Errata

It seems that sometimes when much is going on, there is less time to write about it. As far as the need to write, to get stuff out of my system, I never feel that when in the midst of things. It is after, when the stupid little monkey mind starts whining for meaning and connection that sometimes the need to write wells up.

How big a risk are you willing to take? How big of stakes and for what? Ever notice that the stakes you gamble for (whether money in cards, your life climbing or security with a career change) are never the reasons you take the risk (the rush for the true gambler, the moment of purity for the climber, to get something new or get away from something old in the career change). So separate the stakes from the reason- people usually get into fights because of ego not survival... and strangely, in self defense, things sometimes fail because self image beats survival: people who know what they need to do can't, because they aren't that kind of person. Rationally, sitting in your comfortable den, you know that should never happen, but it does. Quite frequently. Even to people who don't believe it could happen.

Discretionary time- one of the big differences between an amateur and a professional in any Emergency Services job, is the ability to recognize when action is unnecessary. The classic is EMTs: rookies run to the scene, veterans look for the fallen power lines. Generally, if you aren't taking damage, you think. If you are taking damage, you move. The ability to recognize when you have discretionary time is a powerful skill. Working with a true pro, he sometimes seem to slow everything down by pure force of will, but it's not that- he or she just recognizes when you can slow down and takes full advantage of the time. (Thanks to Gordon Graham for the concept many years ago. I don't think he planned on anybody in his audience using it in the middle of a fight, but it works.)

Speaking of famous people and people who should be: Mauricio Machuco in Montreal. Amazing man, experienced fighter. Everything you could want in a brother or when you need backup right now. He's working on applying the dynamics of Steven Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" to survival fighting. Eerie, sometimes, how universal 'effective' can be.

Always watch for failure. When you see some one fail and can see the mistake, especially if it is obvious and the stakes are high... Forget it. I'm mincing words here, trying to be nice and non-specific. Let's try it again: When somebody screws up and dies and the reason is obvious (he should have fired; he should have searched better; he should have practiced the draw while sitting in the car; he should have expected...) there's a damn good chance it was obvious to him, too. There's a damn good chance that he was just as well or better trained than you. Just as smart or smarter... on and on. You have to be aware that shit in the moment is not like watching it on video. It does something, many things, to your brain. Be ready for that, as ready as you can.

We built a big snow man, almost seven feet tall and had a snowball fight and let the dogs run in the goat pasture. Across the gully, the trees were covered in snow and shrouded by light mist. The kids are out sledding now.

Hitting The Ground Running

Forty minutes into the first shift on line and I'm putting cuffs on a big guy. By the end of the day: fights averted, mental health issues addressed; officer issues addressed... and paperwork, but that's okay, too.

It's been two active days since the transition from desk jockey back to officer and it feels nice, useful. More laughter- who the hell would want to smuggle a pair of scuzzy, stained jail panties out as a gift for his wife? Wouldn't that be a lot of explaining? More pathos- a 23 year old addict with veins so bad the hospital had to put the catheter in her external jugular for the antibiotics that she needs to fight the necrosis from the infected needle sticks. More honor- 'nuff said.

Large, clearly angry inmate striding purposefully (not quite charging or running) towards the officer and I step in...
You're outweighed by at least forty pounds, Grasshopper. The threat is exhibiting intent (yelling, fists clenched, jaw muscle clenching); has the means (fists, feet, size); and the opportunity (is in reach) to a clearly ominous level, which authorizes at least serious force on our continuum. There are 74 other inmates and one officer in the immediate area. You are required to engage. What do you do?

I just shook my head slightly, murmured and pointed to the side. He turned in line with the point like it was his idea and I stepped in close and said, "Let's go, I'll cuff you outside." I am good at this.

There's soooo much in that. Eye contact and eye focus. Body language. Proximics. Amount of facing (full on, angled...). Gestures. Rate, tone, pitch and volume of any verbals (half the time I don't even use words). Does it work? Almost all the time, when you see it coming, which may be why for physical stuff my emphasis is on the ones I don't see coming. It's reliable enough (not some recipe of movement and words, just the skill of connection and communication) that I've talked inmates and arrestees in full-blown excited delirium into letting me cuff them.

But it does have the potential to go bad, and if it does it will be very close and very fast and, whether I should have been surprised or not it damn well will be a surprise.

I thought I would be a little rusty.
It's good to be home.

Nostalgia

A really pressing need to get away, be alone, let some of the dreck and contradiction and just slime of living in society seep away. So no one knows precisely where I am. The electronic leashes of cell phones and pagers are plugged and far away.

The trip took an odd twist early, being pulled to old significant places. A walking place in a certain park (first trembling kiss by moonlight with K). Dorms, each one bringing a name and face out of shadows of memory. Dancing and eating places that no longer exist. A giant flag.

I turned away from one door where I knew I would be welcome, but my own sense of past was getting overwhelming.

So for two days, old places. Old memories. This is really strange for me. I live in the present. For the most part the past is an advisor, a teacher. It's rare even for me to remember almost anything specifically. I can, I just don't bother any more than I watch movies a second time or re-read books unless I have something to clarify.

I took pictures of the cliff where Jake saved my stupid ass. Other stuff. Climbed just a little. Worked with the boken in surf up to my waist. Slept under a nearly full moon in a rare (for this region) hard freeze.

Still not done, still cleaning out. Just feeling things shift.

Time: the First half second

It's about time for a short series on the things that people just don't get when they are talking, thinking, training or analyzing acts of violence. One of the biggest is time. First some background:

There are different types of fights, different approaches and different dynamics- but not really a lot of them. The dominance display sometimes goes to a fight. Not usually, unless you let your ego get involved. I call that one the Monkey Dance and it is common, predictable and seemingly genetically imprinted to be safe. On the rare occassions someone dies in a Monkey Dance it is by falling and hitting their head.
There's also a display of solidarity, the Group Monkey Dance. There are two levels of this. Both suck, but one can be brutal and pitiless beyond what too many people are ready to accept in their comfortable, safe worlds. The high level GMD is the one type of attack that scares me most, because it is the one that I have least experience dealing with and the one that I have trouble even imagining a high percentage response. I know two strategies to survive them, I've used one of those... but I have no evidence that my survival had more to do with what I did than it had to do with what the bad guys didn't do.
The third is the predatory assault. This is the one I think of when I am writing about survival and self defense. This is the one that I plan and train for. The other two are largely preventable or avoidable (NOT the same thing, not even close). A good ambush is generally preventable but rarely specifically preventable (and that is the third very important concept so far. If you don't grasp the difference, remind me.) Yeah, there are variations- the charm and blitz predators use different approaches; process and resource predators have different goals and follow somewhat different dynamics after the initial assault. Hustlers trying to use predator dynamics rely on display instead of effect, and there is a vulnerability there that can be exploited, but exploiting it comes with its own special danger.
So just to be clear, we are talking about ambushes. Sudden assaults.

In a Monkey Dance, sparring or dueling it starts at a very mental and perceptual level. What is the threat doing? How is he positioned? What can I do? Then someone decides to do it. If you make good decisions fast, you can usually establish dominance early. The threat may get the first move and will be a big step ahead, but much of your intelligence gathering is done- you can recover.

The assault is different. You get hit first. What do you do?
"Well, that depends..."
You get hit again.
"How is he hitting me?"
You get hit again.
"What can I do?"
You get hit again.

If what you do depends in any way on what he does, you will take more damage while exploring options.
If you need any data beyond the fact that you are taking damage in order to make a decision, you will take more damage while you gather it.
If any aspect of this is a cognitive process, you will likely never close your OODA loop. In other words you will take damage and probably never act.

This is fast. A decent fighter can hit you eight to ten times a second. Most street fighters aren't particularly skilled in the nuances of short power generation- they will only hit about six times a second because they are putting weight and power into it.

Do those numbers seem high? If so, it is probably a sparring artifact, where the two contestants maintain a balance between offense and defense, distance and time. In an assault the predator relies (with iincredible reliability) on the speed of the attack freezing the victim. He has probably never heard of the OODA loop, but he uses the dynamics. And it works. Also, if the numbers seem high, get out a stop watch and try it. Completely untrained people hit at least four times a second. I seriously doubt the skill of any striking artist who can't do eight. I've hit thirteen. One of Loren Christensen's students peaked at seventeen.

This is what I usually refer to as the OC stage of the attack. The person attacked has to be trained for immediate action regardless of the nature of the attack. What kind of immediate action? It really doesn't matter. Turning and running could work. I'm partially to irimi. One guy I knew could reliably kick the knee from almost any position. Palm heel to the face is good. But it must be immediate, must bypass the cognitive process.

This training for immediate action is a separate thing from fighting skill. Decisiveness, what USM Jones calls "Initiative" or "violence of action" is a skill all its own. It is probably the premier skill if you expect to survive an ambush. If you do not survive this stage, you will not be able to access whatever killer you skill you have gained in your training. What you will do is sit in a depression a week later and lament what you could have done, all the options that you see with the perspective of time. If you are very unlucky, you might even have an instructor that will reinforce this, claim that he would have seen what to do. Don't be fooled. This ability for immediate reaction is a separate thing.

Ask yourself honestly if you train for it.

Dueling and Monkey Dance based styles don't need this within their world-view. So sometimes it's just new information. I can think of one person (Hey, Tony!) who has made a great career out of helping people with this new information. But sometimes (and in my opinion this is criminal) I've seen instructors deny that it exists and a few practitioners stick their heads deep in the sand with the old saw, "You can't train for that so why bother?" But people do train for it, and use it with decent success.

A general (Patton? McArthur?) once said, "A decent plan now, violently executed is better than a great plan too late." In an assault, even in a military ambush, a half second can be too late.

This is a trainable skill. It's a critical skill. What will you decide to do?

SMEs

  Probably in the last ten years I've had the opportunity to be at the center of three things that have been done extraordinarily well.  One was the tactical team, one was the changes in training over the last four years, and one was the Mental Health Team.  All of these things had stuff in common.

The need for a Tactical Team was pretty obvious.  The original team was nearly completely unarmed and expected to handle riots, cell extractions and even hostage rescue pretty much hand to hand.  You needed the best to pull that off.  But the original plan on the drawing board was terrible.  Someone had decided it would be unfair and possibly even discriminatory to limit the team members to people in good shape who can fight.  That first concept quietly died and the real team was selected very carefully.

        The training changes followed a definite and obvious need, at least from the perspective of staff.  When a quarter of your staff are getting assaulted and roughly 10% hospitalized a year, they need better preparation.

With a huge budget crisis in mental health, large numbers of people who really needed extensive help were going to be released to the street.  A handful of people predicted this and prepared, knowing that some of these people who should be in institutions or Halfway Houses were going to wind up first on the streets and then in jail.

These are the things that we have done well, better than anyone in the nation, in my opinion.  All three had certain things in common: they were envisioned, designed and executed by SMEs and the SMEs were empowered to make it work.

An SME is a Subject Matter Expert.  The original tactical team were chosen not just for their fighting ability, but for their control, professionalism and cool under stress.  They designed the team, the training and were given a free hand to plan and execute operations.  The end result was a team that has talked more people out than they've fought and even in situations where lethal force was clearly justified they managed to handle the majority with no injury whatsoever.  It was their team, and they were empowered to design a team that they could be proud of.

Same with training: look for the people who know both how to finish a force situation; how to communicate; how to teach.  Get the ones who know what the officers need, know the policy inside and out, and let them design the course.  It hasn't been perfect, of course, but staff assaults dropped by 30% in 2007 from the year we started this paradigm.

And the Mental Health Team.  Wow.  Interdisciplinary? Yeah, IMO our best counselors, best medical staff and best officers, both in the modules and working from Classification.  The results have been extraordinary.  A truly therapeutic environment but just as- possibly more- secure than the regular jail. Continuation of care on the outside.  One of the safest and quietest places in the jail.  The original officers were hand-picked for this.  It was new and no one knew if it would work or how dangerous it would be to have 65 severely mentally ill people, all with criminal convictions or pending charges in an open dorm.

These all confirmed something that every leader knows: If you pick your good people and let them do their jobs, they will exceed your expectations, sometimes in ways that you can't imagine.

Each of these groups had another thing in common: A real leader with a real vision.  There would have been no Tactical Team without Ron, and he went through the fires of bureaucratic hell to make it happen.  It probably damaged his career severely at the time but he was willing to sacrifice that to keep people safe.  There would have been no change in training without Jose.  He pushed it (and sometimes just got it done) against people resistant to any change who sometimes act like they pretend the dangerous side of the job doesn't exist.  Even when he was exhausted and frazzled, he did the right thing.  The Mental Health Team would never have happened without Cathy.  It was the right thing to do and she never had and never would back down from doing the right thing.

There is one other thing they have in common.  They are all in danger.  Something about success, something about SME's seems to draw (not fire, what is the opposite of fire? inertia?).  If people make a job look easy, people looking for an easy job lobby to be included.  Once people feel a little safer, they start complaining that what made it safe is too hard or too burdensome.  In a way, I hope that is it, or simple regression to the mean.  I hope it's not simply that people who work hard to be good, to be SME's, trigger a jealousy in the mediocre and the mediocre, as the majority, exert their power.  I hope I don't live in a world that punishes excellence for the crime of excellence.

Too Many Words

As part of a project I am trying to put together a manual for agency instructors on this new way of teaching.  Most of it draws from a previously unpublished piece about 'principles.' I started writing that years ago, trying to put into words why some stuff worked, why other stuff didn't. 

The big mystery was how I pulled stuff off that bigger, stronger people couldn't. 'Principles' was trying to lay down the core ideas of efficiency- what it is and how to make it work.

In the course of the last several years reading, training, fighting, I've observed a lot of things, put together some clues.  I think about conflict in a way that only a handful of people seem to share.  But the way we think is useful and so in addition to the Principles there is now a section on Concepts.

'Concepts' is just a list of the stuff that I/we* think are critical to understanding what goes on in a fight.

But I wonder, right now if I am going off on a familiar and useless path.  How much does it really help?  I believe it does, I believe that if you understand predator dynamics you can prevent things that you otherwise couldn't.  I believe that you need to recognize a freeze before you can break out...

But I've read an awful lot of theoretical stuff and wondered, "That's interesting, but will it make any difference to know that when something slams into the back of my head?"

Maybe, like technique, the Concepts need to be absorbed and stripped down to their essentials. I do this most of the time: not thinking of concepts or principles but acting in accordance with them.  So that ability exists.  Can it be taught?

Sometimes I feel that words get in the way of understanding, that if you learn all of the concepts you learn the names and can discuss them and that lets you think that you know them and that lets you feel comfortable enough to just stop, keeping them in your brain but never internalizing them into your bone and muscle and tendon.

So here is the insecurity and self-doubt of a teacher. Can I really take the things from my head and get them to you deeply enough?  Will I ever know?

*I seem to do most of the conceptualizing all the writing, but then I kick it back to a few people, notably Mac, for a check on what I have missed or misunderstood.

Expectations

Sometimes it's not what you think it is. You spend years training, researching, planning, visualizing and then sometimes the rubber hits the road and it is so not what you expected.  My first jail fight I was expecting the battle of my life with a vicious, killer, hopped-up gangbanger.  When go time came, it felt like he was made of cheese, completely without muscle.  I had to ramp way back to make sure he didn't get injured.  I had been playing very hard for a long time with college level athletes.

One of the comments on another post mentioned Aldo Nadi's duel. Nadi was a jerk, but he was the finest fencer in the world at the time (it's arguable, but most of Bruce Lee's concepts and strategy of JKD appeared to be directly cribbed from Nadi's book "On Fencing".) In that book he describes his one duel.  It reads with the fuzzy clarity of someone who expected to die, remembering every detail.  He knew that what he did, fencing, was not what he was about to do- dueling.

He was aware of the difference. Probably too aware, because the technical difference was minimal. He was almost frozen and he had to get over that- which he did- in order to access his skills.

I expected the fight to be hairier than anything I had ever experienced.  Nadi expected the duel to be so vastly different from his training as to be alien.

George Mattson of Uechi-ryu tells a story in this article about a run-in after hours at a bar in an interesting part of town. At the time, he had a little less than twenty years of training in karate.  I've met George and he is a superb martial artists, a superb teacher and I've watched how he handles the Uechi crew- subtly, respectfully, without throwing his rank around.  He is clearly a strategist of high order. At the time he had been running the bar, including handling the frequent problem child.  Lots of training and far from his first fight.  George was way beyond where most people are when they start selling self-defense systems or street-fighter certificates.

To paraphrase the story, after hours a group started stealing the bar sign.  George ran out- more balls than brains- and clobbered the biggest.  The bad guy went down, blood everywhere.  Then he got up and said, "You want to fight?  Let's see what you got."

This is the looking glass moment.  You've trained for besting a martial athlete.  You've visualized taking on a knife-wielding psycho. Then what you get is someone who enjoys this. Win or lose, the worst beating you've ever received or handed out is several notches below what he does for fun.  A trip to the ER for some stitches and a cast has all the emotional weight of a hangover- just the price of a little fun.

George got out of there- high order strategist, remember? But he still thinks about it.  The smile still haunts him.

The looking glass moment.  You get to something that you've prepared for as well and intelligently as you can and it's not what you thought it was. What do you do?

There are two things I want to say here:

Broadly, expectations can be the problem. Be prepared to let them go. You may not even believe you have preconceptions, but you do.  If something ever happens and your first thought is, "That can't be right," ditch the thought.  It happened, deal with it.  Quickly.  I've tried to say this a lot of ways- a survivor can come from any training background if he recognizes when he has entered unmapped territory and lets go of the map. And someone from any training can be killed by the training if they cling to the training in spite of the reality.

Narrowly, about George's experience.  If you take your training as serious business and you train hard and play hard, imagine mixing it up with someone who takes your best shot and laughs because it is sooo much fun.  It's been years since he met anybody good enough to hit like that! Yeeeha!

I've been in that mindset, and it's hard to stop.  You see the look in their eyes when they slam you and they see your grin and they actually start to think that you're not human, not like the people they practice on.

There's another mindset too, where it is just a job: "Son, I get paid whether you go to the hospital or not.  Make a choice." Martial artists have years of ego built into their training and to fight someone who has no ego about it is chilling and strangely comforting. At the peak, when I was averaging two a week, I spent a lot of time in this mindset.  It had a cost, but it was even effective on the manic fight lovers.

There's too much information here to parse it all and I apologize for presenting it with such poor organization.

Boil it down: Here are a few mindsets you might not be aware of. Most people can't really comprehend them until they meet one.  If you do, you may lose all confidence and your blood will feel like ice.  If you can't get out, fight anyway.  The skill is still there, you just need to get over the freeze and access it.  But don't expect to get out unscathed.  You can achieve these mindsets: the first if you push yourself and actually take punishment as a hobby (but you will pay for it later- numbness, arthritis, blurry vision, etc.).  The second only (to my experience, so far) by exposure to the point that you burn your adrenal glands out, and that has a cost, too.

Most importantly, whatever you have experienced, you haven't experienced everything. When something new comes up, don't waste time trying to cram it into a pigeon hole.  Let go and see it for what it is.

Living in Interesting Times

There was a short space years ago, assigned to a relatively small unit of about ten officers and only me and my friend were not going through a divorce.  In the space of about four months, that was an 80% divorce rate.  Not having the social graces of an average rock, I started asking people, "Did you marry the wrong person or did you just fail to make it work?"  How's that for sensitivity?

Most wanted to talk anyway, so it worked out and I did learn a lot. Mostly about how people saw problems, where they placed blame, what they felt were their limits of control over their world... what Kai calls agency.

(aside- I just figured out how to link.  I used to wonder what the 'frog with sunglasses' icon was on the dashboard.  My lovely wife explained that it was a globe and a pair of chain links. I'm a goof.)

I think I learned more about C and myself, the two who weren't getting divorced.  We saw the world as manageable challenges.  We both have extreme, maybe outrageous beliefs in ourselves and our ability to shape and adapt to our world.  We both thrive on taking any situation but particularly a very bad one and making it better.

Reading Epictetus again and he keeps repeating that you deal with the part of your universe that you can control (you) and don't whine about the rest.  Fix it if you want it fixed.  Being able to control one variable and being conscious of what you can and can't affect is great power...

There's something in that which allows you to turn big setbacks into long term gains.  There is momentum in every fall.  There is a lesson in every injustice.  Even betrayals bring freedom.

2008 promises to be a banner year.

Lunch

One of the things that is far more rare (and thus precious) than it should be is the ability to get to the edge of what you know and stop there.  I don't mean quit exploring.  I don't mean stop pushing boundaries and I don't mean stop thinking or learning.  I mean the simple ability to say, "I know this, but I don't know that."  The ability to recognize when you are guessing.  To recognize when you are extrapolating and the related ability to know that extrapolation will only take you so far.

People get just as territorial over their mental maps as they do over their possessions, homes or status.  Some of the strongest, angry opinions I have ever heard have been on subjects like politics or religion where the actual amount of personal information is miniscule.  Religions are unnecessary for people who have looked into the face of god.  When you don't know what information was given, you can't accurately judge decisions that arose from the information. (check out Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for an interesting, tiny insight: almost never have the people in the moment accurately judged what would prove important.  The great world-shaking stories of previous centuries are forgotten while what clearly was important with a few decades of perspective was often unnoticed at the time).

This is so common that I've come to expect it.

Yesterday I was very pleasantly surprised.  Steve Perry knows a lot.  Writing, of course.  Martial arts. Local politics. Surveillance. Guns. The SF community. Music.  Medicine. Pretty much everything except for hot tub repair... He goes on the short list of people who would be handy to have around if civilization collapsed. And... humble is the wrong word and I'm pretty sure he would laugh if I wrote it.  He makes a clear distinction between his facts and his opinions; between his data points and the conclusions he has drawn.  Steve can point out the difference even in himself, and that's a rare trait.

Not to imply that his opinions were wrong- his extrapolations are very careful and his insights draw from a long list of diverse experience.  And he likes being challenged, another very rare and precious trait.

He also will keep me on my toes about precise language usage. Wish I'd known him before the book went to the publisher.

It was the first really good day in some time.  Thanks, old man.

Nod to Dave

Dave Chesser at http://formosaneijia.com shared an experience that's worth looking at.  Not for what happened, there are too few details, but for what everyone chose to see:

I had this debate with a Special Forces guy when I was a mental health counselor in the Army. I was telling him of a fellow enlisted counselor that I worked with who had done an amazing thing with our aikido-based takedown training. One day a disgruntled patient had walked into the clinic and pulled a gun on the receptionist. The soldier/counselor I worked with had taken control of the gun, threw the patient to the ground and subdued him with no shots fired and no one got hurt. The only other training this soldier had was some high school wrestling.  

I related this incident to the Spec Ops guy and he just laughed. That wasn’t REAL martial arts, he said, and intimated that my friend was lucky he and other people weren’t dead. He then went on to describe the Special Forces training he received, and it became clear to me that martial arts to him meant snapping sentries’ necks and killing others in the quickest fashion possible. With a clear intent to kill, he felt this enraged patient deserved the same himself, and not to use that level of force was to put others at risk.

I quickly realized that he and I were training for completely different contexts.

I like this because too many people assume that for some reason SF or SWAT or whatever training is in some way "more real" than... what?  Reality is reality.  The counselor pulled it off in real time for real stakes with damn little room for error.  That's real.

And we have a guy arguing from training (anything in the above to indicate the SF guy had ever been deployed?  Ever been on a mission that screwed up so badly that he had to go unarmed against an armed man?) that the experience was somehow invalid.  He made good points, making points is easy- but he is arguing with success in an environment where he may have been killed using his tactics (and probably would have been sued, successful or not) and there is no way to know.  No way to know if the counselor could pull it off a second time, no way to know if the SF guy could have pulled it off once.

That uncertainty terrifies humans.  When arguments arise out of this (and, for the record, I don't think Steve and I are having an argument or even debating, we are looking for the bridge between our experiences) it is because people are whistling in the dark, hiding behind talismans from this fear.  

You can never know.  You can believe, you can trust.  You can have an edge.  But you can't know, and you can't even know how big your edge is- or if this is the one fight in a thousand where your edge is a vulnerability.

...he just laughed. That wasn’t REAL martial arts, he said... this burns me, a little.  He implies that REAL would be better, but what could be a better outcome?  He also equates REAL with his "realistic" training, and that training as more real than real.  I sometimes wish that when people catch themselves in a contradiction like this that their brains would implode.  Maybe it would happen if they could only see it.

Dave deals with it with his characteristic wisdom: I quickly realized that he and I were training for completely different contexts. In anything, context is critical, sometimes context is more critical than the event: If a 200 pound guy picks you up, slams you into the ground and begins strangling you, you shoot him.  Clearly self-defense... unless it is a judo randori, in which case it is murder.

I believe that the SF soldier cripples himself when he chooses to believe that his training is more real than real.

I believe his instructors at some point told him that he was training for the "real thing" and that helped to close his mind. (Caveat- I see this as intensified in martial arts where often students are taught one definition of a win, e.g. KO, submission, ippon; work in one environment; and under one set of rules and extrapolate this snap shot to the vast world of violence. Military/LEOs sometimes expand these, but rarely enough. They usually deal with only a slightly larger picture.)

I believe deciding to train to only a certain set of problems (I don't live in a high crime area so I can skip the nasty stuff) is a form of denial.  A small woman who wants to survive a home invasion attack may need a level of ruthlessness and ferocious technique that would make the SF guy faint.

Here's that uncertainty terror again: You don't get to pick which bad things will happen in your life.  Deciding that you are prepared for what is essentially unknowable is talisman thinking.

Last- the greatest skill a martial artist can develop and the greatest gift an instructor can give a student is permission to see and respond to what is actually happening.  Permission to break any 'always' or 'never' when it is clearly not working. Permission to respond lethally or to not fight at all as required and the judgment to tell, in the moment which is required.

The Joy of the Lesson Plan

Teaching private students is fun and easy.  Provided they have good safety basics (they know how to take a fall and they don't panic at minor striking contact) you can usually get a good session rolling with a simple, "What do you need to work on today?"  It serves a couple of purposes beyond setting an agenda for the day.  It gets them thinking critically about why they are here, what they want and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.  More importantly, it pushes them to take control of their own training.  Taking control is critical.  In a predator assault, especially a sexual one, the predator wants the victim's submission and degradation.  It can set up a powerful disconnect if, in the class where you are supposed to be physically learning how to prevent or survive such an attack you are mentally expected to be subservient to a 'master'.

            The student isn't always in control, of course- but when I take control it can never be about my ego or proving who is in charge or who is smarter.  I drive the training when I have seen a problem like a need (something they suck at); a hole (a skill or danger they aren't even aware exists); a glitch (a psychological problem with a performing); a false belief (something they have been told is true that may not be, e.g. "a broken nose is a fight ender"); or a missed concept or opportunity (they know how to do a technique physically but don't realize that the skill translates to something wonderful, like Okinawan blocks infighting or aikido-style movement in the clinch).  Stuff like that.  This is why we have instructors, in my opinion- not because they are smarter or wiser or even more experienced- but because they have an ability to see things that we can't.  Sometimes because we've never been exposed to it (ask me about the 'horizontal line cats' experiment some time) but often because we are too close to the problem or have already decided something is a certain way and quit exploring it.

So with private students, they collaborate in the lesson plan and I rarely write one unless there has been a good time commitment, time to get to know the student and they have been very clear about their goals.

Teaching seminars is a hoot, too.  For the most part, you know why they asked you there: you have an expertise that they feel they lack.  What you usually don't know is how broad a range of skills the students will have, who can do what safely and whether they have even a basic grounding in what you will cover.  If the students don't even know the vocabulary (like giving a class on Use of Force law to certain martial artists) it can take a while.  But that's fun and challenging.  To design something that can be used by rank beginners, specialized experts and generalized experts and have them all walk away with something is a very good day.

Teaching cops, though, requires a lesson plan.  Pre-written, pre-approved.  Judged by some higher authority to be what all of the officers need (no matter how different the officers are). Some instructors go the easy route with a short list of skills to be memorized by rote, completely out of context with the day-to-day job.  I've seen the results of that kind of training.  I've called the ambulances for the officers who got it.

          I've bragged about this before, but my agency (largely due to Jose) realized that they had experienced instructors with hundreds of real fights who honestly cared about their fellow officers and knew how to teach and how to write.  They let us write what the officers needed.  Not what the academy said was "industry standard."  Not what an imaginary lawyer deemed to be "sufficient for liability reduction."  What they needed.

        It forced us, or allowed us, to look at training in a new way.  Something the officers, regardless of ability, experience, skill, previous knowledge, size or fitness could all use.  Something that would make everyone more survivable, from our best to our weakest.  And something that could be explained in a lesson plan.  That was, possibly, the hardest part. And I love it.

       The lesson plan has to be broad, deep, and logical.  Unfortunately, because it has the potential to be challenged in court, it can't be too flexible- we must be able to testify that all the officers were taught the same way.

     So here are two of my great joys of the lesson plan:

       1) Having a very intelligent, very caring supervisor ask, "What if...." and "What do I do if...."questions all day and be able to say, "We'll get to that in a few minutes," every time.  Every single thinking contingency was dealt with in a logical order.  It felt complete and solid.

        2) One of the instructors who understands this paradigm best is looking over a draft lesson plan and says, "What about 'fighting to the goal' do you... oh, there it is."  That really got to me because five years ago no one had even put in to words that survival fighting was different than struggling to put handcuffs on a squirming drunk.  We knew it was different, but we hadn't taught it as different.  Now we teach goals-strategy-tactic-technique.  It is one of the keys to being both flexible and decisive.  We have created a common language that has become so logical that one person can anticipate that an abstract concept needs to be in a basic lesson plan, and it is there.

It's a good feeling.

Another Perfect Morning

The snow falls in fat flakes outside, pushed into flurries like ghosts by a fitful east wind.  It looks like it will stick this morning, blanketing the deck, the rock garden, the acres of unconquered black berries, the tall firs just down slope.  It is a beautiful morning.

The perfect wife thinks that bacon-cheddar french fries and sausage will make a wonderful christmas breakfast.  She wears a silly santa hat and a tight pirate tank top with loose dragon pajama bottoms... perfectly her: sensuous and cute and deep.

The kids are good- they never did the game of waking up at 0400 and waking up the parents to eagerly tear into presents.  They like presents, but they are neither so greedy that they must have them now nor so insecure that they must see them to believe.  They choose to open them on christmas morning instead of christmas eve or the solstice because they enjoy the anticipation.  That's a patience and discipline I don't see in many children.

The family is mixed and that makes for a medley of tradition- grandparents on one side catholics from "the old country" in Eastern Europe.  Surviving grandparents on the other side quietly pagan- not overtly, very secret with many traditions lost, resulting in something more a relationship with the world and with presumed (and often scary and dangerous) forces.  The parent from the catholic side is Wiccan; the parent from the pagan side bases  spirituality on solitude and the Quest.

So the children grow up with a taste of each and christmas tries not to be confusing.  The solstice is the big night, with vigil and fires; Christmas Eve is the big night for one grandparent, with gifts and traditional meals.  The children choose Christmas morning, because it is the last day important to so many and the longest they can stretch out the festivities.  The only reason the season doesn't confuse them is because we have made it so clearly about each other, about family.  Friends too, but family.

The one who coordinates this all is Kami.  Without her I know I would drift away from this world, farther and farther to the edge of experience.  Not that I don't do that, but she makes me return, brings me back to the world of hearth fires and family dinners.  She has given two autistic children the feeling of security they need and the confidence to live beyond that security.  Every child needs "roots and wings" and these children more than most.  They have them.  I could never have given them roots, not sure I even understand the concept beyond the intellectual level.

So it is another perfect morning with good company and good coffee.  Mellow dogs and dignified cats and snow falling beyond the warmth of home.

Small Circle and ABT

When Wally Jay originally designed Small Circle Jujitsu he didn't see it as a system by itself but as something you could add to any system and make it deeper and more efficient.  The physical principles that he centered it on were present in almost every style but rarely overtly.  The "small circle" wrist action, for example, was a refinement in most of the striking arts I am aware of; a rare but effective defensive move in judo and a core element of using a slashing long bade, whether katana or fencing saber.  But only in the weapons arts was it commonly pointed out and, weapons arts being weapons arts, the interesting unarmed uses were not mentioned and probably unknown.

SCJJ was largely centered around finger locks- an effective tool missing from the arts that focused on striking; removed from the sport grappling arts (two big guys rolling and allowed to use small joints result in many breaks and arthritis in later years); and rare in the older battlefield styles (our style has only one).

Wally's vision (it's changed through time as more and more people got on the band wagon) was an openly incomplete system (and all systems are incomplete- to approach completeness they would have to cover at minimum threat identification, violence dynamics,strategy and tactics, talking, dealing with the emotionally disturbed and mentally ill, all ranges of unarmed combat, all common weapons -from clubs to long guns-, impromptu weapons, escape and evasion, small unit tactics... on and on.  And don't think I'm talking military operations, those are the same skills that will get you and your friends out of a bar fight with minimum damage.) The vision was the important and brilliant thing.

I see ABT going that way too.  Awareness Based Training is the paradigm that Mac and I have been using to teach our agency.  The gains have been huge, but it is definitely not a system of fighting, or martial arts or DTs or self defense.  It's more a way of teaching.

I keep trying to come up with analogies and comparisons.  It's less molding an officer than growing one; less 'forging a warrior' than releasing a predator to the wild.

There are concepts and principles that are critical to real situations.  Many of them are addressed in most martial arts but rarely overtly.  Some of them you can see in the old kata but the modern instructors don't recognize the implications or the uses of some of these details.

Principles are the physical things that make the technique work.  Range, for example, is covered by all styles.  Some are complicated (8 ranges), some simple (in range/out of range).  A few are sophisticated (which is much different than complicated).  Balance, leverage, two-way action, using gravity, exploiting momentum... I've identified 10 or so.  Again, these are present in most if not all styles but rarely brought to the student's conscious attention.

Concepts, some of the mental things, are even rarer.  Violence is a big animal and only teaching the physical aspects of fighting is like only teaching a surgeon organ repair.  The surgeon needs to know sterile technique and how to read a medical history and how to open, repair the organs, close and prescribe post-op care...

Aside- not all martial arts teachers are teaching about violence or about self-defense.  If people are playing for fun or training for competition or adjusting their chi or getting healthier or learning about another culture that is great, and far purer and better than someone who wants to kick ass trying to learn from someone with warrior fantasies.

But if you are teaching about violence and self-defense you must address the basics: Legal issues.  Each student's personal emotional capacity for violence. SSR and how the brain and body work under stress.  The OODA loop.  How attacks happen (if you don't know how people really use a weapon how can you possibly train for it?) How to deal with freezing. How to recover from mistakes and failure. How and when to change goals. Fighting to the actual goal (if you have only ever trained for ippon and now you have to carry your daughter past threats and out of the house, how do you adjust? Practice adaptability.) Dealing, win or lose, with the aftermath- physical, legal and emotional.

Pretending these things don't happen or won't come in to play is talisman thinking- pulling blankets over your head and hoping the magic words will keep the monsters in the closet.

Almost every system I've seen, especially the systems that arose in places and times where the level of violence was horrific by modern standards, deals with these concepts.  The much maligned x-block of traditional karate deals wonderfully with the range, power and surprise of a real close range ambush attack (How do attacks actually happen) and works with the SSR (how the body works under stress).  Instructors or generations of instructors look at how ineffective it is in sparring and drop it.

All this stuff is there, but the instructors as well as the students need to learn to see it

Knife and Gun

My captain used to say, "For most people, carrying a gun is like a fifteen year old with a condom in his pocket.  He's not going to get a chance to use it and if he did he wouldn't know what to do, but it's cool to show his friends."

In a similar way, a person with a knife out scares me more than a person with a gun out.  Some of that is personal- in most of my knife experience, the threat was trying to kill.  In the very small number of gun encounters, I got the impression that the threat was sort of hiding behind the gun.

This goes to a lot of shooting.  I know a handful of very serious gun guys  (who consider me a knife guy) and a smaller number of very serious knife guys (who tend to consider me a gun guy).  In my estimation, the knife guys are more serious than the gun guys.

This, of course, falls to my definition of serious.

The serious gun guys I know practice with a cold, surgical precision.  "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."  Dry fire every day.  Four count draw.  Weapons transition, long gun or SMG to sidearm.  Immediate action.  They practice turning corners at retention in the house.  Walking with a rocking motion of their feet.  The best (and civilians rarely have an opportunity for this) practice with ConSims in uncontrolled environment with all of Force policy and statute in effect, working their judgment in tandem with their skills.

The serious knife guys are a different level.  Stay close, here, because my definition of serious knife guy may not match anyone else's.  Knife is not a precision skill, not at the serious level.  It is a matter of intent and will.  Knives are close range and messy and the serious knife guys I know focus less on motion than on the context.  They prepare themselves for the smells; the transition when things go from technical to slippery; the feeling of parting tissues transmitted up the blade.  The screaming and struggling.  It's easy to play with a knife or a gun or any toy... but actually using a knife hits almost every social button, every uggh and disgust and "Oh, Hell No!" a human being has.  Just for the record, slaughtering and butchering animals is valuable (struggled with that word- it's not important in all ways, not critical- you won't learn a lot about knife work; and cutting through a skinned animal with a good set of boning and butcher knives isn't the same; gutting a bled-out deer is very different from the warm, slippery gush of a live disembowelment.  What you do learn is about yourself and a tiny, itty bit of how much a death can affect you.  You also learn how some things die very hard.)

Much of the difference is in the mechanism.  A gun is a joy of engineering.  It is a nifty machine that throws a rock in a straight line.  It is classically civilized.

A knife is anything portable and sufficiently thin to cut.  I've found eyeglass earpieces that were sharpened to scalpels (more for torture than assassination or combat) and plastic toothbrushes sharpened to puncture.  A knife is primitive- no matter the skill and technology that went into it, the knife is an exemplar of more primitive, less civilized times.

Part of the difference is in use.  In combat neither a knife nor a gun is used for winning fights.  Get over that. They are used for killing people.  That is a profound difference.  A handgun (as opposed to a rifle) is used defensively.  As one of the rookies put it, "My glock is just to buy time to get the shotgun."  Simplistic, but the sentiment is there.  A handgun is a compromise- portability and concealability for a profound drop in accuracy and power.  The handgun is something you pull when bad shit happens to you or you expect it to..

The knife (dueling systems aside) is used offensively, usually in a close-range ambush.  The threat appears to be walking past his target and suddenly grips the shoulder or arm with his off hand and pop-pop-pop-pop hammers staccato thrusts into the kidney or liver.

Neither of these examples are universal- handguns can be used offensively, but no professional does as a first choice.  If you are going on the offense, you get a rifle, AR, SMG or shotgun.  Knives can be used defensively, but usually increasing range is a better choice than working in the knife's required range- and when bad things happen in knife range, you can take a lot of damage while making the draw...

Today we had to demonstrate our weapons for a group of people who are frankly scared of us.  I was given a stupid but funny ninja t-shirt.  Said goodbye to an old team mate.  Watched as each of the rookies tried to impress me in their own ways, and thus showed where their insecurities were.  Let flashbangs go off at my feet in a vain attempt to convince decision makers that they were good tools, not scary bad things.  Taught a new generation the culture and ethos of the team.  Appreciated good friends (thanks Dre, Derrick, Mike, Jon).

Reality and Denial

Teaching cops is different than teaching civilians.  One of the big differences is that in a regular martial arts class, your students want to be there.  When you  are teaching officers, that's not always true.  Sometimes they are ordered to be there.  Sometimes because they desperately need the training, sometimes because it is 'that time of year'... annual training.

Some of the students that are ordered to the training are extremely resistant to it, and that really puzzles and bothers me.  I don't teach fluff classes.  My classes fall solidly into the Survival Skills (Defensive Tactics, Confrontational Simulations); violence prevention (Advanced Communication, Crisis Communication with the Mentally Ill) or not getting sued (Use of Force) categories.  This is important stuff.  A failure in any of these areas could cost you your life, your job your income... it's potentially bad.

This isn't a safe job.  Things have gotten better, but when they tasked me to design the program, 10% of our officers were being hospitalized each year.  Yet in every group of people who don't want to attend training, at least one will say that they don't want to attend training because they don't need it.  They don't fight.  They've been doing this too long and that kind of stuff doesn't happen to experienced officers...

I've visited officers in the hospital who said stuff like that.  You don't get to pick whether you get attacked.  You don't get to pick whether you will have a bad day or not.  We see this all around us.  Good officers get taken hostage too.  Good officer get clocked (far more rarely than bad officers, but it still happens).  We see this, we see this all the time, and still a very small group says, "But not to me."

Watching them, they would get hurt a lot more if not for alert supervisors who assign them to safe places.  Why does stupidity about risk so often go hand-in-hand with the kind of blindness and complacency that makes one such a perfect victim?  The question answers itself.

Changing tires in the rain, the guy couldn't figure out how to use the rod to lower his spare tire from the undercarriage.  I crawled under (why was everyone else hesitant to lie on the wet ground?) and felt for the attachment point.  The square end of the rod he slid in was exactly the same size as the attachment. "You have to use the other end," I said, "this is too small to fit over the crank."

"Nope," he replied, "That can't be right.  The handle fits on this end.  That doesn't make sense."

So let's get this straight:  I'm right there.  I'm telling him why it's not working and what we need to make it work... and he rejects it because it doesn't make sense from his (completely separated) point of view.

He actually refused, twice, to turn the rod around.  After those two failures he acquiesced to try it my way (the way of the guy who was actually there) and in a few seconds, his spare tire was free.

Maybe that would make a good name for a style, translated into Japanese: The Way of the Guy Who is Actually There.  Actually there guy-do.  Kevin?

Nefarious Skullduggers

Been asked to put together a few class for a writer's conference coming up in two months. Planning the classes has been fun- working with PowerPoint, which is almost new, and trying to decide what writers will need versus my usual audiences of cops or martial artists.

The class on Use of Force policy will be easy. I could teach that in my sleep. They will learn almost exactly the way officers learn about how and when and why to use force. Even get into report writing a bit.

The one on violence will be easy, too. I don't think it will help writers as much as they think. Real violence tries to minimize many of the factors that make for entertaining writing. Things tend to be short and one-sided. I work very hard to keep them that way and so do the professional criminals that I know.  The goal, in real life, is to limit drama.  the opposite in arts and entertainment.

The class on weapons will be fun. With luck I'll be able to check out some of our more exotic toys, such as a six-shot 37mm grenade launcher. There are also slides of injuries (knife, gun and a particularly ugly one where blunt trauma ruptured the perineum) and a good analysis comparing skilled shooting at the range and how real officers do in particular shootings.

The one that is hardest to outline will be the class on criminals. I just know these guys too well. There are some categories that are useful- my three basic types of criminals; how different personality disorders gravitate to different types of behavior; and the nightmare threats- excited delirium, mass bad guys, trained teams, process predators.

But real people don't pigeon hole well. Yes, I know the drug dealing pimp with over thirty children and I know that he thinks that he is a good dad and defines being a good dad as giving them presents occasionally. I know people who have engaged in brutal murders, but I also saw them being weak little kids. I've watched people who have committed really heinous crimes try to coach other inmates on how to deal with their mental illnesses.

There is evil. A rapist/murderer with all sincerity explained to me once that while he did it, it wasn't wrong. When I had the duty of telling one young man that his brother had just died, he had a ready list of privileges he should be extended to go with that. I've read the journal of an incestuous rapist who didn't get it- if he couldn't do anything he wanted with an object, they wouldn't have called it "his"... in his mind that logic extended to "his" daughter. The act of raping a wound- on a baby. Yeah, there's some evil.

But no one is evil all the time. That takes a lot of energy. It's possible to be selfish almost all the time, though. There is much more stupidity and selfishness than there is evil, and some of the evil is just stupid.

I've got a feeling that this section will be a very rambling talk.

INTJ Hell

Tired and busy. I'll be teaching six classes in the next two weeks from a custom lesson plan just for these guys. Have spent the last two days re-writing old lesson plans and designing new ones. Won't talk about that, much.

Maybe a little. I have this little situation that can only be described as INTJ hell. The world actually does make sense and is really pretty simple. People desperately want to be complicated and they aren't. There are a lot of issues and as the scope of what you are exploring grows, the variables increase. More importantly the unknowns increase. This is why I don't have much of an opinion on political situations that I'm not personally involved in... I've been in situations where I was given a pretty full brief and then watched what was presented to the media, and what the media presented to the people and talked to some of the people who drew their conclusions from partial information. In essence, I'm too aware of how much I don't know to rabidly defend some opinion.

However, people imagine a complexity that they then create. This is INTJ hell: Something needs to happen. It is obvious what needs to happen... and someone with power but without information decides that the right thing would look bad. Or MIGHT look bad. Or could incur some liability. So the obvious right thing isn't done and real people get hurt to protect imaginary perception.

"Perception is reality"... but it isn't, not when you are the one who is really bleeding. Not when you are the widow or the orphan of the one sacrificed for appearances.

One officer did exactly what he was taught and was able to take down a knife-wielding psych who ambushed him without using deadly force. Dozens have told us it was the most useful program yet. A few (mostly rookies but one senior) have said it gave them a confidence that they could do the job.

I'm being asked to rewrite the class that made those stories possible.

It's possibly the most effective DT class we've ever had. But it's too violent, according to some. It looks that way on paper- at least to some... and "perception is reality" to some people. The ones not in a position to bleed. Have any of the people complaining been through the class? Has there been ANY increase in excessive force claims? Have officer hospitalizations gone down by a third?

That's what INTJs do- they design systems that work, and it is hell to change a working system, especially if the cost might be in the pain or blood of friends.

Maybe, maybe if I can make the changes with enough skill, the cost will be less. Maybe.

C'mon, Sisyphus. Time to push that rock up the hill. One more time, partner. Don't feel alone.

I'm very, very tired.

Supporting Illusion

We all do it. We have spent our entire lives creating a detailed mythic story of who we are. Nothing in this story is by chance. We never say, I got married because i was lonely and desperate and just happened to run into someone more lonely and desperate. Never. A good love is "fate". A bad relationship is a conspiracy of villainy or insanity.

We never stumble into a career because we desperately needed a job and this one of the thirty applications came through and it was good enough and besides I'm lazy and change is hard. Oh, no. If you love your career, your whole life has been leading up to it and you cherry-pick from your memory all the experiences that make that seem true. If it is a job you don't like it is either a stepping stone or, more likely, a cast of characters whose soul purpose on this earth is to enchain and challenge your inherent nobility and goodness.

People love drama and they create drama in their lives. They tell this story of who they are. Never underestimate the power of that story. People who won't lift a finger to save their own lives from imminent violence will fight and die so that people don't think bad things about them. People who are careful not to step on bugs have killed over rumors spread about them. It certain cultures, someone can be a coward, but don't you dare call him one. In jail I have heard inmates on the phone screaming at their mother: "Bitch you put some money on my books or swear to god I'll slash your face!", Men who would try to shank another inmate who insulted the same woman.

The biggest threat to this story are those inconvenient little things called facts. When someone's story is threatened by facts, watch the scramble. Facts can be denied, and often are. They can be labeled with 'opinion' or the "equivalent sources" fallacy (My favorite example: "It's unfair to claim that your experience is in some way more valid than my training." A martial artist at a seminar years ago.)

Watch the scramble. People will marshall resources and allies, redefine words, reject their own personal experience all to protect this story, this dream.

Same with supporting it, which is what got me started here. A friend was writing about the friction that MMA gets from the self-appointed "Practical self defense community". After all, MMA is only cross training. Picking the best things you can find from multiple sources. Is that any different than the so-called PSD community? Very valid point (most of my friends are pretty smart. Stupid people make me tired.)

That's not really the point, though... and the issue isn't what MMA is or isn't. The issue is, here and elsewhere, the "True Believer". It doesn't matter- the Gracies, MMA, WWII combatives, Koryu snobs: all have their kool-aide drinkers, the ones who have taken whatever it is as a core tenet of their story and defend it far beyond logic. They believe that this thing is IT, the ANSWER, the SILVER BULLET, because in the story they tell themselves, it is. Never likely to be in a fight for their lives, this piece of the story is tested over and over in fantasy before they go to sleep.

They will go to extreme lengths to defend the story. The Gracies swept the early UFCs (ignore that they wrote the rules, ignore the ruleset of a 'no rules' competition, ignore the difference between a bar fight and a match) so it must be the answer. MMA is the winning set of skills in the Octagon today, it must be the SILVER BULLET. WWII combatives and koryu have a bit in common- they were both used to kill real people in real battles, they must be IT!.

Each of these things are what they are. The Gracies I have played with have had the most superb body mechanics of any grapplers yet. I'll play with them whenever I get the chance (If I can afford it... damn, dudes!). But the mount isn't the worst case scenario, not even in my top ten and wearing gear does make a difference- sorry Rener. MMA guys play hard and with skill and relatively safely. They are always worth the time and you will learn more losing to Joey Lauzon than winning with many other people... but weapons and hard corners and multiple bad guys are part of my world. I am a koryu snob and love the WWII stuff- but both were designed for extremely fit professional soldiers and completely ignored the lower end of the force continuum- not something I can use most of the time.

Do you see it yet? When we speak of violence, we are talking about a very big animal. Almost infinitely complex, ranging from incoming artillery to squad tactics to snipers to assassins to redneck stompings and gang hamstringings and...there are an infinite number of ways to die. Adding patch after patch to all the ways you can imagine dying still leaves holes and can make a solution too unwieldy to apply.

The people who have dealt with violence are pretty consistent in their advice: You won't fit this beast in a box. You won't find a single answer to an infinite question.

"What's the answer, then? What is it? Where's my magic bullet?" the question echoes. There is no answer.

Amazing

George Ledyard is an aikido instructor in the Seattle area. I haven't met him, but he wrote something once that really resonated, something that most martial arts student need to hear. I don't have it in front of me and I definitely don't have Mr. Ledyard's gentle way with words, so this is my personal take on it.

This is for all of the students who are in awe of your instructors: Get over it. Get over yourself.

The best instructor in the world has the same number of arms and legs as you (more or less). A human body and human brain not too far off the charts. In most cases (barring the ancient or damaged student) there is nothing he can do that you can't do.

Do not use him as an excuse to aim low. Do not set him up in your head as an unapproachable paragon. Never say, "I'll never be as good as my sensei." It's an insult to you and it is an insult to his teaching.

It's time to stop trying to be good.

Don't be good enough.

Don't be damned good.

Decide to be amazing.

Exceed your teacher. Take what he gives you and bring it to new levels.

You can do this and if you really want to honor your teacher you must do this.

And then you must turn around and give your students permission to be better than you.

Be AMAZING. Good enough isn't.

Moving, Seeing, Training

Steve Perry asked the $64,000 dollar question today.  I've answered it or tried to answer it in many ways over the years.  Sometimes I seem to say that you can't prepare for the bad stuff, and yet I train and I train other people.  I also sometimes equate violence and martial arts as an apples and oranges thing... or even crop rotation versus hydrodynamics.

So, if there is one, what's the bottom line? (I think both Steves will get called out a bit on this one, but they're big boys.)

One of the most basic problems is in the realm of how martial artists are taught to move.  They are taught to move right.  They are taught to strike or throw or lock correctly.  This works in a controlled environment.

It's the same with basketball players: throwing free throws they can do it with precision and consistency that any sensei would applaud... but they can't deliver that kind of precision in a free-for all.  At some point each player has to transition from moving right to moving well, just getting the ball through the hoop from an unstable platform against resistance.

Most martial artists take it to exactly this level with sparring and think it is enough.  They forget (or don't know) that all live training has built-in flaws for safety.  At the best, the flaws become habits that can get you killed... at the worst, they become "the right way" to do the technique.  The part about safety flaws is an aside.  The meat is this:

Games are simple.  Life and violence are not.  If you take the basketball player who can really move well but suddenly the basket is defended by a rugby, soccer or lacrosse team, using their tactics, his moving well has to come to an entirely new level.  When he is not allowed to know what kind of team he will be playing against in advance, that's another level.  And in real life, sometimes putting the ball through the hoop isn't the way to score.  Sometimes it is and you don't know until you are there.

So most martial artists learn a collection of very specific ways to move.  It's like having a toolbox filled with pre-cut jigsaw puzzle pieces and jumping into a jigsaw puzzle and hoping to find a gap that happens to fit a piece you have.  It works sometimes, but people in real life actually say, "He attacked me wrong."

What the practitioner needs to do is to soak all of his puzzle pieces and mash it into a sort of paper mache that you can cram into an hole you can find.  It won't look pretty....

Steve (Perry) talks about ingraining technique until it becomes a natural way to move. That's key, but it needs to be checked because it is much easier to believe than to do.  When you bump into someone accidentally, do they get knocked back?  If not, you aren't naturally walking with power. When your wife turns around in the kitchen and she has a knife do you automatically close and shut down her arms?  If not, it's not instinctive yet.  Do you cover as naturally as you answer a phone or strike the solar plexus without targeting as unconsciously as you shake a hand? Do you automatically stand so that you can pop knees or exploit weak lines? Where are everyone's hands in a crowded room?  Do you monitor shadows and reflections without thinking about them?  Do you sometimes forget how to teach a technique because you can't remember another way to move?

Crossing hands with Steve Barnes he was very comfortable with close range chi sao style movement- pushing, trapping- but he had an instant of hesitation whenever I didn't do it 'right' breaking contact, say, or head butting.  Lawrence Gonzales in "Deep Survival" pointed out that one of the dangers of getting good at something is that you tended to stick with the script, responding to what happened the other hundred times instead of the different thing that is happening now.

Long training, especially with a system and instructor that you admire, sets you up for this.  You come to believe and expect and internalize his idea of what a fight will be like.  The concentration on doing things 'right' combines to instill a tunnel vision that what you are training for, the venue where the system has worked (and all good systems are designed for something and work very, very well in their natural venue) is the only reality out there.

Years before we met (and I don't really feel we've met yet, but we've chatted a few times) I sat in the back while Steve Perry discussed fighting with a bunch of SF fans and writers.  Steve said, "If you are ever in a knife fight you WILL get cut."  I started to raise my hand and my lovely wife elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, "Cookie!" which is our code word for "Don't be a monster."

Steve then said that no one ever, ever attacks overhand with the knife in a reverse grip... and my hand started to go up again.

Thing was, I've had five knife encounters (sort of, two could be considered assassination attempts and two were pre-empted, one pretty decisively.. not sure 'fight' is the right word) without a scratch.  Sean has had six without a scratch.  Brad had one with just scratches, literally, and he almost bit the dude's ear off.  Mauricio, on the other hand, has some scars that impress me, which takes some doing.

One of my attacks was the reverse overhand thing and one of the others might well have been if he'd ever got a chance to move.  It's actually pretty common.

Not putting Steve on the spot- this happens to almost everyone who trains and I've seen students swallow crap whole in cop classes and SWAT classes and HNT classes.  You start to confuse training with reality.  You've never been attacked that way in class and your instructor has a logical reason why no one would.. and you turn to your students and start using words like "never" and "always".

Which are dead give-aways.  Crap, I've had physics fail on me twice... but once was in my favor, so it balances so far.

Bigger than this "moving right" issue though, is thinking and perceiving.  If people could just see what was right in front of them, combative training would be completely unnecessary.  All humans already know how to move.  In any given situation there are obvious and effective options.  With no training at all, people are often blinded or frozen by their social conditioning.

Unfortunately training, particularly training in disciplined movement, instills these templates of what an attack looks like and the right way to move.  You wind up looking through the templates and comparing learning and experience instead of looking at what is right there.

This is easier to demonstrate than to explain.  You can go into a competition with your mental rolodex of armlocks and flip through them looking for a technique that matches what you see...or you can just see a straight arm and opportunity to apply force in two places.

When a martial artist is taught striking and grappling, they tend to do one at a time.  Instead of looking at their body and the threat's body and doing the efficient and effective thing they decide if they are in wrestle or strike mode and try to remember an appropriate technique.

One of my drills is to get the students up on the MOVEMENT/PAIN/DAMAGE/SHOCK paradigm and put them in a free play (sparring, continuous one-step, etc) with the caveat that at any instant they should be able to do any of the effects to the opponent.

The reverse POV, the technique paradigm:

 MOVE THREAT/STRIKE/TAKEDOWN/LOCK/PRESSURE POINT/STRANGLE at any given time and in almost any position, the student should be able to do all or almost all of them.  Too often training, instead of teaching the student to see more, blinders them into seeing less.

The ideal is simply to see the situation as it is.  All of your solutions are inherent in the situation.  As an organism, you see it complete and true... but as a trained, thinking person you perceive it through created filters.  Teachers teach the filters and students learn them: "You see that possibility?  Good, Grasshopper, you are now a yellow belt.  See two possibilities? Six? Aaah, blackbelt!"  But the default, the natural thing with open eyes is almost infinite possibilities.

So in most training they aren't learning to see they are learning to focus, which is a way of not seeing the extraneous- which, in this case, means all of the hundreds of things the instructor doesn't know how to exploit.

Sonia has trained with me a bit and she says good things about my teaching, but the truth is I haven't taught her one damn thing.  She'd learned to move and strike and throw and twist and slash and stab long before I ever met her.  All I've done was point at the things she missed seeing because she was too busy following scripts.

She had the aikido movement down but only used it at aikido distance- and it works much better at extremely close range once you learn to see the voids.  She knows how to force someone off balance but wouldn't remember it was an option in a fist fight.  She knows, intellectually, that it is easier to beat someone up from behind but she almost never attempted to get behind me in action- intellectual knowledge never expressing in motion.

So (and forgive the long post) I've met very few martial arts instructors who could really see and even fewer who gave their students permission to see.  What gets people killed aren't the moves or even the false confidence.  It's setting their brain- their perceptions, their expectations, their assumptions and their reactions for a limited interpretation of what they might face.

I can almost hear, "You can't train for everything."  Trying is the opposite of the right solution.  Humans are immensely adaptable, perceptive.  Our eyes don't quit seeing mountains because we've been watching the ocean (though we can be trained that only mountains matter or only oceans are real).  You practice seeing and you practice acting.

Easy, right?