Monkey Lessons – Erik Kondo

Everybody loves when the underdog defeats the bully. But what about when you are the stronger or more skilled one? How do you justify beating someone else senseless? Well, you go with the next best thing. You claim the recipient of your beating deserved it. Now, all is right with your world. You were just teaching a much needed lesson to a misbehaving cretin.

Using Rory Miller’s terms for types of social violence, you were not engaging in a Monkey Dance, you were just administrating a much needed Educational Beatdown.

The internet is filled with videos of one person beating another to a pulp. When one of the commenters sides with the Victor, he or she will typically justify the beating with various claims such as:

1. The Victim deserved it because of his prior actions (Blaming the victim).
2. The Victim deserved it because of he was a scumbag (Othering the victim).
3. The Victim deserved it because he was dangerous and could have caused harm to the Victor (Fearing the victim).
4. The Victim deserved it because his “type” always acts in this kind of anti-social manner (Stereotyping the victim).

In order to really feel good about the beating, it needs to be established that the Victim had it coming to him or her. The above four methods show how people justify their support for the use of force, including excessive force. Once they can establish in their mind that the Victim deserved whatever he or she received, they can enjoy the beating without guilt. In their minds, it’s not that they are racist, bigoted, or sexist, they just want to see justice served.

Many acts of violence are in essence enforcement actions of some real or perceived boundary (social rule) violation. Almost all enforcement actions can be categorized as Under-Enforcement (too little), Over-Enforcement (too much), or appropriate for the situation. How the enforcement is viewed is in the eye of the beholder(s). This sounds all well and good, until we realize that many times the Beholder is your Monkey Brain/limbic system.

Instead of using your Human/rational brain to evaluate the violation (real or perceived) and formulate the best level of response, your Monkey/emotional Brain jumps at the chance to teach someone a lesson. But in order to teach someone a lesson, you also need to have the Means and Opportunity to do so (as in Intent, Means, Opportunity). The greater your advantage (Means) relative to the recipient of your lesson, the more incentive your Monkey/Ego has to want to use it.

When people talk about “how cash burns a hole in your pocket”, they are talking about how the simple act of having available money in your pocket means you feel the need to spend it. Cash is the Means that drives you to seek the Opportunity to spend it, even if your original Intent to purchase was relatively low. Your Monkey wants you to spend the cash, even through your Human/rational brain knows you need to spend the cash on your rent and groceries for your family.

Let’s assume your Monkey wants to give out behavioral lessons to those it feels deserve them. Your Monkey needs to have three things:

The Intent to give a lesson to a particular person, and the Means to give the lesson to that person, and the Opportunity to give the lesson to that person.

The combination of Intent and Means is the “cash” in your pocket. Now, you only need the Opportunity to spend it. The higher the magnitude of your Intent and Means, the more likely you are going to encounter an Opportunity to provide a lesson to someone. Another way to look at it, is that you have a “chip on your shoulder” and you are just waiting for someone to knock it off.

Let’s say you carry a weapon and/or train in “combative arts” for self-protection. Weapons and skills are effectively force multipliers which provide you with a greater magnitude of Means. If you also happen to be the kind of person that habitually,

1. blames certain groups of people for wrongdoing,
2. considers certain groups of people less than you, (othering)
3. believes certain groups of people to be dangerous (fearful)
4. sees certain types of groups as all acting in the same type of anti-social manner, (stereotyping)

then, it is likely, you are predisposed to wanting (having the Intention) to give a person in this group a lesson. And you will jump at the first Opportunity to do so.

Your Monkey/limbic brain is only concerned with the here now. It is not concerned with the consequences of its actions. It doesn’t consider that the consequences of “giving a lesson” may be that you go to prison, and/or spend thousands of dollars in legal fees, and/or you are seriously injured/killed, and/or you seriously injure/kill “your student”, or you become a victim of a revenge action by “your students” friends and family, and/or some other undesirable consequence.

Now you are faced a paradox. You carry a weapon and/or train in the combative arts as a way to keep yourself safer. Yet, in fact, these actions actually have the effect of subjecting you to more risk of destroying your life. Which, in effect, puts you at risk.

It’s not your weapon or your training that puts you at-risk. It is the influence of your Monkey/limbic brain. One way for you to mitigate the risk created by your increase in Means is to learn to control your Monkey/limbic brain with your Human/conscious brain via critical thinking and non-emotional decision making.

Another would be to reduce your tendency to engage in the blaming/othering/fearing/stereotyping certain of groups of people. That requires acknowledging and taking steps to lower your implicit bias against said groups.

In other words, sometimes the biggest threat to your personal safety is you.

Fun with de-escalation – Terry Trahan

De-escalation of a threat or situation is often talked about as a way to avoid a conflict, create good witnesses, or as a way to set up your escape. It is a very serious topic, and a cornerstone of good conflict management, but that doesn’t mean that it always has to be a dark and difficult thing.

Of course, all of our training has to be context specific, and we always need to keep an eye towards our chosen tactic not working, and heading south. If talking a situation down does not work, or ends up escalating a situation, we do need to be able to step up the choice ladder and employ the next appropriate level of force. But that does not mean that de-escalation tactics, the employment of them, and the training of them has to be deadly serious. Sometimes the absurd or humorous is a great thing to use, and can save the day( or night) as the case may be. The following story will hopefully illustrate this point.

I was working a night shift at The Landing Strip. How would I describe the Landing Strip. It was a biker/blue collar topless bar, that also was one of the unofficial hangouts for both the Sons of Silence and the Bandido Motorcycle Clubs. On top of this, it seemed to be a favorite place for college and frat boys to slum and live up their fantasies for birthdays and the like. It had such a bad reputation, that when I took the job, and told some of my bouncer friends where I was working, the main question was;”God, why?” Or some crack about how hard up for cash I must have been. Of course, I had a really good time working there.

I would normally work to corral the straights, and the Clubs would police their own members, and that worked out fine. Honestly, we, nor our customers had much to worry about from the Clubbers, unless you really screwed up, they just wanted to hang out and have a good time. Maybe make some money, but they were smooth. It was almost always the frat boys and insecure straights that caused a problem.

This particular evening, we had the Sons in attendance, including some of the OFDs, or Old Foul Dudes, including Scrounge, who, quite honestly, was one of the few guys that scared me. If we had ever fought, I’m pretty sure I’d be medically retired, if not dead. He was scary, but good natured and easy to deal with. We also had a group of young guys celebrating a birthday. For whatever reason, they were bothered by the Sons, and there had been a few minor incidents, but pretty easy to handle.

Until one of the young guys sat on Scrounges jacket. If you don’t know, a Clubbers jacket is a pretty important piece of property, and symbolizes a great deal. As I said, Scrounge was pretty good natured, but this particularly pissed him off, and he came over to tell me I had 5 minutes to clear the guy out, or shit would start, and the Sons would sort it out.

A young, drunk guy with his friends is not the easiest of people to deal with. In fact, they are my least favorite people on the planet to deal with.
I hope you can see where good de-escalation skills, and the ability to speak with people would be better here than the ability to fight…
Anyway, I came up with a plan. I had a waitress and bartender talk to the young lad, while we set up to run a free shot special. Free shots are a big deal, and we would go all out, flashing lights, loud music, all the stops would be pulled out. The ladies got him out, and now was the time to smooth everyones feathers, and return a party atmosphere, instead of the tension that had built up.
It is important for a bar to not have fights, minimize the tension, and not get the police called. It is all about making money, tension and police stop the money flow.

So, anyhow, back to our story…
The kid is gone, and the atmosphere is a little tense, so the shot special is called, and then I hit the music and lights. Music choice played a big part in my tactics. So, obviously, we play “Have a Drink On Me” by AC/DC as an opener announcement. We are starting to have the desired effect, but still need to get it back to party time, and especially to get the Sons mind off of mayhem… so what to do…
It then hit me, and I am at once overjoyed and deeply saddened by the fact that smart phones and YouTube didn’t exist then. What happened next is one of the favorite memories of my bouncing career. As the guitar fades away from the speakers, I cued up the next song, a 180 degree turn from the driving hard rock from Down Under. Out of the speakers start horns and synthesizers. This is one of the clearest examples I can give of a pattern interruption, breaking the mind of the target audience, and installing a new program that works better, or in your favor. And this was more than successful. For out of the sound system starts blaring disco from the ‘70’s, more specifically, The Village People. By the end of a 3 minute song, we had the entire bar, including the Sons of Silence dancing around, standing on tables, girls on the bar, all doing the Y.M.C.A… it was beautiful.

Now, for the breakdown of why this worked.
I had established a trust relationship with the Sons, and all the clubbers that came in. They knew they could come to me, and I would deal with things for them. I also knew that the repercussions were real, and I needed to deal with this quickly. Trust goes both ways.

I picked the ladies to talk to the young guy, instead of myself. The reason for this was, I would be taken as a threat, and would probably ended up having to fight all of them. This would not have been a desirable outcome for the reasons stated above, police, breaking of the atmosphere, injuries…
So, by having the female staff, who knew what they were doing, talk to him, and get him to leave, we avoided that trigger.

By calling the shot special, we got all of the patrons out of the fear and stress mindset, and started them back to a party and fun outlook.

Now, the music choice. AC/DC is a goto for rougher bars, and I played it to let the aggression be put to a positive experience, and start the vibe changing.

Then, I flipped everything on its head by the second song. Choosing a song that doesn’t go with the genre causes a pause in the mind. By playing a fun, group action song, we got everyone out of their own heads and into a group mind, with the intention of partying, and not murdering.
When you throw in the spotlights, flashing strobes, extra loud volume, dancing girls, and verbal coercion to fun, you turn it into a tribal experience, and set up an inclusive, we’re all one let’s have fun dynamic. It sets up a situation where anyone who would violate the space we made would be an obvious dick. Clearly, you have to keep an eye out for this, and have a contingency in place to deal with it, but honestly, the majority of people want to be included, and not left out.

Hopefully you can see not just the specifics of this example, but the principles behind it, the things that made the specifics work. You can use these as a guide to see if your de-escalation hits on these main points, while maintaining the adaptability and flexibility to match it to your own situation or training.

Unfortunately, sometimes it all turns to crap, despite you following all of the points and strategies, and like I said, you must be willing to show this. Nobody will negotiate when they are sure there will be no consequences, and you will need to be able to communicate your ability to deal with it in an unpleasant manner in addition to the verbal, mental strategies, but in the vast majority of the time, people will take the non-violent path, as there is an innate understanding that violence hurts on multiple levels, and should be avoided as often as possible.
Remember, have fun.

Police Use of Force on the Emotionally Disturbed and Mentally Ill Opinion Piece – Rory Miller

Violence is a visceral thing and people tend to respond to it emotionally. There is always an emotional element to an act of force. Simultaneously, people assume a moral aspect to an act of force. One person is assumed to be the good guy, one assumed to be the bad guy. Combined, these make a powerful gut reaction and people tend to look at a force incident through a moral and emotional lens that is almost completely irrational.

I am going to try to explain and explore some basic but uncomfortable truths in this artitle.

In my opinion and experience, people with mental health issues are not more criminal than those without. They are far more likely to be victimized than to be the bad guy. But they are less predictable, and that increases the fear in other people. In mental illness, the person may see the world differently (e.g. hallucinations) and/or may process the world differently (attributing other people’s motivations to conspiracies or spiritual forces; or seeing personal connections that don’t exist.)

When thinking of justice, motive matters. Force is always tied up with ethics, and every rational person only wants force used on bad people. Using force to stop a murderer or rapist is moral. Rapists are bad. Murderers are bad. People with screwed up brain chemistry aren’t bad. We don’t want force used on people who aren’t bad…

That is the source of the disconnect. This is where the moral aspect of the lens confuses people and influences them to write bad policy and to scream against good decisions. “Rapists and murderers are bad, mentally ill people are not” is a completely irrelevant metric. It is not the people, not the rapists nor the murderers that are bad, not in the moment at least. Rape is bad. Murder is bad. Force is used by police officers to stop behavior. The motivation behind that behavior is irrelevant.

For justice, when the courts and the mental health experts have time to find the facts and discern underlying causes, motivation is a big part of determining right or wrong. When it comes to treatment or rehabilitation*, motivation is critical in changing long-term behavioral patterns. But if someone is swinging a hammer at a baby the person needs to be stopped before he or she finishes the hammer swing and motive doesn’t matter at all

Force is used to stop behavior. Force is used to prevent bad outcomes. Those bad outcomes must be stopped regardless of the motivation behind them. If you are going to take my baby, I will stop you. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to kill my baby to get back for some generational vendetta between our grandfathers or because you think you will get ransom or because you believe my baby has been possessed and must be destroyed to save the world. My choices are the same no matter your motivation.

Screwed-up brain chemistry versus evil intent does not affect my options at all. Motivation is irrelevant and as such, this is a problem completely separated from the concept of “justice.” The only thing that affect my choices are;

how hard you will be to stop

how much time I have to stop

If I have all the time in the world, I will try to talk you down. Doesn’t matter if you are an old enemy or having a psychotic break. If you are in the act of swinging a hammer at the baby, I will shoot you, regardless of your motivation. And if you are small and weak and untrained and unarmed and close enough that I can protect the baby just by pushing you away, I will do that. And if you are big and strong and skilled, I may have to hit you in the back of the head with a brick. None of this is influenced by your emotion or your mental state.

But because we want force tied with justice, many people want a completely different suite of options to use on the mentally ill.

If that hypothetical suite of options, with a lower level of force and ideal outcomes existed, guess what? We’d use them on everybody. Not just the mentally ill. Not just people in altered states. Everybody. Because officers are taught to use the lowest level of force that will safely work.

And since it would be used on everybody, my fear is that advocates would then scream for a special lower level of force to be used when the subject was mentally ill, because they can’t outgrow the idea that force should be tied with motivation. They can’t recognize the irrelevance of their justice filters.

There are some political and practical considerations that aren’t long enough to be separate articles. In the emergency services world, political considerations are important, because they can force changes in policy that severely affect how the work is performed.

Policies that require officers to deal differently with mentally ill or emotionally disturbed persons rather than “regular” bad guys are impractical. Even a trained and experienced clinical psychologist can’t tell the difference between schizophrenia and LSD at a glance; or meth and the manic stage of bi-polar, or suicidal ideation brought on by depressant chemicals versus natural brain chemistry. Expecting a cop to figure it out in a fraction of a second with bad lighting and a huge number of other distractions and concerns (no clinician has to make the diagnosis in busy traffic or with an audience of hundreds, some of whom are potential threats and/or victims) is ludicrous. It is setting an impossible standard that will get more people hurt, not fewer.

As a rule, advocates from the psych professions who say that all it takes is a little training and officers could talk down violent EDPs have never dealt with someone who wasn’t at least stable enough to get to the office. Officers deal with people ranging from the mildly upset to full-blown Excited Delirium; people charging into traffic or chewing up and spitting out their own tongue. Some who are pre-verbal and can’t seem to process words at all.

Physically and verbally, some people in altered mental states are much harder to deal with than criminals. Verbally, some don’t process words at all. Some do not know or remember how to surrender. Many will not recognize an officer tackling them as an attempt to save their lives. Physically, many of the lower level force options fail with EDPs. Pain compliance, a very low level of force frequently fails. In my experience, it is not because they don’t feel the pain, but because they do not understand that the pain is part of a bargain, and the pain stops when the resistance stops. Another low level force option, simply using mass to tire the threat (‘threat’ is the law enforcement euphemism for someone requiring force) often fails. Some people, especially on the excited delirium end of the spectrum, will fight until their heart fails.

This point ties into point 3. High levels of force are rarely required on experienced criminals. An experienced criminal knows how to play the game, knows how to surrender and when to do so. Neurotypical people without extensive criminal histories, if they resist, tend to require more force because they don’t know the rules, they think fighting is like they see on television. The mentally ill and emotionally disturbed, with a combination of naivety and the fact that low levels often fail frequently require extreme levels of force to control. The amount of force necessary to control a person is often inversely proportional to how we would do it if justice or motivation was a factor.

All uses of force look shocking to the uninitiated. In many cases, the force that looks most shocking actually involve very low levels. Using a mass of officers to hold down a single struggling subject is a tactic designed to cause minimum injury. With four officers, you can attempt to have one merely hold each limb until the subject gets tired. A lone officer in a similar situation would likely have to use a baton or a gun. But the social media reaction is often, “Why did it take four officers to beat down one poor, unarmed, mentally disturbed child?” It took four officers because they were trying so hard, at extra risk to themselves, to not injure the threat.

Because the uses of force look shocking and because officers work in a political environment where public outrage fueled by ignorance can change their policies, people can feel good about demanding change that in the end endanger the very lives they intended to protect. In the eighties, after a few incidents of death following the application of choke holds** many agencies banned the use of vascular restraints or reclassified them as deadly force. This removed the one tool most likely to control an EDP with minimal injury. Tasers(tm) are incredibly painful, and they are new and scary and electric and a “weapon” and so people agitate to have them banned or restricted extremely, even though they cause pain with very minimal risk of injury. The only tool that does what a Taser(tm) does, which is give a fairly reliable stop at a distance, is a gun. Wanting to ban Tasers(tm) is effectively saying, “I’m more comfortable with blowing holes in people than in causing five seconds of pain.”

Using force on EDPs causes extreme emotional toll on everyone involved. The officers as well have the concept of justice tied to their need to use force. This is why so often a number of officers and a lower level of force is used even when a higher level of force is justified. And when the subject dies anyway— after a long fight when the officers are trying not to use deadly force— the officers have emotional issues. The public and the victim’s family are extremely upset. Everyone wants something done. Wants a better outcome. Wants their irrelevant instinct for justice satisfied.

To sum up, many of our instinctive filters are irrelevant in an emergency situation that requires force. The “solutions” offered often require officers to have supernatural levels of skill and knowledge that simply don’t exist. If a workable solution with less chance of injury existed, it would be applied universally, not just to special cases. And that has and is being done. The Taser, as one example, is an effective tool that decreases the risk of injury to everyone, when it works.

Public outcry stemming from a naive understanding of force endangers everyone.
*Leaving aside for the moment that metastudies show that involuntary rehabilitation is pretty much a myth.

** Setting aside for now that many of the holds were taught and applied incorrectly, which could and should have been addressed as a training issue instead of a policy issue.

 

The Zombie-Hunter’s Diet Guide, Part II – Teja VanWicklen

Supplements

“Be the kind of person who takes supplements, then save your money.”

Michael Pollan

Many studies show most supplements are not well-absorbed, and people who take them already tend to eat well. If you do take supplements, try the food-based version. You will have to take three or four pills to get the same amount of the vitamin, but your body will actually recognize it as food. As we age, supplements can help since we lose the ability to absorb nutrients. Read up and consult the true experts. I recommend PrecisionNutrition.com for pragmatic, well-researched and entertaining articles.

If you are female, you probably need more of the following nutrients than you are consuming, look them up: Omega 3, vitamin D, Calcium, Magnesium, B complex. If you have anxiety related issues, depression, PMS or PTSD, there are a number of other well-documented supplements to look into like Rhodiola, Phosphetidal Serine (PS) and L-theanine.

When we don’t get enough magnesium, vitamin D, or omega 3s, we are more likely to get pissed off, lost, yell at our kids, start arguments and forget important things. Of course if you eat a lot of high quality veggies, you won’t need very many supplements, if any.

Here are some specifics:

Omega 3 and beneficial Fatty Acids

Omega 3 is the queen bee of mental and cognitive health, especially if you have anxiety, PTSD or sleep issues. Find a good, clean Omega 3 supplement. Add small, wild caught fish, flax, hemp and chia seeds to your diet. You can sprinkle hemp hearts or chia seeds on almost anything, even icecream, they are nature’s sprinkles. Eat grass-fed butter and meats, nuts and cold pressed oils.

Beneficial fats reduce anxiety by calming your sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for your fight or flight response. When this system becomes overactive, no amount of therapy will help you feel better. Lack of important fatty acids causes depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, memory malfunctions and a number of other issues we often erroneously consider solely emotional or psychological.

There are many studies on Omega 3s and there doesn’t seem to be much of a downside. There has been evidence of people affected by bipolar disorder cutting medications drastically and experiencing improved lifestyles through high doses of Omega 3s. Which begs the question, are we emotionally ill or malnourished. Another study found violent outbreaks among inmates were reduced by up to thirty percent when the inmates took high doses of Omega 3s. Perhaps if everyone took Omega 3’s, we wouldn’t need this magazine.

Watch out for Omega 6s and even 9s, we tend to get too many of those and they can counter crucial Omega 3s.

Get the sugar out

Get sugar and synthetic sweeteners out of your diet as much as possible. Sugar feeds fat and cancer cells. Some chemical sweeteners are actually banned in Europe for causing symptoms that mimic multiple sclerosis. Some of them stimulate areas of the brain that increase appetite, so they make you fatter even though there are fewer calories. Try coconut sugar, dates, lucuma, raw honey and maple syrup. There are so many more options than there used to be. If you are often wired and over-reactive, or you are diabetic or close to it, you want a sweetener that doesn’t affect blood sugar and has almost no calories, try Stevia, Erythritol or Monk Fruit. Use one for a week to get use it and move on until you find one you are happy with. Tastebuds can change and regrow in one to two weeks.

Macronutrients

Different body types need different amounts of protein and it can take some trial and error to figure it out for yourself. In my experience as a personal trainer, most women don’t get enough protein. It just isn’t a priority. Both in literature and studies I’ve read, women especially who increased their intake of clean protein gained strength and lost weight with more ease. And they reported sleeping better, feeling sharper and having fewer cravings for sweets.

The science suggests taking in a minimum of 1 gram of clean protein for every 2 pounds of body weight if you are sedentary. So, if you weigh 140 lbs, you need a minimum of 70 grams per day, if you’re 110, you need 55. This is actually low. If you enjoy exercise, especially the weight bearing kind, you need more, all the way up to 1 gram per pound if you run often or engage in sports regularly.

By clean protein I mean protein from the best possible source. Organic, local, grass-fed meats and wild-caught fish aside, you can get your protein from Greek Yogurt (always organic please, since dairy is not to be trifled with), tempeh, eggs and mixed foods that create full chain proteins through combination. Ultimately look for at least 25 to 30 percent of your caloric intake to be protein regardless of grams.

Watch the ratio of carbohydrate to protein. For some people bean and seed carbs don’t affect health (or weight), for others it will. There is more carbohydrate in these foods than protein, so keep track of what you are eating and see what happens over weeks and months. A diet high in carbohydrates seems to adversely affect sleep, mental acuity and general health for many people. The theory is that we did not evolve to eat these things and our digestive systems are still figuring them out.

In general, worry less about calories and more about what is in your calories. A calorie of celery carbohydrate is not equal to a calorie of sugar carbohydrate. And a lean or regularly exercised body uses calories differently.

Caffeine, Alcohol, Grains and Dairy

There is a big difference in how people respond to caffeine, alcohol, grains and dairy, though there are plenty of other low-level allergens. If we have been consuming them most of our lives, we don’t really know which of our common issues may be food related.

Caffeine does wonders for some, and is disastrous for others. It has been documented to augment energy, but it can also have adverse effects on mood and behavior. Caffeine is a powerful and unregulated drug and you should be aware of the effect it has on you.

We often think of alcohol as a relaxant when it is really a stimulant of sorts. The high sugar content revs the system and often causes anxiety. Alcohol is a regular bedtime go-to, but sometimes it makes us toss and turn rather than relax.

Try nixing any of these common foods for at least week or two to see what happens. Detoxing from regular caffeine intake is almost guaranteed to give you a headache until you get it out of your system, so have the aspirin ready just in case. Try going to half decaf and then full and then no coffee at all for a bit. Become British, try some tea for a while – caf, then decaf or herbal.

Reintroduction of any potential allergen makes it pretty obvious whether or not there is an issue. With caffeine you may get a headache when you start up again, or you may just feel wired in a bad way. With other things like gluten and dairy, you may find you have unwanted digestive issues after eating.

The Take Away

Our bodies perform some alchemy every day, but there is a limit. We take in garbage and expect gold medals. We think we are healthy while we are young, but really our bodies are simply better able to mask the results of poor dietary choices. It all catches up with us somewhere between our late thirties and late forties. It’s simple science. If you put garbage in, you get garbage out.

Try keeping a food diary for a week or more. There are lots of apps for this purpose. You might be surprised at what you find out about your eating habits. Keeping track makes it easier to spot both effective and ineffective eating and will help you replicate the effective habits. Log or write down what you eat and how you feel at the end of the days and weeks.

If you observe a few of these rules you are likely to wake up rested on less sleep, have fewer muscle aches and pains, raise your energy level, stop yelling at your kids so much, have better sex, get into fewer arguments, remember names and regulate your menstrual cycle (if you have one).

In my experience, nutrition can make an enormous difference in quality of life, so it is an easy place to start, probably easier to do than say, finding a therapist or even getting into a regular exercise habit. Nutrition is a great place to start de-stressing and getting mentally and physically healthy and ready to combat zombies.

Suggested Reading

Food Rules by Michael Pollan is one of my favorite books. It is very short. You can just read the chapter headings if you like and get lots out of it. It is the most concise, easy to read, book on eating healthy ever written. Just keeping it on your counter will make you healthier. If you have the inclination to delve further into nutrition, read The Omnivore’s dilemma also by Pollan. At one point the author creates an entire meal from foraged resources just to see if he can. Great stuff.

If you are female, look into The Hormone Cure and the Hormone Reset Diet by Dr. Sara Gottfried, a Harvard educated gynecologist who has dedicated herself to helping women overcome, brainfog, anxiety, depression, mood swings and sleep and weight disorders stemming from hormone imbalances. It’s about time.

Murray Carpenter wrote a book called Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us, if want to learn more about the caffeine in your life.

Check out www.PrecisionNutrition.com for everything nutrition related.

What Does Learning Look Like? Part II – Kathy Jackson

Learning looks like a step backwards. Most people tend to think of learning as a process that looks something like this:

[XXX PICTURE HERE XXX]

In reality, for physical skills and especially for complex motor programs, it often looks a lot more like this:

[XXX PICTURE HERE XXX]

There’s a sharp dip when students first encounter a new concept or physical skill. For a short time, the new learning disrupts what they already know, so we’ll often see a decline in their existing level of understanding or ability before they have fully grasped the new material. There’s a double whammy on the physical skills side: Learning a new technique often messes up your existing technique, but you’re not yet practiced enough with the new one to make up for the lost ground.

With some exceptions, the more time we’ve spent learning and refining our existing technique, the deeper and wider that initial dip in performance will be. When we’ve spent a lot of time with one technique, it can take a lot of time and energy to effectively learn a different one.

This has several very important implications for us, both as instructors and as lifelong learners:

  1. We cannot – repeat cannot! – accurately judge the long-term value of techniques that are new to us after trying them just once or twice. It takes time and repetition to overcome that initial dip in performance. This is one important reason why, no matter what their own preferred stance might be, smart students shoot Weaver Stance all week at Gunsite, and use Stressfire Isosceles when taking a class from Massad Ayoob. It takes repeated practice of an unfamiliar technique before we can adequately judge its merits for ourselves.
  2. We cannot – repeat, cannot! – reliably judge new products after trying them just once. Again, it takes time and repetition to overcome the initial dip in performance when we change away from doing something we’ve practiced a lot. When you choose to write product reviews, even brief ones, for your students or a wider audience, be sure you’re giving the products a fair shake (and, just as important, a fair chance to fail) before you take pen in hand. This goes for new holster designs as much as it does for any other type of gear.
  3. When we read articles comparing the speed (or ease of use) of Technology A against Technology B, we should view those claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. Lasers vs night sights, should we move the magazine release levers from here to there, which way is the best way to carry your magazine? Whatever the question might be, very few reviewers take enough time and spend enough energy to become equally-skilled at both options before measuring one against the other. All too many already have an answer before they even ask the question, and that means we should always read such claims with caution – and certainly think twice before we repeat them to others.

Once we understand the initial dip in performance when people change an existing way of doing things, we realize why it’s so hard to sell a new, undeniably better technique to students who’ve already spent a lot of time developing a different one. This isn’t an unreasonable response on the part of our students. It’s normal and even good.

The shape of the learning slope means that your available class time will strongly dictate how much you can expect to change your students’ existing habits – and how hard you should try. Longer classes provide more leeway to introduce radically new techniques, while shorter classes must build on existing foundations. If you’ve only got them for a short program, it may be more worthwhile to simply teach them how to do better within their own paradigm, even when that paradigm may not be the one you prefer.

Before you try to switch anyone away from an existing technique that they believe is working for them:

  1. Be sure you will have enough time to be fair to both the student and yourself;
  2. Take a moment to explain the shape of the learning slope; and
  3. Make sure you understand the student’s goal for the class, and shape your suggested changes to meet your student’s goals rather than your own.

Never suggest a student change techniques simply because you yourself prefer a different technique. Instead, carefully weigh the anticipated benefits against the time and effort it will cost your student to change. Are you absolutely sure your suggested change will be worth that level of effort and that investment of time?

Don’t suggest big changes, such as switching Weaver shooters to Isosceles (or vice versa), unless you will have enough time for their performance to rebound after the switch. Similarly, in the absence of safety factors, don’t make big changes to students’ grips unless you have enough time for the change to settle in.

It’s an easier sell if you have a compelling, easily-demonstrated reason that the switch will make a long term difference in the shooter’s world.

In classes where using your preferred grip or stance (or whatever) will be foundational to later techniques within the same class, assure students that those later techniques will clearly show why you want them to switch to your preference now. Provide either a quick demonstration or at least a simple explanation of how things will later fit together, to give them a taste of what lies ahead. Then make sure you complete the sale before closing time. Make sure your work throughout the class will give them enough time with the new technique that they can see its value for themselves before the class is over.

“Be wary of instructors who refuse to tell you why what they are teaching is worth your time, money and energy to learn, master and anchor.  ‘Because I said so’ or ‘because this is how I teach this’ is not enough.” – Dave Spaulding

The shape of the learning slope has one more important implication for us as instructors. Because good teachers should be generalists – able to pick up many different types of guns and effectively demonstrate their use, able to efficiently demonstrate many different shooting and gunhandling techniques in addition to their own most-preferred method – it can be difficult for even the best instructor to display the absolute highest level of skill in competitive shooting events. That’s because the highest competitive performers work very hard to keep small grains of sand like these out of their finely-tuned shooting gears. Although the best competitors will usually remain open to trying new techniques to get a competitive edge, they also can’t risk messing up their existing habits by practicing different techniques than the ones they use in competition, or by constantly switching either gear or techniques.  During the off season, they may play with a wide variety of techniques and try out new gear, but during the shooting season, they often work hard to perfect only the techniques and gear they will use in that season’s events. There are important reasons for that, and the shape of the learning slope is one of those reasons.

This factor does not matter at all for instructors who compete in the mid ranges (as many do quite successfully), but if you’re looking at the possibility of a jump to the supersquad, you may want to keep it in mind.

Once we realize that learning sometimes looks like hard work, and might even look like a step backwards, it isn’t surprising that our students may not always see their progress the same way we do.

Learning sometimes looks like failure. From the student’s perspective, learning sometimes looks and feels like failure. Repeated failure. Repeated, potentially demoralizing failure.

Because we continually set small, fresh challenges in front of our students, some will have a constant sense that they “can’t quite” do any task we give them – even when they do succeed. These students tend to focus on the “just barely” nature of their success, and fail to see that they are succeeding. Because every task we set them is a little harder than the one before, together they add up to a long staircase of skills that leads the student to a higher level of ability and achievement, and we as teachers tend to focus on that progress. The student, however, might only see the effort and feel the continued sting of not quite getting it together.

This is another reason to celebrate each milestone along the road to improvement. Some students won’t ever notice the mile markers, or realize how far they’ve come, unless we tell them. Showing them exactly where they’ve made progress can help these students stay engaged and working hard when they might otherwise give up in despair. We also need to look ahead with them to the ultimate goal so they understand how much more work there remains to do, so they don’t quit prematurely from unrealistic optimism about their existing skills. They need to see both how far they still need to travel, and how far they’ve already come.

“Failure is a gift. Embrace it in training because those failures will provide you with priceless insight and preparation. I am prouder of the student who fails, but tries harder to succeed. It shows great character. Even in this artificial environment adversity is something to be overcome. Plus, it makes your successes sweeter.” – Jeff Gonzales

Does all of this sound discouraging? It shouldn’t. It can actually be very encouraging for the student to realize that the reason he is finding the work hard to do, is because the work is hard. Without that understanding, he may think there’s something wrong with him when he doesn’t find it easy. He might beat himself up for that instead of celebrating his progress. He might even give up and quit, not realizing that the apparent failure he’s experiencing in the moment is actually the fast track to success.

Learning sometimes looks like failure for a different reason. That’s because sometimes, a student perched on the brink of an “aha!” moment might not be making any measurable progress at all.

We sometimes – often – see this type of learning the first time we put a student on a moving target. They try and try and try to hit the mover, and get annoyed that they can’t quite seem to get the hang of it. We reinforce the fundamentals and remind them of the basic strategy. We coach them to see the front sight and press the trigger smoothly, simply moving the muzzle along with the target so that it’s exactly like shooting a target that doesn’t move. They try again and they struggle some more. Then all at once the light bulb goes on, the student says, “OH!!” as they hit the target cleanly, and apart from minor bobbles they rarely have trouble with moving targets again. After a long stall on the edge of success, they finally unlocked the code and they feel wonderful.

The middle of this process looks a lot like failure – like repeated attempts that don’t work, don’t get any better, and don’t achieve the desired result. What makes it learning instead of true failure, is that each of these failures is greeted with the kind of grit that gets up and tries again, again, again. And keeps doing that, over and over, until the result changes. That’s true grit.

It’s also the definition of insanity.

It’s insanity, that is, unless each try includes either a slightly different strategy toward achieving success, or a slightly better effort at using an already known strategy. (There’s a coaching hint in that sentence, somewhere.)

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston S. Churchill

Not long ago, I saw a charming online video of a young boy who made a “Rube Goldberg machine” – a multipart contraption that creates a complicated chain reaction to do a simple task. This particular creation would be started by knocking down one domino that would set off a series of dominoes, which would then knock a small bowling pin into a bowl causing a shockwave that would move a small gyroscope down a pair of dowels and then bump into a steel marble that would run through a spiral tube and then down a ramp where it would bump into a switch to activate a toaster that would cause the toast to pop up and a lever to rise that would … but you get the idea.

As the child explained on the video, because Rube Goldberg designs are complex, it’s common for them to fail many times in trials before the builder finally gets it right. The kid estimated that he would probably need to run the machine ten to twenty times before he succeeded. Then he began running his trials. As each attempt failed, he figured out what had caused the failure, corrected it, and tried again. By the end of the video, when his machine finally worked, he was dancing around and giggling with ecstatic glee: “It worked on the fourth try! Look, I thought it was going to be umpteen failures, but it was only three failures! That’s surprising! It worked!”

Having an expectation that failure – even repeated failure – would be a normal part of the process made it possible for the boy to keep working despite the effort it took to get it right. It gave him the energy to try different strategies and avoid discouragement. It set him up to celebrate his achievement when it came, rather than beating himself up for having to work hard to get there. Learning should feel good.

There’s something else. Every failure brought the Rube Goldberg kid incrementally closer to his goal. He failed in a different spot every time, fixing a different step in the process each time the machine went off the rails. Because he was committed to learning from each failure, he did not fail in the same place twice. He analyzed each failure and figured out how to avoid it in future. (And there’s another coaching hint.)

Although from the perspective of an accomplished shooter, a task such as drawing to fire a single round might seem incredibly simple, it’s actually quite complex – even more complex than getting a Rube Goldberg machine to work. For this reason, as we work with students it’s important to remember that sometimes, from a student’s perspective, learning looks a lot like failure. We must frame this reality in a way that keeps them motivated and helps them to move forward.

Here’s one more possible thing we might see when we look to see whether students are learning in class. It’s the flip side of learning looking like failure.

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.” – George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes, failure to learn looks like learning. Don’t let this one fool you. Some students are highly committed to looking good in class, and that means they are not risking anything, not learning, not growing. These are often the folks who were told as children that smart kids never get anything less than straight A’s in school, so they’re reluctant to tackle anything that might make them look bad as an adult. Their shooting often looks pretty good when you first meet them, but it will rarely get any better, because they’re afraid to push their own limits. Some students have ego riding on their existing level of accuracy, and thus won’t push themselves to get faster or to shoot at smaller targets or greater distances. Other students have ego riding on their existing speed, and thus won’t sacrifice even an ounce of speed in order to learn how to shoot more accurately. In either case, these students aren’t willing to learn and in fact they are not learning.

You may notice this when you tell your students to speed up and shoot faster. You don’t want them to miss paper, you might tell them, but it’s perfectly okay if their groups open up a little, perhaps from a fist-sized group to a hand-sized one – because that’s how they’ll learn what the right speed is for them right now, and that’s also how they’ll learn to shoot more quickly. They have to push their existing limits in order to learn where their limits really are and then overcome them. They have to risk the miss in order to learn the speed.

But some students won’t do it. Simply will not.

There are two ways to deal with this type of reaction from a student. No, three. The third and least-desirable option is to simply ignore it and let it slide, as if you’d never noticed what that student was up to on your line. Since this student will often be trying to avoid your attention anyway, it’s easy enough to give her a day of supervised practice without pushing her to learn much more than she came with. This sometimes might be necessary, but shouldn’t be done lightly, and never just for your own convenience.

“It is funny to see people complain so much about a miss… There is no pressure on you, there is no fear of death or injury. We are in a friendly environment trying to improve. Some people are more interested in stroking their ego than truly improving and that’s a problem.” – Jeff Gonzales

Because these slow but accurate students usually shoot small, beautiful groups, you might be tempted to think they don’t really need your attention anyway – but they do. Meanwhile, don’t let a small group size fool you into thinking this resistant student is learning well. She’s not. She’s simply practicing the things she’s already good at in a way that doesn’t risk her ego in front of others.

When you decide to reach this student and help her move to a place where she’s willing to risk looking bad in the eyes of the other students (or her own) in order to learn, you have two choices:

  1. Say something. Challenge her to do better, privately or semi-privately, as you walk down the line reading targets. Withhold any positive comment about her group size or shot placement, and instead focus on her shooting speed: “You’re not pushing yourself enough. You’re shooting too slowly. I’d like to see you go at least 10% faster than you went before, and I think you can do that. Speed it up!” Sometimes, this student needs an explanation of the ‘wobble zone,’ and what it means to simply accept her human limitations and press the trigger smoothly so that she can speed up. Or she may need some other quick technical tip that gives her the tools she needs to trust her shots. Give those tips to her. As much as possible, as you talk with her, avoid giving her an ego boost for practicing the things she’s already good at. Instead, find ways to force her ego to ride on learning the new skill. (Then be sure to praise her for doing so!)

If more than one student seems to be resistant in the same way, you can call out the group as a whole. I often do this with groups of women: “One of the things I know about groups of women is that we often don’t shoot as fast as we really can, because we’re afraid of making mistakes. Right now, that’s not okay. Right now, our goal is to get about 80% of our hits inside the area we talked about. If you’re missing more than that, you should slow down to get better hits because that’s what you need to learn right now. But if you’re already skilled enough with accuracy to hit more than that on this drill, I want you to push against your limits so you can find out where they are. You can hit faster than you’re going right now! If you’re getting perfect little groups right now, you’re going too slow and I am not impressed with that right now. Right now, it’s okay to let a few shots hit paper outside our perfect area, as long as you’re going as fast as you really can. I will be impressed when I see you speed up. Go faster!”

  1. Do something. Change up the drill to challenge this student indirectly, so that her ego will rest on her speed instead of on her group size – or it will rest on her speed as well as her group size. For this, I’m a big fan of a series of shooting exercises I call the Speed Up / Concentration Drill, learned from Marty Hayes at the Firearms Academy of Seattle. In this set of drills, students start with six rounds in each of three magazines. They begin by firing six shots, slow fire, while concentrating on the front sight and a smooth trigger press with good follow through. On command, they reload with another six rounds and are told, “If you were going 20 miles an hour before, speed up to around 35 miles an hour to fire the next six shots. You’re still going to do everything you were doing before – concentrate on the front sight, press the trigger smoothly, follow through – but you’re going to do it a little faster.” For the last magazine of six rounds, students are told to shoot as fast as they can hit: “Not as fast as you can shoot, but as fast as you can hit. You’re still going to do everything you were doing before – front sight, smooth trigger, follow through – but do it fast!” By forcing the entire line of shooters to work faster, the slow student begins to push her own speed so she can keep up with others. Make it even more powerful by recognizing and praising the students who finish fastest, so that egos ride on going faster.
“Take the risk of failure. Very little learning takes place when you succeed. Give yourself the benefit of failing. You learn when you fail. Fail magnificently!”
                           – John Farnam

There are other options that do the same thing. For example, you can take accuracy partially out of the equation by moving students closer to their targets. Or announce that it’s time to work on alternate indexes and tape up the sights. Look for things that will give her a “reason” to miss, an excuse she can use to shelter her ego as she works on her speed. This also often has the side effect of destroying the “perfect” target that’s currently slowing her down. To get the same result, you can swap used targets around between students, so that your perfect, slow shooter no longer shoots at a perfect little piece of cardboard with all the perfect tiny little pieces of tape in the perfect tiny little center, but instead has a visual that indicates some rounds have already gone outside that perfect little center. The presence of tape outside the “perfect” area indirectly gives her permission to miss a little in order to work on her speed.

Of course, sometimes this same basic problem happens the other way around: the student who prides himself on his speed at the expense of accuracy. He missed, but he was the fastest shooter on the line. For this shooter, his ego is invested in shooting super-fast, and he’s unwilling to slow down to get better hits or learn high-accuracy techniques that will help him in the long run. Give him a reason to slow down. Perhaps give him an anatomy lesson about the fist-sized human heart or tell him about the cranial hit zone that’s actually smaller than his iPhone. Put him in an uncomfortable shooting position that forces him to slow down and concentrate. Look for ways to force his ego to ride on his accuracy. When you change up drills for this shooter, try challenging him to be the slowest shooter on the line so that he can demonstrate his perfect trigger control for you.

Both the too-slow shooter and the too-fast one have something in common: they aren’t learning right now. They need information and they need a coherent understanding of what their shooting goals should be. They need to know why you want them to change it up – what’s in it for them? Learning something new is a risk, and often involves a blow to the ego. Give them a good reason to take that risk and make that change.

No matter what it looks like…

Regardless of how learning appears – whether it happens fast or slow, whether it comes with ease or takes a little more work, whether it looks like instant success or annoying failure or something in between – understanding what’s happening with different types of learning helps us do a better job as coaches and teachers. It helps us encourage and inspire our students to keep working hard when they might be tempted to give up in frustration or complacently rest on their laurels. As you work with your own students, you will soon learn to identify the different ways learning appears, and flex your teaching style to suit your students’ needs.

 

Eye Contact: Observe Surroundings, Part II – Tristan Chermack

Observe surroundings

Any self-protection must involve you paying attention to your surroundings, regardless of whether there are people around.  Keeping an eye on people adds a little more difficulty to the task, but it is still pretty easy to do.  Let’s look at each of these separately.

When observing your surroundings, you should first be looking for anything that might pose a danger.  Accidents claim more victims than predators, and self-protection skills also work with accidents.  Many accidents happen because of a lack of awareness.  The street crossing analogy comes into play here:  look to see if you can safely cross the street regardless of what the light says.  Potential threats come in many shapes and sizes, so we cannot possible tell you every way to spot them here.  Keeping your eyes open for potential problems, or accidents waiting to happen, is something you must build.  The practice of looking around rather than having your eyes buried in a cell phone or iPod works splendidly.

It should take a quick look around, for only a second or two, to get a decent feel for your surroundings.  Familiar surroundings are easier, but you should take the time and effort to notice anyway.  If a place is familiar to you, looking around can show you something that is out of place or not normal.  This can be helpful to give you a heads-up that something might be amiss.  Your instincts will pick up on these things, you only need to scan around and take in what you see.

If you are in an unfamiliar place or somewhere that gives you an uneasy feeling, you will probably look around a lot before becoming assured that you will be safe.  This is an instinctual trait so use it.  Once you have looked around extensively and still feel uneasy about where you are, you should really leave.  If you cannot leave, get yourself to a position where you can see anything approaching you.  This brings us to the next point about observing surroundings.

When you observe a room, you should be doing more than looking for threats.   You should look for where the exits to your immediate area are.  If you had to get out fast, which ways could you go?  These exits are also entrances.  We will discuss observing your surroundings for people next, but you should know where they come in so you can see who comes into your area.  Knowing where the exits are is a good habit to build.

Another thing to watch for with your surroundings is where you are in them.  Are you in a place where you can be approached by someone without noticing they are coming?  In the best case, you should be somewhere that you easily notice people approach you.  It is also best that you are in a place that has an exit handy from any given direction.  The last thing you want is to be cornered by a threatening person, with nowhere to go to escape.

One last thing to look for in your surroundings is obstacles.  They can provide a place for you that make approach difficult.  It may happen that you notice a bully or group of potential bullies coming and want to stay out of their path.  Rather than running for an exit, you can position yourself near obstacles to make it difficult to get to you.  The great benefit of this approach is that you can usually move there casually without drawing attention.  It will be easy to notice if the people you are concerned about are approaching you, and then you can move to an exit if it appears they are coming for you.

If you have ever been in the same room with a bully, you may have experienced looking at your environment in these ways.  It is best to have an idea of what is around you before that panic hits and you are desperately looking for where to exit.  We believe in preparing early, and this is a perfect example.  It takes only a second to notice exits, so take a look.  You might not need it, but if you do it is great to know already.

Now that we’ve covered the environment itself, the really important part is to watch people.  You should at very least look for a moment at every person in your immediate area.  If the area is very crowded, you should scan the crowd for anything that appears out of the ordinary.  When you do your scan, let your instincts talk to you.  They will tell you if you should be concerned.

This kind of looking around and scanning is more than glancing up from time to time.  If you are sitting hunched over a book or cell phone and glance up momentarily and down, then you are missing two points: posture and observation. These two should work together.

Keep good body posture whether you are standing or sitting and scan regularly.  Take your time scanning and don’t rush it.  Anyone looking at you will quickly be able to tell which is more important to you: looking around or not paying attention to surroundings.  It is okay to be absorbed in a book or texting with someone, but go to a place where you are safe to do so and look up and around frequently.

It is very common to watch for people when you know they might be present, and it is almost always someone you already know to be a potential threat.  Kids who are around bullies learn to watch for their bully through pure fear.  They are constantly scanning so they can see them coming and get out early.

One thing to add here, which is something more common to adults than children, is that purposefully not making eye contact is also a signal. Take care not to think that this is imperceptible because it is. If a potential predator looks at you and you are intentionally avoiding eye contact, he will very likely be able to tell. This is a signal of pure fear, which is not the signal you want to send. A confident person does not fear making eye contact.

Once you make eye contact, what you are thinking is pretty easily conveyed through your facial expressions. I’m not talking mind reading here, but simple mood and attitude. What is on your mind will affect the signals you are sending, so take care of what is on your mind. Be smart, not oblivious – confident, not fearful. This type of communication is fascinating, but not within the scope of this article.

What we take in about our surroundings and the people within it is crucial to avoiding trouble. You can think of it this way: your goal is to see trouble before it sees you. A predator decides when and where he will strike, which is powerful. Predators will avoid targets which are aware (hard to approach undetected) and do not look like good opportunities. They will dismiss inviting targets which are not in a good place or time to strike. The first indicator is eye contact or lack thereof. An unobservant target is very inviting. You might never even make direct eye contact with a predator. He may very well dismiss you as a potential target merely because he sees you scanning the area, staying aware, and appearing ready. It is so much better to avoid being targeted early than try to evade a predator who has already chosen you as a target.