Just the other day, I received an email frrm a client of mine I hadn’t seen in a while. He reacted to my “8 self-defense tips for men” article and after receiving his permission, I wanted to share his story with you. I removed the names to respect everybody’s privacy but here’s what he wrote:
Hi Wim,
I just read your latest post “8 self-defense tips for men” and I really felt the need to make two comments about this post:
1. Keep up the good work
2. If, at one point, you have some time for this, I really think that you should delve even deeper into your last point. It’s an incredibly important one.
As I told you some months ago, the fact that I am still breathing is a kind of miracle. After a car crash on highway E411, each and every person who saw what was left of the car requested confirmation that this was indeed the car I was driving on E411.
The truth is: because I was hit on the right side of the car by a 13 tons truck, rebounded on the concrete wall dividing the highway towards the rear of the same truck and rebounded again in a spin which eventually sent me in the concrete wall for good (sounds like a bad action movie but all true) I had “time to think” (you know what I mean!).
My actual thinking was divided in two distinct parts:
I first felt a kind of relief. As you know, I was at the lowest point in my life. I just thought, for a second, “what the fuck, let’s end this shitty life of mine!”
But, as you also know, at that time I was fighting like hell in order to get equal custody of my son. The most beautiful human being I have met in my life (a fight I won, by the way). And, suddenly, “IT” exploded into my mind: a burst of anger beyond anything I could imagine when I realized that I would leave him behind all alone.
I use the word “exploded” because it’s exactly that. My conscious mind vanished and was replaced by … something. A something which tapped into my (small) “self-defense databank” and selected that left hand guard that my boxing trainer “slapped” into my brain/nerves/body and your “basic” self-defense stance (high pointing left elbow and open right palm at chin level) that I was practicing 500 times a week in the preceding months.
When I woke up in the ambulance, one of the first thing they asked was about my martial arts “background” because of the position I was found in when they arrived at the scene of the accident. That question made sense: without my boxing trainer and you, I would probably have been unable to come up with a life saving move. Still, and it shows how incredibly important your last point is, what saved my life that day was more than everything else (except luck) my sticking to my mission/obsession: being there for my son.
By stressing that point you’re offering people a treasure. My experience and the part you played in that experience give me absolute legitimacy to tell you this: your teachings on the “mission” approach are a gold mine. Keep digging! :-)
Warmest regards
I’m always humbled and grateful when I receive mails and phone calls like this. It is one of the things that keeps me motivated to train people and write: the chance to make a fundamental difference in somebody’s life.
There are a couple of things I’d like to point out about this case here: [Read more…]