Varg Freeborn – Conflict Manager

The Model of Competence Based Performance Part II – Varg Freeborn

Smooth is Fast

We have talked about training the fundamentals until they are “automatic”. We need to repetitively train the fundamentals until we can perform them, repeatedly, without having to think about them at a conscious level.

This is not accomplished by going as fast as you can. To use driving and braking as an example again, have you ever taken a day and just went out specifically to practice slamming on your brakes in your car? Probably not. However, when the moment comes at 50mph and something goes bad in front of you, you will slam on your brakes with extreme unconscious competence and stop the vehicle (providing your situational awareness is in-tact and you’re not texting or reading this article: observe). The reason you can achieve the brake pedal movement flawlessly is NOT because you have practiced slamming the pedal at speed. It is because every week you have performed literally thousands of slow, correct repetitions of going from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. If you train your fighting skills in the same slow, correct and deliberate manner, you will find that when speed is needed, it will be there. Speed is a product of smooth and correct repetition.

Improving the efficiency of your processor requires basic skills being ingrained enough to not have to use processor resources on them. Which allows you to then process information more quickly and thoroughly. This is the path to rapid and correct decision making in a fight. When you are not worrying about whether you can actually perform a movement or not, you are able to delegate those movements to the unconscious mind and allow your conscious mind to be fully engaged in the observance and decision making processes.

As the skills become trustworthy, you are able to go straight to processing your environment. This is a good step, but there’s more. The concept of maximizing your processor speed by not using resources thinking about the basics, allows you to not only solve one problem at a time, but to be able to flow through many problems, one after the other. It gets so good that you are able to set up subsequent moves with the ending of each solution. That is achieved after many, many hours of practice, force on force and mental training with positive mental imagery. Like shooting pool. First learn how to make the ball go into the pocket. With practice, we can make the ball go into the pocket with the cue coming to rest in position to make another ball go into a pocket… But for now, let’s focus on practicing the isolated skill to reliable perfection.

Positive mental imagery plays a key role in keeping you on the quick end of the spectrum during practice. This is possibly the most difficult part of training: not picturing ourselves failing. We have to DENY those negative images from gaining entry. We have all stepped up to perform at some point in time and failed. Whether at the range, or in a sport, we feared failure at the critical moment before performance. When you fear failure, you will picture yourself failing. This image will bog down your processing speed and prohibit you from performing well. Denying these images of failure, and other fear based anxieties, from entering into your observance and decision making processes will allow you to perform the fundamental skills necessary to prevail. It is truly difficult sometimes to imagine yourself doing something flawlessly correct, but it MUST be worked on. The faster we try to go, the harder it is to block out the imagery of failure.

The importance of correct practice

When we talk about practice, we need to immediately and forcefully kill the myth that “practice makes perfect”. It simply is not true.

Practice makes something reliably repeatable. But understand this very important fact: it becomes repeatable in the way that you have practiced it. FACT: If you practice it wrong, you will get really good at doing it wrong. This means, if you have made it a habit to try to go too fast, and to not seek out positive feedback, you may have actually practiced doing something incorrectly. The biggest cause of this that I see is going too fast. Remember what I said about the car brake pedal and hitting the brakes quickly? Practicing fast does not make you fast. Practicing smoothly and correctly makes you fast and correct.

Think of your neural pathways like weeds in the woods. If you want to make a new path in the woods, where it is all grown up with undergrowth, you have to walk that new path several times to even make it visible. As you walk the path for months over and over, eventually it turns into a recognizable clear path. This is just like the neural pathways that tell your muscles to fire in a certain pattern. As you practice, you are myelinating the axons, which speeds up the electrical signal across the neural pathway. This means the more frequently you practice, the faster you get at doing it exactly the way you practice.

So, again image you are going to cut a new path in the woods. However, this time, you walk a slightly different way each day and never walk over the same exact pathway twice. How successful do you think you would be at efficiently trampling the undergrowth down and making a visible, clear path? You would not. If you deviate each time, even slightly, you will not develop one well worn path. Your neural pathways are very similar. When we deviate our path of movement when practicing a skill, there is no way to efficiently train ourselves to perform it the one intended way. While it is ok to work into advanced levels where we train variants of a technique or skill on purpose, it can only be done after the basic primary skill has been perfected to an automatic, non-conscious performance ability.

The most common and pretty much expected mistake that I see newer students and shooters make is to begin pursuing speed much too soon in their training. Everyone wants to be Instagram hot and perform cool shit with the timer. As you speed up, you begin to automatically cut corners, make mistakes, fumble tasks and just plain screw up. This is what you are practicing! Every practice run that you fumble is a step backward in your training toward automatic skill levels.

Resist this urge. It is much better to perform perfectly at whatever speed you can maintain perfect pathway performance at. Remember the example of the brake pedal and your skill at emergency braking, without ever really practicing emergency braking? It is simply true that the slow, repeated perfect practice of a skill will program the brain and body to perform that skill on-demand and at greater speeds than practiced.

Speed is for testing and fun, but do not make testing the majority of your time on the range. I say this because this is what I see most people do. Practice is for doing it perfectly correct. Do not forget this. Make this the cornerstone of your physical training protocol. Self-aware unconscious competence performance with clear ongoing assessment is the goal. The more capable your body is, the less you have to think about performance, the more you understand leverage and power, the more you will be able to reach this level.

The Model of Competence Based Performance – Varg Freeborn

There is a very popular learning model often referred to as the “conscious competence learning matrix” that depicts the stages of learning and competence in skills performance. It is arguable who originated the theory, and there have been several variations since its widespread use beginning in the early 1970’s in the U.S. For our purposes, I will present a general version:

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence

The student is not aware of particular skills or knowledge at all
The student is not aware that they have a deficiency in the skills and knowledge
Condition is often protected by denying that the skills or knowledge are even important or needed

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

The student gains awareness of the skills and knowledge
The student is aware of their deficiency in the skills and knowledge
The student is aware of the importance of the skills and knowledge

Stage 3: Conscious Competence

The student can perform the skills at will reliably, but still has to think about it and focus to perform well
The student understands the importance of the skills and their performance and puts in the requisite practice to maintain capabilities

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

The skills become natural and can be performed without focusing and thinking about them directly (many of the skills of driving a car are good examples of this)
The student has practiced and repeated the skills so much that they don’t even have to manually recall and decide to use the skills, the brain will run the skills as a default program when the need arises and the student may not even be aware fully that they performed the skills.

Unconscious Incompetence

Stage 1 is the hardest one we fight against in the firearms and combatives communities. There is nothing as impenetrable as the belief that simply being exposed to and/or shooting guns or rolling on a mat makes you competent. If you doubt people think this way, go work in a gun store for even a short time. There are a tremendous amount of people who own guns that legitimately believe that an NRA basic pistol course at a gun club is representative of everything that firearms related training has to offer. I would even go further and say that a majority of average gun owners may believe that. The same thing is present in gyms and dojos populated by individuals who have never really engaged in deadly level violence. That belief is definitely an example of unconscious incompetence. Because they are not truly aware of what is out there, they deny it’s importance if you try to explain it. Unconscious incompetence all too often is accompanied by an unwillingness to listen. And, sometimes, there is just not fix for that until it’s simply too late.

Getting yourself or someone else past unconscious incompetence requires, at some point, listening to the possibility of something greater. You must be ready to accept that maybe there is more out there than you are aware of, and that it is very important information that you should know. The first step out of that state of ignorance is the acceptance of the ignorance or lack of capability. I loved one aspect of teaching basic concealed carry courses when I used to do a lot of them, and that was watching unconscious incompetence fail on the range. By safely allowing their belief system to fail, repeatedly, they are left with little argument to continue to embrace it. Learning can occur; if only through failure sometimes, it can occur.

Conscious Incompetence

Stage 2 is where the student acknowledges a few things that are required for improvement to happen. First, they acknowledge that there are skills and knowledge out there, they acknowledge that the skills are important to goals they have, and they also acknowledge that they have a deficiency in these skills. Acceptance is the first step, as they say. It is ONLY at this point that the student is ready to learn and willingly will receive instruction and or practice.

Conscious Competence

Stage 3 is the where the beginner begins to have some successes in skills performance. A key change here is that the student accepts and embraces the importance of the knowledge and skills. It is very important to note that no one will reliably retain information that they do not deem important (generally speaking). The more important someone deems a skill or piece of information, the higher the chance of them learning, retaining and practicing it. It’s just a fact of adult learning. Therefore, in order to achieve the level of conscious competence, the student must first understand the importance of the skills, and next must practice the skills to be able to perform them.

At this stage, it still requires focus and thought to perform flawlessly. This means that the student is definitely not ready to begin stacking skill demands together, as we refer to advanced training. If it still requires concentration and thought to successfully perform isolated skills well, success will rapidly decline as skill demands become complex and stacked together all at once. The answer here is keep practicing and keep returning to train with someone who can offer positive feedback.

Unconscious Competence

This is where the skills become like what some refer to as “second nature”. For the student/practitioner, this is the goal. If you train the skills properly enough times, you WILL reach a point where you will be able to perform the skills without actively concentrating on the performance of the skill.

When you first learned to drive a car, you probably were not very skillful when it was time to accelerate or stop. I’m pretty sure all of us nearly gave our teacher whiplash the first time we stepped on the brake pedal. Today, I am confident that you probably step on the brake pedal so gracefully that you do it literally hundreds of times a week and do not even notice that you are doing it. That is unconscious competence at work. The skill is ingrained and so well practiced that you can not only perform it without focusing on it, but your brain can actually make the decision to employ the skill without your conscious, active attention to the decision making process.

How did this happen? It was at first the realization that you weren’t that good at it and that you really needed to be. Next, it was the repetition, over and over, just repeating the act until it became smooth. Smooth will become fast. The important point right now is to realize that unconscious competence is the result of proper practice. This is what instructors and teachers mean when they say that the fundamentals should be trained until they become automatic.

I will say it again. It is my belief that the non-conscious performance of an individual can not be taught, bought or gifted. You’ll hear me say this repeatedly: training and conditioning around the fundamental skills will allow technique to naturally develop. This is true. This is why we must move past the “kata” type training and move into conditioning around fundamentals. It is not the perfection of a movement that we seek. No. It is the capability to perform the movement and yet observe, assess, correct and adapt to any changes happening in your environment at the same time. Performing a movement perfectly under predictable conditions is not the pinnacle of accomplishment. Performing a movement correctly and effectively under unpredictable changes in variables and environment while maintaining self-control and the ability to synthesize new incoming information are the true mark of accomplishment in skill level.

The “Fifth Stage”

There have been several suggestions for a “fifth stage” that is centered around articulation and teaching. It is worth discussing very briefly here. The fact that skills become automatic inherently means that little concentrated thought is put into their performance. It has been argued that it seems impossible to articulate or teach something that you are not consciously making decisions about and performing. This can be true. I have met many people who are awesome at tasks, yet can’t explain how they do it to save their life. If you are going to be a teacher, you need to reach a fifth stage of reflective unconscious competence, and have the ability to analyze your skills and knowledge retroactively.

I would also argue that there needs to be at least a minimum amount of this utilized for self-defense purposes, because post-event articulation is mandatory and may decide your future in very life changing ways. Self-awareness and self-control are the two major components for this fifth stage to happen.

CRGI Live #1 – Erik Kondo, Terry Trahan and Varg Freeborn

In this the first of a series of interviews Erik, Terry and Varg discuss violence addiction, the realities of violence, mindsets for dealing with violence and much much more.

This is dynamite stuff, this is learning by proxy.

https://vimeopro.com/user47283856/crgi-live

Road Talk: Season 2 – Varg Freeborn

Listen to the audio now online or download for later when you are offline.

Episode 1 – Mission Parameters
Mission parameters are the internal boundaries we set for our mission that define how far we are willing to go and what we are willing to go there for. Many mistakes in violence that end in death or prison are rooted in poorly defined parameters.

Episode 2 – Self-defense May Not Be What You Think
The importance of understanding what self defense is, and isn’t.

Episode 3 – Instructors and Students
A rant about the role of instructors and students. More cooperation and less competition among instructors. Students, branch out and get a variety of training. Lower level instructors get your head out of your ass and get out and learn something so you can quit teaching garbage to unsuspecting students.

Episode 4 – Confidence vs. Fantasy
Hypothesis, Theory or Fact. How realistic are your beliefs about your fighting skills?

Episode 5 – Situational Awareness
A different view on situational awareness and learning how to relax by having a good threat assessment system.

Episode 6 – Knife As a Self-defense Weapon
My thoughts on why using a knife as a “self-defense” weapon is a setup for failure on many levels.

Episode 7 – Fallacies of Judged By Tweleve – Part I
Thoughts on the fallacies of saying “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6”.

Episode 8 – Judged by 12 – How Not to Think About it – Part II
Ways to NOT say “I’d Rather be Judged by 12…” and other ways to stay out of jail (and the ground).

Season 2 – All Episodes 1 – 8

Listen to all the episodes at one time (70 minutes total)

Road Talk: Season 1 – Varg Freeborn

Listen to the audio now online or download for later when you are offline.

Episode 1 – Your Mission
A quick talk about the importance and meaning of conditioning for the fighter (and self defense civilian, leo, etc.)

Episode 2 – Orientation
Your “orientation” is the foundation for how you will react to a violent encounter. It encompasses everything that makes up your decision making process and parameters. Orientation is one of the two major components of a fighter, (the other being conditioning.)

Episode 3 – Criminal Combat Culture
Some talk about criminal combat culture and prison combat culture, and how it affects the orientation of the violent criminal in such a way that puts the good guy at a deficit.

Episode 4- Conditioning
A quick talk about the importance and meaning of conditioning for the fighter (and self defense civilian, leo, etc.)

Episode 5 – Kata Based Training vs. Reality Based Training
A few thoughts on the differences between kata based training and fight application.

Episode 6 – Concealment
Concealment means more than just hiding a weapon. This applies to understanding your threat and enemy as well.

Episode 7 – Aftermath of Lethal Force
A quick talk covering the psychological and social aspects of the aftermath of a lethal force event.

Season 1 – All Episodes 1 – 7
Listen to all the Episodes without interuption.

Fighting Mindset, Orientation and OODA – Varg Freeborn

Mindset is a slow, subtle process. It will include “breakthrough” moments, but for the long haul it sets in slowly and creeps up on you. If you stick with it, one day you wake up and you “get it”. At a certain level, your journey really begins there.

Fighting Mindset, Orientation and OODA

This process happens more quickly for those who have experience operating in dangerous environments for prolonged periods of time at a certain stress level. That usually brings along with it life altering events that violently shift your paradigm.

At worst, for most, you may only have one confrontation in your life. Listening to people who have had many is an important part of preparing for that one. There are many verticals (LE, military, criminal underworld) that put people in a position to have to perform it, deal with the aftermath, live with it, and be ready to roll out and do it all over again the next day. Having experienced it does not necessarily mean you can teach others about it, but I do believe it is one requirement to be able to articulate it properly.

Many people can not deal with serious, paradigm-shifting confrontation well. That problem is rooted in the components of your Orientation: your cultural, religious, genetic, moral and ethical beliefs, along with your dependence upon attachments and your confidence (or lack thereof) in your capabilities.

Here, I want to focus on the importance of that “orientation” both as stressed by Boyd and through my own observations reached via training and fighting.

The OODA Loop

Created by Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the Observe/Orient/Decide/Act Loop has been discussed, taught and twisted ad nauseam in the training industry. Some say it’s not a process in the moment, that it is an after-action function. Others say that it is as simple as “observing a threat, physically orienting yourself to it, deciding what to do, and then acting upon that decision.” Perhaps they have not read the same writings of Boyd that I have, or they are working exclusively from Boyd’s earliest writings. While the earlier writings do point toward a command and control tempo and after-action system, his later work broadened the subject and he clearly emphasized the individual fighter’s real-time experience with the loop. Below is a diagram from Boyd’s A Discourse which he completed in June of 1995, two years prior to his death. It is important to note that this is the only graphical representation of the OODA from Boyd himself. (1)

Orientation is the only pre-existing condition in the OODA loop

In Boyd’s view, the orientation component is made up of: cultural traditions, genetic heritage, new information, previous experience, and the process of the analysis and synthesis of it all. In other words, your orientation is your filter through which all observations and decisions are made. It completely influences the observe, decide and act cycles. Two things happen in an orientation cycle: is the application of your pre-existing paradigm to the problem at hand, and the synthesis of new information coming in in real-time. It is the filter through which all things are observed and all decisions are made.

I believe that it is true that you can not “speed up your brain”. One of the best explanations I have ever heard was during a lecture from John Chapman where he stated, basically, that we are born with whatever processor speed we have and we can’t change that. What we can do, is limit what we allow to use our processor resources up. By training the basic skills to an nearly auto level, we free up our processor to be able to take in information and make decisions quicker and more thoroughly. This was during an EAG Shoothouse course and it made perfect sense by days 3 and 4, as the shooters began to have the basics of breach, dig corner, collapse sector of fire down to a science, allowing for brain power to be used on observation and processing new information–critical elements for success in hostile CQB environments.

Boyd also wrote something very similar about speeding up the tempo of the OODA. He suggested that it was not necessarily about speeding up yourself to be faster in the OODA than your opponent. For him, it was more about denying certain patterns and images from entering the OODA, thereby allowing the tempo to move more quickly. This is exactly the same information that Chapman provided in his lecture: by eliminating the unnecessary thoughts, images and patterns from using your processor resources, you are clearer to focus on synthesizing the new information coming in.

The other part of this equation is confidence. Having confidence in one’s skill set, the fighter is able to choose the proper response (orientation pattern) to the threat. The result of this is that the fighter can maintain a constant effort of menacing the opponent with enough effective violence to constantly derail the opponent’s orientation to the situation. This will cause confusion, uncertainty, paralysis and eventually defeat. Orientation is thus broken up into two components: personal orientation to violence, and; fundamentals and confidence. As new information comes into your orientation, it effects those two components directly.

Personal Orientation to Violence

In order to be effective at responding to extreme violence, you must have an orientation that, at least to a minimum level, is permissive to participating in said violence. In other words, if you culturally just do not believe in committing violence on another living being, all the processor (brain) speed in the world will not help you defeat an attack. This is where the importance of cultural traditions and moral views comes into play in the observe, decide and act components of the loop. Through training, I personally stress that this problem can be solved by first establishing what I refer to as Clarity of Mission. Your personal mission will be dictated by who you are and what you need to accomplish. The missions of law enforcement, military and civilians are vastly different in very important ways.

If you are a civilian, your mission will be something like, “To make it home, with my family, every night, for the rest of my life.” That mission will identify a few critical elements: what you are willing to fight, and die, for; what you are allowed to do (laws, rules of engagement, use of force policy); and what your likely demands will look like in that mission. It is only through this information that you can put together an appropriate Training Protocol and begin to establish your orientation to the violence you may someday face. If you are not morally and ethically oriented toward performing violence, you will encounter very serious problems in dire self-defense situations.

Fundamentals and Confidence

Through proper training based on the likely outcomes of violent situations within your mission, you can begin to build a strong confidence in your ability to perform under the stresses of a deadly fight. We often talk about training the fundamentals until they are “automatic”. We need to repetitively train the fundamentals until we can perform them, repeatedly, without having to think about them at a conscious level. This is known as unconscious competence.

This is not accomplished by going as fast as you can. Have you ever taken a day and just went out specifically to practice slamming on your brakes in your car? Probably not. However, when the moment comes at 50mph and something goes bad in front of you, you will slam on your brakes with extreme unconscious competence and stop the vehicle (providing your situational awareness is in-tact and you’re not texting or reading this article: observe). The reason you can achieve the brake pedal movement flawlessly is NOT because you have practiced slamming the pedal at speed. It is because every week you have performed literally thousands of slow, correct repetitions of going from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. If you train your fighting skills in the same slow, correct and deliberate manner, you will find that when speed is needed, it will be there. Speed is a product of smooth and correct.

Positive mental imagery (orientation patterns in Boyd’s view) play a key role in keeping you on the quick end of the spectrum during a fight. Boyd wrote several times about denying certain mental images from entering your loop. We have all stepped up to perform at some point in time and failed. Whether at the range, or in a sport, we feared failure at the critical moment before performance. When you fear failure, you will picture yourself failing. This image will bog down your processing speed and prohibit you from performing well. Denying these images of failure, and other fear based anxieties, from entering into your observance and decision making processes will allow you to perform the fundamental skills necessary to prevail. It is truly difficult sometimes to imagine yourself doing something flawlessly correct, but it MUST be worked on.

Victory: Utilize Self-knowledge to Win

Sun Tzu clearly was a fan of disrupting the enemy mentally with any means necessary. The Art of War is all about using deception, strength, speed and constant pressure to literally shape the enemy’s perception of the world coming at him. Boyd wrote extensively about the importance of uncertainty, both in eliminating it in your perception (denying those orientation patterns), and in creating it for your opponent. Uncertainty is the cradle of fear, anxiety and doubt. This is arguably the most important and fascinating aspect of fighting: attacking your opponent in his mind.

When we have reconciled our own orientation to violence through mission clarity, rules of engagement, moral application, and the proper training of fundamental skills to the unconscious competent level, we have gained an extremely valuable insight into how the mind works. Your opponent’s mind works in very similar ways, regardless of his mission difference from your own. By defeating yourself, you have gained the insight necessary to defeat your opponent. What was difficult for you to overcome, mainly uncertainty, is also his most difficult enemy. By applying violence of action, overwhelming force, or at least repeatedly denying your opponent from achieving his planned goals, you begin to cultivate the perception of uncertainty in his mind.

THIS is the essence of getting inside of his OODA loop. Literally changing the opponent’s orientation to the situation at hand to the effect of growing uncertainty. There is no way in this article to discuss the endless sub-topics of fighting, violence and fight psychology. In fact, it’s a struggle to truncate this information while not getting too technical so as to bore or go over the head of the non-fighter. However, it is important to note that within the above laid information rests all of the concepts from striking for your opponent’s vulnerabilities, and making your weaknesses become strengths, all the way to dealing with the aftermath of a confrontation and surviving the legal, social, and psychological effects of deadly conflict.

There simply is so much more to training than going to the range and learning how to shoot; or going to the dojo and learning some hand-to-hand art.

My primary goal is to train people to fight, with firearms. Teaching shooting is easy, and somewhat boring. Fighting, however, is complex and takes years to cultivate. Especially if you lack that experiential shift of orientation. Which makes this task much more difficult in terms of teaching fighters. This is why I work overtime to expose as many of you as I can to the deeper thought processes that are involved on the other side of that paradigm shift.

Most people do not have the attention span or frame of reference for the long haul of learning and self-development in fighting. They come out for one or two shooting classes and think they are good to go. This is the definition of “you don’t know what you don’t know”. It’s very difficult to cultivate the thought process that is necessary for a non-fighter to realize that there is a vast of world of training that exists solely within the mind. Especially with the American Way of commercializing the “cool” stuff: technique, gear and lots of BANG action in the gym and on the range.

The big reward comes when the students who have never been in a confrontation recognize the genuine quality of the information provided by those who have. This enables them to realize that there is a big world inside the topic of violence, and no one has all of the answers. But the answers simply don’t come from people, who have never really been there, hypothesizing about how it all works. When they recognize those limitations within themselves, they begin to recognize them in sources of information about the subject, and learning ensues.

Take the concepts and roll them around in your head until you wake up one day and it’s there. The light will break through. Don’t let anything get your heart rate up, no matter how bad it looks. With clearly established Mission, legal boundaries, threat assessment, and repetitive training, eventually you can roll through the problem and just look for work. You will know what you can and can not do. You will also know what eats at the mind of your opponent.

(1) Chuck Spinney (who some exclusively credit the diagram to) directly credits Boyd with the diagram, explaining how the diagram was developed as a “joint effort in the late 1980’s” between Spinney, Richards and Boyd himself. Both Spinney and Richards, who were there when the diagram was made, directly refer to the diagram as Boyd’s depiction of his OODA loop. see Spinney’s citation here and Richards’ citation here