Recap

This has been a long eleven days. Roughly eight hours a day of training preceded by an hour or two of prep and finished with four or more hours of campfire-level talk.  One or two hours (depending on the day) for travel.  I'm a little wiped.

Friday.  Landed at the airport.  Killed time until Marc's plane got in.  Lise picked us up.  Drive to Lise's for dinner, scotch, talks.  Of the four instructors, (yours truly, Kasey Keckeisen, Marc MacYoung and Steve Jimerfield) Marc and Steve hadn't met.  Lots of story telling.  I listened.

Saturday.  Eight hours of mat time with Steve Jimerfield as the lead instructor.  30-year cop, retired.  Even at his age he moved and adapted like a force of nature.  Good techniques, structure and thought process.  Every art, system and instructor is formed by his or her environment.  Steve's was as an Alaska State trooper.  Back-up hours away, criminals with high confidence that they could make your body disappear if they got the upper hand and an environment (cold, slick, hypothermic and numb) that in some cases was more dangerous than the bad guy.  He lived in a world that had no room for error and a teaching environment where bullshit would kill rookies.

All week, each class and each day was debriefed by the students and each day began with a safety briefing.  Starting Monday, each new skill was thrown back into the One-Step to begin the integration process.

And usually followed by dinner, scotch and cigars.  And talking.  Lots of talking.  I won't go into these much because in many ways it blended into a single long conversation.

Sunday.  Day two of the cold weather One-on-One Control Tactics, plus two hours on a little pain compliance tool called the Talon.  I'm not big on pain compliance, it's extra and pain is legendarily idiosyncratic and unreliable.  I can ignore it so I assume most bad guys can.  That said, "ow."  Nice little bruises.  Also- Jimerfield is an old judo guy.  Between the judo and the experience, he moves the way so many aikidoka try to move and fail.

Monday.  Our first hiccup.  This entire seminar was Kasey's brainchild to see how our styles meshed, whether we could work together and take the first steps to designing a combined lesson plan.  Which would be cool, because Jimerfield's DT program blows away anything I've seen and the program we designed at MCSO does, too, but in different ways.  The meld might be amazing.

Unfortunately, we'd promised a 1on1CT Instructor's cert and that requires 40 hours with Steve for the basic. So we had to split into two tracks.  Half of the mission was accomplished-- I got a good taste of how Steve taught, but he was going to miss most of what Marc and I taught.  So we split into 2-tracks and I didn't get to watch one of them.  Our track included:

Intro to the basic drill (with all the little lessons in that)

• Context (me) With a segue into teaching philosophy and teaching methods for emergency skills
• Structure while moving (Marc)
• Compliant cuffing (Steve) 
• Power Generation (Marc's version)
• Power Generation (My version)

Tuesday

• Warm-up
• Sightless (me)
• Strikes to takedowns (Kasey)
• Violence Dynamics (Me)
• Threat Assessment (Marc)

Wednesday

• One Step
• Practical Locks (Me)
• Force Law (Kasey)
• Leverage (Me)
• Ground Movement (Me)
• Ethics and Application of Pain (Me)
• Counter Assault (Me)
• Drives and Impacts (Marc)

Thursday

We were joined by the RCSO combined SWAT for their regular training.  First part of their morning was getting them up to speed on our methods and, especially, safety protocols.  One of the few places I've ever seen where civilians are allowed and encouraged to train with high-end police units. Then:

• Environmental Fighting (Me)
• Weapon Retention (Steve)  I took the few civilians who didn't carry off to the side to cover spine manipulation, infighting strikes and creating and exploiting pockets of space.
• Blade defense (Marc)
• Neck manipulation and structure on the ground (Kasey)

Friday

One of the themes that had consistently come up was the interplay between movement, structure, leverage and space.  Fighters that can actually use structure in a brawl are rare.  It's not, generally, something that young men grasp and the guys that get it rarely fight.  Good judo players are the exception.  Anyway, a lot of the 99% effective techniques were failing with Kasey (although he is a good uke) Dillon, and me because over the years we've learned to structure instinctively. So Kasey and I decided to do a class exploring how we were preventing or escaping techniques and how it could be used against us.

• Structure on the Ground (Kasey)
• Plastic Mind (Me)
• Size Difference Fighting (Marc)

I know there was some more in here and some stuff I'm taking out of order.

Saturday, we had four new people joining us, and whereas every one of the regulars had agreed to get some sleep and start at ten, I couldn't reach these guys so I was there before eight.  Ran them through the academics-- Violence Dynamics and Context and ConCom.  Steve took most of the physical stuff.  It looked like fun.

Sunday, we met at the Mall of America for an advanced people watching course.  We included the Clothespin Game in the course.  Check out Drills for a description.  We broke into very small groups to draw less attention.  All of the students got a session with each instructor.

This was extraordinary, according to the feedback.  They got four entirely different ways of seeing the same thing and I'm frankly jealous I couldn't be a student for the other instructors.  Kasey used his tactical and sniper experience to show them space.  Marc taught a form of cold reading and evaluating relationships between people.  Steve used his extensive experience watching criminals to point out criminal and pre-criminal behavior and attitudes.  That's what I picked up in the moments I could eavesdrop and what I gathered from the debrief.  I hit:

• How to expand peripheral vision, including seeing both ways down a corridor when you break a T, and how to look directly behind you 
• Shadows and reflections
• Risk assessment as separate from threat assessment
• Moving without being noticed (stalking in the wild is about not being seen, stalking in crowds is about not being noticed)
• Active shooter options for civilians
• Defensive observation in pairs or teams

As you can see, a full week.  I can't even begin to describe how cool the students were.  Open minded, physically gifted, critical, smart.  Could not have wished for more.

Hopefully, I'll have more time for writing.  Things are already percolating.

Reminder:

How to Run a Scenario in Port Townsend next weekend.

A weekend at Soja Studios in Oakland the weekend after that.

Collaborations

There are three classes that I think should exist but don't.  Maybe they exist somewhere, but I haven't heard of them.

1) A class for women going into law enforcement.  I wrote about this in "Violence: A Writer's Guide." Men and women are different.  And law enforcement, like it or not is a paramilitary, testosterone-laden and violence-driven profession. (Note well, I don't consider any of those things to automatically be negative.)  Not all, but most guys going into these professions have already handled the locker-room politics of team sports.  Many of the women going into the job don't know when they are being tested versus being harassed or when it is absolutely necessary to handle things yourself.  Many (again, not all) were raised that friendship comes from niceness and respect is assumed.  In this world, friendship stems from respect, which is never assumed and must be earned-- and niceness itself is suspect.  We lose too many good female officers on probation because no one taught them that being a nice person and being a good officer are unrelated things.

(I am aware that this sounds sexist.  FIDO.  One of the reasons that this class doesn't exist is because the politically powerful people who control the dialogue insist that men and women are the same.  This stupidity and blind ideology, no matter how well meaning, condemn too many women to failure.  The pretense that the world is fair or equal creates victims.)

2) Political survival for tactical leaders.  This class appears to not exist for two reasons.  Number one, the political players keep insisting that they aren't playing politics.  The other guys are playing politics, but not me...  So they tell the operators just to be natural and everything will be fine.  The second reason is that tactical guys have a couple of blindspots and an arrogance issue.  The blindspot?  We believe that 'playing politics' is an inborn things, some kind of genetic trait. The arrogance?  We believe we are above that:  "You play your silly little bullshit political games.  We're saving lives here."

Because of this some really good operators get punished or sideline.  How cool would it be if you could play the games well enough that your budget didn't get gutted every year.  And it's a skill.  As much resistance as there might be to such a class, it would be extremely effective.  Because if there is one thing good operators know it is how to learn and how to use information and how to adapt.  And politics is a skill.

For some reason, the first name that comes to mind for collaborating on this is Greg Ellifritz, which is odd because I've never met the man.

3) Nerd rehabilitation. The Conflict Communication material keeps turning over new rocks.  Originally intended as a de-escalation program for cops to manipulate crooks, the principles have worked for everything from negotiating huge business deals to family issues to getting along in the workplace.  The reason is that it is natural communication done consciously.  A friend pointed out tonight that ConCom has all the tools for people with no social ability (nerds was his word, not mine) to gain those abilities as skills instead of inborn talents.

All three of these would be good classes.  Valuable.  None of them do I feel fully qualified to design and deliver on my own.  Ahhhhhh, who am I fooling anyway?  As if there was enough free time...


-------------------------------
Coming up:
Nine days in MInnesota with Steve Jimerfield, Marc MacYoung and Kasey Keckeisen:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Violence_in_Minnesota.html

How to run a scenario in Port Townsend, WA:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Oct-_Pt._Townsend.html

A long weekend in Oakland.  Ambushes and Thugs, ConCom and a Playdate.  Probably.
https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/ASP/home.asp?studioid=22451

Training and Selection

There's a trueism in elite teams.  You don't create extraordinary operators in training.  You discover them in selection. Then you polish them in training.

Want to have a stable of extraordinary fighters in any martial art?  Make the training tough.  Make the training so tough that 90% of your people drop out.  The people who stick with it will be tough and strong and endurant and have high pain thresholds.  They will be able to hold with anyone else.  Don't think for a second that it validates your training.  They were selected, not trained.  Your training did exactly jack shit.  If you set the selection bar high enough, you can be an unbelievably crappy trainer and your students can still hold their own.

This is on my mind. Jess had her first muay thau fight months ago now.  I'd heard it'd gone well but didn't get any details until we could sit down and talk during the Boston trip.

Looking at Jess, knowing Jess (and please, Jess, if you read this find the compliment in it.  I am so proud to know you) you wouldn't think of her as a fighter.  Slender, unathletic, health problems.  Not exactly social.  Not the kind of person you think of as a fighter, much less a muay thai fighter.  But she trained, she trained hard with a good coach...and she kicked ass.

Selecting for heart is cool.  But training heart is hard and time consuming.  There are no quick fixes, no program that will make someone brave.  It has to be grown over time and it takes an extraordinary teacher to make that happen.

To do it in sport is incredible.  To grow heart in SD is critical.  Selection in a self-defense school is toxic.  You wind up training only the people who have no need.  Those with a true need for SD, the victim profiles, would never pass a selection-based process.

There are very few who can do it, even fewer who bother.  And almost no one bothers in a competition-based school.  Except for Jeff and people like him.  Jeff is Jess's coach.

Play Dates

As always, Boston was fun and interesting.  Met a new branch of the Uechi clan and instituted something that I think should continue.

Paul DiRienzo of Metrowest Academy is a fun guy and a great host.  He's gathered or created (since that's what good instructors do) a fine set of people with good skills and open minds.  Logic of Violence and ConCom over two days.  Went well.

Spent most of midweek with Dr. Coray.  Some light hiking and quality time with her mastiff/pit mix.

Dinner with Wes and his lovely wife, L.  As always, insanely deep talk.  L has insights into a world I've never seen.  Wes is brilliant and entirely too self-effacing.  I think it would embarrass certain people, but sometime I'd like to do a post on people who should be household names in martial arts and self-defense.  People who are a full order of magnitude better than the 'masters' and champions you know, but teach quietly in their garages and basements; write treatises that they then file away.  If I ever write that post, Wes will feature.

Saw Jeff for just a minute during the week.  He was teaching a kid's class.  Jeff would also be featured in any piece about amazing martial artists who should be famous.

Met with Erik Kondo, for a big project that a few of us are working on.  More info on that later.  But it was enjoyable.  Erik is fun, intelligent... I have three pages of notes from our little breakfast meeting.

Then taking pictures for the cover of the Joint Lock video due out early in 2014.
This is not the picture, but the sign in the salon window was too cool so Doc Coray agreed to put on a lock:

And an evening class on Threat Assessment for YMAA Boston.  Ben was a warm person, a good host and he didn't mind getting bent and twisted for a cover.  Class went well, I think, but it was getting a touch frustrating, in that most of the teaching for the trip so far was talk.  It's important.  Most of the people who come to play with me have good physical skills.  But just because it's important doesn't mean I don't get bored.  I totally needed to get hit.

Which brings us to Saturday and the point of this post.  Molly-Mac came up with a last minute option for my free weekend, a place to brawl.  People came from New Jersey and Connecticut (I think those were the farthest) for a play date.

This was the deal:  Not a seminar.  No fee.  Donations would be gratefully accepted and split with the host.  Then it was more or less the VPPG formula.  Each participant got asked, "What do you want to work on?"

And that's what we did.  Multiple bad guys was fun.  Nate took some impact on that one.  David asked some tough de-escalation questions.  Art wanted to play with close-range power generation.  Someone wanted to play with close range kicks.  I got to push my knee a little (first ukemi practice since the knee injury).

If time allows, I think Play Dates will be part of my regular traveling schedule.  Any time I have an extra day and a venue...

Dynamics

It’s not just you.  It’s not just the threat.  There is a layered interplay between and through the involved people in any situation.  It is affected by other people who might be around (witnesses and also audience) and even geography.  People who feel trapped respond very differently than people who feel free to leave.  The invisible thoughts and imaginary fears and beliefs have a huge impact on behavior.  The officer who has been counseled about a recent force incident will reliably have a slight hesitation in his or her next force incident.

A hit is a simple thing and you can work to perfect your strike… but hitting someone is not a simple thing and will be affected by the threat’s movement and body composition and skill and positioning and to a great extent by his mindset.

And your strike, which you have practiced to physical perfection, will be affected by your mind.  Sometimes, we call that choking.

Logic of violence the other day, this was coming up a lot. 

“Someone is approaching and you think he might have bad intent.  Do you make eye contact?”

“What if the threat doesn’t respond to your boundaries?"

“Can you back up while setting a boundary?  What if you circle?”

The thing is, everyone knows the answers to all of these.  Humans are communicating animals—it is what we do.  But we don’t, generally, have a conscious skill at it and we do, generally, have an over-active “what-if monkey” imagination. 

Do you make eye contact?  Where and how?  The rules for eye contact are different in some cultures, but you know the rules where you are.  Maybe not consciously, but you know them.  So it becomes ‘how’ you make eye contact.

A smile can show pleasure.  It can show confidence.  It can show a snotty superiority.  But a big smile is the exact same facial expression as a grimace—what a chimp does when it is afraid—except for the eyes.

So, do you make eye contact when you think someone with bad intent is approaching? Depends.  When you make eye contact, do you pair it with the body language of a terrified monkey?  Or the body language of a bored predator?  Do you have any idea how you actually look?

This is huge.  Conflict Communications has the bones, all the underlying necessary structure.  Logic of Violence gat people thinking and looking at the problem. Both programs increase your ability to communicate mindfully.

But it takes practice and a level of self-awareness.

I don’t have the skills, but I’m curious what a good acting coach could contribute in the realms of crisis communication and self-defense.  Not acting as in faking, although there may be an element of that—but an actor’s job is to communicate consciously.  To send a specific message with face, voice and body language.

Intriguing.

Tying it back, since I went off on a tangent.

Everything depends on interplay.  It succeeds or fails in the chaos of the Four Factors (You, Threat, Environment and Luck).  Skill in isolation is almost unrelated (maybe 1:3 correlation) to effectiveness in application.  That goes for physical skills and verbal skills and awareness skills (bad guys hide their intentions).

Physically you must generate kinetic energy, get that energy to where it will do the most good, and make damn sure the bad guy is where you need him to be.  Verbally, you must be able to make sure that the message received is the message you intended to send.  Observationally, you must read the threat as well as signs of the threat's deception and signs of his or her skill at deception.

Life is a moving target.

Mission Statement

In the ConCom model, every tribe has mores, which are more about how things are done than what is done.  Mores are the collection of beliefs and protocols that separate groups from each other.  We both hunt in the jungle, but I wear black feathers and you wear white.  We both think people should be polite, but my culture teaches eye contact is a sign of respect and yours teaches it is a challenge.  The how of doing something becomes very important.  Sometimes more important than the what.

Businesses use mission statement as a short hand.  All of the employees come from different groups with different values and protocols.  The mission statements and vision statements that organizations come up with are (subconsciously) trying to get their members to realize that when they are on the job, they are in a different tribe and these are the tribe's values.  "Duty, Honor, Respect" at work... but "Love" should be in your home mores.  You get the idea.

Yesterday, I wrote:

in this place and time and for my purposes and definition of best, etc*.

This might be the bones of a mission statement.  Might help explain the important differences.  So here's a stab at explaining those thirteen words.

In this place and time:  Dealing with the threat and environment that exists.  For civilians, training with respect to current law, who the student is (as a victim profile), weapons availability and actual criminal predation patterns.
          This is, for me, one of the big differences between SD and MA.  Martial arts is partially about preserving a method, a set of mores.  Many instructors start by teaching escapes from a wrist grab--- because 130 years ago, in Japan, it was the most important self-defense technique for one strata of society.  The koryu mindfully preserve cultural artifacts.  Far too often the gendai arts preserve artifacts mindlessly.
           And place and time changes.  The situation is different in the jail, at home, traveling, in Iraq or competing.  Competition is the easiest because it has the fewest variables.  Not the easiest to do--grasp that.  Because you can set the variables you can set competition right at the edge of what the contestants can handle.  But by far the simplest to train for.

For my purposes:  Changes by student profile.  But the essence is this: I don't want the three a.m. phone call that Officer D is dead, and I hate visiting people in hospital.

          For pure SD students with no experience, I want them to be able to recognize and avoid a situation if possible; if not have the tools to survive an ambush; and get a leg up on dealing with the chaos of a bad situation.  I need them to be adaptable enough to deal with a situation where they cannot know the parameters in advance.

           For experienced martial artists studying violence, they already have good physical skills.  Any athlete has good physical skills.  They need to know where those skills fit, what they will face, where their training has created false expectations.  They need to know context.  This is my biggest group.

            For force professionals, they need to be able to adapt to situations where they cannot know the parameters in advance and they must be able to integrate all of their resources (and know when, due to space or time, their options are limited) and adapt.  And that has to be taught in very limited amounts of time.  This is the group that is most precious to me.

My definition of best: The most important metric is maximum adaptability with minimum training time.
            Measuring anything this chaotic is tricky, but that's the best I can do.  And it works when you set it as a goal.  Best example is the lock training.  I consistently get untrained people improvising joint locks under light pressure in an hour.  They don't know the name of a single lock and couldn't pass the lock portion of a traditional JJ yellow belt test, but they can find a lock, including some exotic ones, in a brawl, something many blackbelts can't do.  I think that's more important, hence 'my definition of best.'

            And the biggest gains in efficiency don't seem to come from adding skill, bur from removing constraints.  Still working on the implications of that.

Nobody Is Wrong Here

Spent a fantastic weekend at Water and Steel. A lot of moments for me.  Learning, thoughts.  Good people.  The instructors-- Professor Trigg and Kelly Worden were the headliners. Alex Corper was a blast and Randy King is an up-and-comer who is going to change the martial arts world from an unexpected angle.  There were other classes I missed-- sorry, guys, but someone had to run into town for gin and you know we couldn't trust the Edmonton crew with that kind of responsibility.

Lots of differences between the instructors, and that's what I wanted to talk about.

Got to play with Kelly Sunday morning.  He was teaching single stick as it relates to empty hands and he was kind enough to play with me between the lessons.  Almost everything he did was different and sometimes contrary to the way I teach and think.  Pattern, timing and rhythm.  He gives them as a platform to build from, I treat them as an addiction and distraction to be avoided.  Kelly could take the concept of timing and tie it three dimensionally, not just to rhythm but to pitch, and that gives you an entire extra dimension in which to manipulate the opponent.

We teach differently.  We think differently.  And both ways work.

As different as the paths of learning, the movement in students isn't that different.  Some differences. For instance Kelly likes a little more distance than I do and his preferred point of action is in the limbs and mine tends to be in the core.  But the essence-- the NSI guys can strike, throw, lock, grapple and incorporate weapons.  It's all integrated.  The faster things come, the more they adapt. And everyone is having fun.  When people giggle when they get hit, you have a good school.

I only got two sessions with Leonard Trigg and didn't get to cross hands.  I'm usually resistant to calling people (and very resistant to being called) master or professor or sifu. (Less resistant to sensei, since I came up in those systems and early habits are harder to break).  But Trigg is one of those guys that you look at and get a feeling that a name isn't enough.  You feel that there should be a title.

Quiet, incredibly self-efacing.  Soft spoken enough that everyone goes silent when he talks.  And tough.  Moves flawlessly, hits hard.  The professor taught a sequence in steps.  Within that sequence were offense, defense, shutdowns, target preps and transitions.  Everyone got it. No child left behind.  And I saw several people spontaneously using pieces of the sequence later in more random play.

I learned very little about Professor Trigg's thought process.  Two shy people tend not to make deep conversations on the first meeting.  But his teaching method was very different from mine.  And it worked.

People get tribal, and I have to watch for this in myself.  Water and Steel was an opportunity to see a whole bunch of excellent things that were different.  Challenge myself.  I do believe I'm working on a superior training methodology (in this place and time and for my purposes and definition of best, etc*.)  If I saw something better I'd be doing that.  But it's good to get a solid reminder is that there is no 'one right way' that there are a million ways to be excellent and to create excellent students.  And a lot of those methods will be better for many people than my methods.

That's what diversity is all about.

Kelly, Professor Trigg-- Thank you.  It was a genuine pleasure.



* That might be a blog post tomorrow.

Minimal

Move less.
If I had one piece of advice for the physical aspects of self-defense, it would be two words.  Move less.

Fighting is like marble sculpture.  It isn't like painting or architecture.  It is like sculpture.  Because moving well has nothing to do with adding things.  It is all about cutting things out.  You make a sculpture out of a slab of marble by taking out all the rock that isn't the form.  Sculpture is removal.

So is the art of good movement.  Absolute efficiency is not having a millimeter of unnecessary motion.  You don't defend if the strike is going to miss by a fraction of an inch.  Your own strikes do not go through any unnecessary distance.  Avoid decelerating to zero except with linear impact.

In sparring, there is a lot you can do with extraneous motion.  You can fake, disguise your telegraphs, change your rhythm.  But when you need to take someone out, for that matter, when you need to do anything quick, no extra motion.

And that's not how we teach it, usually.  The good martial artist can do more stuff than the beginner.  He can do the flashy moves.  The TV martial artists-- Bruce Lee hitting bad guys who just stand there in rapid fire strikes, clearly five times as fast as the bad guys can move.  Congratulations.  Those are the skills you need to beat someone 1/5th your speed-- and, in case you missed it, if you have superspeed you don't need any skill.  The best martial artists move more than the beginners.

And one of the side effects-- if the stakes go up, it becomes even more critical to move less.  A knife coming at your belly has no margin of error.  Bad things require maximum efficiency, not more cool moves.

The best fighters move less.  The best fighter, the best athlete in any speed game, moves less than the second best.  Not more.

For Tiffani

This is that question Tiffany asked yesterday:
So... today in class we were having a discussion on bullying. Having been bullied as a child I made the comment that I was against it and stop it when I see it happening. A girl turned to me and said that bullying happens, its normal, and to toughen up because there is nothing wrong with it and it never goes away. While I agree it never goes away, I disagree that its normal and there are no adverse effects from bullying. Marc MacYoung and Rory Miller, I'm curious of your perspective on this. Is bullying harmless and how do you deal with a bully?

For the record, what to do about bullying is here.  Two lines in the second paragraph covers everything that works.


This isn't as clear as we would like.
Part of it is the way Tiffani subtly reframed the questions.  If something never goes away, then it is the normal state.  It will take an act of will to create an unnatural state where this doesn't happen.  And her arguer never said that there were no adverse effects.  Nor that bullying was harmless.

So, clearing up, there is no bad guy in this disagreement.

Is there "nothing wrong with bullying?"  There's all kinds of things wrong with bullying.  Does anybody like to be bullied?  Barring certain personality disorders, I mean.  But there are some benefits.

Augustine, in "The City of God" was trying to explain why good things happen to bad people.  One of his arguments was that it is not the event that is bad.  Olives and olive leaves both go into the press.  The olives come out as pure, valuable oil and the leaves come out as mangled garbage.

Everyone has been bullied.  Everyone.  And the reactions to it are critical to who we become as an adult.  Tiffani didn't like it and won't let it happen for others.  Her reaction to bullying, whatever age it happened at, cemented one of her most admirable traits.  I went through a progression as a kid.  I would fiercely defend any of the littler kids on the playground, but it was years before I realized I had the same right to stand up for myself.  Then I went a little too far the other way, making a point that I could bully big strong people who liked bullying the small and weak.  In hindsight I can see I was just as bad, and felt fully justified because I only bullied bullies.  But I bullied them, I wasn't merely assertive or just trying to get their behavior to stop.  I wanted them to feel what others had felt.

That's still stronger than I like to admit in my psyche.

So, "toughen up."  That's actually good advice.  Discipline, strength (physical and mental), whatever it takes so that other people can't control your emotions is a good thing.  And it is woefully hard to get tough or strong or brave or compassionate or even loving if those qualities are never challenged.

The most formative thing in high school for me was football.  My school was small. Graduating class of six.  My junior year, for the first time in almost a decade, they had enough boys to field a B-league (eight man) football team.  If I went out for it.  As a junior, I was almost the smallest kid in the school.  I didn't break 5 foot tall or a hundred pounds until the summer before my senior year.  (I did basketball and track, too.  Really small school.)  It was a lot of pressure, but we had a team and I played.

And I learned more about human dynamics, and power plays and politics and bullying in that locker room than any academic could ever dream.  As did damn near every male (I have no idea how women's team sports are) who has been through the same thing.  Most importantly I learned that size was not a tenth as important as the willingness to stand up.  And knocking people down was not as important as getting up yourself.  And stepping in to help others is noble, but expecting people to step in is stupid.

And there is a qualitative difference in every aspect of life between the men who have navigated that experience successfully and the ones who have not.  I see most of the anti-bullying industry as weak people who failed at overcoming it as children fantasizing about a solution from the distance of adulthood.

Sometimes I see anti-bullying causes as wanting to create a world where it is safe to be weak.  And I get that.  I like the idea of a safe world.  But I virulently despise the concept of a world of the weak.  The mild.  The insipid.  And that is one of the inevitable unintended consequences of making a world too safe.

Much of 'good' is unnatural.  It takes a sustained act of will.  It would take an enormous and coherent act of will to make bullying go away, and even then it will keep cropping up. But if we were to raise children in that perfect environment, would we make them incapable of dealing with adversity?  Would the weirdness of people who believe that hurt feelings are are more real than spilled blood, spread?  Would our society become a hothouse flower, beautiful but incapable of surviving without the charity of others?

If people never learn to stand up, they become dependent on others to stand up for them.  It's personal, but dependency is one of my core sins.  It is the other half of slavery.

FB World

A friend asked a question on FaceBook today that I can't answer on FB.  Can't answer it there because the answer isn't simple, and FB is a place for simple things.  A place where people put up links with built-in outrage and a dearth of thought, nuance or truth.  I have a compulsion: if it is something I care about, to go back to primary sources.  And there are some common FB sources that I just discount because every one I have checked out has been a lie.

But they are easy.  Short videos.  Impassioned speeches.  Headlines.  Soundbites. It takes absolutely no effort to find vitriol-disguised-as-fact to support whatever emotion-laden thing you choose to believe.  But if you go to primary sources and have even basic skills in critical thinking, it is almost all bullshit. No, not bullshit.  It is entertainment designed for no other purpose than to get you to read it and spread it.  You are the product of this business.  And it is brilliant at manipulating you.

Statistically, most of you will get half of this.  You will immediately realize how true it is for the other side and completely dismiss that you partake of it too.  The more raw intelligence you have, the better your justifications will be, because your limbic system trumps your neocortex.  As long as you have the emotional attachment, your intelligence is a slave to your tribal identity.

Your emotions, not your intelligence decides what is 'right' and then your intelligence is drafted to prove why it is right.  I've talked with pagans and shamans and christians and muslims and atheists.  High end, intelligent people.  They disagree.  Think about two icons of the American right/left divide say, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton.  I'd put both their IQ's above 130.  There aren't a lot, maybe any, top people in any field who are actually stupid.  But what they believe (feel) trumps.

And the soundbite world of FB is perfect for this.  Thinking is work.  Research is work.  Evidently, people hate work.  We all pretend we think for ourselves, but if someone gives us a factoid that supports our worldview, the question of truth doesn't even enter our minds.

Life is about the questions, not the answers.  If you accept the answers without the questions, you are giving up part of your life.  It's hard, I know.  And it can be stressful to live in a world where things are fairly complicated and there aren't many clear-cut bad guys and there really isn't a simple solution to big problems and there is a very real possibility that even the big problems themselves might not be what we think... but part of being an adult, as Kai says, is your comfort level with ambiguity.

Think, dammit.

Absolute Basics

Trying to brainstorm something for mixed environment (urban/rural, hot/cold, etc.) survival every day carry.  I like working from basic principles forward or from goals backwards.

Completely setting aside the fact that there is no actual need to live (can't be, since there is this inconvenient 100% mortality rate) in order to live, what are your most basic needs?

I learned Tom Brown's Sacred Order long ago: Shelter, Water, Fire, Food.
Shelter, because one of the quickest, surest deaths in the wilderness is from exposure (hypothermia or hyperthermia) and conserving core temperature is more efficient than adjusting it.
Water, because that is the next quickest killer.
Fire for a lot of reasons.  It can make the water safe.  It can make food safe.  It helps to make tools.  It increases morale and acts as a signal.
Food.  Most people have more than enough stored energy (the polite word for fat) to go for some time... but when that time is up, you will die.

The Ten Essentials were taught in a survival class when I was a pup: Map, compass, light, clothes, water, food, fire starter, sunglasses, knife, first aid kit.

The essence of small unit tactics: Move, Shoot, Communicate

My dad was more pragmatic, and minimalist, "A good knife.  A rifle doesn't hurt."

Survival also happens in a context.  Car might break down in the Eastern Oregon desert.  Maximum survival need of a couple of hours.  Possibility of getting iced into the house with no electricity.  Maximum two weeks, but with the whole resources of my house, which has way more stuff than I can carry.  Plane wreck in remote areas?

Any really extreme survival will be voluntary.  I'm never going to get sucked through a wormhole and have to live in a dinosaur infested jungle.  Won't have to create a resistance cell when the commies invade. But might decide to do a week with minimal equipment just for the hell of it.

Personality comes into this as well.  I'm a luddite.  I am slowly coming to like my phone, but I hate the idea of betting my life on anything that needs batteries.  The phone is cool-- If I'm in the right place it can serve at least three of the ten essentials and 'communicate' from the small unit essence.  But if I depend on them to the point I don't carry a map and compass... Badness.

The last factor that comes to mind is portability.  Your house is probably full of useful stuff and it takes little to put a very complete kit in the car and just forget about it.  But I'm not going to carry a ruck to the grocery store on the off chance that the zombies rise.  If it's too much stuff, you won't carry it...and going back to personality, I'd prefer that no one notice I'm carrying anything.  Things are even more restrictive as much as I fly.

Do weapons figure in this?  It's a potential threat profile, and high stakes.  But I won't discuss it here.  That's always a personal decision.  And potentially actionable intel.

Another consideration.  Training is more important than equipment.  There are a lot of things you can do with ingenuity and minimal equipment-- and equipment you don't know how to use is just weight.  But training can influence things another way.  I've been trained up to sutures and administering IVs (way out of practice on sutures, though).  The first aid jumpkit I'd like to carry would be huge... and it was appropriate when I was a medic assigned to an infantry unit.  Knowing how to use cool tools sometimes makes you want to carry more cool tools than you can transport.


More thoughts later.

Take Offense

My favorite used book store is Robert's in Lincoln City, Oregon.  Whenever we make a trip to the coast we make a point to stop by.  I've occasionally found some amazingly rare books there, like a copy of "Caves of Washington" with all of the maps intact or "Judo In Action: Grappling" which was going for hundreds of dollars on E-Bay not so long ago.

This time, I ran across two incredibly cheesy 1970's era self-defense manuals.  One is hilarious.  I may write about it later.  The other is Lt. Jim Bullard's "Looking Forward to Being Attacked."  It has the seventies hair styles and clothes and some odd pictures (exactly how does someone get mugged while playing tennis at the country club?) but most of the advice is spot-on and the gimmick of looking at assaults as fun opportunities is entertaining.

Anyway, all cheese isn't cheese.  Or cheese has some nutrition.  Whatever.  It's a metaphor.

But one of the things Lt. Bullard says again and again is both potentially terrible advice and absolutely dead right.  Boldly go into dark places.  Take offense whenever you are offended against.

Right.  This hits my core.  I don't let bad guys be bad around me. I do go to places I warn others about and hang with people that most shouldn't...and I have committed to a cold math.  Behavior has consequences, including mine.  I will be one of those consequences, if necessary.  And, if necessary, I will pay my own consequences for that decision.

I tell my students the truth, however, and encourage them to use it.  Bad stuff happens in predictable places, at predictable times.  The targets are predictable and you can simply not  be one of the targets.  But to follow this advice is to cede a certain part of the world to the predators.  To give them some control over our behavior.  To 'give up freedom' as Lt. Bullard phrases it.

Many good strategies (and plans and especially policies and government programs) originally designed to evade a problem wind up enabling.  We don't want people to starve and we don't want being unemployed to be especially demeaning so we set the social safety net at a dollar amount that satisfies those needs...and people who have no intention of ever producing are enabled to be comfortable.

We do the same thing in self defense:  "Avoid, escape, de-escalate, only in the gravest extreme do you use your skills."  This attitude (and it is not just self-defense instructors, society as a whole condones this, which is why we teach it) makes it extremely safe to be a criminal.  It should not be safe to be a criminal.

But we live in a world of liability, where law-abiding people with legal assets have much to lose and criminals almost nothing that can be forfeited.  You can't garnish profits on drug deals.

And so we teach avoid, evade, de-escalate... But I wish we lived in the world that Bullard imagines, where someone who chooses to rob or rape (these are the bad guys for cryin' out loud) is at immediate risk for their lives, sight or motor function.  Where people felt confident to say, "We don't tolerate that bullshit here" and could go a little commando on the gangs and riffraff that ruin a community.  But they fear that they would be punished quicker and more fiercely than the bad guys.  You see, it is safer and easier to punish good guys.  Good guys take the punishment.  Bad guys laugh at you.  Far easier to confiscate weapons or sue citizens than to get the same thing from criminals.  And if you are deluded, it still feels like you are doing something.

The smart thing is to avoid.  But I wouldn't have leaned a damn thing if I'd been smart.  I went into a profession that let me fight the bad guys.  Because they have to be fought.  Not understood-- we understand them well enough.  Not accommodated-- you give them what they want and you have identified yourself as a victim and there is no limit to what they want.  Bad guys need to be stopped.  Cold.  As a citizen, that is legally problematic.

Josh's comments implied that people become cops seeking power and authority.  That's not my experience.  People become cops because they know the victims.  They know that the only way to prevent victimization is to stand up and fight back... and they also know that under our current system that is a very, very risky strategy unless you have the sanction of the government.

I would love if that was just an expected thing, and I think that is what "Stand Your Ground" laws are trying to bring back.

It should be dangerous to be a criminal.

Question for the Regulars

The Conflict Communications Manual is out to the first readers.  Waiting on their feedback, and then the usual boring stuff and the book will be available.  ConCom's big.  I don't think I can overstate how big it is-- a functional taxonomy of all conflict-- but I feel a little animal screaming in the back of my head to not make it available.  The deep parts of your brain, and mine, fears change.  Especially profound and unpredictable change.

So... I need another writing project. It would be entirely too easy to vegetate right now.
The stuff on the table:

Principles-- A manual of the things that make other things work.  Those principles of physics or geometry or mindset that apply to all techniques.  This has been written for a long time, but it would need a lot more work, and pictures.  Working with pictures and photographers is always a pain in the ass.  Can someone genetically engineer a photographer who isn't flakey?

Concepts-- Experienced fighters don't think the way that other people do.  There is an entirely different way of looking at the world.  This might not be long enough for a real book.

Principles and Concepts-- Combine the above two.

Teaching Cops-- A manual on how to teach pros: cops, soldiers and operators.  Will set some people off because, frankly, most people shouldn't.  It's a waste of everybody's time.  But if you have the right stuff or intend to do it anyway there are a bunch of things you need to know: rules and tools, paperwork, vernacular and how not to be a dick to a relatively tough audience.

Awareness-- Want to write it, but, frankly, Terry Trahan would do a better job, so I'm giving him a year to finish.  So I can't write this one.  Yet.

FICTION-
My lovely wife got me writing fiction some time ago and I quit about the time I became a sergeant... but there's some stuff floating around.

Godbox-- your typical science-fiction cowboy medical mystery.

Scars-- working title.  Hard to describe.

Short Stories.

So, what would you like to see out next?  I'm blatantly using you for motivation.  Which will it be?  Or something completely different?

In Reply

Lots of comments on the last post and some of them require more thoughtful answers than I can do in a short space.

Preamble, though:  there is a reason why SD and martial arts are so ripe for misinformation.

One, of course, is that so little of it is tested by so few people.  Of the few who test it, very few will have multiple encounters.  Outside of certain professions, if you have had to fight off bad guys a lot, you need to make some lifestyle changes.  Outside of those professions it would take an extraordinary level of stupidity to get into enough situations to make someone an 'expert streetfighter.'

Related to that (we can call it problem 1a) is that the experience garnered will be in a very specific venue.  Most of a bouncer's experience is with one threat profile (drunk idiot) and two scenarios (breaking up fights or being challenged.)

Problem 1b would be the fact that after a certain number of encounters your internal wiring appears to change and desperate chaos becomes something else.  A lot of us wind up teaching what we would do and can't really remember the first few encounters where it all seemed so fast and chaotic and the brain wasn't working

Second, martial arts is an endeavor that hits really hard at one of the core questions many people share: If things got really bad, who would I be?  Training gives people the illusion of an answer to that question.  It's not an answer-- we've all seen tournament champions choke-- but it feels like one.

And that leads to 2a: When you feel you have an answer but deep down you know it is an illusion, you are almost driven to put all of your mental resources into justifying it.  And so almost every practitioner has long involved rationalizations why their system/training method/teacher or whatever is the best.

It gets really, really tribal very quickly.

So--
Budo Bum wanted to know about wiring to the wrong part of the brain.  Cognition is the slowest part of the brain.  It hesitates.  The more you think in words, the slower your reaction time.  We've all experienced it.  Which means that teaching in words and targeting reason tends to be ineffective in emergencies.  Note- I'm not saying give up logic and reason.  They work very well.  Unreasonable things are unreasonable because they don't work.  But the part of the mind that processes things in that way can't keep up with chaotic action, so use reason in your system and designing your lesson plans, but target a different part of the brain in the actual teaching.

My best practice right now is to concentrate training on conditioning, (not physical conditioning, but operant conditioning) that wires a stimulus/response; or on play with the goal of making effective movement just feel natural.  The human brain appears to be wired to learn faster at play than by rote AND a properly designed game has operant conditioning built into it.

Chiyung disagrees that inbreeding is bad.  Inbreeding happens in every insular art. I have a good attack so you come up with a response to that attack and I come up with a response to your response and you... within three iterations you have created something that only works within your school and for your reasons.  Case in point is the turtle in judo.  Turtling is a defensive position where you are down on your hands and knees, forehead pressed to the ground and your own fingers inside your collar to prevent chokes.  We used to spend a lot of time on breaking the turtle... but the turtle itself could only arise in a venue where you weren't allowed to simply boot the guy to death.

Inbreeding is the perfect word for this, because from the outside we can see the hemophilia and cleft palates and harelips and mental health issues... but from the inside the practitioners (of inbreeding) call it refinement.  Same in pharaonic dynasties as in some martial arts.

Chiyung brought up a lot of stuff and I don't want to pick on him, but I couldn't have made up a series of naive arguments this good.

"It is the warrior who makes the art."  The individual, absolutely.  I have seen natural winners take completely worthless systems and use them effectively.  And I know two instructors in my own favorite system who can't fight worth a damn.  But warrior?  My thoughts on that are here. Have you, working as a team, destroyed a group of other, breathing, human beings?  Have you buried friends?  Have you unwillingly accepted an order to risk your life and done it anyway, to the best of your ability, because other people would die if you weren't willing to sacrifice yourself?  Unless you have done ALL, not some, of those things, you aren't a warrior.  And training in a martial art makes you a warrior to the exact extent that watch a Steven Seagal movie makes you a Navy SEAL.  No more, no less.  And for the record, I don't claim the warrior label.

"I only need to get punched in the face once to know it is painful."  Nope, you don't even need to get punched once to know that.  But here's the deal-- how many does it take before you know you can shrug it off and keep fighting?  How long before you can differentiate between pain and damage and press through pain and adapt to damage?  Because if you can't do that, you can't fight.  You can only play at fighting.

"Do I need to knock someone out to know if I can? I don't believe so because science shows that concussive force to the heard (sic) would probably cause a knockout blow."

Fighting is really idiosyncratic.  The fact that someone believes that concussion=knockout is a sure sign of serious misinformation.  I've had five concussions that I clearly remember (pun) but I had to report seven for a medical in 86' and at least one of the ones I remember was after that... so I've had at least eight severe concussions.  And only lost consciousness from one event.  And only for a second.  Science understands concussions well; unconsciousness less well.  And because science understands something, does that mean you can do it?  Science knows how to go to the moon.

Malc asked about training the difference between dueling and assault.  (Good to see you typing here, BTW) He rightly understands that the hardest part is getting past our social conditioning and wondered if that could only be done by physical drills.

That's the hardest part and in a lot of ways the big question.  Every aspect of physical self-defense violates social taboos.  Every touch in a self-defense situation is a bad touch.  One of the things that sometimes makes martial arts ineffective is an attempt  to play at self-defense while keeping everyone safely within their social boundaries-- and so you get blackbelts who are uncomfortable with close contact.  Does that make any sense at all?

Even the physical drills for this must concentrate on the mental aspects.  Grabbing faces is physically easy but for most people psychologically hard.

My soundbite right now is that SD training has a progression: First, you have to make an emotionally safe place to do physically dangerous things.  Then you have to make a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things.

The second thing is that the mechanics of a physical assault are entirely different than the mechanics of a duel or sparring match.  So a lot of training (for assault survival) goes into conditioning immediate action to a stimulus and after the first half-second fighting by touch instead of sight.  There are a lot more drills that help.  There's a reason why I'm partial to blindfolded infighting.

And another prizewinner from Malc-- what constitutes experience?  It's all experience.  Experience in a dojo is experience in a dojo.  Experience in a ring is experience in a ring.  Experience working the door or as a soldier or as a cop is all what it is.  But it isn't any more than it is.  So if you Monkey Dance with people every Friday night at the bar, you can have a lot of experience and be really good at that... but have absolutely nothing to teach a person who is being dragged to a secondary crime scene.

As for flipping the switch, I don't know a training method that provides the real thing.  The training method that mimics it though (and that is often good enough) is a conditioned response to get you through the first half second.

Chiyung again: "It's a false assumption that you have to train with a hot stove to know how to be able to touch it."
Correct.  But you have to touch a hot stove to know if what you have learned is correct.  That is one of the big dangers with martial arts being ripe for myth.  This statement is factually correct, and also serves as a perfect foil so that your students don't test and question.  If your students accept this one statement, you can teach them utter crap and they will never, ever figure it out.  That's the danger.

Chiyung also seems to believe that hard conditioning is a myth.  There are some things you can't condition.  You can't make your belly impervious to blades and concussions make you more susceptible to later concussions. Can't toughen the brain.  But you can toughen bone and muscle.  More importantly, pain is almost entirely imaginary and exposure to pain makes it easier to deal with.  And people who sit back and imagine pain don't do nearly as well with it as people who have pushed through before.

Wrap up.  I know this has been long.  More important than the martial mistakes-- what do you tell yourself to pretend that they aren't mistakes?  What is the narrative that allows you to do something you know is wrong?  And how do you justify passing it along to your students?

Charles hit it on the head when he said (paraphrase) that the people who most need to challenge themselves, to question, are the ones least likely to do it.  Dunning Kruger isn't just a phenomenon, it is the mechanism.

Martial Mistakes

The list won't be exhaustive, and I wish all of the things on here were simple and had simple solutions.  Most martial arts training isn't effective for SD purposes.  Some of it is on the teaching end, and some of that is on the learning end, and some is in the culture.

That last sentence might take a long time to sink in, so examples:  Teaching by rote wires the reactions to the wrong part of the brain for use in a fight.  Bad teaching.  The most exciting aspect of training feels the most realistic, even if it requires the most artificiality to maintain safety.  The student will take away the wrong lesson.  Bad learning.  And a hierarchical cult of obedience is exactly what an exploitive predator dreams about.  Sometimes the culture farms victims.

The dueling paradigm.  Other than for fun or sport or balancing things within a social group, people don't square off.  Because it's dumb.  If you had to take out the biggest, scariest martial athlete you can imagine, how would you do it?  Exactly.  From behind with a weapon.  And maybe friends.

This has a lot of implications for MA/SD.  The paradigm sets you up to expect distance, time and warning, none of which will exist unless you are monkey dancing.  People who are successful at dueling or sparring believe (sometimes, I hope rarely) that the skills will transfer to ambush survival...and they don't.

Unarmed.  With the exceptions of corrections, hospital security, and secure mental facilities, almost no profession goes hands-on unarmed.  Because it is stupid.  If you know things are going to go bad, you get a weapon.  And friends.  And intel.  And surprise.  Crime, by the way, is another profession that uses weapons.  And this goes back to the dueling/sparring paradigm.  To get good at unarmed dueling is to develop skill at a very bad strategy, a strategy which has the sole purpose of stroking your ego.  Don't quit playing.  I love to play.  But don't make it something it's not.  If someone was trying to kill someone you loved would you tap them on the shoulder and step back so that they could face you at the appropriate distance?  Or would you hit them in the back of the neck with the best tool you could find?  Your choice, but one choice is stupid and that choice is the one you have likely practiced most.

Inbreeding.  You train together and you get used to dealing with each other.  When I taught at a dojo, my class were infighters.  They were really good at doing all the things that infighters do.  But nature of a class setting, they were spending all of their time practicing against other infighters, which is a pretty rare category.  Frankly, this is a slight problem for infighters and grapplers.  It takes very little to close range, especially at ambush distance.  But it can be a huge problem for strikers.

Bad metrics.  How do you measure if something works?  The military has a "Lessons Learned" program.  My team, and Search and Rescue and even the Reception crew when I was sergeant there used After-Action Debriefing protocols.  This will get you better continuously-- provided you have actions to debrief.  Without those actions, it is much harder.  I wonder what percentage of students of an SD instructor are attacked on average, how often...  but I feel the numbers are too low.

When people don't have a reality check they have this really stupid tendency to make up a reality check.  'Make up' and 'reality' rarely belong in the same thought.  I almost always pick on karate for this.  When I look at their kata and kihon, they have possibly the best body mechanics for infighting that I've seen... then they choose to test it at sparring range, where it sucks.  Or, worse, point contact range where it sucks AND it screws up everybody's sense of distance and time.

Scenarios can be solid gold to test some things, but only if the scenarios are incredibly realistic (ideally based on real events) and the role players are superb actors and the facilitator really knows his stuff, especially the debrief.  Without that it can ingrain incredibly bad habits.  Doing the instruct's fantasy at high speed is still doing fantasy.

The Safety/Effectiveness scale.  Fighting, especially recovery from ambush, is a very dangerous thing.  One of the biggest challenges is training people to fight without injuring them.  Straight up, if neither you nor your opponent are scared or need medical attention, it's not a fight.  It has nothing to do with fighting.  Trying to approximate the skills without the injuries is a very fine line.  Weapons arts have the advantage in that they can make the weapons safe.  Much harder to do with throws and neck twists.  MA tend to make the techniques safe...and more safe the higher speed the training.  And so the safety artifacts ingrain right along with the techniques.

Modality.  Related to metrics.  The measure of effectiveness is how much damage something does.  Do bones break?  Does the guy go down?  Again, less of a problem in grappling arts, but a hellish issue in striking arts.  When you can't actually do what you are supposed to do (collapse tracheas or cause concussions, say) the instructor's default seems to be whether it looked right.  Fighting is about touch, not about looks.  Pretty, crisp, geometrically clean can be seen.  Power and structure need to be felt.


There's tons more here, but this is a start.

Too Close

I'm editing on the Conflict Communications manual.  As always, I hate editing.  By the time you get to this stage of editing, you've read the damn thing so many times that you everything sounds redundant and you hate every word.

It feels a little different this time.  I love teaching the ConCom class because I can actually see the lightbulbs go off, feel the energy in the room change as people become conscious of a new power.  That sounds overblown, but it isn't.  Just like the physical stuff we do, ConCom is completely natural, and because it is natural it is intuitive.  The class just makes it conscious.

Reading it over, it doesn't have that impact to me.  It is a way of thinking that I've become accustomed to over the years, so it reads like a reminder, not a revelation.  Not sure if naive readers will get that or not.  Probably not, but it is so hard to be sure in the editing process.  I fear that a lot of good stories and books are killed in editing.  The temptation to make it exciting to me (on the umpteenth reading) would make it incomprehensible to anyone else.

Still to do:
One more time through and expand a few bits
Read for continuity
Create the Table of Contents
Create the internal links for the e-version
Expand the bibliography, bios and add a contact page
Send out to first readers for critiques
Send out for blurbs
Get Intros (I have two great people in mind)
Copyedit pass
Get K to do interior design and cover
Upload

That's the work part of writing,  It's a chore but like any job you just do it.  And most of it won't take that long.  Longest will probably be waiting on the first readers and intros.

Johannes is trying to open up some new markets to teach ConCom in Germany.  A university asked about the "table of contents" of the program.  The book is way more detailed, but this is the overview:

Maslow's  Hierarchy of Needs as a model for sources of conflict
Group needs of humans as social primates
Goals and purposes of social conflict
Goals and purposes of asocial conflict
Triune Brain Theory as a model for reactions to conflict
The Lizard Brain (hindbrain) and survival threats
the Monkey Brain (limbic system) and social threats
The Human Brain (neocortex) and problem solving
Conflict scripts
How to recognize when the limbic system has taken over
How to turn off your limbic system so that you can use the power of your neocortex
How to use the neocortex to evaluate and soothe the other person's limbic system
Followed by a collection of specific tactics.

The book will go into overt violence as well.  One of the programs covers dealing with emotionally disturbed people (EDPs) but I think I covered that as well as I could in "Talking Them Through."

So, that's where my time is going.

CCA:
I'll be teaching a session at this year's "Water and Steel" Kelly Worden's annual camp.  Professor Trigg will be there as well, and he's one of the Old Dragons I haven't met.  Bonus.
Information is here:
http://www.kellyworden.com/water-and-steel-2013

Community

Talking with Wayne A. for the last couple of days... good talks-- he's smart, skilled and comes from a very different background (martially, upbringing, and professionally) than I.  So lots for me to learn.

One of the conversations was about community, inclusiveness and exclusiveness.  I'm almost paranoid about groups and organizations in the martial arts.  They stagnate or splinter, dissolve or become dogmatic.  I can think of a single martial organization that lasted beyond the death of its founder and stayed both coherent and effective (judo).  But even my beloved judo appears to be changing.

In martial arts instruction, a lot of people have observed that people come for self-defense but stay for other reasons.  Wayne says that they stay for the community, and I see that.  There was a time when I would talk about my 'martial arts brothers'-- we bled and sweat together.  We were tight. So I get it.  the judo team was tight.  Direct interaction with pain and sweat.  Also, nature of judo, it was hard to get away with being a poser.  Everybody rolled with everybody every practice. But add one layer of abstraction... College politics or the AAU or the Olympic community all appeared fragmented, political and nasty.  There were at least three organizations all vying to be THE umbrella organization for judo in the US (two big ones, actually and a couple of fly-by-nights).  All hated each other and it was all about power... if you can consider writing rules for sweaty strangers to be power.

I think it's worse in martial arts that don't have a strong competitive aspect.  Doesn't make sport better, but it makes it clear about what you are doing.  If you have competition, and you aim for competition, you have immediate feedback on whether your stuff works for competition when you compete.  If you aren't sure on what you are measuring or what you value, there's a lot more weasel room.

Self-defense?  How can you know when such a small percentage of your class will ever use it?  Deadliness? You can't know unless you kill people.  Authenticity/lineage/etc.  --hard to measure, even assuming you have actual documents and can read an archaic version of a foreign language. And even harder to show that it matters in any real way.

When people don't have a good metric, they tend to rely on received wisdom.  On dogma. When you can't know, you want to feel sure.  Dogma makes you feel sure.

That was mostly a tangent, but it ties back to community in a big way.  People want to be sure and have identifiers.  "We are the (insert name here)."  Once you have chosen your tribe, your tribe must be the best, and since no tribe (or style or school or method or nation or family or team) is or can be the best (too many different measurements of 'best' for that to be possible) your excuse-making brain goes into overdrive.

And a big piece of that process is coming up with an excuse to deny any information from a different tribe.

There is an exception, though.  Certain high end teams, the VPPG, and the valued friends that I refer to as 'honorable enemies'-- all have the same concept. We exist to challenge each other.  To push and shatter illusions.  "A man sharpens a man as steel sharpens steel."

I don't think it will ever spread very far.  Don't think a group like this will ever get very big or last beyond a small group at a certain time of life.  Most people want comfort and certainty.  The few I know who seek discomfort and doubt tend to be the men and women who bet their lives on their skills and can't afford certainty, comfort or similar illusions.

I believe it is completely incompatible with teaching subject matter (may be wrong about that-- competition teams are an obvious exception).  Preparing for high-chaos, high-risk environments, I'm confident you can't be dogmatic and continuously improve.

Would it be possible to create a long-term community dedicated to challenge?  I wonder, because the people who seek groups also seem to like to crystalize them.

Multi-Dimension

I've written a basic intro to risk management before.  You can find it here:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2008/12/elements-of-risk-management.html

The part I want to focus on is the levels of risk versus levels of frequency.
You can categorize things into High Risk and Low Risk.  For self-defense purposes, High Risk means you are likely to get hurt or killed, Low Risk means those things are unlikely.  You should put more training time into high risk events than low risk events.  You really don't need extensive training in how to protect yourself from a toddler attack.

The next paradigm is frequency.  This may be counterintuitive, but you don't need to train for high frequency things that much.  Reason being that you get a lot of practice.  Driving is almost surely the most dangerous thing you do on a regular basis, but very few people get continuos training (unless they go into special jobs or get told by a judge they need some remedial lessons).  If you actually do something four hours a day, there isn't a lot of gain in training it two hours a week.

The low frequency stuff is where you need good information, good training and a plan.  You should have a plan for how to get your family out of your house in a fire (HR/LF).  You probably don't need a plan or rehearsals on how to drive to the gas station (HR/HF).  Or a plan/rehearsals on how to deal with pet hair in the carpet (LR/HF) or how to deal with a gerbil overpopulation problem (LR/LF).

There are more dimensions, though.  Not sure how they affect risk management, but they are very powerful in how you must train and what you can analyze and learn.

One of the biggest is time compression.  The basics of how Toby and I teach survival are almost identical.  Train awareness, use your brain and body, instincts... the biggest difference is that Toby teaches wilderness survival where many of the dangers require hours or days to kill you.  I teach assault survival, in which the dangers are measured in seconds or fractions thereof.

This is one of the biggest, and I'm not sure I'm willing to write about time yet.  Not ready, because so much of it is hard to explain.  Working through the ConCom manual it is really apparent how much of the communication skills are really counter-assault skills... just brains instead of bodies.  And how much I would never have noticed except for the  combination of High Risk + Compressed Time.

Dealing with conflict as opposed to violence, it can be spread over a long time and much of the nuance can be hidden in the thousands of other acts of communication all around.  The patterns in ConCom are incredibly obvious once you see them, but it took the filter of fast violence to screen out the white noise.

The second dimension is intelligence.  Information.  And that further breaks down into low and high quantity, clarity, breadth and reliability.

If you know a lot about the problem, that is usually better than knowing little or nothing. Quantity.

But you may know a lot of facts about the big picture but not details. E.g. You might know the names and histories of the local gangs and their territories and business; but not be up to speed on the current members.  A problem that a lot of people who leave an active job and go into training run into.  Clarity.

You may know a lot about a piece of a big subject or a lot about a related subject and just miss this subject.  A degree in zoology with a concentration on marine mammals may have big blindspots dealing with reptiles.  Bouncers know what bouncers know, not what cops know...and vise versa.  Same with victims, perps and enforcement.  Breadth.

And reliability.  This one is endemic in the martial arts.  It is possible to know an awful lot of things that aren't true.  It is always hard to measure the reliability of your own beliefs.

A high risk, low frequency event where you have years to plan and prepare is different, both in training and response from one where you have seconds.  Obviously.  And it changes even more when you are well-informed, clueless or deluded.

More to think about here.

Structure, Space and Orientation

Good playtime with KJ yesterday.  He wanted to work infighting defense against elbows, specifically elbow flurries. Ergo, we both had bloody lips and big smiles before we broke for lunch.

Infighting is not like fighting at striking range.  As I use it, it is also different than the other player's concept of infighting.  It's not the range where you can comfortably hit with your elbows.  Infighting, for me, is the range at which our torso's are in contact range.  Maybe a fistwidth between, at times.

And that has huge implications for how you fight and think-- and this is hard for me to write.  Because the range is so close, the speed is high, far too fast even in play to think.  I don't infight mentally with words or pictures, it is almost all by touch, which makes it very hard to write about.

KJ has a lot of skills, but his default is a striker.  And so he envisions incoming attacks as things that must be intercepted before they reach him.  That is how you fight in space.  But at infighting range, that's not necessarily true.  None of those attacks are separate from the body and brain controlling them.  The attacks are physically linked.  And it's not like an octopus, either.  It is bone.  Hand bone to forearm bones to humerus to shoulder girdle to spine (and rib cage) to pelvic girdle to femur to lower leg bones to feet.  All bone, all connected.  And every one of those bones is a lever arm.  And if you displace any of the core bones (spine, rib cage, shoulder girdle--rarely pelvis) you affect what all of the other satellite bones can do.

So if that elbow comes in, I don't have to intercept it.  If I can modify the position of the ribs, the spine or the humerus, I don't have to worry about it...and if I am already in contact with any of those parts, a light push in the right direction will not only be easier, it will be much faster, require less strength/speed and be infinitely more sure than trying to intercept an attack in space.

You have to understand structure and part of this is counterintuitive.  Generally, I want to apply my strong structure to the threat's weak structure.  But infighting, if I apply structure and some power to the threat's strong structure with the right leverage and at the right angle I control his whole body.  If I apply the exact same motion against his weak structure, he simply twists or folds.

We have a couple of games to start developing this skill-- puppetmastering and elbow chi sao.  Structure and leverage are intertwined and damnably important to both offense and defense at this range.

At this range, you and the threat are both working structure, trying to smother or drag potential attacks.  One of the key offensive skills is the ability to find or create pockets of space in which you can strike.  There are some systems of power generation that require zero space, but I'm not that good at them.  Most of mine require about three inches (the one-inch punch requires about three inches too).

Aside-- don't want to get in a long debate.  I can put my top knuckle in contact with the threat (zero space) and hit hard, but the hit comes from the bottom knuckles-- which move about three inches. Zero space hitting means (to me) no visible movement, basically accomplished with skeleton bounce.--Aside ends.

So creating the pockets is critical and, again, has to be something you develop an intuitive feeling for.  Not so much for when you create or find space.  That comes easily.  But defensively, you have to be able to sense when the threat has opened a dangerous space, because something very bad is going to move through there very quickly and into your hurty parts.

And this goes back to manipulating structure.  You can make the space go away. You can try to fill the space (block).  But frequently you can merely tug or push on the shoulder (or neck or whatever you happen to be touching) and change the threat's orientation.  He still has that pocket of space, but it is no longer aimed at you.

You have an orientation.  You are facing a certain way.  So is the threat.  The positional battle in infighting (or any good fighting) is to get to the dead zone, the point where all of your weapons are on line and all of the threats are pointing the wrong way.  Attack from behind or the rear flank, in other words.  But for infighting this isn't just a matter of your motion, but what you can do to the threat's orientation, via his structure.

Probably too technical, but Mick has challenged me to try to put infighting into words.  Working on it.

Writing Advice

My lovely and talented wife is working on a non-fiction book.  It is about becoming a writer.  Not another how-to book, more like pathnotes.  Anyway, she asked me to expand and write down something we were talking about:

The difference between editing a book and herding cats is that cats are way less insecure and neurotic than writers.

Maybe my experience won’t fly here—I’m not a fiction guy.  The books I’ve published and edited are non-fiction.  Intense subject matter, violence and criminals and things, but not stories.  Which means that a lot of the people who write this stuff are subject matter experts first and writers second. Sometimes a distant second.

I noticed a few things editing.

These subject matter experts, the best of the best, would shyly and hesitantly ask if maybe, just maybe, they might have an idea that might make a story that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t hate.  As if I was doing them a favor.  These hard-assed violence professionals turned into shy teenagers asking for a date.

There is a lot of insecurity about writing.  It’s something that you have not just done since grade school, it is something that has always been judged.  Always evaluated.  If you weren’t the one who got the gold star you felt bad and told yourself you weren’t a good writer.  If you did get the gold star, you worried you wouldn’t be that good again.  If your parents told you that you might be a writer someday it seemed like such a huge impossibility…

So they would send me the manuscript, and in every single case, the manuscript was good.  Just because you are insecure and just because you have been judged doesn’t mean you can’t write.  For the most part, most of us have been writing since we were six years old.  Odds are you’re actually pretty good at it.  Writing is just like talking, once you get the insecurities out of the way.

So I got a good manuscript and I would send a little note saying, “Great! Thank you!”  And many of the authors would send me a note saying, “Oh, wait.  That wasn’t the real article.  That was just a rough draft.  Here’s the real article.”

Out of insecurity, in some weird and misguided act of ego-defense, most had sent a draft, not the finished manuscript.  You see, that way, if I rejected it, I wasn’t rejecting their best work.  I wasn’t rejecting them.

And here’s the part that writers need to hear: In every single case the amended article they sent me was worse than the original.  In the draft, they were experts just communicating something they felt passionate about.  It was brilliant and raw.  In the second drafts, they were trying to be writers and it sucked the soul out of each and every piece.

Assuming you have basic writing skill, if you feel passionate about something you will write something raw and powerful.  It will be good.  If you feel nothing about a subject but have basic writing skill (and intelligence), you will write something very clear.  It will be good.

Both are good.  Both are different types of good.

If you try to edit the passionate to make it more clear, you will ruin it. If you try to edit the clarity to make it more passionate, you will ruin it.

Run with the type of good that you have.