I’m encouraged to see that self-defence is being taught to school kids (specifically girls) here in Australia.

I  was running a martial arts session with a group of schoolgirls recently and we were addressing the idea of self defence as part of our lesson.  I asked them whether they’d had any previous self defence training.

The general response was that they were shown a lot of techniques that they probably wouldn’t be able to remember.

And therein lies the problem when teaching “self defence”: Too much focus on technique.

Self defence is not about learning techniques. Self defence is about learning a mindset. More precisely, self defence is about learning to deal with confrontation.

If you’re going to begin to teach self defence to anyone, you need to cover the following topics:

Awareness

Is this person, place or situation dangerous?  How long would it take me to get from here to a safe place?  Is there anything that makes me appear vulnerable to a potential attacker?  Am I tired, injured or scared? Am I under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and if so, to what extend does that impair my ability to defend myself?

Dialogue

Every day, each new piece of information your brain encounters causes you to poses two questions to yourself:  “What does this mean?” and “What should I do?”.Unless you habitually moderate your self-talk, you’ll be unable to understand HOW you feel in response to a threatening situation.  If you don’t understand how your mental processes work, you have no hope of changing them.

(This is built on the skill of developed awareness).

FEAR

Many will tell you that “fear” stands for “False Evidence Appearing Real“.

Others will tell you that it really stands for “Fuck Everything And Run“.

People respond differently when facing fear.  It’s useful to be aware that it’s a perfectly natural response to threat.  It’s also useful to be able to process it effectively (dialogue) and move on.  Fear can completely paralyse you.  Make no mistake.  Learning to move beyond the sudden dump of adrenaline and act effectively is important.

More importantly, it’s important to decide, quickly, which way to interpret your fear and take action.  If it is false evidence, by all means move on to technique selection.  If not, fuck everything and run.  Fast.  Being brave and dead isn’t valuable to anyone.

Technique

First: learn to deal with realistic attacks.  This is not the simulated, slow-motion attacks you’ll find in most self defence classes.  If you can, train with someone who scares you a little.

Second: face up to some healthy doses of your own fear.  Go skydiving.  Try bungee jumping, or enter a full-contact sparring match.

Technique training should be about developing the above skills FIRST.  You’ll notice we haven’t addressed “how to stop a 6 foot hairy guy from stealing your wallet” yet.

Once you’ve worked on techniques that address your awareness, your internal dialogue and your fear – Then (and only then) can you begin to think about adding actual self offence techniques to your arsenal.

Remember – the best self defence technique you can have in your arsenal is an alert mind.

Master that, and you won’t find yourself in  99% of the dangerous situations that “regular” people stumble into.

The other 1%…  Well, that’s where martial arts may come in handy.