either side of the argument) and just being open about who you are and what you teach. My promotional line on my website is:

“Does this mean I can turn anyone into a “lean, mean, fighting machine”? No, obviously not. The unfortunate truth (or fortunate, depending on your world view) is that not everybody has the nature or potential. Can I give you a set of physical skills which will much improve your chances in a physical confrontation? Almost certainly.”

Not the snappiest tag line and probably not really what potential students want to hear but it is what I do.

My final word (in as much as I’ll ever stop talking 🙂 ) would be to question that, given that 90% of self-protection is in avoiding physical conflict and that a physical response is what you fall back on when all else has failed you, then would you rather learn your self-protection from someone who’s had hundreds of fights or from the guy who’s had none?

Just a thought 😉

Training Students with Trauma – Jeffrey Johnson

“The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.” -Psychologist Nicholas Hobbs

Trauma can alter the relationship between the psychological self and the physical self. A violent event can turn the body into a foreign place, with all human interaction becoming somewhat distant and strange. Martial arts training, traditionally conceived as a mind-body practice, has helped many people to bridge the gap between their psychological selves and their physical selves. As a professional with experience counseling survivors of trauma and teaching self defense, I am proposing a method for self-defense instructors to approach their students who may have experienced trauma, as well as a subject for therapists and counselors to explore as a means of helping their clients to reclaim their bodies and heal.

This is intended as a brief introduction to the topic and the proposed approaches. Understanding fully that self-defense instructors are not clinical therapists, I am not suggesting that a person attempt to take on more responsibility than they are professionally qualified to handle. I am hoping to help instructors to empower their students and avoid re-traumatizing vulnerable individuals.

Trauma

How trauma impacts people can vary from person to person. What can prove to be a debilitating emotional experience for one person can easily be shrugged off by another. Everyone is composed differently, so professionals should be careful not to rush to judgment over how a person has internalized the event(s) they have experienced. We don’t get to qualify or disqualify the magnitude of a troubling event or series of events in the life of another person. We don’t get to tell them to “get over it.” Not if we are trying to help them.

I have had to develop a thick skin when hearing the stories. Vicarious trauma can occur when we internalize the stories of trauma survivors, but it can be a bigger problem if those survivors’ residual behaviors cause distress for us. We begin to emulate the psychology of those we have been tasked to help. Know what your limits are with regard to how much help you can give and where it ends and the help from other professionals (domestic violence centres, rape crisis centres, etc.) begins. Know when to step back from situations beyond your expertise and abilities.

Trauma can affect the brain in similar fashion to a blunt force injury. The brain will often re-wire itself in an attempt to cope with the injury and the “new reality” of danger and fear. Trauma survivors (note that I avoid the term “victim.” How we frame events and our definitions of ourselves has a lot to do with how we cope and heal) may experience a range of emotions connected with the trauma, such as depression, anger, feelings of hopelessness/helplessness, hyper-vigilance, and any other emotion or combination of emotions. Again, most self-defense instructors are not clinical professionals, so know the limits of the assistance you can effectively offer.

Triggers and reenactments are things that a person with no personal trauma history will not easily understand. A smell, a spoken phrase, a noise, or any other seemingly random and unrelated stimulus or bundle of stimuli can cause (or trigger) an emotional response that acts like an echo of the original traumatic event. One might assume that the males in the room are planning to physically harm him. Or one might tighten her fists and breathe rapidly anticipating an attack. The first response is a paranoid hypervigilance while the other is a physiological response. I have seen re-enactments run the whole gamut of wild possibilities at work, but thankfully nothing overly dramatic at the dojo. Having a sense of what may trigger a student is important, because we don’t want to re-traumatize (essentially recreating the traumatic event, causing even more emotional damage) anyone. For instance, a person who was robbed at gunpoint may not be immediately ready to do gun defense techniques. I am not saying that a trigger is always reason to avoid necessary training. I am saying that it may take some time and finesse to help a student reach that level of trust with you and comfort in their own readiness to deal with body language, object reference, and maybe even phrases that replicate a very bad experience.

Teaching Method

The challenge for all self-defense instructors is to help students become stronger, more competent, and more confident people with each class. To succeed at this, we have to do a lot of listening and observing our students, cross-referencing what we see and hear with what we know and have experienced. We mustn’t make anything up to fill gaps; we are obligated to give the best of what we know to our students because someone’s life and person may depend on what we have taught. A trauma survivor may come to us with “pieces” of their narrative missing or damaged due to physical, emotional, or sexual assault/abuse. We are trying to help them to fill in their own gaps on their own terms.

We are dealing with disturbing behaviors of a criminal element. This means I have had to explain to very young children that they have to establish safe boundaries, always tell trusted adults when these boundaries have been crossed, and what to do if someone makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. This means discussing even what to do if someone attempts to touch private parts or other such disturbing and inappropriate behavior. I can’t pull answers out of thin air. I have had to read books by professionals who work with children dealing with this same disturbing subject matter. I have had to discuss with professionals what the best practices are for dealing with what children report. All of this applies to adults, whose stories have been, in my experience overall, more terrifying and disturbing and more psychologically damaging. Knowing something about the best practices regarding what your students might report to you (i.e. A child reports that a cousin has kissed him on the lips and made him feel embarrassed or a woman reports that her ex-boyfriend has been showing up unannounced at her home. These are stereotypical examples, I have heard far more bizarre and disturbing stories and I advise instructors to learn what they can to help their students) is key and aids students and their loved ones tremendously since very few people have any idea how to handle these situations. In other words, I know where my role ends and where a rape crisis worker’s, or police, or a lawyer’s begins.

Training methods can be very fun, very rewarding, and very empowering for students and instructors alike. Survivors are pretty brave already if they are coming to your dojo/gym to learn how to overcome the events that they are struggling with, and we have an opportunity to help add strength to that bravery. There are some major keys to remember when developing your training methods for these and all students:

DO NOT EVER give someone the “you should have” lecture. In my experience, survivors have said “I should have…” and I listen first, but I always encourage them not to beat themselves up over how the events occurred. Sometimes my advice-my good, tried and true advice, like don’t hang out with people known for unsafe, reckless behaviours, or don’t continue dating someone who has little respect for your boundaries and tends to be controlling-is grounds for my students to feel guilty and ashamed. They replay events and can see and hear what I am describing in vivid clarity. I might say, “you did the best you could given what you knew then. Let’s plan for the future and use what you know now to help you make the best choices for you and your family.” Trauma can steal a person’s faith in the future. I try to get them thinking ahead, using the past as a learning tool only.
Know your students. I try to anticipate their feelings when we run a new or difficult drill. I try to use some emotional intelligence to get a sense for how relaxed, stressed, tired, etc., my student is. All of this can impact how they feel about their own ability to perform, which of course alters performance. If they are having trouble, I slow down. If they apologize, I encourage them to forget the need to apologize and focus on being here NOW. If they are survivors of trauma, they may be experiencing strong feelings of insecurity, defeat, embarrassment, and their self-consciousness can cause them to pack their things and leave in the middle of a class (I have seen this happen). We instructors like to yell to get the energy up in a group. Some students don’t need yelling, but instead our confidence in them to improve with every class. In my experience as a behavioral counsellor, I used a “10 to 1 ratio” rule for encouraging statements to corrective statements. Most people don’t need 10, but some people do. Know who needs some more attention and encouragement.
Breathe-I incorporate breathing from Qigong and Tai Chi for my more nervous students (I also use this for my hyper kids. It helps them to focus in the same way.). When I run a drill where they have to close their eyes and wait for me to attack them with the pad, they practice the breathing I taught them so that they can get some control over their adrenal and fear response. It worked for me in a lot of situations as well. It didn’t mean I had no fear or that the adrenaline stopped pumping. It just took the edge off enough for me to still be able to think and observe during a crisis. A student may experience a reenactment during intense drills and not tell you. I had that happen with a woman whose ex-husband used to turn the lights off and beat her. This I learned after running the “close your eyes” drill I mentioned above. I would not have run that drill if I had known that at the time, but thankfully she reported feelings of empowerment since this was the first time she’d ever confronted that memory. In getting to know her, I always knew when she was getting nervous, filling up with disturbing memories. We would take some time to breathe together, every class if we had to. It helped to get her focused on pushing through the drill.
Push students to a level just above their competency. My intention isn’t to make it too easy, because then they don’t feel challenged. I also don’t intend to make it too difficult, because that is defeating. Defeat for some trauma survivors is so familiar that it can be a default emotional space, entered in to upon the mere scent of impending failure. If I know they can give me 10 palm strikes, I might have them give me 2 more at the end. If I know they can give me 5 strong knee strikes, I ask for 2 more at the end. If they say they can’t, I respond that they can, it will just take some time and effort. Most people get it during class, some might take one more class to get the mechanics of a technique or drill. I assure them that I look and feel just as foolish when first learning something new. I have to relate my own power to them as something they can attain to.
Ask for permission. You don’t have to literally say, “can I grab your wrist for this technique?” as obviously they have given you an automatic degree of permission just by signing the waiver for class. What I mean is making sure you are checking in with them when it is appropriate to make sure you aren’t pushing them so far in to their discomfort that it is harmful. Some people will quietly suffer, assuming your word is law because you are the authority and they want to be respectful. Encourage them to speak up about their boundaries. I used to tell the kids I taught that not even I had permission to make them feel unsafe or uncomfortable with themselves.

I hope this serves as a good starting point for many instructors who will certainly have some students coming to them seeking help in regaining their wholeness. Reiterating that we can only do so much in our roles as self defense instructors, I encourage the counsellors among us to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of realistic self defense training from quality instructors.

Russian Chavs – Mikhail Didenko

Editors note.

Whilst it all depends on a situation Russian chavs (white trash) are very aggressive, but they are usually bluffing. When encountering a really tough guy they will usually back off once they realise they have bitten off more than they can chew. They differ from real gangsters who are serious people – chavs are not wolves, they are jackals. At the same time they are the most frequent opponent the person in the street will come up against.

They are like an Bollywood movie fight – a lot of blah-blah-blah, and minimum of action. Chavs try to impress you telling you scary stories about themselves and trying to look cool, it is certainly a case of style above substance and the style is debatable too. They want to suppress you, to break your spirit, thus winning without a fight. However, most of it just an imitation.

When dealing with them it is important to stay cold-blooded and don’t listen to their bedtime stories, which would make Martin Scorsese envious, most of them are just hoodlums, street punks, so if you beat them it wouldn’t have any consequences as long as you do not get caught that is but let’s try to avoid that. Strangely though, were you to take ‘direct action’ they would just respect you, because you proved yourself, stood your ground, such is the world of the chav. But you never know – some of these bad boys can go to a police station and snitch, trying to squeeze some cash from you, it is never all over until it is over as they say.

According to their pseudo-criminal mentality, Russian chavs cannot beat or rob you right away. Usually they need a formal reason to do, they will try to set you up and reel you in like a fish. For example, you talk the wrong way and they just want to have a little ‘compensation’, you have failed to show them respect and need to pay the fine for this crime, once they ‘explain’ the error of your ways and you are frightened enough you give them your watches or purse by your own hands, in their minds this is then a gift from you to them, not a robbery. They think that would make them more innocent if questioned by the police and even in the court, because you gave it of your own free will!!

Knowing how they operate, like jackals, is the good news because when you understand the situation goes like this, you have some time to make a decision – to fight, to counter-bluff, to run or something else. Whilst the urge to give them a beating may be strong most of Russians are not that cruel and you can turn a conflict into a handshaking conversation. Just tell them that you respect Russia, and you respect your opponents, you know their game and see the funny side (even if there is not one). Maybe they would invite you to drink with them and you would become ‘best friends’ in a minute, remember Vodka is a great equaliser. Treat them as equals and don’t show your fear. Bluff works for you too.

While an average tourist will not come into much contact with our Russian chavs, they are best avoided with a polite ‘spasibo ne nado’ (thanks I don’t need it) as they can easily switch to your friend to your enemy, a chav can put on the friendly approach, but when you shake hands, he would grab your hand starting to punch you with another fist, most likely with assistance from his sidekicks. So don’t let them to touch you, especially not to embrace, to put their hand on your shoulder, because you cannot control distance in this way, and if they start fight you cannot move or run away. Be calm and careful and don’t relax until your opponents disappeared around the corner, then you can change your diapers.

When you encounter a Russian person in a street conflict, forget all that tolerant pacifistic stuff. Unfortunately, due to GULAG and anarchy in 90-ies after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of Russians follow the pseudo-criminal codes of behavior and they have the corresponding mentality. Only two variants are possible: 1. A victim 2. A predator. If you prove you are a predator, it’s OK. It is not necessary to fight, just show you have guts and the intenton to follow it through.

Of course, it depends again and a Russian chess or a violin player is not like that, but we are not talking about average people, poverty has created an underclass here and they need to feed off somebody, like a jackal they choose the easiest mark. Also, remember that these chavs can be in their 30’s or 40’s, but they are still behave on a teenager bullies level, their lack of sophistication both a strength and a weakness for them.

Due to this criminal mentality Russian people always have to be alert, they don’t feel safe and tourists to Russia need to be on their guard too if they stray into the wrong areas. Often ordinary Russian people may seem to be unfriendly and unsmiling but they are warm people once you get to know them, it is just an inbuilt defence system learned over many generations and helps prevent becoming the victim of any occasional chav. In the Russian society, one cannot show weakness, anywhere, in a street or in an office.

So if you come to Russia, and please do, but you meet a Russian chav, stand your ground, treat them as equals and remember they can easily turn to be your friends from your enemies and drink some vodka together, PRIVET!! (Cheers).

Principle Based Teaching, Part III – Rory Miller

Paul McRedmond describes his approach as “Awareness Based Teaching,” or ABT. Mechanically, breaking people is not difficult. The human body is not a mystery, or, at least, it shouldn’t be for any reasonably active adult. We all know what hurts. We all know which functions can’t be disrupted (breathing, circulation). And we all know how to move, whether it is pushing a car or swinging a hammer. The mechanics of breaking people are no different than any other mechanics. Physics doesn’t change in a fight.

Once you understand this, self-defense is mostly a matter of learning to see. Learning to recognize opportunities and available tools quickly enough and exploit them ruthlessly enough. Hence, ABT.

Training awareness is broad and deep. “Situational awareness” gets thrown around a lot as a phrase, but it is useless unless you have the training and experience to know what to be aware of. Seeing things is not and never has been the problem. It has always been noticing the important things and recognizing the unimportant so that they can be disregarded. So, breadth: Awareness spans from understanding the uses of terrain to working in the social milieu and down to the nuances of targeting and power generation.

And depth: Each piece of awareness can be studied at many levels. Group dynamics can be a life time study and so can body mechanics and communication.

Principles-Based Training is dependent on awareness, in both the student and the instructor. Honing that awareness will be a lifetime endeavor.

The next aspect works on a more micro scale. You will be teaching physical skills. We know that teaching an endless series of technique is an incredibly inefficient way to teach. We also know that memorizing technique is almost worthless in a fight. Attempting to process information consciously is far too slow.

Caveat, though. There is one potential problem with this teaching method: If your measures of success (grading) is based on what your students can parrot back, students trained this way will not test well. They will be able (for example) to improvise jointlocks under pressure, but they won’t be able to name a single lock or demonstrate a named lock.

Whatever you teach, there is a way to break it down to make it easy for the student to grasp intuitively. Breaking it down to the right chunks, combined with the right training methodology, make for much faster gains in applicable physical and interactive skills. I call the classes of technique broken down to the sweet spot for fast learning “Building Blocks.”

This will be idiosyncratic. No two people will break down what they teach in the same way. All practitioners who have gotten to the unconscious competence level of skill will have slightly different intuitive understanding of what they do and why it works. In other words, there is no perfect list. This is about what works, not about what looks pretty.

For instance, “striking” is not one of my Building Blocks. I teach striking in three parts– “Power Generation” + “Targets” + “Conformation.” Conformation is just a fancy way of saying “How to use the right weapon so you don’t hurt yourself.” And Power Generation is a combination of three things as well– Conservation (structure) Stealing (using gravity, the environment and the threat’s motion) and Generation (the things you do with your own muscles to hit hard.) Broken down in this way, the student gets comfortable (and decent power) with a variety of handstrikes in about three hours.

But remember it is a deep study as well. Three hours to good, solid hits. But years to get the nuances of each piece and a lifetime to explore all the other ways to hit hard.

That’s my breakdown, my building block. It would be perfectly valid and work just as well to break it down as Hand, Forearm and Elbow; Power Generation and Targeting.

Homework. Breakdown whatever you teach into chunks that make sense to you. Try breaking them down in different ways. For instance, I teach takedowns as Momentum Ploys; Sweeps (Static and Moving, moving broken down into draw, cross, or stop); true throws (full entry, half entry, and reverse); Leverage; Locks (up and down); Base destruction and; Combinations of the above. But it is perfectly valid and would work just as well to break them down based on balance principles as simply “Getting the Center of Gravity off the Base”. Move the center of gravity, change the base, combine those two. If I had a class full of physicists, I’d probably go with that as the chunk. Again, there are many ways to be right.

I’m going to go a little meta on you for the next set of things to understand. You must understand what you are doing. For physical skills, when you go hands on, there are only three valid reasons.

You are either:

Trying to escape

Trying to get the threat under control

Trying to disable the threat

You must understand these because these are three very different things. The body mechanics are different. Grappling and locking arts are incompatible with a strategy of escaping. Doing damage to the threat involves kinetic energy going towards his core, which is the absolute wrong direction for your kinetic energy to be moving if you are trying to escape.

The physics of these three reasons are different, thus the body mechanics will be different.

The goals of these three reasons are different, thus the best strategies and tactics will be different.

Evaluate your system as it stands and evaluate what you teach as you teach. Are you teaching your students how to escape, disable or control? And be very, very careful, because fighting is nowhere on that list and the goals, strategy, physics and body mechanics of fighting are just as unrelated.

And the last. You need to understand the strategy of your system. Your priorities. The biggest weakness in modern RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) systems is that they collect a variety of real cool techniques but usually have no strategic thread that ties them into a useable package. The human animal organizes information. Organized information, organized skills are far easier to use. Especially under pressure.

Managing Discrepancy – Schalk Holloway

My parents stayed in a small town on the Gold Coast of Queensland Australia for a couple of years. As is customary when visiting another country one quickly gets around to chatting about everything that’s different and strange from what you are used to. One of the first things they told me was about how different pedestrian crossings were to South Africa (where I reside and where we all come from). Apparently vehicle drivers in their own and the surrounding towns always give way to pedestrians. As in always. This sounded unbelievable as in South Africa you really have to watch your ass when crossing roads. Being my usual sceptical self I decided to check it out for the six weeks that I visited.

First thing I noticed was that the pedestrians there don’t even look before crossing. Initially it freaked me out. Every time I saw a pedestrian just going for it I would imagine them getting ploughed down by oncoming traffic. Never happened though. Vehicles just magically stop for pedestrians. It was crazy. They just assume all vehicles are going to stop. And they do. Interesting thing is that it is law that vehicles should give way for pedestrians in both countries. So technically – that’s what it should be like in South Africa as well. But it isn’t.

There’s a discrepancy between what is and what we believe should be.

I got into a tangle with a couple of ladies a while ago for sharing an article from Mashable where Mashable responded to a statement made by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She was quoted saying the following on a radio show

I know it’s controversial, but for your program, I’m going to stand up and be counted and, like I do in the book, be very honest. I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man or two men or two women, but I talk right now about woman and man, can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time, he or she — most of the time they think she can say, I changed my mind. No such thing is possible. ¹

I thought “wow, that’s good advice.” Got riled big time though by the girls. They felt that this idea is oppressive by nature. Their argument is that they should be able to do pretty much what they want to with their bodies without any fear of any type abuse. I agree.

But there is currently a discrepancy between what is and what we believe should be.

That discrepancy is conflicting by nature. In both the anecdotes that I have shared I am presupposing that what we believe should be is truth. Coming to this position is also a necessary process but it is not the focus of this article. This article is focused on the discrepancy and managing that discrepancy.

The first principle of managing the discrepancy is mutual acceptance of both positions.

Those on the side of what is needs to be honest about whether change or movement is necessary. Is what should be honestly and objectively healthier for all involved? If so, are we willing to accept that? If not why not? Those on the side of what we believe should be should at least acknowledge, if not accept, the reality of what currently is. If what is really is then we need to work from there to here.

I shared the first anecdote with the ladies from the second anecdote. Why? My argument is the following: If I, as a loving father, have to teach my children about pedestrian crossings, what do I teach? Do I just teach what is (South African experience)? Do I just teach what should be (Australian experience)? Or do I teach both? Which approach is best equated with my position as a loving father?

For me, it would obviously be to teach both. Advocates of what should be say that I should just teach my child that YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO CROSS THE ROAD WHENEVER YOU WANT TO WITHOUT FEAR OF MOVING VEHICLES. THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO STOP FOR YOU! But that would be silly because the current reality of what is is that they don’t always stop. So I teach both. I teach something along the lines of “remember, vehicles are supposed to stop, and when you drive try to be aware and always stop. But still, before crossing, check, because they don’t always stop.”

So why not teach my daughter that yes, her body is hers and she should be able to do with it what she wants, but also, that yes, the world DOES NOT CURRENTLY WORK LIKE THAT, so maybe it’s not the wisest thing to jump naked into bed if you’re not planning on having sex (and yes, I, as her father, would talk to my daughter about that).

The ladies agreed to this line of thinking. If they did not, I would seriously have wondered why.

The second principle of managing the discrepancy is accepting that it is a process.

Getting from there to here will have to be a process.

If we have to put should be as position 10 on a line of 1 to 10 and is as position 1 as follows

IS SHOULD BE

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

and we are serious about getting from what is to what should be then we need to acknowledge that is is a distance away. There has to be a process. If you are not willing to acknowledge this principle of process – why not?

The third principle of managing the discrepancy is allowing the two positions to compliment each other.

This principle should actually be the first principle.

However, in highly polarized or aggressive environments it’s not possible to see the complimentary potential until the first two principles have been established. Thinking about different words to describe the two groups we can possibly go with realists for the what is camp and visionaries for the should be camp.

My wife and I fall broadly into these two categories. I’m the realist. She’s the visionary. She essentially creates a lot of energy for movement by consistently helping us to see where we should be going. I get us moving effectively because I’ve got a good handle on where we are and what would be good first steps. This is great. Energy and effectivity. We compliment each other. And I think it serves as a good (albeit simplistic) analogy for what can be possible once we start to see the worth that each of the groups bring to the situation.

¹ http://mashable.com/2015/06/02/dr-ruth-rape-consent/

Maintaining Balance – Ashtad Rustomji

In almost every field of study or work, there are various areas with focus on different aspects of that subject. These areas are meant to achieve a specific purpose in a specific aspect of that subject.

For example, what comes to your mind when I say ‘Fitness’? Now when I say ‘Self-Defense‘ ‘Self-Protection‘ ’Conflict Management‘ etc. what areas of studies come to your mind? Does one specific thing come to your mind or more than one? There are many other similar fields of study like physics and engineering that focus on various areas of those subjects.

Now, let’s take fitness for example, it’s not just about lifting weights or “just” running or “just” yoga, stretching, etc. No, in biological terms, Fitness is an organism‘s ability to survive in a particular environment. Of course it can also be described as being competent enough to fulfill a particular task. It also can be described as a condition of being physically strong, athletic and healthy.

There is no one aspect of fitness, it consists of combining different areas that focus on improving your physical abilities. The main areas include Cardio, Calisthenics, Weight training and along with them an equally important aspect would be; Diet and Nutrition. Of course there are sub-categories of the above mentioned areas that focus on and specialize in different aspects like Endurance, Stamina, Dexterity, Reflexes and Flexibility, Strength, Speed, Durability, Conditioning, but doing only one of these, won‘t mean that you have achieved physical fitness, it would only mean that you‘re not totally out of shape. Only by training every aspect, understanding it as a whole and applying the knowledge practically will you achieve a certain level of fitness and you will progress further from there. The thing is, fitness doesn’t end on the physical level, but extends to a psychological level too, there are exercises that help you be more focused, improve concentration, etc. When you train on both levels with dedication and persistence, you achieve total fitness.

Same goes with Conflict Management, Self Protection, Self Defense, etc. They’re not just one thing, they’re composed of many different aspects that address all the necessary requirements to survive violence. Focusing on just one of those aspects will not help you prepare for what you think you are preparing for, instead it‘ll just give you a false sense of security that will be destroyed when you face something you weren’t even aware was a part of it.

There are many who tend to focus on just one aspect of those subjects, resulting in an incomplete analysis of what they truly consist of, therefore not achieving effective solutions to the problems they‘re claiming to solve.

Same goes for the training balance between SD and Martial Arts. They’re not the same. Simply put, SD doesn’t take a lifetime to learn, it’s a legal term used when you need to justify your violent actions during an attack in the court of law. You simply cannot pile them together, there has to be a balance between what you train for violence and what you train as an art or as part of a skill development routine.

When learning and training in subjects like CM, SD, SP, a lot of different areas need to be focused on. They are;

-Legal.

-Societal.

-Environmental.

-Consequential.-

-Moral.

-Psychological.

-Biological.

-Physical.

-Strategic.

-Tactical.

These areas give an overall understanding of violence dynamics. While it is a broad subject, the physical aspects are given the most preference than any other by most. There is no balance in training for violence, it’s all about fighting for many.

But without the balance in training, the knowledge and preparation required to face and survive violence is not gained resulting in an incomplete understanding of the subject matter. When that happens the individuals involved in the violent incident have to face harsh Consequences of their actions. They don’t know when to avoid and back-off (Strategic) and they don’t know how to prevent it (Tactical), they’re not aware of the Legal, Moral or Societal Consequences of their actions, so they resort directly to (what is supposed to be) the last option, I.e. the Physical part of the subject without considering the Environment they‘re in, which either leads to them landing in more trouble than they imagined and more damaged than they expected (or didn‘t expect), not to mention the Psychological issues that occur in the aftermath of violence.

Same goes for Martial Arts too. Too many get too focused on the punching and kicking rather than focus on the responsibilities that come with being a Martial Artist and the in-depth knowledge required to actually be competent enough to utilize the techniques taught as practically as possible in the appropriate environment and to know when and how to translate them to various situations.

I’ve heard Martial Artists say that Martial Arts is a journey and yes, they’re absolutely correct, it’s just that sometimes, some Martial Artists forget where their journey is supposed to lead them, there is no destination for their journey, and a journey without a destination is just wandering around aimlessly.

Most of them just follow “What their instructors once told them“, rather than think for themselves and try to understand what the instructor meant by what they said or even question whether what they said made any sense at all in the first place. All the while forgetting to maintain the required balance between the physical aspect of Martial Arts and the non-physical ones, which in MA’s case, includes an unique aspect of; Philosophy. Many know it as ‘Budo’. Of course, it’s a Japanese term, but the philosophy itself is applied in virtually all of traditional and classical Martial Arts. It encompasses much more than physical techniques and violence, it includes self-control, self-discipline, respecting others, understanding your art in not just width, but in depth. These things, the principles, they transcend the physical aspect of Martial Arts. They’re what help a Martial Artist maintain the balance in their training.

In conclusion, Balance is a simple principle that applies to just about everything. Without balance, the desired results will not only be difficult to achieve, but almost impossible.

It doesn‘t matter how hard you train in one area of the subject, not unlike a machine, without all of the components, the knowledge will not be fully functional and effective.

Of course, I’ll add this, I’m obviously no “expert” on any of the subjects above. What I wrote, are just my opinions based on my experiences and research, you (the reader) will have to test things out for yourself to check and see if I’m b.s’ing or if these things are indeed true. After all, what good is information if you don’t test it and put it into action, right?

Well, that’s all. Thank you for reading.

Garden Club Ladies – Kathy Jackson

This article is about and for Garden Club Ladies. You almost certainly know one; perhaps she’s your mother, your aunt, your sister, your grandmother. Perhaps she’s even yourself.

When I described this demographic to a friend and asked if they were a part of her culture too, she instantly responded: “Oh, yes. The matriarchy is alive and well here.” As my friend understands, Garden Club Ladies run the world. Oh, not unassisted, of course: it also takes farmers and carpenters and plumbers and shopkeepers and investors and more, to keep the wheels of our modern culture spinning along at pace. But Garden Club Ladies run their communities, and no doubt about it.

A Garden Club Lady in America drives a luxury SUV – a four wheel drive Lexus or BMW, perhaps even a Mercedes. She’s a retired professional woman, or a lifelong housewife married to an executive or successful business owner. She uses the SUV to haul her pedigreed pup to dog shows and agility trials, or to haul hay for her horses and other pasture pets. She likes her vehicle because it has enough room to conveniently carry her golf bag to her country club, where she plays once a week with a friend before their committee meeting for the charity pro-am golf tournament. She also uses it to collect boxes of clothing for the back-to-school donation drive she organizes every fall, and of course she enjoys having enough room in the back to keep a pair of weeding gloves and a few trowels for her volunteer work at the senior center. In the spring, you’ll find her busy helping the local parks get spruced up before the first big wave of tourism hits, and summer finds her watching over several of the exhibits at the county fair.

She’s a key member of the local Friends of the Public Library and other service organizations like the Elks or Kiwanis or Rotary Club. If her town has a Farmers’ Market, she was among the first to help get it organized and you’ll find her there every Tuesday morning helping to set up. One of her pets is a certified therapy dog, so on Wednesdays she’s busy at the nursing home visiting the old folks, and she spends Saturday afternoons at the public library so hesitant young learners can read out loud to her dog. She and her friends also organize meals for anyone they know who might be in trouble or in need, and they provide the endless succession of casseroles and three-bean salads that grace every potluck from one end of the country to the other.

The details might change. The Garden Club Ladies never do. They might be as young as 45 or as old as 85, but however old or young they are, they share several key characteristics:

They are wealthy by the standards of their communities.
They look wealthy: they drive luxury cars, wear expensive clothes, and like to be seen sporting the diamond tennis bracelets and other fancy jewelry they’ve amassed over the years.
They spend most of their waking hours in public. They are the first to arrive to set up local festivals, and the last to leave after dark when the event is over.
They are not young (except in their thinking).
They are female.

What do the Garden Club Ladies have to do with us, you wonder? I’m glad you asked! This demographic – female, older, wealthy and community-involved – is a prime victim group for muggers and home invasion robberies. They’re attractive targets for this type of crime because of their obvious wealth, their public visibility, and their age and gender.

Despite these factors, we don’t find many Garden Club Ladies working out in crossfit gyms. The very idea of one of these women joining an MMA or Krav Maga class brings a wry smile. They’re not going to show up for a Critically Dynamic Tactical Operators Carbine class or a training evolution of Extreme Close Quarters Handgun Battle Concepts. So it’s easy to write them off as defensive students. Since Garden Club Ladies won’t take “serious” classes, we think, they can’t possibly be serious about self-defense.

It’s a rare self-defense trainer who spends a moment’s thought about getting Garden Club Ladies into class, or who works at providing any classes that might meet their needs. After all, there’s no glory in teaching 60-year-old women how to defend themselves. There’s no glory in it because no matter what you teach these women or how well you do it, they are not going to make you look good by being a beast in the MMA cage, slaughtering the opposition on the competition mat, or dominating all the USPSA events at the shooting club for the next ten years. At best, they’ll still have the bodies and minds of 60-year-old women, though they may stand a little taller and look a little more alert as they carry cookies and juice into the building where the Red Cross blood drive is being held. Where’s the glory in that?

Let’s bring this home to where I live in the firearms training world. If you’re not into firearms, or if they’re prohibited in your neck of the woods, you’ll have to translate this stuff into your own terms. All I can do is tell you a little bit about my own experiences within my own style, and let you take it from there.

The conventional wisdom is that Garden Club Ladies don’t take classes because they aren’t interested in protecting themselves, or because they don’t realize that their lifestyles put them at risk for some types of violent crime. This is not true. Garden Club Ladies experience the same low-level, back of the mind fear of violent crime that nearly all women share, and they cope with it in a variety of ways.

When Garden Club Ladies purchase handguns, their stated purpose is more often self defense than any other reason. But they’re still unlikely to take a class focused on self defense. That’s outside their culture.

Fortunately, that’s changing. Slowly, but it’s changing. It happens sometimes that a group of Garden Club Ladies decides to take a class together. As an instructor, I’ve found myself fascinated by the group dynamics that drive such classes.

For instance, Garden Club Ladies love to feed each other and those around them. Food provides a shared human experience, and it’s often how these women share their love for others. They’re sometimes uncomfortable in venues where people eat together without sharing the burden of providing at least some elements of the meal for each other. I’ve found that whenever I teach a class that includes a lot of women and I tell students to bring a sack lunch, the first GCL who hears the plan will immediately offer to organize either a potluck or a catered lunch for the class. If the plan is to provide a catered meal, that woman and several of her friends will bring homemade cookies or another dessert to share. It’s almost the first thing they want to know about a weekend class: what’s the plan for meals?

When we hear something like this, it’s tempting to believe that these women – focused on frivolities like food! – therefore cannot possibly be serious about learning the skills offered in the class. That’s not actually the dynamic at work here. What these women are doing is helping to create an event that fits into their lifestyles, that meshes with their existing values and personal images rather than clashing with them. They’re not interested in changing their entire lifestyles to accommodate self-defense, but this doesn’t mean they’re uninterested in self defense. It simply means that they’re looking for ways to make learning about self defense fit into the lifestyle they already live and love.

When we reject these efforts to make the learning experience more closely match our students’ lived experiences, we’re actually rejecting the students themselves. We’re saying that it’s not enough for Garden Club Ladies to learn how to defend themselves as the people they are; they have to instead become someone else entirely. That’s not an attractive proposition, so it’s hardly surprising when potential students aren’t much attracted to it. Instead of fighting the Garden Club Ladies’ social expectations, how much better it would be to leverage their existing culture into a powerful force to drive these students to attend good training and practice together after class.

What else helps and hinders Garden Club Ladies and their willingness to attend serious training classes? Of course, one thing that keeps these students away is the usual excuse common to all students: money and time. Let’s examine those more closely.

Garden Club Ladies have a great deal of disposable income, and they spend it freely on products and events that are important to them. We can see by the clothes they wear that they’re as willing to spend their money on themselves as on other people. These women like to feel good about their purchases, and they feel good when they buy things praised by their peer group. This is true whether those things are tangible goods they can show off, or intangibles such as donations to charity events with public recognition. When the local GCL culture decides that training in self-defense is a socially laudable endeavor, Garden Club Ladies cheerfully invest in it.

Time is a paradox for Garden Club Ladies. Retired or working part-time volunteer jobs, they usually have plenty of opportunity to arrange their schedules around important events. But because they are so involved in their communities and charity work, finding time to attend a firearms training class can be a big deal. Plans have to be made a long time in advance, and should not conflict with the Garden Club’s annual tour of homes that raises funds for cancer research or with any other big local fundraiser. (Alternatively, the class should be scheduled on a weekend that coincides with the charity event, and donate a percentage of proceeds to it. Ask a Garden Club Lady to figure out the logistics that will make that work, then stand back as she mobilizes the matriarchal army to make it so.)

When a GCL says she doesn’t have enough time or money for a training class, it means she doesn’t believe she’ll receive enough value from the event to offset her investment. This demographic does understand the worth of both money and time. They won’t waste either one on anything that doesn’t provide an equal amount of value. “Value” here is measured in social status as well as in more tangible factors such as transportation or nutrition. Keep that in mind; when someone in this demographic suggests something you might consider frivolous as an addition to the class, they’re often trying to provide more value as measured by their culture’s standard of value.

When we do get these women into classes, we’re often tempted not to take them as seriously as other students. They’re usually more social and more chatty than fits into the regimented teaching style of most defensive handgun classes. We see them talking with the students around them, visiting with each other and paying attention to each other’s needs rather than grimly focusing on their own targets. We hear them talking and laughing on the breaks, and we think maybe they aren’t taking it as seriously as they ought. Again, this isn’t quite the dynamic that’s happening here.

Some time ago, I was working with students in a women’s shooting class that had around fifteen or twenty students in it. The students were each partnered with another student who would coach them as they fired. Another instructor and I were behind the line along with other trained instructors, all of us ready to help where needed. As we watched the students work together, the other instructor turned to me and gestured toward one particularly animated pair of students. “Those girls aren’t serious!” she hissed. “They’ve been laughing this whole time. Maybe we should break them up so they’ll learn something here.” And indeed, those two students were chatty and laughing, joking about their ability to hit the target and giggling about their errors together. But what my fellow instructor didn’t know was that one of those two women had been violently assaulted just a few weeks before class. She hadn’t come to class to trade jokes with her friend; she had come for the deadly serious purpose of learning how to save her own life, as she had tearfully explained in a heart wrenching conversation we’d had a few days before class started. She and her compassionate friend were doing everything in their power to make it possible for her to learn the material without falling apart.

Instead of fighting the social dynamic, it helps to move with it and use it. By pairing the students, we improved the instructor/student ratio and had the ability to leverage the students’ social instincts to help each other. When the class becomes too chatty or too loud for some students to focus, we can use the same social dynamic in a different way by challenging students to reach a specific goal. Garden Club Ladies want reasons to root for each other and cheer each other on. Setting competitive goals often helps achieve this, and works best with partners or teams competing together. Individual competitions often fall flat because they work against the social dynamic rather than with it, but shared competitions often do the trick.

That brings us to one common accusation leveled at women’s classes in general, which may be even more tempting to apply to classes where Garden Club Ladies attend: they’re too comfortable, with standards too low and no real bar of achievement to earn. Of course, that depends more on the instructor than on any one of the students. If a class full of GCLs fails to bring out each students’ full potential, that’s a failure of instruction and not the fault of the students.

As students, Garden Club Ladies don’t want to be treated like children, don’t want anything dumbed down, don’t want to be condescended to or laughed at (who does?). They do want standards. They do want the standards to be tough and fair and achievable. They want everyone around them to experience success so that they can celebrate their success together, but they want to celebrate it as an earned success – not a sinecure, not a pat on the head of a child, not a participants’ ribbon. They want to earn recognition for skills they’ve worked hard to achieve.

Personally, I believe that if a student has invested the time and money to come to class, they’re serious students no matter what demographic they belong to. Whether they remain so … well, that’s almost entirely up to me as their instructor, and what I do to help keep them engaged with the material and learning more.

Garden Club Ladies aren’t the easiest demographic to teach. Although they aren’t couch potatoes (far from it!), they also aren’t trained athletes or experienced martial artists who understand how to move their bodies for good results in class. They’re sometimes confused by the mechanics of manipulating the gun, and they’ll talk everything over – endlessly! – if you let them. They can be frustrating students and there’s very little glory in teaching them within the macho culture of the self-defense community as it stands today.

But if you’re teaching because you want to help real people learn to protect themselves from violent crime, there’s nothing like the satisfaction that comes from working with this demographic.

And the food is usually excellent.

Reading the Signs, Part III – Garry Smith

No, it is not advice on washing your latest new shirt, skirt or other piece of clothing. The cry, ‘These colours do not run’, beloved of the English football hooligan abroad. ‘Colours’ are large brocade and embroidery flags which were originally carried into battle so that soldiers of a particular unit could see where the rest of their unit was located at all times and used as a rallying point during the course of the battle. The infantry units of the British army each have two Colours: the Queen’s Colour, which is a union flag and symbolises the regiment’s loyalty to the Crown, and a regimental Colour which has all the unit’s battle honours inscribed on it. (http://www.royal.gov.uk).

Loss of the colours was not acceptable, indeed it would be a disgrace to the regiment so they must be defended at all times. The colours are not carried in modern warfare and are now used for ceremonial purposes, nevertheless, brave men died protecting a piece of cloth.

The thing is they were not protecting the piece of cloth but the meaning imbued in it. Every country has its flag, separate regions, states and counties have theirs, Vexillology is the “scientific study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags, flags are popular things.

We wave them to celebrate, we burn them to protest. One persons symbol of freedom is another persons symbol of oppression. For most nations the flag represents us, it is what we rally around when we get together, in September (12th) my brother is hosting a Last Night of the Proms (http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/features/last-night) party and I expect there to be flags and bunting as we engage in this particularly British tradition. The Union Jack will be the main flag as it represents Britain. It is so called because it combines the crosses of the three countries united under one Sovereign. The Union flag consists of three heraldic crosses, the cross of St George is a red cross on a white ground, the cross saltire of St Andrew is a diagonal white cross on a blue ground and the cross saltire of St Patrick is a diagonal red cross on a white ground.

And here comes a teaser, the Union flag is the flag of the Monarchy but has come to represent Britain, the flag of St George represents England, as I am English which is my flag? Well I prefer the flag of St George over the Union flag as I am not a monarchist. The problem is that some of us English do not see why St George should be the patron saint (if we need one at all let it be St Edmund) and why share him and his flag, why do we need a possibly Palestinian born Roman soldier as an English icon? It does not make sense. We English have our own identity and source of pride, our Anglo Saxon origins.

So for me, the flag I will be taking to the last night of the proms party will be the flag of the White Dragon of our Anglo Saxon ancestors. OK, the origins of the White Dragon as the battle flag of the nascent English, the Englisc as they first called themselves, is shrouded in mystery, mythology and numerous pieces of archaeological evidence. But for me it represents my roots, my identity as English better than some 19th century political coming together of separate nations or a foreign saint.

For me you pay your money and you make your choice. Fly your flag, I will fly mine. The flag you fly will say a lot about you, it will not say everything, but it may just reflect your core values and who you identify as. Flags are made to wave, they are made to show the world who we are, which tribe we belong to. My flag, the White Dragon, represents who I am, the tribe I identify with. That is it. I am lucky enough to have friends of many nationalities and I welcome them all and their flags.

I spent a week in a hotel in Greece a few years back whilst the European Football Championships were on, at night the place came alive with the supporters from Holland, France, Germany, Italy and England all donning their respective football shirts and colours and bringing out their flags, rallying around their colours. It was a mini celebration and the vibe was fantastic. Members of different tribes hoisting their colours in an air of mutual respect. Not as opposing camps about to go to war but as fellow travellers differing with each other but respecting the others beliefs and traditions, a healthy form of patriotism. These were not the hooligans for whom football is a vehicle for violence which is like the false patriotism referred to be Samuel Johnson when he said “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.

I do not have time for flag burners. For me it is a sign in itself when that point is reached, a sign that the burner cannot articulate and so resorts to desecrate. Flags as icons really do come to represent the sacred and the profane and polarise peoples. That star spangled banner represents freedom to many in the world but is the shadow of repression for some. Recent events in the USA over the Confederate flag and the Star and Stripes highlight the increasing political divisions in American society as highlighted in Jonathan Heidt’s excellent book ‘Righteous Minds’.

The rainbow flag of the gay pride movement and the black flag of Islamic State both arouse passions that cross boundaries of nation, religion and morality in a multitude of ways. Both proclaim to the world the identities of those who gather under them and their allies who attach themselves, to me they are almost diametric opposites in both visual representations and values presented.

Stark contrast? You bet. Often it is the starkness of the contrast that helps us to see. So reading the signs is pretty easy with flags, they are obvious symbols who’s principle use is to express the identity of the group. Now earlier I said I was English, of Anglo Saxon descent, but I am also a Yorkshireman, hailing from gods own county itself…… So for me, alongside the White Dragon I also will hoist the White Rose of Yorkshire. Does this mean that I must never tread foot in that hell hole that is Lancashire? Of course not, I love a good hotpot and a pint of Boddies, but I do love some of the banter and long may it last, raise your banners, if you feel the need proclaim to the world who you are, there is nothing wrong with that but do not get ants in your pants when somebody else does the same, especially somebody different, with a different flag, of different colours with a different identity, because that, as we English will tell you, is bad form.

So reading the signs is important, some are obvious like flags waving in the breeze, bright and brazen, others are less so and require a more practised eye to spot them. The thing is we humans fill our world with signs and symbols, letters and numbers being just that though they take on a life of their own when we use them so often. These are more or less universal symbols but every tribe has its own symbols with which it interacts and identifies itself and sets its boundaries. Know them, learn to read them, respect them and you will stay that much safer.

‘The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do and how to change’ by Charles Duhigg – Reviewed by Garry Smith

This is an incredibly interesting book. It combines scientific research into human behaviour and psychology with great story telling to unravel how we for habits and how they run our lives. I was particularly fascinated with the incredible amount of research done by marketing companies and the big corporations and not that surprised to find that they often know more about us than we do.

If you train yourself and more importantly if you train others in anything at all, no matter how much you already know, this book will deepen your understanding on how we develop skills by building complex neural networks. Not only that, but what is involved when we try to rewire the brain, how it can go wrong and how to do it successfully.

This is as good an introduction to the architecture and functioning of the brain as most people will need in an incredibly easy to access format. Whilst focusing in p[art one on the individual, part two looks in depth at organisations and part three at societies.

The scope of this book is enormous but it is so well written you are both informed and entertained throughout, and every now and then up pops a dinky little diagram to reward the reader (oops, is that me revealing something). You will learn about camouflaging kidneys, placing sticky tunes on radio playlists and how the shops know a woman is pregnant before she does. In fact this is the kind of book that will have you annoying your significant other as you keep reading bits out to them.

It is also full of really useful anecdotes that will help you understand your training and your teaching better and I have used a few of them times over to explain otherwise technical concepts to students. People love stories more than jargon.

Treat yourself, by it, read it, read it more than once and keep it handy as a reference, I do.

Available for purchase at the CRGI Bookstore.

Tripod – Clint Overland

A buddy of mine asked me to fill in for him at the bar that he works at. No biggie, we cover each other whenever there is a need. It’s a part of being Brothers. I should have turned him down. The night is almost over and everything has gone smooth. No fights, no puking, no blood. It’s all good. The guy that’s playing on stage is a midget, long haired little cat, plays a hell of a guitar and has a great blues voice. What I don’t know is that all night several patrons have been buying him shots of Jaeger. I talked to the bartender later and she said he drank almost an entire bottle by himself.

It’s about that time and I am hollering out LAST CALL. When all of the sudden, this little naked long haired midget runs right by me.

Now let me pause here and say I froze in my tracks. There are times when you can’t move because you are not sure what the hell it is that you saw and you are not sure you know how to deal with it. In my mind, I pull up everything I can remember from every Marc MacYoung and Peyton Quinn book I can remember. Nada, nothing. I look into the old memory file inside my head and, nope, not one thing about dealing with drunken naked midgets. Fifteen years of the violence trade and not one idea of how to deal with a naked hairy midget! Have I got my point across? I was frozen in my tracks. Now back to the story.

He runs right up to a table full of middle aged biker mamas and starts gyrating wildly while they start screaming and laughing hysterically. There I come, like some twisted leather clad version of Frankenstein’s monster, “STOP IT! COMMME HERREEEE YOUUU!!! He zips away from me and runs up to a table of Mexicans. Then does the same thing and everyone is applauding and laughing. I get close enough this time to grab his arm, and he starts flailing away trying to twist out of my grasp. At this point, his gigantic penis slaps me across the shin. Second freeze in less than 2 minutes.

Let me try to put this into perspective for you. He would have needed a blood transfusion to get a full blown hard on or he might have passed out from lack of blood to his brain. It was a trip hazard. He could stand on a pool table and play golf with no hands. Crawl across the desert sands on all fours and leave five tracks. Do you have the picture? It is fucking HUGE!! Gary Lawson, in his Far Side Cartoons, drew one of a guy that worked in the Herpetarium for 20 years and all of a sudden had a cumulative case of the HEEBIE JEEBIES! That is exactly how I felt at that moment. GWAAAA get away get away now!!!

He runs off and after I unfreeze, I start chasing him again. Finally I got close enough to grab a handful of his hair with a straight arm, didn’t want that thing to hit me again. I lead him back to the manager’s office where they bring his clothes to him. It was then I learned that this was not the first time it had happened and that his nickname was TRIPOD.

So folks, don’t think that you won’t freeze just because you have dealt with things in the past. Trust me, it can get weirder than you would ever imagine and if you’re in the violence trades you had better damn sure be able to change gears on the run.

This is something I do not even consider to be one of my worst nights at work. In a Dallas dive bar I watched a man get gutted by a broken beer bottle and had to fight my way through a brawl to get on my knees and hold his intestines in while a fight is going on around me and kick people away so he didn’t die. It took almost 15 minutes for the ambulance to show up all the while the cops are breaking up the fight and I sat there just thankful that someone hadn’t decided to bust a chair over my head or slit my throat while my hands were full. This is a reality check folks, life is a precious commodity and if you want to save yours you need to learn to adapt and adjust to whatever comes your way. How you react as well as respond to a situation can very well mean whether you and others live or die. In my opinion one of the first things a person has to learn to do to be a good Conflict Manager is the ability to think while acting. If you can’t do this find another line of work, it’s a simple as that. One of the best lessons I ever learned from twenty seven years of dealing with drunken, chemically enhanced primates is to read situations not from what was actually happening but from what should be happening and wasn’t .

I would position myself where I could view most of the bar, and what I was looking for was people not having fun, individuals that were drinking alone and acting sad or frustrated. For groups backing away from an area, or moving into tactical position. I would watch for people that might be either blocking the flow of traffic or entrance into bathrooms. Go out some night to a local bar and look for what is happening and what disrupts that flow or what should be happening and isn’t. Then go to a nightclub and sit away from everyone and watch as the same things occur but in a different speed. This gives you a position of experience to draw from. Do the same at a mall or in a crowed venue, each situation has many similarities and will flow the same way if you know what to look for and what not to look for. You should then begin to look into yourself to see how you will or could respond to anything that happens. Remember that the first goal of a good conflict manager is not to outfight people but to outthink them. This is the difference between a Professional and an Amateur, a pro wants to end it as easily as possible a fool wants to fight. It took me 10 years of broken noses and missing teeth to get this point driven into my thick head. The next 17 I spent learning not to fight but to win no matter what it took.

Let me give you another example. Middle aged man walks in one night with a hot 20 something year old woman. I recognize him from another bar across town I used to work at, real asshole that likes to make a fool of himself and show everyone how much of a badass he is. But what I know that he doesn’t is that two days before I saw him with his wife at a local Walmart. I waited a bit and sure enough he starts acting the way I knew he was prone too. I walked up and leaned over and told him “I know your wife.” He stopped everything and left a little later without causing a scene. I won and kept the peace by simple outthinking the person without the use of violence.

I teach young people that want to go into the bouncing trade a list of rules that if they follow to the best of their ability they will be able to survive. My number one rule and this one is as sacred as anything you will ever read or learn and all the other rules lead right back to rule number one.

1.NO MATTER WHAT WE GO HOME TONIGHT!

If that means we have to apologize to someone we hate, we apologize. If we have to act as a priest and hear a confession from someone that disgust us, then we listen. If we have to bust someone in the mouth with a chair then that’s what we have to do but we go home tonight. We will take the easiest win that we can get and by win I mean we live. To be a conflict manager doesn’t meant to be the best fighter or martial artist. It means to use the best tool for the job and the ability to adapt is one of the most important.