In the first part of “Fear, self-talk and self-defense“, I mentioned the negative things that can pop into your mind when you’re about to go toe-to-toe with somebody. Like I explained there, it’s something that can happen to anybody. It doesn’t really matter how well trained you are or how much experience you have. Sometimes, your subconscious mind just decides to mess with you. But what can you do about it? Here are some ideas:

Accept it.

Start by accepting, at a gut level, that this can happen to you. You don’t have to like it, that’s not what I mean. But you have to accept that this can happen to any of us, including you.

Usually, when I say something like this to students or clients, I get a “Yeah, yeah, I got it.” type of response. Which is fine by me, it’s not my own training we’re talking about. It’s their ass on the line when they’re about to be shredded into little pieces by some behemoth street-punk who’s stoned out of his mind. Unfortunately, it’ll be too late to do anything about that little voice in your head when it sabotages your confidence by pointing out just how big that guy is.

The thing is, you can increase your odds of avoiding this situation. All you need is to anticipate it happening. To do that, you have to start by truly accepting you might fall pray to this negative kind of self-talk.

Unfortunately, we all have a tendency to avoid accepting such facts. I guess it’s human nature to rather ignore an ugly truth than face it and deal with it. If you’re real honest about it and can admit to this line of thinking here’s a way to break that self-induced illusion of being a fearless god of war. Though I have to warn you: it won’t be a fun ride. [Read more…]

Loren and I were talking last week and he mentioned something that would be an interesting topic to talk about here. It combines the three things I mention in the title:

• Fear
• Self-Talk
• Self-Defense

Here’s what I mean:

We all like to think of ourselves as bad-ass mo-fo’s who eat nails and spit them out as bullets. It’s a nice and comforting thought but it isn’t accurate: except for rare cases, most people will feel fear when they’re in a self-defense situation. That fear can manifest itself in many different ways but I’m only going to focus on one of them now: negative self-talk.

Picture this situation

You’re having drinks with a couple buddies in an up-scale bar, a place where the bad guys usually don’t come.  You’re having fun and so is everybody else there. Nothing going on but everybody having a good time. But you do a regular radar sweep every now and then, just in case.

During one of those sweeps, something pings on the screen: one guy gives off a negative vibe. You let your sweep pass him by and then observe him in your peripheral vision. A couple of things become apparent right away: [Read more…]