Old Lions

I was invited along to a dinner last night. Not a special event in the normal sense of things, just a group of four old friends who wanted to get together and talk about the old times.

I'm not a karate guy. Not a Uechi-ka. But whenever I am in Uechi territory, they make me feel like family. This dinner of four old friends included Art Rabesa, Jimmy Malone, Bob Bethony and Van Canna. Two of them cops, all of them old battlers from the early karate tournament circuit. Legendary in this circle (except for Jimmy, who may be more on the edge of myth than legend).

For some reason, I was invited to tag along. To listen to stories about fights in the US and Okinawa; in the ring and in bars. Old students and friends. Lots of talk about family. This is the thing about Uechi, at least with this group-- it is a family. With all the squabbling and some of the disfunction, but these men and women have a deep history with each other. They have married and had children and buried friends and they have done it together. Karate runs through all of the stories and all of the relationships.

It makes me feel, sometimes, like an orphan who has been invited to christmas dinner with a big, loving Italian family. A little out of place, a little in awe. Treated with an immense welcoming and open-hearted spirit and wondering "Why me?" I wasn't born to this. I am not of this. I appear to be the only one who cares. Here, I'm part of the family too.

I doubt if any of the old lions of Uechi who had dinner with me last night read blogs. That's cool. But it was very cool to be invited along.

All of Us

Sitting on a plane today next to a very lovely young woman. Looked across the aisle and saw an elderly woman...and they were the same. Sort of. In the elderly woman I could see the bones and carriage of a young lady who had been a knockout.

That's all of us. Born so small, I used to delight in holding my daughter in one hand. So tiny and fragile. Not human, really, except in potential. Precious, but when you make the list of things that define human, (reason and speech and manipulating symbols and objects) newborns don't really fit the criteria. They are a unique animal.

Then, in a few years another discrete stage- exploring the world, stumbling. Occasionally frightened but more often filled with an awe-inspiring curiosity. Toddlers are funny, darling and cute as the dickens.

Then they become children. Real explorers. Full of dreams and possibility. Right here they can be grown into heroes or shamed into robotic, fearful sheep. If you let them run with the age, they will do and be miracles.

Next the angsty teen, pre-teen and post-teen stuff. Trying to figure out who they are and where they fit. With strong kids, this is fascinating. With weak kids or those with a sense of special entitlement I imagine it would be terrible to parent. Gratefully, I've been spared that.

Then the young adult. Full flower. The beauty of the young woman sitting next to me (my wife has much better legs, though. And shoulders. And skin...) The potential and strength in a young man. Little wisdom yet, but often intelligence. Not always, people can be damaged at any stage, but if they aren't too damaged, each stage has a special magic, a special beauty and a power.

The full adult, moving through the world with confidence. Caring for others, making things better. Righting wrongs and holding responsibilities. A force to be reckoned with.

The quiet years where the torch passes to others and you exist in knowledge (I'm not here yet, so this is speculation.) You watch the seeds of what you have done flourish in your community and family.

Then the slipping into darkness that frankly terrifies me. As eyes go and body and possibly mind...maybe it all seems for nothing. Maybe not. Maybe you forget things that should never be forgotten. What would Lawrence of Arabia have been like in a nursing home, suffering from dementia and incontinence?

Then death, pale skin and flesh of cold and clammy meat.

Then the meat rots.

And it is for all of us. The elderly lady has been the same as the lovely young lady, and still is in a way. We are or have been the same as the children we see discovering tadpoles for the first time. It's kind of beautiful.

Stuff Coming Up

Boston is coming up very soon.

Information is here.

The weekend before that (July 30 to Aug 1) George Mattson, grand old man of Uechi-ryu in the US will be holding his annual camp at Cape Cod. I'll be there to play with old friends. A huge mix of skills and insights will be available. It is something I always make when I can, not just for the considerable skill on display, but also for the family feeling of the Uechi community and watching how George deftly handles the personalities. he is, truly, a high-order strategist.

The Crossing the Pond seminar will be held the weekend of August 14-15 in Seattle and then repeated the weekend after that in Coventry, England. Your chance to meet some cool people. I want to meet Iain Abernethy. For some reason I appear to have been drafted into part of it. At least the Seattle show.

Mariusz is arranging a two day seminar in San Francisco for the weekend of September 11th. Details aren't up yet.

Andy is working on a bar brawl in Montreal for late September or October...

Rob is working on setting up a c Conflict Communications course in the Seattle are for October and Neal is working on repeating Seattle 1 and Seattle 2 as a back-to-back two day seminar (with an option of just sitting in for the section on self-defense law.)

Busy, but not quite busy enough.

Purposeful Mistakes

There are a lot of things that you can do on purpose to good effective that are disastrous if done accidentally. It's that mindfulness thing. Almost any rule (whether a law or common sense) can be broken advantageously. Most of the time, breaking rules have negative effects. Often for others, but for us as well.

Self-defense, for example, is an affirmative defense: "Yes, your honor, I committed an act that satisfies all of the elements of the crime (assault, aggravated assault, manslaughter) but it was justified because..."

Physical self-defense, counter-assault, is breaking the rule against doing harm to others.

That's a tangent.

Over on Patrick's blog, he writes about stiff-arming in judo. It is a beginner's mistake, but it is a really hard habit to break. It is a hard habit to break because it works.

It occurred to me this morning that when a beginner stiff arms and blocks a throw, it is a bad habit. Poor judo. When a skilled practitioner blocks the same throw in the same way it is "good structure."

What else does this apply to? It's subtle, the first thing that comes to mind is the manhandling drill. Being thrown around really messes with people, until they learn that it is all a gift and suddenly danger becomes opportunity. That's different, though, because usually what the beginners try doesn't work.

What are the things where beginners are effective, told to stop being effective because it is bad X or whatever, and then later are either taught to do it again under a different name or just notice that the senior practitioners do it?

I know of 'chi masters' in internal styles that state that they don't move and their students seem incapable of seeing them move... but they clearly do. There are weapons instructors who state emphatically that the hands (or weapon) must lead the feet, must move first. But those instructors never actually do that. Their hands and feet move together. The student has no hope of matching speed or coordination or power until they reject what the teacher says and do what he does.

It's curious. A fun thing to think about. I don't think it's deliberate, except in a few cases. The instructors aren't trying to hamper the students. In some cases it does make sense. The stiff arm in judo works very well defensively, but it gets in your own way offensively and hampers sensitivity. It works, but it really gets in the way of internalizing ju.

Training Camp Concept

Met some extraordinary people over the weekend and had a great training idea.

The people:

Tim, one of the most talented man at playing a bad guy safely ever. Very skilled at the FAST armored suit defense stuff, scenario design, debriefing, all that jazz.

Terry, relatively small, but for quite a while the highest paid bouncer in a hot region, and well paid for a damn good reason.

Clint, who has walked on the dark side pretty thoroughly. He prefers vampires to his acquaintances. His acquaintances are both scarier and real.

(There were others-- love ya, Law Dawg and if this flies and we put together one that includes Sims, you'll need to take some time off work to teach gun stuff...)

What Your Sensei Never Told You:

The law. The differences between sparring, brawling, fighting and killing. Real bad guys. Improvised weapons (Clint got me thinking about them at a new level and I teach environmental fighting). Stress decision making. Intuition training. Slamming and jamming. Chaos management. Hell, probably even relevant first aid and definitely justification and articulation.

Just a three day course, an exposure to high-end violence. Mental, physical, spiritual.

Oil and Water

A good day. I'm sweaty and filthy and sitting in a coffee shop south of Denver. Skipping out on a class I would love to see, but I don't have the equipment and I suck at spectating. Lesser temptation just to type.

One of the things about being well-trained in a good system and then filtering it through experience so it is tight and (possibly more important) I trust completely what my body will do is that I can't really learn a new good system and even have trouble with good drills.

I can learn and practice crap all day. I don't as a matter of principle, I hate to waste time... but crappy stuff doesn't compete with good stuff in my brain. It goes in the worthless box or the toy box. But when I see a new system with an extraordinary instructor and great drills, it is hard to practice. If the drills are real enough, I do my stuff. I trust my body to get me out alive. To override it at this stage is to practice staring into the sun. It is a discipline, but it will not serve me when I need my eyes.

First noticed this with Mac. Not just an extraordinary fighter who understands both martial arts and violence, but an extraordinary teacher and a good man. It would be an honor to learn from him. But his stuff is too good and doesn't blend. It is close, but I work about four inches closer. My techniques won't work with his strategies, and visa versa.

If I had started with Mac as an instructor, I would be effective and happy. If I was a hobbyist, collecting two systems (not necessarily in the sense of a martial style, but in the sense of a strategy/tactics/technique/mindset package) wouldn't be a problem. As long as I was in a life where I needed clean reflexive action, trying to integrate (or separately absorb) two systems would be very dangerous. I like crosstraining. I like playing with anybody and everybody, but I am very picky about what I absorb.

Today was another day of meeting good teachers in good systems. Danzan-ryu. Kuntao. Mayhem. Whatever Tristan was doing...

Two insights from today, among many:

From Tristan:

"I would never turn my back on an opponent."

"Then you have never fought multiple opponents."

From Bob:

"What it does is what it is." In one sentence he lays to rest the argument about what a particular move in a kata is.

Let's Talk About It...

Anecdotes are not evidence. I know this and yet...

Everyone who deals with certain extremes, every last person I know, has experienced things that don't make sense. People responding to a kill decision, before you have acted, as if they were stunned. Moving faster than it is possible for a human to move. Seeing bullets in the air. Feeling someone decide to take you.

We don't talk about them. Because we can't explain them. Maybe because we are afraid that no one else has ever experienced something similar...

But we all have. And we get together, sometimes annually, a group of very non-standard people and we drink too much...and we talk. What the hell? You tapped into the source of universal love and the ED freak suddenly curled up and started crying? How many bullets to the chest and he did what?

What would it change if we could collect these stories? I don't know if we could ever verify them (how often are cameras there when shit goes very bad?) and that makes it anecdotes, not evidence. I want to hear it myself, from people I trust after talking to people who have seen them in action... I've seen to many "masters" with brainwashed students and bullshit stories, I want something more.

Would it be folklore? Mythology? Would it be something we could find comfort in? "Someone else has seen that! I'm not crazy." Sure, the wannabes would twist it and repeat it back, but that's just the way of the world.

Would a book on the twilight zone of combat do more harm than good?

Window 2

There are differences in people and there are differences in problems.

Violence, for most people, it is a vague possibility. Easy to fantasize about, hard to imagine in any realistic detail. For a few it is a professional consideration. For some, it is an element of life, constantly possible.

Those types of responses may be universal. Maybe. Name a problem... say... a Russian invasion (since I seem to be in a 70's/80's mood). Especially after Red Dawn came out, there were a lot of people fantasizing about it. Mostly about glorious battle and grateful rescued maidens, probably. A few practiced a little marksmanship and went back to their routines. Not many made any real changes in their lives and possibly even fewer did a realistic assessment, say by reading intelligence on the threat or even studying Russian language or culture. (Da, ya govoryu nemnogo porooski).

For a few, it was a professional consideration and the military had some training and concrete plans. It wasn't the most likely thing and so didn't get obsessive training... but my National Guard unit had firing positions selected in the Coast Range.

And for some, they actually lived in the old Soviet environment. It wasn't pretty, especially if you had trouble keeping your ideas to yourself or, say, happened to be born Jewish.

The problem wasn't the same for all people.

With violence, I've been working with a lot of that first group recently. Too many martial artists (IMO, of course) are fascinated by the idea of violence and repulsed by the reality. Or would be repulsed, if they ever got close enough to see it.

So another window, maybe.

Violence is a vague thing that might happen. How would your training change if it was a concrete, inevitable thing? If you believed that sometime in the next year, you would be targeted at your weakest to be beaten, or killed? No one can help you.

Would that change the way that you think? The way that you train? Would you still trust sources blindly? When experts contradicted, would you go with the one you liked? Or would the stakes influence you to dig deeper?

This seems like it would work, but I know better. My preparation for Iraq was to read the Quran and a version of the Hadith and a number of books written by Iraqi natives or people in country as anthropologists. Plus the usual military sources. I had my own water filtering system, maps to get to a friendly border on foot, a collection of essential survival and evasion equipment that never left my side and had picked up some basic (unfortunately not local dialect) Arabic.

One of my compatriots preparation was to lay in a stock of jerky and figure out if he could get satellite TV.

When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, she researched the subject obsessively. She could ask her doctors questions, get clarification when experts disagreed. She made informed decisions and she is still kicking along thirty years later. The old friend who said "God will provide" and passively did whatever her doctors told her is dead. So is the tough old man who relied on his own strength.

With violence, you learn. You might still die, but if you expect magic to save you or that you already happen to be the perfect combination to survive, just by luck... it might work for you. Roll your dice.

If it was going to happen, or if you chose to pretend it was going to happen and maybe change your training, would you? Or would you be one of the ones who trusted in forces outside yourself to make things work?

Windows 1

What would you be willing to do if you were afraid your children would starve?

I've been playing with ways to explain mindsets, trying to find the doorways.

"We're a different breed," RC said. What does that mean? I see it, the functionality in certain times of stress and the way that that has changed our perspective on almost everything else. We are what we are, and we recognize each other. We also recognize those who don't comprehend this world we have lived in. Not only don't grasp it, the way a fish can't understand a rosebush, but think that they are experts, because they have heard so many fishy descriptions.

That's not it either. There is a compulsion to study this "different breed". Little boys play with guns and people study martial arts for decades, but neither of those are indicators that they have the slightest insight into the world they are imagining. The errors, the sometimes incomprehensible misbeliefs are stunning...and as viciously defended as any religious dogma.

People work from who they are. I get that. They strive to understand other people by extrapolating from who they are to who the other must be. (And, not germane to the main point they sometimes do this with breathtaking ignorance not only of the other but of themselves.)

They extrapolate from what they have experienced (social pain or shame) to what they haven't (fear of ego destruction and annihilation). They decide that the problem they have never dealt with (surviving an assault or international politics) is like problems they have dealt with (like algebra). That the skills to put a bullet in someone's head are the same as the skills to put a key in a lock.

I've failed to get people to understand so many times in so many ways. I know, intellectually, that they want two incompatible things: to understand something outside their experience and simultaneously to have all of their preconceptions confirmed. But I keep thinking there might be a way to bring them to the window. So that they can see. Not just see what I see, but so that they can recognize that there are different windows.

"What would you do if your children were starving?" may be a little step. Maybe not. I'm not confident that people who have never been truly hungry, or people who play at fasting as a diversion or who have never smelled someone starving can really understand the question... but maybe they can.

Who would steal? Who would beg? Who would demand and threaten? Who would kill? Kill an animal? Kill a human? Prostitute yourself? Others? Children? If the situation were never going to get better and no one, ever, was going to help you-- you could only help yourself-- what would you do? What would you get used to? Would you get better at thieving and robbing? Get better at killing? Come to terms with it? Turn it, in your head, into the right and noble thing to do? Not a crime, but taking a necessary risk? Would it become a way of life? Business as usual?

Do you recognize a particular kind of criminal here? Looking at it from our weird stories of emotional pain and angst, the behaviors of addicts don't track...

One Step

The One-Step is the primary drill in most of my training. there are more, of course, and like any drills it has its flaws. No one goes to the hospital, so something about it is not right.

A few posts back, things are getting a little heated up. That's fine. everyone is making points and I'm learning a lot. But the one step is coming into it and the two people are talking past each other and that is largely my fault.

Jonas has been exposed to the drill several times where we've talked about what it is and isn't, what it's for, the advantages and disadvantages. Steve has been exposed to it once with almost no explanation. It is a safe way to play with strangers. It is a lot more.

It feels unnatural to go slow and limit yourself to one action. It really does. But if you are doing two or three actions to my one, what do you think I am doing? If you parry and side step and counter to my simple punch, in what mythical world do you have time for that before I pile on a second or third or even fourth punch?

Steve was right. The seminars are not about martial arts. They are about violence.

In most of them, so far, someone has stated that his block and counter should be counted as one motion, since he has trained it to reflex and that is what he will do under stress. So I take someone to the middle of the room (usually not the person-- if they are too arrogant to listen, their ego is usually to fragile to handle the demonstration. I do want them to see it.)

I take the subject to the center of the room (and I am careful-- it is always one of the most skilled there. To do this safely I need someone with excellent breakfalls who will not panic.) I then take him out. A fast flurry of face strikes, a takedown and the flurry continues on the ground.

All freeze. No one, so far, has even moved or offered any resistance. A few tried after they were down and I had relented. A few said afterwards what they thought about doing. No one moved.

It has little to do with the teacher student dynamic. That's there, undeniably. But the freeze comes from the OODA loop disruption. The strikes coming at the face are not damage-- I never actually contact-- they are information. Too much information too fast. It is paralyzing and it is doubly paralyzing if damage accompanies the strikes.

For that moment, in a class, with someone not hurting him or her at all, the expert martial artist is completely helpless.

Then I give the speech. That this is not about fighting. This is not about martial arts. This is about violence. If you dream, for even a second, that you can block and strike or do more than one thing to answer a flurry, you are dreaming. You do not know the difference between an attack and a feed. The feeds you have trained on over the years are like fairy tales. there are some good lessons in them, and they are entertaining... but they are fairy tales.

If you have made your block and counter or your trapping work against a flurry, it wasn't a flurry. Flat out, it was a feed.

If you want to stop someone who is intent on injuring you and he started first, you have to move with maximum efficiency. You have to make each action serve all of your goals: protect yourself,damage the threat, better your position, worsen his. Each move. Every time.

If you separate the pieces, you will be even slower. From the moment of assault, you need to be integrated. No hands and feet moving together. No blocking separate from striking...and not because the actions don't work (all though they will be suicidally slow if separated) but because the thought process is too slow.

One of the very basic uses of the one-step is to instill this value: what is the absolute most efficient thing that I can do in this second under this circumstance? That drives everything else.

That's Amazing!

in some places, I swear, having a triple-digit IQ qualifies as a super power...which got me thinking. About this list:

REAL SUPERPOWERS YOU CAN HAVE TODAY

(send no money now, 90 day free trial on all super powers! Change your life at no risk to you!)

• Paying Attention to What You are Doing: this power makes you a force to be reckoned with, a model of efficiency. Something, especially on the highways and byway of our world, unique and effective.
• Finishing the Hard Stuff First: Normal humans stand staring with jaws open as you walk away from a job well done while they are still twiddling their thumbs, making coffee and getting ready. You work out, as they get ready to think about working out.
• Really Listening: For most people, a conversation is just a shallow attempt at getting their own ego stroked by people just as self-centered. With this super power you can gather information, learn things, make friends and be considered wise, intelligent and caring.
• Get Off Your Ass and Do Stuff: We have superpowers to get stuff done, right? But even with superpowers, we actually have to get off our asses and do things. Act. This superpower not only allows you to get stuff done, the purpose of all superpowers, but by doing stuff you Learn things. You Get experienced. This superpower, over time gives you other superpowers! How is that fair?
• Being Nice to People: A subtle superpower that allows you to make friends, alleviate suffering and even be proud of yourself.
• Say What You Mean: one of the most dangerous superpowers, this two-edged sword can make any group you work with more efficient, but may make normals uncomfortable. It's complementary power, Mean What You Say, has surprising force.

Superpowers within the reach of everyone. Try one today!

Really, people. Right there. Give it a try. They're free.

Please?

Boxes

I'm fond of saying, "If I teach this right, you won't learn anything new."  Part of empowering students is to help them realize how much they already know.  Physically, combat is observation and motion, things that everyone has been doing from the cradle.  Most of the mental/spiritual/emotional aspects are just as natural... what blocks them is our training and conditioning.  In that sense, training is not teaching you how to be an animal so much as helping you forget to be a human.  Unlearning.

(You have to be a little bit careful-- some students will take things that they know and jump to believing that they understand and can use it, and that may not be justified.  When I say empowering I am specifically saying increasing power, increasing competence.  You can easily increase confidence without competence.  That rarely ends well.)

After the last seminar, I got the usual batch of questions.  One struck me, because it implied that the person-- a good martial artist-- had learned footwork separate from hand motion and was having trouble integrating the two.

Outside the martial arts, this is rare.  A basketball player doesn't practice dribbling in place and then a specific running step for dribbling and then try to mesh them later with a specific canned rhythm.  Maybe swimmers do practice kicks in isolation from arm strokes.  Do they?  For how long?  In football (American football) slamming into people and running are parts of each other.  With a good coach, so are the vulnerabilities of balance in the other person's run.

Many beginning martial artists separate offense and defense, put them in different boxes in their heads.  Use them as distinct motions with distinct mindsets.  That's often bothered me.  But Jonas pointed out months ago that many learn an attack as a move, and then learn power generation separate from that motion BUT learn the power generation as specific to that attack.  So some never learn to attack with power and some learn to attack powerfully with part of their repertoire but not all and very few ever learn that power generation is a basic that applies in the same way across all of their techniques.

Swinging an axe (or a pick or sledge) the hand slide is pretty much the only thing that need to be taught.  There is foot work in it, and wave-action power generation that exploits gravity... and those don't need to be taught, because pretty much everybody does those naturally.  With an axe or a sledge, we all know how to use momentum, make the weight do our swing for us.  Turn the axe into a weapon and for some reason people complicate everything, break it down into tiny pieces, teach each of those pieces separately... and maybe forget a few of those pieces when it is time to use use the axe.

I'm starting to realize that people do this in martial training.  Maybe I'm overanalyzing, seeing bigger problems than exist.  But I do see people acting as if offense and defense, how they position and move their arms, footwork and how they control their centers of gravity are all separate things.  Things that they must think of individually, do separately, and somehow bring together in the moment.

None of these things are separate when we walk.  Or when we played tag as kids.  You don't think about them climbing or gardening...

I think this may be why so many martial artists, who should be paragons of graceful and efficient motion, move so awkwardly.  They break it down too far and then think about it too much.  It's just motion, something you have done from birth.  You can make it better and more efficient with hints, demonstration, experience.  

We all know how to shut a car door with our hips when we are carrying grocery bags.  It took me five years to truly understand something as a martial artist that I had been doing most of my adult life and that every mom I knew was a master at.  Five years to get to a place that I lived in in my non-martial life.

You don't have to explain structure when someone pushes a car.  All the wrong ways hurt.  I've seen untrained people flinch to something coming at their face with the kind of structured power that internal artists dream of.

When you get a chance, dump isolation for a few sessions.  Move as a unit.  Don't let yourself think about footwork or how your strikes should go.  Just hit the bag.  The wrong ways hurt and, if you've trained for any time, good movement should be internalized (and if internalized movement hurts, it may be bad movement, like the deliberate safety flaw of the pronated fist).  Your body knows how to move.  Let it instead of make it.

Titles

In the last re-writes now, working far more closely with the editor than last time. I'm at that stage where I hate every word in the book. None of it makes sense, everything is juvenile, each comma is like fingernails on a chalkboard...

But it is done, for now. Until the indexing. But David, the publisher, wants to do that as a team effort after the galleys come out. Reprieve.

My choices of title, which included a big, red 7 dripping blood on the front cover or "The Book of Seven Rings" (because sometimes it is funny to tease people who take tradition too seriously) were soundly rejected. The title is official, now:

Facing Violence—

Preparing for the Unexpected

• Ethically
• Emotionally
• Physically
• Without Going to Prison

It seems tepid to me, but everyone else likes it, especially the marketing department and distributors, and they should know. Scheduled for release in May 2011. I'm a month ahead of schedule on the re-write, but that won't speed up the release. Forward by Barry Eisler. Should have some good jacket blurbs...

On to the next one. And the next. And the next.

------------------------------

Driving to Colorado the week of 12-16 July and returning 19-23. Anyone on the route want to set up a workshop or private lessons? rory@easystreet.net

Seattle 2

The Second Seattle Seminar (S2?) was a blast.

Jonas found a great venue, a small club in Georgetown with inside and outside areas, chain link, a stage, obstructions...even some spilled beer.

The crew was good. Three had to cancel at the last minute, but two slots were filled so 'sold-out' became 'one under capacity'. 24 bodies, if my math is correct. Nine had not attended the first Seattle seminar and I was a little worried about their ability to keep up with some of the new information. They were great people and did well, but there were elements of law and violence dynamics that I'm sure they missed.

Still: Violence. Brawling. Manhandling. Fighting to the goal. Power generation. Blindfolded defense and targeting. Environmental fighting. Ground-level brawling. Frisk fighting. And the important new information, an expansion of the self-defense law information focused on articulation. A good decision is only half the battle. A brilliant explanation to an inexperienced jury might be needed to close the deal. Making good decisions is sometimes far easier than explaining good decisions.

Then scenarios. Carjacking variations: alone, with child, with special knowledge. Active shooter. Rude people. Predators. I was assisted by two wonderful role-players, Tim Bown of Bulletman fame and Guro Amy Koeniger in her RedMan suit. Good guys, bad guys, victims and predators, they played them all with a lot of intensity.

I suspect a few people saw some new things.

Good, good day.

Scenario Training

There are different types of scenario training and there are different levels.

Like any training, scenario training must serve a purpose. The purpose has to be something that helps the student as well-- if you are setting the rules, telling the story and controlling all the parts, you can always "teach" a student that they will fail. That's for your ego. A student subjected to that only learns to never try.

Some scenarios can be for testing, and one of the best aspects of armored opponent scenario training for martial artists is that they learn a little about the huge gap between dealing with a training partner and dealing with an attacker. It's never a complete exposure, but skills degenerate so universally that all but the most self-deluded take a second to wonder about the difference between training and life.

That's learning a negative, however. Understanding that you aren't prepared is a step... but it doesn't help you to be prepared. It motivates you.

So in scenario training, you start with what you want the student to learn. You wanted the student to learn how to tap into her inner beast and let go? You can set up scenarios for that. You want to get a student over some deep personal conditioning? You can inoculate for that with scenarios. You want them to take sterile skills and apply them to a dynamic, messy environment? Scenarios were made for that.

Most often I use them to help the student develop judgment in tandem with skills. They know how to take someone down... do they have any idea when it is appropriate? They know how to defend themselves, do they know what constitutes self-defense legally? Can they explain their actions to a jury of their peers?

Can they tell when a situations is developing? Do they know when to leave? Do they recognize the point of no return? Knowledge of violence dynamics (how bad guys attack) and force law are integral parts of self-defense. Every so often, these elements have to be practiced together.

The other thing about scenario training is that you find glitches. When the student doesn't run; or uses a martial skill instead of a survival skill (fighting to win instead of fighting to escape) or plays to the scenario instead of the problem (decides not to use the mirrors or doors, ignoring truth for an image in the head) it tells you something. The same student is vulnerable to his or her own mind games and assumptions in real life. That's a glitch, and a dangerous one. The best survivors are cheaters. If you want to encourage survival skills, you have to make it safe to cheat.

It takes good role-players and a good coach. A role-player who wants to can turn everything into a fight...and the student learns that only fighting (never leaving, never talking) is what works. A role-player who can play a convincing criminal (not an unstoppable monster or a cartoon character) is solid gold.

The coach has to let the students run and not micromanage or microcritique. There are lots of ways to be right, ways to survive. the goal is for the student to learn and so, whenever possible, the student, not the instructor, should be pointing out mistakes and areas of improvement.

You also have to watch the 'weirdness creep.' Most bad things that happen are pretty basic. There aren't a lot of variations on the Monkey Dance. Armed robberies follow pretty simple patterns. Good scenarios that reflect reality will blow away beginners and teach them tons. Unfortunately, what the student does once, the crew (facilitator and role-players) will do many times. The crew starts to get bored. The crew decides to make things more interesting and challenging. the scenarios start to get a little weirder, a little less like real life...

This is where we plan to finish up tomorrow. Sold out show. Life is good.

Handshake

The thing I like about playing with good people is that you don't need to dummy it down. Some situations suck and if you pretty them up too much, or try to 'program your students for success' when they hit the suckage in real life, they are screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.

With good people, you can work the bad scenarios and fail and brainstorm and fail and brainstorm and eventually come up with some things that work. That kind of honest play can save your life. The candy-coated bullshit just makes you feel better, right up until you choke on it and die.

Kasey is good people and has surrounded himself with good people. Marc is extremely questionable people and has spent his entire life around questionable people... which is a perfect environment for acquiring and testing skills. I, of course, have always been an angel: kind, sweet, gentle and innocent...

The particular form of a bad day we were playing with and against was the close range knife assassination. The threat would approach, weapon out of sight, and seize with the free hand (arm, neck, collar, head, hair) while simultaneously giving a bunch of sewing-machine style thrusts to the bladder, kidneys or whatever he thought would be most satisfying. ("How many lethal blows does it take?" "How many to be lethal? Or how many to get the emotions out of your system?' "Good point.")

Coming from different backgrounds (martially: judo/jujutsu; aikido; and indonesian/kung fu. Otherwise: Jail officer/CERT, road officer/SWAT and criminal) our basic idea of what would and had kept us alive turned out to be pretty similar. It became a matter of drilling and nuances. How would a criminal vary his technique? What were the indicators of an assault?

(When you are working variations it is incredibly important and difficult to stay realistic. I think one of the reasons martial arts systems become so complicated is a form of inbreeding: You counter technique A with B, so they start working on a way around B and come up with C, which makes one vulnerable for D but E prevents that and... all of which predicates on a bad guy being trained in your system, countering based on your system and attacking with your system in the first place. The 'what if' chain usually breaks on one of the first two links. Not recognizing this, systems inbreed to inefficient complexity. But it works in-house.)

There's a variation of the knife assassination that has bothered me- the sucker thrust from the handshake. It's actually easier to deal with than the close range grip: there's more time and you have a mutual grip with the hand that is trying to immobilize you. But that's the thing. Intellectually, I know that the right thing to do is to use the handshake grip to control his thrust ( a core-fighting strategy, manipulating his shoulders/hips/spine through his hand to control his other hand). But I was pretty sure that the instinct to focus on the immediate threat would take over, and would be ineffective.

I wasn't prepared when Kasey pulled it. I was distracted, watching other people play. No effort, I pulled the handshake grip in front of the knife and the tip tapped his forearm. Then I was behind him.

The second time, the weapon wound up tied up in the elbow of the handshake hand.

Not something I'd actively trained for in years, but something I'd thought about. My instincts had changed over time and I'm trusting more subtle (still efficient, just not as obvious) techniques. More importantly, my body/hindbrain appears to be taking over just fine and learning in new ways. Not bad.

The Weekend Thus Far

It's been a big weekend, and it's not over yet.

The Fan Boy moment: Taking off from PDX, it occurred to me that I was flying out to team-teach with Marc "Animal" MacYoung the guy who actually raised his hand and said, "Real life isn't exactly like that" and started a lot of people thinking. It was like going to meet a trail blazer in your field of interest...as a colleague.

Some times life demands balance, and the childish fun of the Fan Boy moment got balanced with discovering another character flaw. We were practicing defenses against close-range knife assassinations, and Marc pointed out that I wasn't treating it as a lethal threat. It wasn't because of training habit. Or lack of understanding about what kind of threat someone grabbing you and pulling you into a knife was. Or even inclination-- I have a pretty good idea what it takes for me to turn people into meat.

It was simply arrogance. A bone-deep visceral belief that I had handled so many level five and level six situations at level four* or lower that no ordinary person would require higher; That the person attacking me with lethal intent wasn't worthy of a commensurate response.

A flaw, and a potentially suicidal flaw. More work.

The training has been intense and wonderful.

One day of Conflict Communications. It went well, but in after action there are many things we could do better-- a little time management, some videos-- but most of it is simply polish and practice. The reviews were nice. It rocked. There was one negative review, and I kind of reveled in it: the people who could get the most will have the most resistance. We need to open future classes by asking who was ordered to there and talking about why that happens and how to use the dynamic.

One day, seven hours on the mat, teaching in series with new friend Kasey and Marc. Kasey is the complete package- traditional martial artist, history with competitive martial sports, enforcement and tactical officer. And a hell of a nice guy, who surrounds himself with extraordinary people. We played their basics (so long since I have been in a traditional dojo environment, it felt like coming home after being away for years, wonderful and a little weird) then the visitors (us) worked our stuff, our priorities.

Later today, a short class with the SWAT operators.

Commo, brawling, tactics... hard to get a better three days. Good friends, good new friends and a solid kick-off to the new business...

Sore, tired happy. Three things that often come together.

* Level four: Physical control-- pain compliance, locks, takedowns and control moves.

Level Five: Serious physical control-- Impact and impact weapons.

Level six: Deadly force.

Studying Problems

Sleep deprived, sipping a Velvet Hammer in PDX, getting ready for another wonderful experience...

Minnesota. We'll be teaching the new communications program. We've each done some test-runs separately and one together, but those were rehearsals. This is opening night.

Everyone has default ways to solve problems. If you only have a hammer, as the saying goes, you try to solve all problems by pounding. The scientific method is one of the most efficient:

Ask the question.

Study the situation until you get a feel for some possible answers. (This stage is intuitive.)

Design an experiment to disprove your guess

Repeat as necessary

Martial arts, self-defense, de-escalation... a lot of the high-risk practical stuff work from a different paradigm: What worked before? If it didn't get you killed, don't change anything unless you have no choice. That's a decent paradigm when the stakes are high. It also works well with the way our natural instincts run-- what our bodies tend to do when scared hasn't changed much since the days of cave bears.

It tends to corrupt quickly if not tested, however. People remember what their great-granddaddy did, but maybe don't remember why. Or even if that was a one-time freak occurrence and he had a better way that worked often enough he never told stories about it.

So even in modern police stuff-- patrol, DTs and communications, the current high-speed programs are collections of stuff that worked. Experiences. And there is no way to know how many times those same tactics failed, because there may be no one to tell that story. Or the weight of tradition may be so great that disagreements are treated as heresies instead of potentially life-saving innovations.

I realized that the way I've been teaching lately, as well as designing training, is to spend a lot of time on that second step of the scientific method. Studying the problem. And it has had huge payoffs. Just recognizing the difference between social and asocial violence makes articulating force decisions easier, and also prevents costly mistakes in self-defense.

My primary teaching has shifted from telling students what to do to having them look at the situation they need to fix. An efficient answer is almost always inherent in the question/problem, if you understand the question. If you don't the best solution or technique has a random chance of working entirely dependent on you stumbling across the right problem.

It turns out that this was the big break-through in Conflict Communications. It's not a list of techniques that we have used to talk people down. There's an element of that and we won't toss out practical experience... but the whole system is based far more on analyzing what went wrong. Realizing that failed de-escalations followed very similar, very predictable patterns. Then taking a look at what and who those patterns served.

In that was the key. Not just to calming people down but to recognizing that there are different dynamics to the calming, that they have a pattern and are predictable. If you understand that, you don't need to memorize techniques because you have principles. With principles, you can improvise. With enough practice to ingrain the principles, you can improvise on the fly.

Good stuff.

Done Been

I find myself spending time with a new demographic, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

For most of my life, I had few friends and those friendships were based on a shared intensity. We didn't always do the same kind of thing (I was cautioned early to keep as many friends as possible who didn't deal with the world of crime) but whatever they did it was intense. Usually dangerous. it allowed us to share a frame of reference that was rare with my other circles, largely people I met at the behest of my wife.

One circle seemed more real, more alive than the other. You can guess which.

Lately, though, a big percentage of the people I am connecting with are former bad guys. Some former good guys, too... but that word 'former' is popping up a lot.

They all talk about a moment when they realize that they will die if something doesn't change. In words it is so pale to say that. I've never felt that waking up in my own puke with another friend in the ground or locked up... but I have felt it in a short second when my tactics were failing and I was outmatched in strength. The taste of mortality doesn't really make it into such weak words: "I will die if something doesn't change." Maybe it's something you can never read or hear, but have to taste.

The realization and the decision aren't easy, but they aren't enough, either. You actually have to change. Move away from what and who you know, give up something you were good at (and that means a lot in places where good and bad is measured by breathing) and move to a world where you don't know the rules. Basic rules. How do you get angry like a civilized person? When force is not allowed (and you choose to follow that silly, arbitrary, civilized rule) what do you use instead? How do people negotiate when there are no guns involved?

At the VPPG the other day we were talking about students and instructors who romanticize this life. In the fullness of their pristine manhood they choose to believe that they are in full command of themselves and would dispatch that assassin with one of the "ten best techniques as taught to elite military units across the world" or make that swaggering bravo back down with the steely glance they taught in the "Fear No Man!" pamphlet.

I pencilled a note to write about this, about the differences between the wannabes and the ones who have already done been and don't wannabe no more. Not sure what else to write, except:

Thanks. To those of you who got out and kept breathing so you could share a little-- thanks. Just thanks.

Skies

I love the sky. A week ago, flying out of JFK there was a rainbow, except it wan't a bow. Short and straight, a blur of striated colors hanging in the air. I wonder if, before the advent of flying machines, any human anywhere had ever seen such a thing. Or seen the rays of golden light striking the sea in exactly such a way, or flew between layers of cloud, catching the sunshine just at that angle with glowing white above and below, flying at such a speed to extend the sunset for hours.

Today, there was a brief blue hole in the distance. Shattering turquoise blue with so many different clouds visible on the sides and above. Some rolling cumulus, some jagged, the filmy cirrus probably far beyond the blue hole but looking like part of the cosmic architecture of it. Beautiful and unreal. Need to start carrying my camera. Without a picture all that I can say is that in a painting it would have looked too dramatic, intense and beautiful to be real.

And one phenomenon I have only seen here and only at this time of year: If you are driving eastbound on a highway at exactly the right time of day after a hard rain, the cars kick up spray, and each car and truck appears to be floating on an individual rainbow.

Were someone to come forward from a hundred years in the past and see that one thing, they would be certain that they walked among the gods.

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Guest post on Kenton Sefcik's blog.

Looks like San Francisco, Montreal and Rochester (two repeats) in September.

Conflict Communications in Minnesota in nine days.

A level two (environmental fighting and force law scenarios) in Seattle in three weeks. Three slots left.

A Women's Self-Defense event with Kimberly Kelly at John Darby's club July 10.

George Mattson's Uechi-ryu summer camp last weekend of July

Boston August eighth.

The book broke 10k sales, which I guess is a big thing for a niche market.

Kris Wilder has an idea for a video. I'm in if it happens.