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Introduction
Most of us as martial artists tend to spend a lot of time practicing and refining the hard skills of self protection, the physical techniques and tricks that are specifically designed to damage an opponent in some way. And whilst I realise that hard skills are vitally important to ones personal safety, I also believe that the so-called soft skills of self protection are just as important. In some ways the hard skills are easier to learn. They are just gross motor skills at the end of the day (and Im talking here about the very basic strikes that tend to be favoured in the self protection field, such as power punches and open handed strikes). Aside from the emotional content fuelling their delivery, these techniques are purely physical and require no special physical traits for a person to learn them. You could probably teach your grandmother to powerslap! Soft Skills Soft skills on the other hand, such as awareness (of oneself, of ones surroundings and of ones opponent), situational control and verbal deescalation techniques are usually only taught in the self protection field and are rarely if ever acknowledged by most traditional martial arts styles. Even in the field of self protection, they tend to be glossed over in order to get to the more interesting physical stuff. Yet I would argue that these soft skills are just as essential to learn as the hard skills and are eminently more useful to someone who wants to avoid violence. The point to remember about soft skills (or soft kills, since metaphorically speaking you are killing your aggressor softly, without hitting them) is that they are indeed skills, and need to be practiced as diligently as the hard physical skills. The more thoroughly you familiarise yourself with them and the more effort you put into making them second nature, the more you will get out of them and the more useful you will find them, in daily life as well as when in aggressive and potentially violent situations. Conflict is conflict and the same

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techniques can just as easily be applied to an argument at work or with a loved one, as with some guy who wants to knock your head off for spilling his pint. All of the information I have gathered here is a product of my own experience, or of the experience of other instructors I have trained with such as Geoff Thompson and Al Peasland, or of the experience of other excellent instructors such as Rory Miller, Lee Morrison and Richard Dimitri. I am indebted to them all for sharing their knowledge and experience. It is in this same spirit of giving that I am sharing this information with you now. I hope you find it useful. If you dont you have my permission to hunt me down and kill mebut youll have to get past my Corgi first. Shes a real killer you know!

Section 1: Legal and Ethical Considerations

Much of the following is based upon the excellent work and research done by Rory Miller, author of Meditations on Violence and Facing Violence. What I will provide here is the bare bones of the information surrounding the legal and ethical concepts of violence, as well as some of my own observations. For a more detailed analysis of these concepts I strongly suggest you read the two books I just mentioned, both of which should be required reading for any martial arts student. To begin you need to know your own ethical beliefs on violence and you need to know the laws on use of force. You need to know what your boundaries are when it comes to using violence. How far are you prepared to go? Are you prepared to kill another human being if necessary? Are you prepared to maim someone to protect your own life? Its easy to say yes to these questions without giving them much thought but I guarantee you that if you had to make those decisions five minutes from now you would probably struggle and freeze in the face of extreme violence. When you have never faced a situation before, its hard to predict how you will react
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so you need to know what lines you are prepared to cross or you will freeze. More on this later.
The Law and Force Justification

According to Miller, the first thing we must understand is that in court self defence is an affirmative defence. The implications of this are: 1.You are acknowledging the basic facts of what you did. Yes, I committed murder, but it was justified because 2. It puts the burden of proof on the defence. You in otherwards. So you assaulted someone with a brick and this is exactly why you had to do so. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Force justification is the science of explaining what you did. The basic formula is this: You must use the minimum level of force that you readily believe is necessary to safely resolve the situation. This statement can be broken down and explained as follows: may use You are not required to use force. You can and should walk away. minimum level of force You will be required, if your actions go to court, to explain not only why you chose your course of action, but why a lesser level of force wouldnt have worked. believe To claim self defence, you must not only have felt threatened but you must also be able to explain why any another reasonable person would have believed they were in danger also. is necessary You must prove that force was the only option. Why didnt you leave? If you were verbally challenged and you stayed to confront, then you monkey danced. This was mutual fighting. resolve Ending the situation is critical. Think less about stopping the bad guy and more about getting to safety. the situation Voluntarily placing yourself in the situation usually excludes the affirmative defence of self defence.

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The Threat You must be able to articulate why you saw the person as a threat and how you knew it. I had a feeling wont cut it in court. Practice analysing and explaining what causes your feelings. To be a valid Threat an individual must exhibit four things: 1. Intent: The Threat must indicate that they want to harm you. How did you know? 2. Means: The means to carry out intent. 3. Opportunity: The Threat must be able to reach you with the means. 4. Preclusion: You must convince the court that you did not have any other viable option. You couldnt leave, couldnt talk your way out, you couldnt call for help. Articulate why force was the one option that would safely work. Scaling Force A force incident may change quickly. If IMO are lost then you are no longer defending yourself and you are using excessive force. If you could safely leave and you dont then you have shattered your affirmative defence. If you happen to be ambushed then a high level of force is justified as you dont have time to gather enough information to gauge a proper response. Articulation You must be able to explain each element of your defence: Intent, Means, Opportunity and Preclusion. You must also do so in a clear and logical fashion. In other wards you must adopt a professional attitude and keep the emotion out of it. The bastard deserved what he got just wont do you any favours in front of a judge and jury.

Ethics What are your personal ethics towards violence? Are there lines you just wont cross? Or will circumstances always dictate your response? Saying you will do
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something does not mean you will do it when it comes to the crunch. Understand that this isnt about how hard you are or anything macho like that. We all have parameters when it comes to things like violence. Some people are capable of going beyond those parameters and others arent, no matter what the circumstances. The point is you have to know what your own parameters are and you would do and wouldnt do. It is imperative to work these things through in advance, otherwise you may find yourself in a situation where you dont know how to act because you havent squared it with your conscience yet. Early programming has a lot to do with our personally held ethics. We are brought up to believe certain things about human behaviour and what way we should act towards others. This is social conditioning. So you dont slam the door in someones face because you think doing so would be rude, even though you have a distinctly bad feeling about that person. You may be capable of gouging out an eye, but do you have the capacity to do it? Think about that and apply it to other things. In self defence, clarity adds speed. If youre not clear on what you should do then you will loose valuable time trying to work out your next move. This is why you should get clear on as much as possible beforehand. Think about the likely situations you may find yourself in if you had to use your self defence skills and go from there. Work out your gut reactions to things.

Section 2: Violence Dynamics

Not all violence is the same. People are violent for different reasons; however there are two main types of violence that you should be aware of: 1. Social Violence: Ritualised jockeying for territory or status; also includes acts to prove or increase group solidarity and violence to enforce the rules and mores of the group.

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2. Asocial Violence: Targets the victim, not as a person, but as a resource. Predator violence. Social violence can be segregated into three main groups: Monkey Dance (MD), Group Monkey Dance (GMD) and Status Seeking Show (SSS). Monkey Dance All animals have a form of ritualised combat between males, genetically designed NOT to be life threatening. Your typical fight outside the chippy on a Saturday night is an example of this. Almost all monkey dances follow the same set pattern, as follows: 1. Hard aggressive stare. 2. Verbal Challenge. 3. An approach with signs of high adrenaline: gross motor activity of arm swinging or chest bobbing, a change colour, skin flushing etc. 4. Square of; contact is made by push or finger pointing. 5. Big over-hand punch. No matter who initiated the MD there is no self defence here as there are just too many opportunities for preclusion (to exit the situation). Group Monkey Dance Self-explanatory. A show of group solidarity and tribal violence are examples of this. Status Seeking Show Used to bolster a persons violent reputation. Asocial Violence Asocial violence is the realm of predators and predators are able to ignore the humanity of their victims, which makes them very good at what they do.

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Sociopaths fall into this category. Their tactics ensure they get what they want in the surest, safest way (for them) as possible. Predators fall into two categories: 1. Resource Predator: This person wants something and has decided to get it from you, like your car or your wallet. 2. Process Predator: This person enjoys violence, its the reason they do what they do. These predators, such as rapists and serial killers, require time and privacy to do what they do, which means moving the victim to a secondary crime scene. Resource Predators want you to give up your stuff. Process Predators want you to give up your self. The main strategies of a predator are charm and blitz. To blitz, they use speed, power and position to take control before the victim reacts. This isnt always physical. Sometimes intimidation can be enough to get them what they want. To charm, they use their social skills to get the victim into a vulnerable position. They may talk their way into the victims home, for instance.

Section 3: Situational Awareness Skills

The martial arts have a lot to answer for when it comes to peoples perceptions of what constitutes good self protection. For a long time martial artists (and non-martial artists alike) considered good self protection as having the ability to handle yourself well in a fight. Hence, for many years, we had people learning the ins and outs of particular fighting systems (mostly traditional Japanese systems) because they mistakenly thought thats all they would need to protect themselves against violent attack. The school of thought seemed to be that because you knew martial arts you would therefore be able to take on
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all comers and dispatch them with relative ease. It didnt matter that you ended up in situations were you had to get physical with people, what mattered was that you beat them using the skills you had acquired in the dojo. Self protection therefore came down to how good you were at fighting. This approach worked if you were a skilled fighter outside of the dojo but it still didnt protect you from the consequences of violence. For the average man or woman on the street, putting themselves on the line like that when they dont always have to is unacceptable, especially nowadays were the consequences of fighting are much more serious, especially from a legal standpoint were you can quite possibly end up in jail just for defending yourself against an attack. So fighting does not constitute good personal protection and any good personal protection strategy will be built around the notion that fighting is the very last thing you would want to do. And if fighting is the last thing you want to do, then it stands to reason that you should have a strategy in place to prevent that from happening. This is were having good situational awareness skills come in, skills that go slightly beyond the common sense preventive measures of avoiding dark alleys and hanging around dodgy areas that attract trouble. Proper awareness skills have to be taught and worked on in order for them to be in any way effective or useful to us. Such skills must be practiced by the individual until they become second nature, just like any technique you may learn in the dojo. The basis for good situational awareness is the colour code system, which we will take a look at now and which provides the basis for any good personal protection strategy. The Colour Code System The colour codes are a risk evaluation guide originally designed by American combat pistol instructor Jeff Cooper for the benefit of police officers working in the field so that they could assume a state of mind that was appropriate to the various stages of readiness they may need in certain situations.

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Many defence gurus across the world have now adopted Coopers awareness system and with good reason because it represents one of the best preventive measures available to anyone today. Below you will see the diagram I created to show the different colour codes and what they mean.

As you can see there are four different colours: white, yellow, orange and red, with each colour representing a different state of awareness. Depending on your circumstances and lifestyle (where you live, your hobbies, your favourite night spots etc) what triggers each one of these will differ from person to person. So what sends one person into code orange may not affect another person enough to move from code yellow. The real value of such a system is that it all but eliminates the need for making decisions. Having to make decisions in risky situations will only block action and ultimately force you to hesitate when you can least afford to. Your safety depends on how quick you can spot trouble and how quickly you act from

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there. The colour codes therefore act as action triggers, freeing you from the need to make decisions. Lets now look at each of the colours in turn and what they mean in terms of awareness. Code White Code white represents no awareness at all, such as when you are sleeping or day dreaming. If you happen to be awake then code white is generally not a good state to be in. Walking the streets in such a state is just asking for trouble because you wont notice anything happening around you and the first inkling youll get of any trouble is when its on top of you and its too late. Most people remain in condition white unless a situation is overtly threatening. Code white is the awareness state that all attackers look for in a victim. Even when you are relaxing at home it isnt a good idea to remain in this state of unawareness. You should always have at least some awareness about you. This doesnt mean you should be perked up like a meercat when youre watching telly but it does mean that a small part of your mind should always be on alert. Code Yellow In this state you are switched on and are completely aware of your surrounding environment so that you can pick up on any danger spots like secluded areas and dark alleys. You should also be aware of the people in your environment. Being in code yellow can be likened to the advanced driving technique of commentary driving were you describe everything around you as you drivewhat lies in the road ahead, what turns you make, how fast you are going, what vehicles are in front or behind you, basically every part of the journey. In a similar way you should have a running commentary in your head of what surrounds you as you walk. This is an excellent way to promote good awareness skills and after a while it will all become completely subconscious so you wont even have to think about it. Try this kind of commentary walking for
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two or three weeks, describing in your head every part of your journey as you walk and who is around you, cultivating complete 360 degree awareness. It may feel odd at first, but eventually this running commentary will become subliminal and youll do it without even being conscious of it. This isnt paranoia here, even though it may seem like it in the beginning if you have never held this kind of awareness before. It is heightened observance and it will feel totally natural to you after a while. I exist in this state of awareness almost all of the time. Its completely natural to me now and has given me quite a lot of confidence when Im out and about, which is obvious in the way I carry myself. Carry yourself with confidence to make yourself more of a hard target and attackers will think twice about messing with you. Remember, attackers look for easy targets and people who are switched off to their environment. Code Orange Code orange is the state of threat evaluation and represents potential trouble. When conditions change we go to code orange. As an example, you may notice a couple of drunken guys giving you a hard look from across the road. If they begin to cross the road towards you and you sense incoming trouble then this state of awareness will give you the chance to evaluate the situation and weigh up your options so you can decide on an appropriate course of action. Code Red This is the fight or flight stage of awareness. You have evaluated the situation in code orange and if a threat exists you must prepare now to either run or fight. Always run if you have the chance. Never fight if you dont have to. If no threat arises then drop back into code orange or yellow, but never into white. After experiencing fight or flight many people completely loose their awareness because they think the threat has passed but often times another
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threat will present itself just when you least expect it, so always stay switched on. Visualisation of the Colour Codes It is most helpful to actually visualise the different colour codes in your mind when you move into each one. So for instance you may be walking home alone one night and you will be in condition yellow, with a relaxed alertness, when up ahead you spot a bunch guys, obviously drunk, rowdily coming towards you. A flash of orange would go off inside your mind, signalling the move into condition orange so you can immediately begin to evaluate the threat. Having decided the gang may present potential trouble you decide to cross the road away from them. As they near you on the other side of the road one of them shouts over at you in an aggressive manner. A flash of red goes off inside your mind, triggering the move into code red and you quickly make the decision to run away from the group. Once youve put enough distance between you and the group and you are sure they havent decided to follow you, a flash of yellow goes off in your mind and you drop back into a state of relaxed alertness, condition yellow. Using visualisation methods in this way will help you override the need to think too long and have to make decisions about what to do. The flash of colour inside your mind will automatically spur you into action and instinct will take over. Once again, this may seem a very strange practice to you at this point, but after a short while of doing this, it will all become completely natural to you and such behaviour will become second nature, as any good self protection technique must be to be truely effective under stressful conditions. The Threat Thermometer The use of the colour code system can be likened to a threat thermometer, with the mercury level rising and falling according to the level of threat presented to you. Thats probably the simplest way to think about your awareness levels. When the threat level is high the mercury will shoot to the top of the thermometer and when the threat level recedes, the mercury will drop back down again to normal level. [Use in a sidebar with diagram]
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Dont Forget Your Intuition All else aside, your own intuition is a valuable tool when it comes to threat awareness. If your out and you have that niggling feeling that something just isnt right, listen to what your intuition is telling you and take appropriate action. Our intuitive feelings come from a higher power, like little nudges from the universe itself to help us out. The more you take note of these little nudges the more you will help yourself stay on a safe path. So stop ignoring these heavenly nudges and start listening! The OODA Loop The OODA Loop is a behavioural model or information processing system that has particular relevance to self protection and it can be used in conjunction with the colour code system to sharpen your situational awareness skills. The OODA Loop is an acronym for OBSERVE, ORIENT, DECIDE, ACT and it was first conceived off by a fighter pilot named John Boyd. Boyd wanted to know why some fighter pilots were more successful than others and he eventually came to the conclusion that those with the fastest loops were also the most successful. So how does the OODA Loop work? To use the example of crossing the street, before I cross the street I observe to see if any traffic is coming and if I see if the road is clear I orient or analyze that information before I decide to cross the street, at which point I then act on that decision by crossing the street. The OODA Loop is something that we all use, mostly on a subconscious level. Once we take appropriate action we then observe the results of that action, thus restarting the loop. But what does the OODA Loop have to do with self protection? Well, one of the best applications of the loop is that once you are aware of it, it then becomes possible to disrupt the loop of an opponent, something which is also known as getting inside your opponents loop. Once you can do this you will have your opponent working constantly of the back foot.

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For example, if a thug happens to spot a victim walking down the street he will observe the victim and orient to the situation by noting that the victim looks like easy prey because the victim is walking with head down and hands in pockets. The thug then makes the decision to act and acts on that decision by attacking the victim. The victims loop is way behind because they didnt notice the attacker coming towards them. The victim still has to observe and orientate before they can act, at which point it is too late. Now, if the victim had already observed the thug coming towards them (having already been coded up) and orientated themselves to the situation then the victim would be in a position to make some kind of pre-emptive action that would completely disrupt the thugs attack and his OODA Loop, either by striking first or running off. The thug would then be working of the back foot. So the lesson here is to remain switched on at all times so firstly, you wont be caught unawares and secondly, so you can stay one step ahead of any attacker by getting inside their loop and disrupting their actions, thus forcing them to start their loop again. This is the real value of the OODA Loop because knowing how it works can really help you keep an attacker on the back foot. By being first to act (being pre-emptive) you are forcing an opponent to remain one step behind at all times. This is also why it is advantageous to have a forward drive mentality, which is something we shall discuss in detail later on in the book. For now, Ill just say that having such a mentality means being assertive with your opponent as much as possible, which puts you in control and gives you the ability to keep on disrupting your opponents loop. When it comes to in-fight situations you can do the same thing just by hitting first and forcing your opponent to defend all the time, once again, getting inside their loop and putting them on the back foot, which is what its all about. The OODA Loop is about information gathering and it makes sense that the more information you have, the more informed your decisions are going to be. You can quicken your own loop up by training yourself to act immediately on certain stimuli (flinch reaction training, which well look at in another section)but then not every situation is the same. Not everybody who invades
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your personal space or puts a hand on you deserves a smack to the jaw. Sometimes, just by taking a little bit more time to gather information (to observe and orient) violence can be avoided altogether. Information Overload Cultivating good situational awareness skills is as much about learning to sort out what is relevant and what is not, what information is pertinent and what is not. Although you should try to take in as much of your surroundings as possible and assimilate as much information about certain situations as possible, it is not necessary to consciously process every single detail. Let your subconscious do most of the work and alert you only to what is relevant and to what is going to help you. Most of us do this anyway; learning to filter out a lot of the stuff that happens around us, otherwise our brains would collapse under the strain of trying to process so much information at once. I say this because when you start to use these skills there is a tendency to become hyper-vigilant and you feel like you have to notice everything. You dont. You only have to notice the things that are out of place, that dont match up or the things that may present a possible threat. After a bit of time in using these skills your mind will soon learn to filter out what is not relevant and alert you only to what is relevant. Like I say, it may seem strange at first, but after a while being switched on all the time will become a part of your everyday thinking, which is exactly the point. Everything has to be second nature for it work effectively

Section 4: Avoidance
If you are to avoid violent situations then you must understand the above violence dynamics. What might discourage a predator might trigger a monkey dance. You must correctly read the situation. There are three main strategies for not being assaulted: absence; escape and evasion; de-escalation.
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It is better to avoid than to run, better to run than to deescalate, better to de-escalate than to fight, better to fight than to die. The earlier you see confrontation the more options you have. The more clearly you see it, the less likely you are to make a mistake. Absence: Shit happens in predictable places. Bars, parties, places were people get their minds altered by drugs and alcohol. Also places that groups of young men hang-out. Their need to establish status and bolster their reputation and membership of the group is what drives most of social violence. Avoid these places if at all possible. If you have to go there then keep your awareness about you. If something doesnt feel righthave another drink! No, sorry, just leave and go somewhere else.

Escape and Evasion: If you spot a potential threat then carry out an assertive examination, not glowering at the person but scanning and noting his stance, possible weapons and where their hands are. This discourages the threat and seeing you do this will send a signal to him that you know the score. Scan for accomplices. Do all this with your peripheral vision. Normally after this they will take you out of the victim category. Use your intuition as it is faster than conscious thought decision making. If you are targeted by a threat then running will most likely draw a chase response from them. Just dont hesitate. Run towards safety, not away from danger. Running may put you in panic mode so avoid panic by staying focused on what you are doing. If possible, run towards light and people.

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De-Escalation Fully understand the different types of violence to have a chance at deescalation and be sure to create tactics that are in keeping with your nature, based upon correct principals. De-Escalating the Monkey Dance Like I mentioned earlier, if you get in a fight over a monkey dance then you are not defending yourself. Monkey dances can be walked away from, you just have to put your ego to one side. If someone comes up and says: What are you looking at? in a challenging manner, most people react with, Nothing! which is effectively calling the other guy a liar. This will only exacerbate the situation and things will escalate from there. Better to say something like: Sorry mate, didnt realise I was staring there. Its been a long day. How you doing? Drag the situation out a little if possible. The longer you continue with your easy-going (and not sarcastic or condescending) conversation, the more likely the situation will defuse. Any adrenalin build-up in the other person will quickly dissipate as it doesnt stay in the system for very long. Another tactic to use here is one that Rory Miller calls the Big Dog. If you can see yourself as significantly older or more mature than the other person then you can play on that without being patronizing. What you looking at?! Whats your goal here, son? Or mate if you are around the same age. What do you mean, whats my goal? I mean that you sound awful angry and that youre trying to pick a fight with me hereYou dont know me, so it cant be personal and you seem too smart to pick a fight with a stranger. So whats your goal? This raises his ego slightly by complimenting his intelligence and giving him the subtle power of being your teacher by explaining himself.

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If you are approached by a highly adrenalized person who is splaying his arms wide and just itching for a fight, any verbal probably wont work as they are too far gone at this stage. Best just to break eye contact, look away and leave. As a man, this can cause some degree of psychological pain as it will feel like you have been backed down or even walked over. Thats just your monkey brain kicking in. Ignore it and do whats right. De-Escalating the Resource Predator The keys to de-escalating a resource/blitz predator lie in what he wants: proximity; knowledge of you as a victim; distraction; and no witnesses. Proximity: Be aware of anyone trying to get too close, especially if it seems they are trying to isolate you from the herd. Dont be afraid to be rude. Make full eye contact, put your palms up and tell them to back off. This isnt up for debate no matter what the comeback of the predator is. Just keep saying it: Back off! Predators will also want to gather information about you as a victim. So they will saddle up to you and invade your space just to see how you react, testing how you control your space. If you act overly-polite and allow them to do this they will take this as a sign of weakness. The tactic we just mentioned of telling them to back off will work here, just as long as they are a predator. If its a monkey in your presence then this will only escalate the situation, which goes back to knowing who you are dealing with. Predators will also employ distractions at this point, asking for a light or the time or directions so they can hit you while your preoccupied. Be aware of this. Scan them like I mentioned earlier. Give of the vibe that you know their game and you will go physical if you have to. Predators also dont want witnesses around. By drawing attention to the situation using loud verbals you are ensuring that will not be the case and people will spot him.

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Section 5: Managing Fear and Adrenaline in Violent Confrontations

Real violence is scary. For me to pretend otherwise would just be lies on my part. Real fights scare the shit out of me. You would need to be a sociopath not to feel any kind of fear when someone is in front of you screaming that they are going to kill you in the most aggressive way possible. When I was bouncing, especially in the beginning, I found it very difficult to push through my own fear and keep a check on my bodys reactions to the adrenaline that coursed through it when things often kicked off. The first few times I saw action on the door all I wanted to do was run away, which is natural enough, but when its your job to confront these things you cant run, you have to turn and face the music no matter what. Constantly exposing myself to fear and adrenaline at that time got me more and more used to it and I eventually learned to manage them both. Now Im not suggesting that you should rush out and get a job as a bouncer any time soon. Although such a job is the ultimate baptism of fire there are other ways to learn how to handle fear and adrenaline. Without a doubt, two of the best ways that I have found are visualisation practice and educating yourself about your own body and mind and their natural reactions to stressful situations. Education especially is vital. Primary education in the form of first hand knowledge is best. This can be done by exposing yourself to stressful and high pressure situations in your everyday life. This doesnt necessarily mean fights. It could be anything that makes your adrenal pilot light come on, like public speaking or confronting some other lesser fear like spiders. Secondary education in the form of training drills and information gathering is most helpful also in this endeavour. Either way, the object of this kind of repeated exposure is so that you eventually grow used to the feelings and are better able to manage them. If you know what to expect from your body and
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mind then you wont be so overwhelmed when they go into overdrive if you find yourself in trouble sometime. All the self defence techniques in the world will not help you in a confrontation if you end up bottling it and letting fear get the better of you. I dont say that as a putdown or anything. Weve all been there. Most of us know how it feels to be completely panicked by our own sense of fear and the explosion of pure adrenalin. I certainly do. Ive froze enough times in the past but I eventually learned to control myself and my fear. There is no point in having a killer right cross if you dont have the nerve to use it. So the sooner you begin to address these issues in some way, the more confident you will become and the less fear will have a grip on you. And of course the nice side benefit of this is that you will become more confident in the rest of your life also because the process of confronting and managing your fear is the same in all situations. Thats what the Budo concept is all about. Perfect yourself on the battlefield, learn to control yourself there, and you will also be able to perfect yourself off the battlefield. So lets start by doing some educating and looking at the effects of adrenaline on the body and mind. Adrenaline and its Effects Weve all felt the effects of adrenaline at one time or another. Perhaps you felt it on a rollercoaster ride as you careered down a massive dip at great speed; maybe you felt it at a public speaking engagement; or maybe you felt it when some guy was throwing you daggers outside the chippy one night. It doesnt matter what the situation is. Adrenaline in the body and mind is always felt the same. Its that rush of powerful energy that makes your nerve endings go mad and your stomach turn over. Most people interpret this as fear. It isnt. Fear is in the mind. Your reasoning process just mistakes adrenaline for fear. The adrenal response is just your bodys way of preparing you for flight or fight. The sooner you acknowledge this difference, the better you will be able to cope in stressful situations. When I was bouncing in the beginning, what made a real difference to me in the way that I coped was the fact that I knew what I was feeling was not really
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fear (although I did feel fear as well) but the physical effects of adrenaline on my body. I realised that my body was trying to help me out by making me faster and stronger and less sensitive to pain. It was doing me a favour, in other wards. And thats how you should look at adrenaline- as a gift from your body to help you out in dangerous situations. Of course not every situation is a dangerous one. We still get fight or flight feelings even when there is no real threat, such as when we have to speak in public or go for a job interview or have a confrontation with the boss at work. The mind still interprets these situations the same thanks to the hard wiring in our brains that was created millions of years ago when we lived in caves and had to confront dangerous animals like woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers on a daily basis. The brain hasnt really evolved much since then and consequently we often get feelings of fight or flight even when we dont really need them. But thats another matter. What I want to concentrate on here is adrenaline and fear as they pertain to dealing with violent attack (the effects are just the same though). Take a look at the picture below to get an idea of how the body responds to fight or flight. As can see, each and every response is calculated to make you a much more efficient and effective running or fighting machine. Anything deemed superfluous to these two ends, like the digestive system and your fine motor skills are practically shut down. Dry mouth, voice quiver, bodily shaking and that sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach are the effects that are commonly felt as fear and in violent confrontations it these responses that often cause people to freeze in terror. Once again, this is not terror you are feeling but your bodys natural response to a perceived threat. Your body is trying to help you out here and the sooner you realise that fact the better. You may still be afraid. This is natural but you just have to ignore that fear and do what you have to do to get yourself to safety, whether by running away or fighting back. As hard as it sometimes feels to do (sometimes it feels like you
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are glued to the floor) you have to really force yourself into action. Its like a leap of faith almost. You need the confidence and the courage to just go for it. Thats it. Giving in to your weakness and reluctance to act in these situations usually results in greater mental turmoil than if you had actually went ahead and did what had to be done. You just end up beating the hell out of yourself psychologically for ages because you didnt act. In contrast, crossing the threshold, far from being the like crossing the line into hell, is actually less painful and you always grow after doing so. Use that as your motivation. Every time you step into the unknown, every time you cross the line of fear, every time you push yourself that bit further than last time, you grow as a person in some way, however small. And thats the point, to grow and to learn. Things to Watch Out For A few things you should be aware of when you find yourself in an attack situation. Firstly you will experience tunnel vision which will allow you to completely focus on whoever you are fighting with. This is useful if it is just one person but when there are multiple attackers then such target focus becomes a hindrance because you wont notice if anyone is sneaking up from the side or behind. My advice if there are multiple attackers is to step back a bit so you can take the situation in and also just be as switched on as possible. Secondly, voice quiver is an unwelcome side effect of adrenaline, especially when you have to appear calm and unafraid when you are talking to any would-be attackers. Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this one. My only suggestion is to practice putting yourself in stressful situations and then talking. Obviously public speaking is very good for this. Thirdly, your fine motor skills will be pretty much useless when the adrenal response kicks in, so any physical response you make should be kept as simple as possible. Pressure points, wrist locks etc. are all out. Big, direct strikes are what you should concentrate on because thats about all youll be capable off under such circumstances. Obviously, thats were your punching comes in. If that fails, fall back on things like basic throws and sweeps and also chokes and strangles. These will all work under pressure.
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And finally, if you are worried about feeling pain, just remember that your body will shut of your pain response because feeling pain might get in the way of your survival. As an example of this, consider this anecdote from David Livingstone, the nineteenth-century explorer, when he was attacked by a lion in Southern Africa. He described his reaction to being grabbed by the shoulder and mauled: The shock produced a stupor similar to that felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no pain, though I was quite conscious of what was happening. It was like patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. When the lion let go for a moment, Livingstone managed to escape. Visualisation Practice A very effective way to get yourself used to the effects of fear and adrenaline is to visualise situations that provoke them in your head. By employing your imagination you can actually imprint your responses on to your brain just the same as if you were actually there in real life. The mind makes no distinction between what is real and what is imagined if the mental movie is vivid enough. Visualisation has been proven time and again to work. I used to use it myself when I was bouncing, picturing scenarios in my head and then seeing myself dealing with effectively. The more you expose yourself to the feelings of fight or flight the more you will get used to them. If you imagine them vividly enough then you will feel them just the same as if you were actually feeling them in real life. A Final Word What I hope I have impressed upon you here is the need to educate yourself as to how your body and mind reacts to violence and other stressful situations. Many people are caught unawares by their own adrenal response and are often left in a state of shock and thus unable to act to save themselves. Know what to expect from your body if you find yourself under threat and be aware that what you will feel will be completely natural, and that includes feelings of fear.

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The adrenal response is a very useful gift to help us survive. Get to know it so that it works with you instead of against you.

Section 6: The Fence Concept

Anyone with a passing interest in self defence either knows what the fence is or has at least heard of it. The fence is one of simplest and most effective self defence concepts there is but it is also the least understood, mainly because you have to have used it for real or at least practiced it in the dojo to really understand how to employ it correctly. It also doesnt help that it is a difficult thing to explain using just words, but Ill try- just for you! What is the Fence? The fence is a natural guard position that most of us have probably used at one time or another (whether we realise it or not) to keep someone at bay or communicate something with our hands. In basic terms, the fence is the act of assuming a small forty-five degree stance and stretching the arms out in front of you so as to maintain a gap between you and whoever is standing in front of you. From a physical point of view, thats it in a nutshell.

You may have seen bouncers or security workers like the police control people in this way. Like I say, its a natural position to adopt when you dont want
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someone to invade your personal space and in that sense it is certainly nothing new. Its just something most people do instinctively. Even talking with your hands is a form of fence. It was until the nineties, when Geoff Thompson took what most people do naturally and gave it a name, conceptualising and elaborating on it in the process, that the fence became a fully fledged self protection technique. He made it about more than just putting your arms out in front of you. He made it a psychological and physical defence system that could be used to subtly control and manipulate any opponent. Since then there is hardly a self defence practitioner in the world today that doesnt use or practice the fence in one form or another. It is now widely acknowledged as being one of the most useful and important self defence techniques there is. But as I mentioned before, sometimes the concept gets lost or muddled in the translation which has resulted in some people seeing the fence as just another karate stance to fall into when someone tries to attack them. The fence is far more than just a stance, as we shall now see. Types of Fence As Im now going to explain, there are actually four different variations on the fence. Which type of fence you use will depend on the circumstances you find yourself in or the type of person you are up against. So lets take a look at each in turn. The Passive Fence The passive fence, as you can probably guess by its title, is not meant to be aggressive in any way. A passive fence is adopted when you are just talking to someone. In self protection terms, a passive fence position can be adopted before things get really heated between you and a potential attacker. Like I say, youre just talking calmly so you dont want to appear aggressive by putting your arms out in front of you because at this delicate stage of the game things could go either way so you wont want to antagonise whoever youre talking too. So the hands are kept in front of the body in a natural position,
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perhaps as if you are playing with the ring on your finger or the calluses on your palm as in the picture below. This is a non-threatening stance but it will still allow you to act quickly if things suddenly take a turn for the worse. The Controlling Fence This fence is used when a would-be attacker tries to invade your personal space and perhaps tries to have a go. You simply step back into a small fortyfive degree stance and put your hands out in front of you to control the gap between you and the other person. Normally you would back this up with some kind of verbal warning to stay back. The pictures below show the controlling fence in action. When you step into this position it is make or break time and you must decide on a course of action that is going to put an end to the situation. At this point, I would always recommend that you try and escape the situation if possible. You wont be doing yourself any favours by hanging around. However, I do realise that it is not always possible to escape a situation for whatever reason, which means you have to take some other form of action, as we shall see in a moment. Before we go any further though, a quick word on line-ups. The Line-Up The line-up is when you line your opponent up for a pre-emptive strike and there are two schools of thought on how you should do this. The first way is by stepping back into a small forty-five degree stance while placing the lead hand out in front of you to control the gap, leaving the other hand free to strike. The only problem with this is that if you are too obvious about it then your opponent will know that you are planning to strike and you will loose the element of surprise. To prevent this from happening you combine your movements with some form of dialogue, for instance telling him you dont want any trouble while surreptitiously stepping back at the same time. If you distract him with your words in this way, he wont notice you getting into position.

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The other way to line up an opponent is to simply maintain your square-on stance, or your conversation stance as it is sometimes known. With no movement to speak of you dont have to worry about alerting your opponent to your intentions. The only drawback here is that it is harder to strike from this position. However, this disadvantage can be overcome by learning to strike with power from a square stance. This can be done in the dojo. To my mind the square stance is better because it gives nothing away but you really have to practice your strikes from this position in order to make them effective enough to get a KO (knockout). In both cases, always remember to keep your hands open in a submissive position and dont try to move forward towards your opponent, otherwise he will just try to grab your wrists because he thinks you are trying to control him. Having said that you may put your hands on someone if they are not yet fully adrenalized. I do this all the time when Im bouncing, to lead people away or back them off. Sometimes they want you to back them away if it helps them save face in front of their mates (if you broke up a fight). If he moves towards you simply move back with him, giving him the impression that he is in control. Move in a circular motion as this way you have less chance of falling over something you cant see. Also, moving around your opponent gives you the chance to survey your background and check if he has any mates who may pose a problem. It also takes away his grounding, forcing him to move with you, which means he will find it harder to strike properly. Having said that you may put your hands on someone if they are not yet fully adrenalized. I do this all the time when Im bouncing, to lead people away or back them off. Sometimes they want you to back them away if it helps them save face in front of their mates (if you broke up a fight). Adrenaline Switches Depending on the situation and the type of person you think you are up against you may choose to manipulate your opponent by turning his adrenaline either on or off. Or in other terms, you may choose to psych him out or knock him out.

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Switching Adrenaline On If you sense that it might be possible to psych out your attacker, maybe because he seems nervous or unsure of himself and you sense you can get him to loose his bottle and abort the attack, then you have switch his adrenaline on. I say switch it on, what I really mean is that you will give a second or third kick of adrenaline because he will already be feeling adrenaline. What we want to do is give him a big adrenal dump that his reasoning process will mistake for fear and will cause him to freeze up. There are three main ways of switching on an opponents adrenalin. The first way is by touching them, usually by shoving them back slightly. As soon as you touch him his brain will signal danger and send a message to his adrenal gland which will cause him to feel fear and then the freeze syndrome. The second way is by staring him down and grimacing. Hold him in a hard stare and he will know that you mean business which will only add to his fear. It is possible to switch someones adrenaline on just by staring alone. A few times when I was working the door Id be inside the club and Id get an adrenaline rush because someone was staring me down from a distance. They effectively switched on my adrenaline from across the room. The third way is by using the voice. So you would say to him, You wanna go then, do you? or Right, shift now or you are down!. The more malice and aggression you have in your voice the better. Of course the best way to switch your opponents adrenaline on and make him loose his bottle is by combining all three of the methods just mentioned. Shove him back, talk aggressively to him and stare him down. Your whole demeanour should scream that you mean business and that you are too much to handle for him. The more intense you can come across the better. He should feel like he has bitten of more than he can chew and the adrenaline that he is mistaking for fear should make him back off away from you. Sometimes this method of switching on an opponents adrenaline is known as the aggressive fence technique. It can also be backed up by a technique called ballooning, were you stalk back and forth in front of your opponent, giving him the impression that he is being stalked by a wild animal. This particular fear is deeply subconscious and is a left over from the days when we used to get
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stalked by wild animals millions of years ago. It still exists in the reptilian part of our brains. Ballooning just plays on that. A further tactic we can adopt is by being demonstrative. A good example of this tactic is the story of the old Japanese master who, when confronted by three thugs who demanded his wallet, threw the wallet on the ground in front of him and said, Im prepared to die for that wallet. Are you? The three thugs ran off. The whole point of trying to psych out an opponent is so you dont have to fight and to give both of you an honourable exit. In order for it to work, however, you really have to act it and be convincing in your role. Even then, this strategy will not always work. A lot of time you will be up against someone who is a skilled street fighter and isnt easily backed down or youll be up against someone who is full of drink or drugs and all the posturing in the world wont matter to them, in which case you will have adopt a different strategy, that of taking a submissive stance and switching his adrenaline off. Switching Adrenaline Off If you decide to switch your opponents adrenaline on its because you dont want to fight. If you decide to switch it off however, taking the disarming approach, its because you have decided to fight for whatever reason, maybe because you have two or three opponents in front of you. Whatever the reason for doing it, the method is always the same: appear as submissive as possible to trick your opponent into thinking that he has backed you down and thus won the fight before it has even begun. His brain will tell him that there is no danger and it will send a message to his adrenal gland to kill the response. His adrenaline is a big edge for him, so you want to take that edge away from him. By constantly telling him that you dont want any trouble and by appearing submissive and willing to bend to his will, you are leading him into a false sense of security. If its someone after your wallet then make a show of asking him how much he wants. The point of all this is to give him loads of confidence. The
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more confident he feels the more switched off he will become. Again, you really have to act the role fully in order to be convincing. Once youve made a show of being submissive and youve switched off his adrenaline, you then have to line him up for a pre-emptive strike. Its important to remember that he isnt going to walk away from you once he thinks he has you, so you have to put him down before he attacks you first. A great way to distract an opponent before you strike them is to ask them a question to engage their brain. Ask him a question that he has to answer. Ask him why he is picking on you. Or even better, ask him something more leftfield like how did United do in the football today. He wont be expecting this type of question and it will automatically engage his brain will he tries to think of answer. Even if he doesnt answer you, the effect is the same because its an involuntary process. Once youve asked the question, the time to strike is a split second later because you want to give it time for the question to sink in. Striking straight away is too soon because his brain wont be fully engaged yet. Give it a split second and then strike. He wont even see it coming. The Psychological Fence The impression I dont want you to get here is that the fence is just a matter of sticking your arms out to keep somebody back. There are also important psychological aspects to consider as well. Your psychological fence should be up at all times and this is done by staying in a code yellow state of awareness, like we talked about in an earlier chapter. If you happen to run into a threat then your psychological fence should be intensified and you should draw a line and determine that when that line is crossed, it is time to take action. It is up to you to determine were that line should be drawn. If for instance, you adopt a controlling fence against an attacker, how long are you going to wait before taking some kind of decisive action? You must decide were the line is drawn and when it is crossed. Once that line is crossed then you dont hesitate- you give your attacker all youve got. If you have the right mindset, like we talked about in a previous section, then this shouldnt be a problem.

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Further to that, I always maintain when Im teaching the fence to people that in a psychological sense, you are effectively asserting yourself when you stand up to an aggressor. Most predators have set behaviour patterns when it comes to violence and intimidation. When they do their thing on their victims they expect their victim to act in a certain way, to cower and be afraid. By taking a confident stance and gait you are breaking that pattern and doing the exact opposite of what the Threat expects you to do. This will throw the Threat somewhat and sometimes this is enough to diffuse the situation. The Threat will see you as too much trouble and move on to someone who is easier handled. So when you adopt the fence position, be sure to fully project your intentions. Your behaviour should communicate to the Threat that you dont want any trouble, but if you have to, you will do him serious damage. Further Thoughts on the Fence After reading all of that you would be forgiven for thinking that the fence has to be done a certain way in order for it to be effective, which is true to an extent. But you also have to realise that there are no hard and fast rules here. Its all about what you feel comfortable doing. Use the fence in the way that most suits you. Do what feels natural to you while trying to stick to the basic principles. Remember that the fence is about controlling that gap and doing so in a way that comes across as non-threatening and still allows you to get into a good attack position. Maintain those three elements and you should fine.

Section 7: Self Protection and NLP

NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is something that I have had a longstanding interest in because it is essentially, the science of personal development and it contains many useful ideas and workable techniques for to
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improve oneself in any area you can think of. Excellence is the goal of NLP, excellence in everything from work, to sport, to relationships to personal development and this is done by means of changing essentially how we think, or more specifically, the way we think and interpret information. It is really about optimising our thought processes to achieve optimum results, or outcomes to use the NLP term. The vast majority of the work done on NLP has come from a therapy standpoint (i.e. teaching people how to improve themselves etc.) and so you would be hard pushed to find any material that relates specifically to martial arts or self protection. Like any new technology however, the military were not long in getting in on the act to see what it could do for them (NLP creator Richard Bandler actually worked with them on this, along with Tony Robbins) and they quickly found that it was very useful for training in operatives to work in the field. Using NLP, instructors were able to vastly improve the rate of learning in things like pistol shooting (were results were most startling). It also enabled them to model the thinking processes of the top operatives and use the information gained to help other less talented operatives get the same results in super-quick time. They called this project the Jedi Project after George Lucass legendary Jedi from the movie Star Wars. Although there is still no widely published material pertaining to NLP and self protection/martial arts, certain figures within the self protection/security field, specifically Marcus Wynne and Dennis Martin, have worked for many years on designing techniques to improve performance in these areas and it is from there work that Ill now be drawing from. What follows is pretty bleeding edge stuff and goes far beyond any conventional training methods currently practiced by most self protection practitioners at the present time. It is easy to dismiss these techniques as being too fantastic to be true because of how effective they are and because of how quickly they actually work. A lot of testing has been done on these techniques however, and a lot of time, money and effort have been put into doing so, with the results well quantified. Dont forget that these techniques have been tested by military and security personnel, people whose very lives depend on effective training, so the techniques would not be used if they didnt work. Ive also started to road test these techniques myself and so far the results have
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been very positive. There is still a lot of work that I need to do in order to make the most of the techniques but Im happy with the results Ive gotten so far. Try them out for yourself and see what you think. When you get some results, let me know. Id be very interested to hear about them. Emotional Content Anyone who has seen Enter the Dragon will remember Bruce Lee lecturing his student at the beginning of the movie about striking with emotional content. Well thats one of the things the Jedi Project worked on with NLP, bringing emotional content- or the optimum state for combat- into training. The techniques of NLP enabled those on the project to anchor that so that they had access to the desired mental state at any time. The anchoring technique adds more emotional content which gives more focus to the effectiveness and intensity of a given technique. What NLP can specifically provide to the martial artist and the self protectionist is a more effective tool for that person to re-create, emotionally anchor, and to access those powerful emotional states in a self-defence, or, fighting scenario. So rather than have to go through years of training or years of meditation before finding this state, NLP enables one to install that state very quickly and easily. It is a shortcut to effective and immediate results in terms of combat congruence; that ability to bring all of your resources, physical, emotional, spiritual and mental to bear on the resolution of your combative problem. The following is a technique taken directly from the Jedi Project and it is designed to accelerate performance and increase the retention of your fighting skills by putting you into the optimum combative state while you train. In a study of five thousand students after completing a particular training course it was found that he retention of the skills learned (without any subsequent practice!) was almost as high after five years as immediately after the training course. This was then compared to traditional martial arts instruction, where there was a rapid fall-off in the skill retention when regular training ceased. The key element here was anchoring those skills to the appropriate state, which is what we are going to do now.

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The Combat Anchor Strike a Thai pad or heavy bag in the way you normally would in training. Now stop.

Take a moment and visualize something that would make you fighting madmaybe someone hurting your partner or child.

Make that picture big and bright; add the sounds of someone you love in pain or fear. Take the feeling that arouses in you and double it. Then double it again. Now hit that pad as though it is the person you visualize hurting your loved ones. Did you notice a difference in the power of your strike and how you feel striking? You can anchor that state by clenching your fist and visualising something in your head that represents the state to you just before it reaches peak intensity. Also say the word combat ( or any other relevant word) to yourself. All three things will anchor the state to you so that when you need to access it again you just clench your fist while at the same time seeing the picture in your head and saying the word combat to yourself. You may need to repeat this whole process several times so the anchor takes hold.

This technique will radically increase the intensity of your workouts and you will probably find yourself becoming fatigued and exhausted much quicker than before because you are putting more of yourself into the training. I certainly found this to be the case. Time will tell if the technique aids in skill retention, though it is my feeling at this time that it does, simply because the intense state in which the techniques are applied will naturally make more of an impression on the brain and the neural pathways will be cut deeper than they would be in just a normal state. Try it for yourself and see what you think. I must point out here that you cant have any doubt or uncertainty in your mind as to whether the technique will work or not. If you do, then you will just
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end up anchoring these feelings and the power of the technique will be lost. So when you anchor the state, make sure you believe it.

Section 9: Further Resources

Books Mediations on Violence by Rory Miller Facing Violence by Rory Miller Dead or Alive by Geoff Thompson Websites On Guard Combat Systems (www.onguardcombatsystems.com) Urban Combatives (www.urbancombatives.com) Chiron Training-Rory Miller (www.chirontraining.com) Senshido (www.senshido.com) Complete Self Protection (www.completeselfprotection.com) Street Fight Secrets (www.streetfightsecrets.com) Marc McYoung (www.nononsenseselfdefense.com)

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