Thoughts from Today

The class was working on power generation, using the center of gravity to slam extra power up into a strike or down into a strike. Two types of wave power. One man interrupted. Through the translator, he said, "But I don't want to hit. My reaction will be to defuse and avoid."

Wrong place, wrong time. The class had voted to work on surviving an attack. One of those skills is hitting hard. The defusing and de-escalation part had been the focus of the whole morning. The question was good, in a way, and I had to address the whole class.

There are stages in a fight. If you see something that makes you suspicious, something that's not quite right, you have options. You can gather more information. You can leave. You can prepare a weapon or alert your friends and partners.

If you do nothing, or don't see it until the person becomes overtly threatening, you have fewer options. Leaving, de-escalating, gathering resources and alerting your team are still on the table, but now they come with extra risk. You will likely set him off, if he wasn't going before. You will almost surely increase your chances of being suckerpunched if your attention is on resources or you try to leave when you are too close. You can pre-empt here, and I showed a social pre-emption. No injury, but usually even more effective than trying to suckerpunch first.

But once it's on, once a bad guy has made violent contact with you, de-escalating and gathering resources are off the table. Mostly. By all means yell for help as you defend yourself. But never instead of defending yourself.

By the time you need to hit, it is too late to do anything but hit. And if you are going to hit, you need to hit well. Generally, if you aren't finishing things, you are escalating them.
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Context and timing. Real attacks versus sparring artifacts. One of the common patterns of shanking works from a handshake. The bad guy shakes your hand on some pretext and then pulls you in as he stabs you about in the armpit. I don't usually teach knife defense for a number of reasons, if you know me, you know the reasons. But if you have certain jobs I'm willing to show you what I know under the assumption that you will think for yourself, adapt, and take responsibility for your own survival.

The best defense I've found for the handshake shanking is structural. Very quick. One of the students said, "But all I need to do to defeat the defense is let go."

Absolutely right. That's all you need. But that would predicate on a threat, with full lethal intent, grabbing your hand of his own volition and for his own purposes who is savagely using that hand to yank you onto the tip of the knife...and that threat halfway through this fully committed action sensing that you have a defense, sensing that you are applying the defense, completely aborting his own committed action AND doing the one thing that monkeys almost never do under stress-- open their clenched hands.

Yes, there is a simple counter and no, you will never, ever encounter it in the field.

There are a lot of things, especially in traditional martial arts, that work great for real situations but are difficult or suck in sparring. The hip and shoulder throws in judo are hard to get and involve turning your back on the opponent, but in real life people jump on your back. Karate's x-blocks are all but useless in sparring, but they are a godsend when something unexpected and shiny suddenly arcs towards your belly-- a big, gross-motor move that covers a lot of area and gives you a lot of close-range options.

There is stuff that works under close-range assault, and there are options that only work with sparring timing and distance. Do not, ever, confuse the two.
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"I don't want to waste time learning power generation because I could never hurt a big man."
Grrr. I've broken ribs on people much bigger than myself. Collapsed a trachea on someone who out-weighed me by over 100%. With an informal survey, we are now at, officially, 119 people who have either used a cup-hand slap to the ear, had it used on them, or seen it used. How many of those 119 incidents have seen the receiver keep fighting? Zero.

Small people can hurt big people. The smart way, of course, is to use a tool. It happens and it has happened. But if you are weak and small, your body mechanics must be superb. And there's no rule that say big, strong guys can't have better body mechanics than yours. There are no guarantees in this world.

But how fucked-up is it to say, "I can't win so I won't try." Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Right now, in your mind and every day in training or in choosing not to train, you are laying the groundwork for your success or you are laying the groundwork for your failure. Winning and losing doesn't happen on that dark day when you run out of options. Winning or losing is something you are doing right now.

Win.

Whew. And wow.

It was a big three weeks. All but one of the days was spent either teaching or traveling. Met some great people-- Jeffrey, Alan, Dave-- and reconnected with some old friends, including a slew of Allisons, Teja, Jake and Jeff(s).

The structure and void AAR was the last post. It seems like a long damn time ago. After that it was exploring Manhattan with Teja, and one evening each of talk and hands-on with David Ordini's Krav NY. It was fun, and David has some great ideas for the future. Can't wait to break the toy he is building.

Up to Rhode Island, where Chris Thompson hosted a weekend on how to run scenarios. Scenarios are easy to do poorly, hard to do well, and bad scenarios can do immense harm to students. Not just physically, but programming bad tactics and limiting options. Not to mention the potential for having to deal with an emotional crisis. Two days is an introduction to the mechanics and a heads up on the issues. Hopefully, it's a gateway for the attendees to start taking their teaching game to new levels.

Some very good scenarios, designed and run by the class. Eye openers, as well. A few who fought when they shouldn't. One who fought too late. One who saved a baby and questioned the decision afterwards. The class revealed some good natural actors who will be brilliant roleplayers. Some with a start on being good facilitators.

Three days in Salem were fairly relaxing-- some training in the evenings, lots of talking and debriefing. Meeting with friends (Wes). Found a unicorn. Sort of. My wife has a favorite beverage that they quit making in 2010. I saw four dusty bottles on a shelf in an interesting section of Boston. Bought them all. K is very happy.

Then two days of filming at Jeff Burger's new dojo. It was a blast. A really good crew from all over the area. We were filming "Drills" and the video will be different than the book. Lots of the exercises in the book are internal, or paper. Some require doing questionable things in public places (we did demo one of those) and some, like scenarios, are far too serious and complicated to learn by video. And also remembered a couple that aren't in the book. Fun. Jeff said it will be the best video I've done.

Same time, Jeff was shooting his first video for YMAA, "Attack the Attack." Jeff's one of those guys who should be well known-- extremely skilled and experienced and a talented teacher-- who has always been happy to quietly do his thing in his own quiet corner of the universe. Glad he's finally getting some exposure.

Last for Boston, two days of InFighting at the MetroWest Academy of Jiu Jitsu. I love playing with JJ guys. We have a shared vocabulary (though I think I use more Japanese than they do) and they aren't afraid to fly. There were other people there without the throwing and grappling background, but skilled JJ players were able to keep them safe.

I love infighting! We covered striking at that range, including targets and power generation, specialized strikes and kicks. Takedowns from tangles and at speed. Gouging (damn, I think I skipped biting class. Eh, we had some krav people there. Everybody got bit anyway). Skeleton manipulation offensively and defensively. Locking. A truly great weekend.

As you can tell, I'm late on this AAR because...

Two nights and one day home (40 hours) and I was back at the airport, heading to Zurich. Spent last weekend with a Bujinkan club there (Thanks, Phil) and got to see two old friends (Phil and Murray) and meet a slew of new ones. The class covered a lot of the basics, my basics anyway. Only two hours to look around before things kicked off with ConCom on Friday. Then rock and roll through the weekend (where bruises were distributed, stories told and schnapps imbibed) and out on a train Monday morning.

BTW, I also love being alone traveling and buying food with minimal language skills. And watching some crime crews case potential victims. Frankfurt Rail station was very interesting. And you can get a pork shank at the cafe.

Then on to Fritzlar and Wegas. Actually have some sight-seeing time. Saw Wewelsburg yesterday, a triangular castle with two histories. One was the history of the castle going back to 1600's. The other was a completely separate tour of how the castle was used by Himmler as an SS school and intended headquarters.

Then, and most spectacularly Externstein. Hit it right at dusk. Gorgeous. Should be featured in a fantasy movie. Haven't uploaded the pictures yet, but I'll probably add one on when I do. Stay tuned.
Then dinner in an old castle. Traditional food. No electric lights. A great end to a big day.

Today, more sight-seeing. Friday an evening VPPG in Fritzlar. Saturday and Sunday will be the first attempt at "How to Run Scenarios" through a translator. I think we're using the Highway Riders MC clubhouse again. Which is a unique space. Very cool

Next week teaching cops near Mainz. The weekend after, ConCom and InFighting in the Netherlands.
Then home for a week.
Then Japan.

Structure and Void AAR

The idea-- I've been teaching the infighting seminar for a little while. In a lot of ways it is hardest for me to teach, because it is the thing I do least consciously. And when you try to take something that is not in words in your head, the words you wind up using can sound pretty weird. Two of the things that have been coming up consistently in the infighting seminars are structure and void. The mechanics of skeletons (structure) and how those interactwith empty space (void). If you grasp it, you can organize a ton of material in those two concepts.
Jake likes to experiment. When he saw me post on the blog that I was toying with the idea of teaching a class just on two fundamental principles, he wanted to run with it. The class was yesterday. Debriefed with a couple of students last night. Deconstructing it today.

What happened:
11 people attended. Three extremely experienced MA/instructors, two complete beginners, the rest with varying degrees of experience. Four had trained with me multiple times, two or maybe three had trained with me once before, just under half were strangers. Four women, seven men. One wheel-chair bound. I would say tradition jujitsu and muay thai were the most represented.
Covered: What each student though was meant by "structure & void" in the first place. Parlor tricks with structure (e.g. "unbendable arm"). Power conservation, including pocket structure and how to structure circular strikes. Bone slaving. Application of leverage. Spine extension. Working into the skeleton vs. breaking connection with the ground. Using the threat's structural weak and strong lines to increase damage or to unbalance. Structure and balance on the ground. Swimming, shrugging and posting. Angled structure, sawing and rolling bones. Dead zones (did I cover that explicitly?) Offensive and defensive use of voids. Creating, finding and filling empty space. Void zones in balance (one can only fall into space, not structure. Dropping into a created void. Chock blocks. Defensive use of the threat's structure. Constant forward pressure as a game of impact, compromise and pivot off the impact point or into the available void.

What went well:
I'm a terrible judge of my own work, and the formal AAR process deliberately avoids "what went wrong". From the debriefs and the after class ritual, the people who attended enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. As expected, the beginners and senior practitioners got very different things out of it. One of the beginners found it very intuitive. That leads to big gains fast. The seniors were using it to organize things they already knew and to make some things explicit that students often miss. All of the teacher levels expressed that they were struggling with how to integrate it into their regular classes. That goes in the "went well" section because it means they thought it was worth integrating.

What could be better:

• Organization. Heard at least one "drinking from a firehouse comment." I think if I organized it better, the information received would be the same, but would feel less intense and retention would be better.
• Organization II. Normal for a beta-class, but I was constantly remembering nuances or making connections that were not in the lesson plan.
• Organization III. List the parts, drills and pieces of class and put them in the order that they play off and reinforce each other. Makes it easier for people to grasp and retain.
• Teaching methodology. Classes at this level should be extremely interactive. I got time conscious and wanted to make sure people got all the information they paid for. Not sure anyone noticed except for me. Could be solved with more time.
• Teaching methodology II. Having a unified game to bring all the parts back to for experimentation is central to my usual teaching module. The best game for this material is infighting randori, which is pretty intense for a seminar format. Also, requires more time and might shift Structure and Void to be a mini version of infighting.
• Personal. Working with someone in a wheelchair I was shocked by how much I take for granted about my own physicality and how little I knew about different, less obvious effects. Like not being able to work core muscles. For class purposes, some things will simply not be possible and some require crazy work-arounds that may not be efficient enough to be worthwhile. Between the two of us, we knew enough about physiology to get most things to work, but I'm a little humbled.
• Equipment. I should not be allowed to teach without a dry erase board.
• Complacency. I get pretty foul-mouthed. 
• Play more. Feedback from the beginners was that often the words were confusing until the physical parts of the exercises, and then it came together. Must remember that this is experiential, touch is the only way to learn to fight. Train with respect to that.
• Ground part was important, but I cover it better (more time) in the 2-day Intro to Violence. Too big a chunk out of a four hour class. Maybe. there are really important aspects of structure and void that are more apparent on the ground than standing. Have to think this one through.

That should be enough to work on to keep me busy for awhile.

The Road Beckons

Heading out Thursday, flying in to Boston. It's been some time at home with just a little local travel. Hacked at the invading army of blackberries, prepped for and hosted our big annual party (corned beef and horse radish wontons, scotch eggs, BBQ steak, salted-carmel rum milkshakes...)

Time to get moving, though. And this will be fun, and busy, and intense.
Details for most of it are here:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Sept_in_New_England.html

The first two workshops will be this weekend. Saturday, a one-day intro to violence. The usual: Efficient movement, fighting to the goal, a quick overview of SD law, of context, of violence motivations and dynamics. Power and counter-assault. More if we have time.
Sunday's workshop gets me excited.  There is very little new information in either martial arts and self-defense. People have been bad to other people since before there were people (judging from pre-human fossils who appear to have been hit from behind with an antelope bone). The quest now is to organize the information in ways that make the package tighter, easier to understand, easier to apply-- and do so without becoming vague or useless. So Sunday will be four hours exploring the principles of Structure and Void. Which sounds all cool and esoteric, but it is only how to offensively and defensively use your skeleton and the bad guy's skeleton (structure) and how to exploit the empty space between you, the threat and the environment (void.)

Then to Manhattan for a pair of evening workshops on the 16th and 17th. Gonna cram as much data in the first evening and principles-based physicality in the second as I can.

The following weekend in Rhode Island at "Just Train" will be an instructor class, "How to Run Scenarios". Scenarios are easy to do, but hard to do well. And if they're done poorly, they can mess students up on multiple dimensions.

The next week, three of the days will be spent filming Drills for YMAA during the day. Evenings, the plan is to run the CRGI/Chiron Instructor Development course. Specific material on teaching principles-based self-defense, limits of knowledge, trouble-shooting difficult students, developing and maintaining rapport with specialty teams-- stuff like that. It's _going_ to happen, even if we haven't hammered out exact location and price point. If everything falls through, I'll get with the interested people and do the class over dinners.

And then top it off with an infighting weekend at the Metrowest Academy in Natick. Martially, InFighting is the thing I love above all things, and a traditional JJ school will have a lot of the fundamentals down, so there will be some good people to play with.

Then home, for a few days, before hitting the skies for Europe.

Abandon

I like the word "abandon" and it has been coming up a lot, lately. There are three (at least) instincts when faced with chaos and danger. The most common is to try to control it. To minimize the chaos, to minimize the danger. To basically take chaos and  and make it "not chaos." Whatever the opposite of chaos is.

When you can do that, it's a powerful strategy. Damming flood-prone rivers has been so successful that only historians have a grasp on the immense damage that unpredictable flood cycles used to do. An aircraft carrier constructed of 60,000 tons of steel and powered with nuclear engines can ignore all but the most extreme weather conditions.

I would say that is the second most common strategy. Evidently, people prefer even an evil stability to all of the possibilities that come with freedom. But that's a long talk over coffee.

The most common strategy is to pretend to control it. You can, with enough resources, control things you understand. Without an understanding, and a fairly deep understanding, all attempts to control become a gamble. Most common example is central planning of an economy. The planners would have to deeply understand a huge number of industries, the interplay between those industries, and somehow have to correct for the fact that a large number of humans, the cleverest monkeys ever, will be actively trying to subvert the system.  This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "Naive interventionism." "Something must be done! We don't understand the problem, actually, and have no idea if what we are going to do will actually work or make things worse... but something must be done!"

On the micro, we have martial arts. Which are largely a stylized, impressionistic, ritual of violence and controlling violence. "When you achieve your black belt, you will be ready." Ready for what? You can't know the answer to that simple question-- no one gets to know what bad stuff the future holds. If you can't know the question, you should be incapable of feeling confident in your answer. But people feel confident all the time.

Like economics, violence and self defense always involve other people, and people are the cleverest monkeys on the planet. It's not just mechanics, but mechanics applied against a moving target who may understand what is going on better than you and certainly wants you to fail. And each of those people will be different in some way.

The third strategy is to give yourself up to the chaos. Abandon. To immerse yourself in it. Not become part of it, but recognize that you have always been part of it. You have always been one of these adaptable, clever, frequently unpredictable monkeys. This (whatever 'this' is in a given context) can be chaotic, but not beyond what the human brain and body evolved to solve.

It's scary-- humans prefer even an evil stability to chaos. But it is also powerful. And it works. It takes confidence, but also builds confidence. And there's no way to learn it theoretically. You have to get in and mix it up. Take chances. Push the edge of the envelope until the envelope changes shape.

It also requires faith. Not in the religious sense. Dangerous stuff is dangerous precisely because you can get hurt. Chaotic means that you can't know the outcome. And jumping into that with both feet pretty much defines faith. Or stupidity. No one gets good at this stuff because of their overabundance of common sense.

To sum up:
The first strategy--Control the chaos:
To an intermediate grappler, a beginning grappler is completely under your control. You just make him do what you want him to do.

The second strategy-- Pretend to Control the chaos:
"We train not to go the ground in our dojo. If you're facing a grappler, all you have to do is..." says the man who has never grappled.

The third strategy: Abandon
The superior grappler doesn't bother to control the intermediate grappler, because everything is a gift.

Fishing

... or phishing.
One thing every predatory criminal needs is privacy. The quality of privacy depends on the type of crime. Beating a member of your gang that you suspect of breaking the rules might go better if the other members can watch, but you'll certainly limit civilian and police witnesses. The quantity of privacy varies as well. Rape and torture murders can take days, muggers may only need privacy for a few seconds.

There are only a handful of general strategies to get some one to a private place. You can intimidate them, trick them, lure them, follow them or wait for them.

Following and intimidation rely on assessing the victim, but very little intelligence gathering is needed. You want someone smaller, weaker, less confident to intimidate, someone oblivious to follow. Those are instantly obvious. The other strategies, usually, will have an element of intelligence gathering.

Not always. Just like fishing you can try to match the lure to the specific fish you want or you can cast a wide net. In "Think like a Freak" the authors pointed out that it might seem stupid that the Nigerian scam emails you get actually say they're from Nigeria. Everyone's heard of the Nigerian scam, right? But when you cast a net that wide, sending thousands of e-mails, you want to weed out the bad prospects as early as possible. If I send 1000 emails saying I need help getting millions out of the Nigerian bank, the 995 who recognize the scheme and don't answer have allowed me to concentrate on the five that might fall for it. Efficient use of time.

One personal version. "Hey, you from America? I love America. You know, there's a shrine that's not on the tourist map. It's a little far..." Which, could be targeted to the person trying to go native and be different from the other tourists, but works just as well if you ask every tourist you see.

When the isolation strategy is targeted, there will be some element of intelligence gathering. Surveillance is a possibility, but following someone for days to figure out his or her routine should be rare. Very labor intensive, far more evidence of premeditation, and I can't speak for other people, but I always thought the Hollywood cliche of the target who has the same meal at the same restaurant at the same time every day pretty damn unlikely.

Most intel gathering comes in a simple conversation-- the phone call claiming to be from the IRS is a big one now. Ted Bundy would strike up a conversation with a woman in the library on campus. In any first conversation at a university, three things come up: "Where are you from?" "What's your major?" and "Which dorm are you in?"

It's rapport building. Knowing your hometown tells me about background we have in common. Your major is a big clue both to the possibility of common interests and how you see your future. Where you live on campus tells me your socio-economic background and how social you are. But Bundy used the routine questions for something simpler.

If you ask a target at the library where the target lives, you can scout the loneliest place between the library and the home.

It can be hard to spot someone gathering intel. Like many long-term crimes (e.g. creating a relationship so the predator gets the victims home and access to bank accounts and can groom a victim), the criminal excels at imitating the steps of a normal relationship. Ted Bundy used the normal conversation scripts to extract the information he wanted. There are a finite number of tools, good guys and bad guys use the exact same tools.

The best exercise, from my point of view, is to practice it from the other end. Strike up conversations with the intent of finding out as much as you can about the other person while giving up as little as possible about yourself. Don't lie, just focus the conversation back on the other. Not only will very few people notice you aren't answering, they'll be flattered to be the center of attention. And they'll spill their guts.
Seeing how easy this is will help you recognize when you are on the receiving end. It will also teach you how rarely it is necessary to share. And, weirdly, the focus on others can even make you more popular.

The Process of Principles Based Teaching

Partially in answer to Jim's question, largely this will be a draft of an article for Conflict Manager Online Magazine. I've been doing a four part series there, the last three are the steps towards application (deriving your principles, a touch of adult learning theory, stuff like that.)

So, background-- You have to know your principles, understand them. And you have to have a clear idea of what you are actually teaching (most common mistake, people equate fighting with self-defense.) Your ability to pass on knowledge is absolutely limited by the clarity of your understanding of that knowledge. And what follows is a process, but you must know how to teach and how to communicate separately from this process. For instance, criticism is rarely effective teaching.

The process:

On a psychological and emotional level, you have to prep people for learning. One of the most toxic things we have done in martial arts and in some of the reality-based systems is to make conflict special. People come to us convinced violence is alien to them, it is complicated, it is hard to learn. Emphasize that this is natural. The physics are the same as any other physical activity and the mentality is part of their evolutionary heritage. It's been hammered and brainwashed out of them, but they are all natural fighters, all survivors.

I like having an over-all game that skills will always tie back to. The game has to be well designed. Minimal bad habits (if people don't go to the hospital, there are safety flaws built in. If they do go to the hospital, they don't learn anything while recovering.) It must be what it is and no more (I never call the one-step a fight simulation. It is a geometry problem made out of meat, and your job is to solve the moving meat problem as efficiently as possible.) 

I like the game to have a competitive element to it, but no winner or loser-- you are going to strive to be more efficient than me, but if you excel at that, you haven't beaten me, just given me a more challenging problem to solve. The problem with full active resistance or any form of direct sparring is that the only the winner learns that "it works against a resisting opponent." The loser, who probably needs the skill more anyway, learns that it fails against resisting opponents. Failure is not a lesson you want to teach. Not at this stage. This is the play stage where you are familiarizing with principles and what you can do, and looking to increase efficiency.

I start with the one-step. That's the slow motion, taking turns, efficiency exercise described in Drills: Training for Sudden Violence, (That's Smashwords. Link to Amazon Kindle.) Next level up is to blend that into a faster flow drill. Flow helps to lock in the skills, but as you go faster the students will miss opportunities.  And that's always the balance-- you need speed to handle speed, and you need to practice speed to not be overwhelmed. But that always comes at the price of: 1) missing opportunities and slowing down learning. 2) The safety flaws become more important. A slow elbow to the head you can make contact, a fast one you have to pull. 3) The faster you go, the harder the training ingrains, good or bad. Including the safety flaws.

The third level is full blown infighting randori. Your students need supreme control and confidence to do this well and safely, and frequently, this one has a winner. It integrates skills better than anything I know, because it is too close and too fast to process cognitively.

So those are the games I tie back to. We play the game, the one-step first. Before any instruction whatsoever (they get an extensive safety brief and a demo) they play. The only criticism at that point will be for safety and staying within the rules. Like any other game, they have to learn the rules. Most important is time framing. It's a slow motion drill, so it is easy to get competitive and speed up to "win".

Because they can do this successfully, it helps convince the student this is not special or alien. Gets them over that first big hurdle.

Next stage, you need to know your principles inside out. Then come up with ways to demonstrate them. Not techniques to remember, but sensations to feel.

Tie it back to personal experience "structure is just like pushing a car" but remind them it can always be more efficient. Or: when you do a squat, are you ever on your toes? Of course not. And you don't sprint from your heels. So heels down for power, heels up for speed. 

Basically, students may not have been consciously aware of their own bodies, but the body mechanics of physical altercations are the same body mechanics they have used every day.

Design or find a specific game that works a specific principle. Sumo is awesome for learning about the interplay between using structure and exploiting momentum.

Or demonstrate the common traits of a class of technique. I show one aspect of leverage by pointing out the different high-mechanical-advantage leverage points on the body and have the students experiment with them. The experimentation is key. And this is one of the places, where, as an instructor, you have to be careful. A lot of martial artists have been damaged by their previous instruction. These are the one who are always asking if they did it 'right' or which finger to use or how to grip. They are so used to being corrected that they are more concerned with the instructors criticism than success or failure they can feel. You have to deflect this by asking the only question that matters: "Did it work?"

Then bring bring them back to the general game, so the new stuff start to work with everything else. They shouldn't obsess on the new skill (e.g. only trying for leverage points) but the new skill will be fresh in their minds, and will come out a lot.

Repeat the cycle. Break them out of the game to work on something else, like targeting. Then put them back in the game. 

Theoretically, you could, after each skill, increase the speed. When they are starting to do it reflexively, pick up the speed to the flow level. Finally lock it in with a contest-level fast and hard game (infighting randori.

I don't do it that way. They can work on the principles in one-step forever. I move them to flow and randori based on their abilities and confidence level. Animals learn through play and the first exposure to randori should be fun and slightly overwhelming but shouldn't make them feel terrified and helpless.

The last, critical piece to self-defense is to occasionally run good scenario training. That allows them to use their skills in tandem with their judgment. And use more force, because of the armor. That said, scenario training is very hard to do well and safely and easy to do poorly. And poor scenario training can mess up students, physically, tactically and emotionally. It is better to stay away from the completely than to do them poorly. Last CCA for this post: I'll be running scenario training (and other things) in Rhode Island next month. Information is here:  http://chirontraining.com/Site/Sept_in_New_England.html

So, Jim, not a single technique anywhere in that progression.

There are some caveats, though:

1) Done properly, it allows and encourages creativity. Which means your students will innovate some sneaky shit and beat you far sooner than if they train in techniques. This is not a good method for egotistical instructors.

2) It can be hard to measure and test. Using this platform for jointlocks, we've gotten untrained officers improvising locks under pressure in an hour. And some of those locks would seem to be advanced. But they wouldn't have been able to name a lock or to demo a specific lock. Which makes organizations and concrete thinkers get the twitches.

3) It's incompatible with most martial arts business models. The student/teacher relationship will shift to colleague/colleague very quickly. I like that, personally.

Concretes and Abstracts

Technique-based training is concrete. "He throws a straight punch and you outside block, side step and throw an inside knife-hand strike. Go do a thousand reps." It's easy to teach. He does X, you do Y. Reps. But I can think of zero actual fighters who find this valuable (except as a business model). To deal with chaos you need to train with chaos. And train is the wrong word. You need to play.
Partially because play is the way animals naturally learn, partially because, in a complex system working rote drills hampers more than helps.

Principles-based training involves understanding the principles and applying them in chaos. It's much harder to teach, because knowledge isn't enough, the instructor must have understanding. It's less measurable, less "objective" but infinitely more useful under stress.

Technique repetition may lead to knowledge. Actual experience leads to understanding. Play, if the games are done well, can give you a start on understanding, maybe some insight.

As understanding deepens, you are able to "batch" more and more things. To integrate techniques that seem disparate into single thoughts. As you do so, you process things faster, you become more efficient and decisive.

A technique-based practitioner may go into a fight with a rolodex of forty hand strikes and twenty kicks in his head. He'll try to use this unwieldy mental rolodex and probably get his ass kicked. Memory is simply too slow. Taught in a principles-based way, one level of abstraction up is to understand that striking is just power generation, targeting, and conformation. If you understand it, your rolodex of sixty has become a rolodex of three, with a vast reduction in reaction, action and decision time but an increase in flexibility and adaptability. That's if you understand it. The problem is that if you only know it, you're going into the fight with three mental rolodexes that have to be cross-indexed under pressure. That's bad.

As your understanding deepens, your integrating concepts become simpler and more efficient. In Meditations on Violence I wrote about meta-strategies. Many of the extraordinary fighters I know have complete battle systems that can be expressed in a single sentence. "Destroy the base." "Defang the snake." "Take the center."

Simpler and more efficient, but also, expressed in words, they will seem more abstract. Memorizing techniques is easy. Nice and concrete. Teaching power generation, targeting and conformation is a good size to chunk the information. It gives beginners efficient tools and increases flexibility in hours instead of months. But every so often I want to go really deep, experiment with teaching a workshop on "Structure and Void". I think it would be a really powerful integrating concept, a good framework to teach. But I fear it's too abstract for most people. It would probably only be useful to people with a good depth of understanding already. There are far fewer of those.

Upside the Head

Every so often, you get your perspective shifted for you. You get one piece of data, or hear one thing, or look at the same problem from a slightly different angle and the whole world shifts. You don't just see the particular problem in a different way, you see the entire world in a new way.

On the martial journey, you'll occasionally hear a beginner say something with utmost sincerity and only later remember that you used to believe that, too.  I've written about one experience here, a minor one:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2006/05/kime.html

Another one, as near as I can remember it--
I was hitting the heavy bag, doing as I had been taught, throwing fast, loose karate punches and tensing them at the moment of impact when Mac said, "You realize that's unnecessary, right?"
I was flustered. It was the way I was taught. I hit hard. I started to argue and explain.
Mac continued, "All you need to do is get these bones (he indicated my metacarpals) in line with these bones (the radius and ulna)."  Then he completely shifted my understanding of martial arts "Tensing and clenching are what people do when they don't understand structure."

No one is stronger when they're tense. No one is faster. No one is more flexible or agile. We all know this. All of us. And even the instructors would pay lip service to it... but there was an awful damn lot of practicing tension while talking about relaxation. Misunderstanding of structure.

Haven't been writing for a while. Had one of those paradigm-shifting whacks upside the head. Took me some time to get equilibrium back.

Imperfect World

Once Rob wanted to introduce a new member to our little play group. "What's he like?" I asked, "How messed up is he?"
"Oh, he's broken," Rob replied, "but he's broken our way."

My world is full of beautiful but imperfect and even broken people. Rephrase. They are perfect, but they are perfect at being themselves, not perfect compared to some imaginary, objective outside benchmark. They are perfect, not flawless

People are amazing to me. One friend is tough, brilliant, hilarious... but the toughness in a product of nurture not nature. He survived an amazingly brutal early life. And it has left some deep insecurities, including places where his wit and intelligence are unavailable to him. People who hear him on these subjects say, "How can you be friends with..." It's easy.

Since leaving the SO, a fair number of the newer friends I've made have been former criminals. They have the criminal mannerisms and speech patterns that set my teeth on edge. But who they were is not who they are, and when people are working that hard to change their lives, it works for me to marvel at the possibility of redemption. And it would be cowardly and counter-productive if you were to find a bad man you were unable to take down when he was a bad man and try to take him out after he had become better and safer.

Experienced bad-asses with self-destructive streaks annoy me, but several are fast friends. Two of the people I most trust to watch my back are full-blown sociopaths. Almost all of the best teachers I've had had some very deep insecurities. Too many of the most innovative people in this field have never become successful because of stupid pride. I like them as they are, flaws, warts and all.

And all of them have blindspots. So do I, of course, but I can't see mine.

Passion

Talking about a workshop for next year and the host asked a great question: "What are you passionate about right now?"

Some background. Personal information. Feel free to skip it. Something very profound has shifted internally over the winter. Last year there was a lot of travel, a lot of teaching, and I was getting really burned out on people. Simply hating the whole world. Didn't want to talk or interact. Just wanted to find my cave in the desert and walk away from it. But I have obligations (mortgage and a wife I love dearly who really likes living in a house.)

And so, this year, even more traveling and teaching. But I'm not burning out. I'm loving it. I'm coming home rested and only slightly irritable (people in airports wandering aimlessly like zombies still make me irritable, but not nearly as much.) So something shifted, and I think the host nailed it.

Even before leaving the SO and the team and eventually Iraq, I was pretty heavily burned out. I was good enough at what I did that it took immense discipline to work to get better. I'd never realized how much fear (especially of failure or letting down the team) had motivated me. When the adrenal glands started to burn out, so did the motivation. I went to Iraq because I was looking for fear. Decided to go into business for myself, giving up financial security, because I was looking for fear. I feel like I want to define fear here, because I'm pretty sure I'm not using it in the normal sense. But I can't. It's just that I do best in conditions of danger + uncertainty. Those are the times when I feel like I am really me. The only times.

End of background for now.

Three things immediately popped to mind when asked about current passions: InFighting, Teaching Methodology and Power Dynamics. And there's an element of fear to each of them.

• InFighting is the thing I love best about martial arts. It's not self-defense, because it's not about prevention or escape. It's about maximizing internal integration and your ability to play with complexity. It's a blast. The fear element? This knee injury could or should have been a career ender. We all have expiration dates, and those come up quicker the more you push the envelope. I want to play more with what I love-- and get the information out-- while I'm still capable of enjoying it. That's the current physical challenge. As well as rehab and reconditioning a body that I let stay too injured for too long.
• Teaching Methodology. This is the intellectual challenge. SD is a unique skill with unique problems. The only good way (modeling with experienced people under real conditions) to translate these kind of skills from training to application is simply not available for civilians. So how well and how fast can it be taught? 
• Power Dynamics. Started as something simple, trying to hammer out the good and bad power relationships in a martial arts or self-defense class. But it got a lot bigger, and a lot of what I'm seeing, on a societal level is pretty disturbing.

So, things are changing and it might be as simple as passion. And passion might be as simple as fear. It's all just adrenaline anyway, until you name it.

Dripping Integrity

Living in a world of social media, where passion is considered on a par with information and where surrounding oneself with a coterie of sycophants passes for critical thinking and cherry picking sources is as close as most people get to being "well informed" I want to give Greg Ellifritz some kind of medal.

Some background. It's well known in the Gun Rights movement that almost all recent active shooter events have occurred in places where citizens weren't supposed to carry guns. John Lott (economist, researcher) says, "With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms."   

It's true, and it makes sense. Posting "No Weapons Allowed" signs obviously only works for people who obey signs. Murderers are generally not worried about "Keep off the Grass" signs. The idea that rules control behavior is not just naivety. It is superstition.

Anyway, Greg has a special interest in active shooters. When the shooter's diaries were released, Greg ran with it. And, though the shooting once again happened in a place where a sign told citizens they were not allowed to pack heat, Greg writes, "Although the killer did take security into account (by choosing the movie theater over the airport) there was no evidence (as some experts have postulated) that the killer chose this specific movie theater because it was the only one in the area that banned the lawful concealed carry of firearms.  In fact, there is no evidence in his diary that he even considered the possibility of being shot by a lawfully armed citizen or an off-duty police officer watching the movie.

Though the message won’t be well-accepted by this audience, gun control did not appear to be a factor in the target selection for this massacre.  The presence or absence of armed citizens wasn’t considered in this specific killing."   

Okay, get this. We have an event that fits the narrative ("Spree killers choose places where civilians are unarmed.") Something that anyone with an opinion and any less integrity would have used...and instead Greg admonishes on our ethics: 

"It’s important not to let our personal feelings or hunches replace the facts in cases like these.  In the ever-present debate against the anti-gunners, we have the facts on our side.  We must stick to the truth and the facts we know so that we retain credibility in the debate."     

If I could change one thing in our national debates, it would be to set this as the standard. Truth over emotion, what you want to believe limited by what the evidence shows. There is no reason to lie when the facts are on your side.

This is my wish for the politics in America. My fear, of course, is that emotion will silence reason and  those that feel will exterminate those that think. For the common good, of course.

Thanks, Greg. 

For Greg's Full article, http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/an-active-killers-diary 

Mindsets 2015

The blog is where I do my thinking out loud. And, to help clarify a debate I'm having with a friend, I need to define some terms in my own mind. Just assume an IMO or IME after almost every sentence.

There are a bunch of different mindsets. Written about it a little before. And people at different levels of experience don't gather or process information the same. There are trained mindsets, which are ways you learn to think; and there are core mindsets which are deeper parts of your nature. Maybe.

Any of these might be accessed in a force situation, and all of them will work differently for different people and in different circumstances.

Some of the Core MindSets:
Fighter. Unfortunately, this is the mindset almost all men have as the ideal. It is about "winning" but it is also about letting others, especially the opponent, know that you have won and he has lost. It is a show of strength, conditioning, courage and skill. Operative word is "show." Over millennia, the traits essential to the fighter's mindset are the traits that would impress a female chimpanzee looking for a mate. That sounds dismissive. Sorry. There are a lot of good things that come with this mindset-- toughness, endurance, courage, pain tolerance, the ability to think on your feet, others. Those are good traits and there is no downside in training to develop them. But for the two primary goals (my primary, anyway) disabling quickly and safely or escaping, this mindset lends itself to very bad strategy and judgment calls. In my ideal world, for instance, the bad guy should be down and in cuffs without ever knowing quite how it happened.

Survivor. Just as the Fighter is obsessed with "winning", the Survivor is obsessed with "not losing". In non-violent life these are the people who are so afraid to make a mistake, they generally do nothing. In martial arts, instructors create this personality type (so maybe it should go under "Trained") by constantly correcting. When your students are more afraid of doing something wrong than eager to do something right, they fall into this category. I don't like it, but I see reasons why other people might think it's important. In force professions and situations, I didn't know a lot of these. Rephrase-- I knew them, but they always gravitated to desk jobs and safe posts, so I never considered them to be part of the profession.

Hunter. The Hunter gets the job done with maximum efficiency and minimum personal risk. Snipers are the iconic hunters, but all good pros work from this mindset. The team didn't take risks. Putting the bad guy down was never a contest. If it turned into anything approaching a fight, my tactics sucked or my ego got involved. Hunting mindset is alien to most people in our culture today because they've never hunted or slaughtered. But once they get reintroduced, the world shifts.
Hunting mindset is easy when you have distance and time on your side. Officers responding to a call. Slaughtering day at the farm. Actually hunting, like a deer. It is harder but still accessible in close quarters and even from surprise-- in the fighting mindset you tend to forget things like throat spears, rabbit punches and ear slaps. In the hunting mindset, those are the first things you see.
In the fighting mindset, it is in some way noble to engage with equal weapons or no weapons at all. To the hunter's mindset, this is choosing to be unprepared. Not noble, just stupid.

Predator. Exactly the same as hunter. Just different words for a different model.

"Warrior." I've already written what I think of people who need the label here. In it's current usage, the "Warrior Mindset" seems to be little more than an attempt to grab some reflected glory. I'm not a warrior. I was a soldier long ago, but I was never activated. I know who I am and what I've done and have no need to steal a label that was earned by others.
The proper warrior mindset, the real thing, has layers and levels. At one level, you must have the humility to follow orders. If you have to deliberate about whether the order you follow is worthy, or think that you're so much smarter than the source of your orders that you should have choices... there's no time for that. Arrogant people die and get others killed. At other levels, there is a definite hunter's mindset. And sometimes, you just endure.
The myth that people want-- that you train  in a certain way or follow a certain tradition or wear certain clothes and you enter a brotherhood of secret knowledge is just...childish.

Mama Bear. Mac showed me this one, once. He was sparring with K and she was definitely in the survivor mindset, not trying to take Mac out, just trying not to get beaten too badly. Mac suddenly threatened her daughter. K went apeshit. Mac's good and he was nearly twice K's size, and for the next thirty seconds he was completely on the defensive until I called it.
It's not a gender thing, necessarily. Everyone should have something so precious to themselves that they will cast away all caution, go completely offensive, give no thought to self protection at all... And that can be a huge advantage. Ferocity is one of the factors, and protection of others is inborn in all of us. But it is buried deep. And I don't think this is just buried by social conditioning. It's a high risk strategy. Going apeshit on the tiger will buy the kids time to get up the tree, but it's still a tiger.

Scholar. Not sure if this is a trained one or inborn. And I think you can be in scholar mode simultaneously with some of the others. There are parts I couldn't access before a significant accumulation of experience. The scholar goes into a force situation to learn. Early stages, most of the scholars' work is in debriefing, writing the reports. Not everyone does it, analyzing each event to figure out what worked, what failed, and why. But the scholar core improves you over time. After experience, at higher levels, I would deliberately experiment in a force situation. That's rare, most professionals stick with what works because it is risky to do otherwise. The two experiments I remember was a breathing exercise for in the middle of the altercation suggested by George, and Mac's suggestion, "Next time you have a fight in Reception, thank the guy afterwards. See what happens."

Hopeless. Not sure what to call this one. There comes a time when you know you aren't getting out alive anyway, you have nothing to lose, there is no way to survive and your brain shifts. You don't think about winning, you don't think about not losing, because death is a foregone conclusion. And something clicks and you decide to leave a mark. To leave so much forensic evidence, there is no way the threat will escape. To make this the worse day of his life. To cause as much pain and damage and horror as you can in the limited time you have left. This is hitting rock bottom and embracing rock bottom.
And it is one of the most powerful survivor mindsets there is. Very few people want to pay the price to stay engaged with a victim who has touched this level, the full-blown lizard brain.

Trained MindSets:
Technician. This is a meat problem I have the skills to solve. Very impersonal. I used this more sparring than in real force incidents.
Workman. "This is my job." This is an odd one, because sometimes it gives people permission to access something like the Technician or the Hunter. I've also been bouncing around some thoughts with MR: Having an identity as a bouncer or LEO or CO allows some people to engage with far less monkey brain. Especially if you have a tendency towards the fighter's mindset (and almost all young men do and most of these professions are recruited from the pool of young men) the workman mindset, when achieved, allows you to take the ego out of it. To be efficient, to not take things personally.

There are probably tons more. These are the things that come to my head right now.

They all work, for various people and to varying degrees. There are some I prefer. Anyone can access almost any of them. The physical act of breaking another person is not hard. The mindsets are the ways one becomes willing.

Men and Women, Big and Little

Interesting to note that two of the people debating in the comments continued separately on their blogs. 

Men and women are different. A lot of that is biological, a lot of that is social conditioning. And a lot is psychology created in the interaction of biology and social expectations. It doesn’t serve anybody to pretend it is not true. It also doesn’t serve anybody to pretend that it means very much.

Different just means that, given the same problem, you will have different tools to solve it. Viva diversité. But if the problem must be solved, you will find a way. That’s what humans do, we adapt.

Do men and women have different fighter/warrior/killer instincts? Sort of. Maybe. My experience actually says no. Sort of. One of the questions I ask in some seminars is how many of the participants have ever had to fight a women for real. Few hands go up and they are almost always street cops or bouncers. Then I ask if they ever want to repeat the experience, and they go a little pale and shake their heads. It seems that it takes a lot more to get a woman to cross the line into physical force, but when she does, she has no internalized rules.

So that’s two differences, I guess. Generally, women are more reluctant to fight than men. And when they do, men tend to focus on the abstract, bullshit social construct of “winning” and women are just there to hurt you. That’s what makes them so dangerous that experienced people pale a little at the memory… but grin when they remember the college kid who took a stance and bragged he was a black belt.

But not that much of a difference, because (and this may be my generation whining about “kids these days”) even most men will not engage under even extreme provocation. The biggest coward I ever worked with was a male, former marine, over six feet tall. And the most fearless was a 5’2” single mom.

Are women more reluctant to engage? Sure. If you take any group that, on average, has less muscle density and is smaller, being eager to engage would not be a sign of intelligence. Smart people avoid damage, and hands-on conflict always has the risk of damage. And any conflict with someone who is likely to lose with words and likely to win with fists has inherent risks. So, yeah, just like a small country or the smallest boy in the red neck school a woman (on average) will avoid confrontation. Not because of her gender but because of her intelligence. And it doesn’t take above average intelligence, either.

And when you are the smallest in a conflict, there are three ways to win that I know of. Technical superiority is the trained option. If you are superb, you can give up a lot in the weight, strength and age departments. But you have to be really good and, more importantly, you have to be really good at exactly the kind of fight that you’re in.

The second is ferocity. Or crazy. Everyone has little internal lines they won’t cross. Even when death is in the air, almost everyone holds back to some extent. There is always a balance between trying to win and trying not to lose and those are incompatible strategies and incompatible worldviews. It’s not always the answer, but if you are willing to go all-in and the threat is not, the threat has a tendency to leave. I think that is why things like nose strikes and groin strikes have been so successful for Leonnie’s WSD students and so dismally unsuccessful in jail fights. The disparity between what the threat expected and what they got became the signal to disengage.

The third is clarity. And clarity doesn’t hurt ferocity and is integral to technical skill. All fighting, anything with an athletic component, is all about efficiency. Efficiency is removing any unnecessary motion whatsoever. Clarity is the mental equivalent. It is knowing yourself-- what you are willing to do and not; why you are fighting and that it is worth all it will cost. It is knowing your goal and your strategy. Not some vague “I want to win this fight” but “Get to the door.”

And it’s not a hyperfocus on a single goal. It is clarity also to recognize when the first choice is no longer an option. That allows you to switch. Effective adaptability is predicated on clarity.

Convergence

25 hours (about) into the 40 hour Core Dump in Edmonton. It's going well, and the entire Canada trip deserves an AAR. We've covered some new stuff and some core stuff in new ways. It's working, but it's not "a" thing that's working. It's a convergence of a bunch of different things-- attitudes, philosophy, understanding-- that make it possible. As always, there's more going on than I can see clearly, but here are some of the things.

Philosophy. Nothing about survival or self-protection or self-defense or whatever you want to call it is difficult or unnatural. This is exactly the problem we were evolved to solve. Not being a victim is part of our deepest wiring. Mind, body and spirit have all the tools. This is not about forging warriors, this is about rehabilitating predators.
I can corroborate that eight ways from Sunday, as my dad used to say. Talk to any cop or bouncer who has ever had to fight an untrained woman for real and ask if they want to repeat the experience. Read Strong on Defense and look at what the survivors did and the mindset they tapped into.
 That's for me. But the students have to hear it too, and further, they have to be told a really ugly truth: Almost all of society is set up to perpetually brainwash them so that they never remember their own power.

The physical part isn't hard. It's breaking that damn social conditioning. Seriously, have you ever seen anyone keep fighting after a cupped-hand slap to the ear?  And how long does it take to master that? I've heard of one who kept going after a throat chop. Other strikes are far less reliable, but there is a solid core of 'A' techniques. And even if there wasn't, there are these handy things called "tools". Breaking people is not hard. Our ancestors solved that problem before they were even human.
Rephrase. It's not physically hard. But the social conditioning gets in the way. Almost every officer I've debriefed who got hurt knew exactly what he needed to do, but somehow couldn't make himself act. And that's not even taking into account fear, surprise, or the fact that the bad guy will do his best to psychologically control the victims so they don't fight back.
That is the hard part.

Understanding that most teaching methods work the wrong parts of the brain. Memory, rote, names and labels and techniques mean jack shit in chaos. Technique-based training is the easiest-- for the teacher. And for administrators who need "measurable." But it is possibly the worst possible way to teach people about chaos. Teaching, training, conditioning and play. Four ways to get things into a student's mind and body. Each has a time and place, but each is also useless in other areas.

(And that might be a nice article-- designing drills. Knowing the purpose; knowing which of the four methods are appropriate; checking for pollution e.g. thinking you're using operant conditioning but critiquing turns it into training; and means testing to see if it worked.)

Understanding the problem, obviously. If you don't know attacks, you can't teach SD. Just like you can't teach medicine if you don't know disease and injury. Want to know one of my red flags? If someone shows me what they do and it's clearly based on sparring timing, distance and orientation, then they're just fantasizing.

The partners need training as well. The attacks have to be attacks. You have to be able to project the physical and emotional intensity of grabbing a woman by the throat and slamming her into the wall. Those are the physics she must learn to deal with. That is a taste of the emotional environment in which she will have to deal with those physics. You have a responsibility to be a good bad guy for your partner.

And training tip of the week (or subtle student manipulation, if you want to look at it like that): "You must give your partners good attacks. I know that you're good people and it's hard for you. But if you attack them weak, or slow, or gently, you are literally endangering their lives. Do you want your partner to get hurt because you were so self-conscious you couldn't help her prepare?"
What's subtle about it? The reps of acting ferocious combined with the idea that you are being ferocious for the benefit of someone else will likely also make it easier to slip the leash if you need to for real.

Clear goals. Martial artists try to adapt martial arts to self-defense and usually think of the physical part as just fighting very hard. And fighting has almost nothing to do with it.

Avoidance is best, obviously. Not being chosen as a target, not being isolated if you do get chosen, not allowing yourself to be psychologically controlled. If it goes hands on, well... who would you take out? And how? Shoving down an old lady on a walker and going through her purse? Slamming a drunk tourist's head into the pipe above the urinal? There's almost nothing in the "fight" paradigm for the kinds of attacks that happen. It's a qualitatively different problem. Using the medicine analogy, it's like using a four-week antibiotics regimen for a severed femoral artery. Pre-hospital trauma care is a different skill than fighting disease.

If you know the problem, you can clarify the goals. When it must go hands on, the only sensible options are escape, disable, or control-- and control pretty much only applies to people who have a duty to act and take people into custody. The body mechanics, as well as the mindsets, are very dissimilar between those three. And all are different from fighting. And, for martial artists, that's the second biggest challenge. For most people, the big challenge is getting them to slip the leash and go hands on at all. For martial artists, it's fighting their urge to stand and fight. To get to their preferred distance and orientation and have a duel.
Clarifying the goal, working the body mechanics of escape, for instance, makes the skills pretty easy to get down. But the emotional, social and mental parts are still hard.

Recovery Report

17 days post surgery. ACL replaced, meniscus trimmed. Doc looked around and decided to leave the LCL alone, for now. I've been walking without a brace (most times) for over a week, but don't tell my physical therapist. Strength and passive flexibility are coming back fast. Took myself off the heavy pain meds in less than a week. Ibuprofen now, and that's mostly to help the swelling.

Wes sent me a box of incredibly foul tasting Chinese herbs. No way to tell if they're helping for sure (I'd have to get the same injury again and not take the herbs and compare healing rates) but the PT says he's having trouble keeping up with my progress.

Weird thing with each new exercise-- it takes a moment of concentration the first time I do anything. Like a leg curl. There's a specific place in the back of my knee I had to remind how to move. Or maybe the zombie parts (doc said there was too much damage to replace with my own parts, so I had to use pieces of dead people) needed to get used to taking orders again. Once it was activated, no further problem.

The new repairs are fragile. I'm not supposed to test them. Not even supposed to ride a real bike for another three weeks or try to jog for three more months. That's frustrating, but it makes sense. And the bad things about knees is that you only really find the limits by breaking them. I guess that goes for a lot of things.

Near injury today-- The good leg slipped on the stairs and I reflexively kept myself from falling, by taking all of my falling weight on the bad knee. No pops or snaps or wet ripping noises, but the knee is letting me know it's not happy.

And the surgery is forcing me to rethink some things. Things I've put off thinking about.
Humans have expiration dates. Sometimes I feel like I'm well past mine. But there's some information I want to see spread while I'm still capable of demonstrating it (and can have fun brawling with the people who get it down.) The infighting stuff, mostly. Then the focus will have to switch to mental stuff-- commo, awareness, teaching...

I'm not useless, yet.

On the plus side, I'm getting a lot of writing done. The first draft of "Concepts" is finally finished and out to first readers.

Some stuff coming up that's exciting. Bad time to be injured, but the second iteration of the CRGI Instructor Development Course will be presented in London, Ontario next weekend. A class purely on how to teach emergency skills to adults.
 And  May 16-24 a 40-hour core dump in Edmonton, Alberta. It's something I've been wanting to do for awhile.
Information on both of those is here:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Canada-May.html

And in June, I'll be team teaching with Tony Blauer. It will be the first time we've met in person. The Convergent Evolution seminar. Some information is here:
https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1703674

New Ground

Kasey made the cover of Police Magazine. He posted one of the interior pictures on FB with this caption:
"Here is the April 2015 issue of Police Magazine
Randy the business Sensei will be pleased to see the product placement of the One on One Control Tactics - O3CTlogo in a national publication. Also if you look close you can see a flag for Allegiance Fitness in the back ground. And I'm sure Rory Miller will recognize the Chiron Training weapon retention being demonstrated. #represent"
The shout-out is appreciated. And the CDT program (Chiron Defensive Tactics) is a good jumping-off point to something else.

The weapon retention part is good. I want to say it's the best out there and there's nothing else like it, but that's probably not true anymore. Enough people have been exposed to the idea, and been pleased with it, that it has and will spread. And there's always convergent evolution-- many different ways to get to something that works, and many of the things that work will be very similar.

The thing that's important in my head right now, though, is an aspect of permission. Under what circumstances do people and organizations give themselves permission to change? Refusal to adapt is a death knell. But change, especially organizational change, is hard. ConCom explains why...  but there's still a lot of work to do in how to change despite the difficulty.

Incremental improvement, building off of previous foundation is change, but it is very limited. As Dabrowski pointed out (Hat tip to Ann Craig) big personal growth involves a dissolution, a complete destruction and rebuilding of the person you were before. Big growth in a system would require dismantling the system and starting over.

You can get better by continuing to build on your foundation, with diminishing returns, but you have to dismantle them to get paradigm shifting change. And, of course, this level of change is seen as ego or identity destruction and is fought fiercely. ( I know I'm having a good thinking morning when I reheat the coffee four times and keep forgetting to drink it.)

So-- what gave MCSO the internal permission to give us the permission to change our weapon retention? I don't know the absolute answer, but I do know some of the pieces.

• We cared. The people who needed this weren't some abstract "customer" they were people we worked with and cared about. Friends and colleagues. I think this is important personally, but it was true before change was allowed, so it wasn't the key.
• We had a different demographic. Thirty or forty years ago, a big part of officer selection was simply size. (And who you knew.) They wanted big men and that was mostly what they hired. If you're teaching (like many military-based systems) 18-20 year-old men in the best shape of their lives, full of ego and testosterone, you can teach them almost any crap and they will make it work. Times change. In trying to make the profession gender and age neutral, there was a definite shift in physical abilities of the average officer. More importantly, there was a much wider range of physical abilities. You could no longer teach crap and expect a former high school linebacker to rely on strength to make it work. But that's not the reason either, because one of the things a modern bureaucracy requires is slavish lip-service to the patently untrue ideal that "all people are the same."
• The techniques taught at the academy and by my agency simply didn't work. That right there should have been enough... but it wasn't. What they were teaching was measurable: the stereotypical eight-step wristlock takedown to prone cuffing never worked, but it gave you eight easily measurable steps on which to pass or fail a student.
• People got hurt when things didn't work. Again, that should have been reason enough. But it wasn't. Not until we had a year with so many injuries that people got alarmed. Really alarmed, as in the union was looking into it. Understand that injuries came out of a different budget, it was state workman's comp. But lawsuits came out of the agency's budget. ---And another thing. When things are rare, like shootings, it is often easier to categorize failure as a "fluke" rather than entertain the possibility that you are doing things systematically wrong. Lots of people rationalize away problems until it is too late.
• I think this was the key. It was the stupidest, most minor of details. We were teaching the academy-approved weapon retention curriculum for a gun grab from behind-- use your weapon hand to pin the weapon in the holster and turn to your non-weapon side to move the gun out of reach... and realized that the turn gave up the third level of retention for our modern type III holsters. We had not changed or seriously looked at our training methods on this subject since before we switched to semis. What we were teaching was actively wrong for the equipment we carried.

All of the other stuff mattered. People cared. But it took something to blame that didn't tie to people or policy to get the permission.

Just one example, and I know it's incomplete. But if you want to break new ground you need to reject old ground. Not out of ego. As a rule you don't change things that work, especially if you're doing it just so you can be in charge.

And there's a method to deconstructing the old practices so that what you build is stronger. It's not, or shouldn't be, just a childish rejection out of pique or spite.

This is already getting too long. Do you or does your organization need to change? If so, what will be required to give that kind of permission?

Packs

Just...wow. Off a plane, home for 26 hours, on the road, home for twelve hours and on a plane, then home for less than nine and on a plane again. And something is happening to my internal wiring, because (so far) I don't appear to be burning out on people. This is more exhilarating than exhausting. We'll see if that keeps up.

And the to-do list is somewhere between ambitious and overwhelming. Especially the writing section. And it's imperative to fight the paralysis that comes with having an excess of worthy goals. Things to do, things to do...

So let's make this quick.

Very few things are zero sum games. Outside of artificially imposed stuff (like the rules in a game. There are only sixteen chess pieces per side, only so many pieces of property in Monopoly) the only truly non-zero sums I can think of are space (literally the surface of the earth) and chemical elements, like Fe, iron. And exposed to human creativity, even those can be tweaked. There are only so many acres in Manhattan, but a skyscraper vastly increases the useable acreage by thinking in three dimensions. Money may have been a zero-sum game when we were on the gold or silver standard (although even then, it was never limited to one metal) but it certainly isn't now, and wealth never has been zero-sum.

Power, absolutely is not zero-sum. Increasing your intelligence does not decrease mine. Becoming more creative will not make me less creative. Your reps in the gym do not prevent me from doing my own reps (ooooh, though-- waiting in line for a squat rack is a zero-sum game. Limited resource of a specific object...until you apply human creativity and go outside and lift rocks.)

Power does have the effect of making other people who want to use power to coerce think. Coercion over powerless people has zero consequences. Coercion over powerful people is always risky. And thus evil people want to be surrounded by all the weak people possible. And they will claim that others getting strong is weakening them.

And look at the mechanics of that one very carefully. Because te other side is to claim that weakening the strong somehow, magically, strengthens the weak.

From a conversation with Anna Valdisseri when we talked in Sheffield. (I like the way she thinks, that's one of my highest compliments.) She had a unique way of looking at it. As best I can paraphrase:
Humans live in groups. We're social animals. When we see ourselves as pack animals we know that becoming more powerful as individuals makes the pack stronger. It's better for everyone. When we see ourselves as herd animals, we want all the other members to be weak because it increases our chances. If everyone is weak, the wolf will get someone else.

When something bad happens and hits the news, is your instinct to learn more and train harder so that you have options if it should ever happen around you? I started carrying regularly after the Luby's shooting in Texas because I realized I could not have contributed unarmed. If your instinct is to randomly disempower the people around you when bad things happen, that's a herd mentality.


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Actually wrote this three weeks ago but stumbled on an internal monkey brain problem in the middle. Took a while to work it out.

On Power

Maija asked the right question. Always best to define your terms. I think "strong" and 'weak" are false sorts, and forgive me for not being clear.

This whole line of thought got launched because Dr. Tammy Yard-McCracken started a dialogue about power dynamics in teaching-- and the can of worms got a whole lot bigger than either of us expected. I really don't know where that project is going. It could be a book or a class or something unexpected. But so far, just in the questions, the collaboration looks promising.

Power isn't an endstate. There are no weak or strong people, just people at different places on a given continuum. And power is not linear. I am stronger than K, but she is smarter and more artistic than I am. R has more money, but J has more skills. Q can access a deep level of viciousness, but W can access an equally deep level of empathy. Power is not a scale but a net of ever-interconnecting methods of affecting the world. And in each strand of the net, you have attributes and skills that both affect the strength.

But in the end, it is about ability to affect the world and, at least equally and maybe more: an ability to have choice in how much the world affects you.

And so when I say "strong" or "weak" in this case, it has nothing to do with where you are on this scale. It has everything to do with which direction you are moving in. Because you are either getting better, or you are getting worse. If you don't get stronger, you will stagnate and get weaker. You can't rest on this. And that "can't' isn't meant as an admonition, but as a simple statement of fact.

If you are getting better, you are strong. Maybe not as strong as you want or you could be. Certainly not the strongest in the world. But the very act of seeking to be better, to be able to affect the world more, is strength.
And, conversely, if you are not striving to be better, you have accepted entropy and you are weak. Doesn't matter if you have the genetics to be a world power lifter. Doesn't matter if you inherited wealth and political power. Doesn't matter what you tell yourself so that you can sleep at night. If you aren't striving to be better you are, by my definition weak. Sorry.

And there's another dynamic here, because power is only a small part of it. You are already powerful. You have a brain bigger than our ancient ancestors. If you have a decent diet you are likely much bigger. You have better communication skills. You have access to information your ancestors could never dream. And your ancestors conquered the world. With half of your gifts, with nothing much beyond rudimentary communication skills and opposable thumbs, your ancestors became the apex predator of this planet. Do you get that? You are fucking mighty.

That is your birthright. That is who you are. And no animal naturally weakens itself. Tigers never starve themselves to look better to other tigers. Snakes don't slither over coals to show their bravery.

So the second dimension is not just power, but comfort with power. If you have a working brain and a decent amount of mobility, anyone on this planet could assassinate anyone else. I may be stronger than K, but she is comfortable enough with the strength and skill that she has that she has no doubt she could make me pay. People who are comfortable with power have to be respected.

There's a huge amount here that Tammy and I are slowly working on-- the ethical element, toxic relationships to power, whether power can be given or must be taken-- a ton of stuff. But I think the bones lie in these two things:
Power is about growth or stagnation.
Comfort with power is required to use it.

Just a Few Thoughts

It looks like we might be on business stuff for a bit. And there will be some teaching stuff, too.
The blog is my place for thinking out loud. That was easier when it was the anonymous meanderings of  some random jail guard poking at internal stuff. The biggest mystery and challenge in my life right now is the business end. I want to get good at it because I hate being bad at anything. And I must do it without compromising my principles. So far, no problem.

This will be kind of random. I may not publish it (I already have several posts written that I'll never publish-- some too dark, some too personal). I may take each paragraph and expand it into a post. I don't know yet.

Thought One:
In this discussion, there is a cross-over to another project I'm working on. We have all been systematically lied to. There is a belief that is so common it is considered axiomatic, but I believe it started as a deliberate lie with a deliberate purpose:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."-- Lord Acton (titled, landed, seat in parliament...)
What better way to keep good people powerless than to tell them they will become bad people if they gain power? And it has the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy because once the edict is taken to heart, only people who are already bad seek power. So we see corrupt people in positions of power and assume that the power made them that way.
It's a lie. A systematic lie woven into the fabric of society for the express purpose of keeping good people from ever being strong enough to challenge those in power. If you believe this (and I did for years, an assumption so deep I never even considered challenging it) you have been brainwashed. And the brainwashing has made you a servant to your enemy.

Thought Two:
This is coming up in the discussion. Mac made a comment on the last post that earning a living and getting good enough to teach are both full time endeavors, and that made it hard to do both. The math doesn't work for that. You have to make a living anyway, why does a career at the Sheriff's Office not make it just as hard to do both? When we have arguments we can show to be mathematically false, what are we really arguing for? I think we are driven to preserve our own brainwashing.
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And, aside-- I do need to make a living, and I really only had two marketable skills when I came back from Iraq. But money is not how I keep score. I started teaching JJ because there was no one nearby who could play the games I wanted to play at the level I wanted to play them. I was creating my own playmates. My current goal: Weak people annoy me. They whine and complain and play bullshit little political games (and the loud blustery ones, whatever they tell themselves, are in the weak camp as well.) If I can't find enough strong people, it's up to me to make them. And that's probably more than you wanted to know about my inner motivations.
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Thought Three:
I'm doing everything wrong and it's working.
No advertising. Only social media is FB and that's still a personal page. I don't send out e-mail blasts. For that matter, I just have a few regional e-mail lists and people have to ask to be put on it. I don't list the agencies or special groups I've worked for. For the first three years I charged for a whole weekend what a few others in this field charge per person for a weekend. (Not quite true anymore-- it would be for the cost of about two people.) And there are very few openings left on my schedule this year, and it was almost full before I even opened it...

Thought Four:
That implies there are some universal principles that work, that go deeper than just common business wisdom. Not sure what they are, but I have a pretty good idea what works for me.