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Extensive selection of self defense tools utilizing all forms of media that take you from base principles to complete and immediately useable applications of the entire TFT System.
The fastest way to ingrain the TFT System into your subconscious is to follow a specific path of instruction. Now there are two ways to accomplish this.
(**Note To Readers: I’m expanding my horizons and getting into video blogging. I think this format gives me the greatest range to communicate the ideas I want to share with you. Bear with me as I cut my teeth these next few weeks gettin used to using this format. Also please let me know if you find this format useful so I can gauge how this is being received.)
How To Learn Good Information
From Bad Instruction
This week’s video shows 2 Marine CQC instructors discussing a “knife hand” strike to the side of the neck.
I make the majority of my points in the video I created and even if you think you’ve seen this video please watch my presentation so you can get my various takes on this clip.
The point I’m making in this clip is that the instruction is incomplete. The good result of the other guy getting knocked out is in spite of the instruction.
Most people would watch this and come away with incomplete information that if they tried to use it in a life-or-death situation, the results would be iffy at best.
Also I pointed out that both guys were damn lucky that this ended up just a “funny” YouTube video rather than high cervical damage or massive head trauma to the recipient.
Your car? Your cell phone? The contents of your wallet? Twenty bucks?
Everybody’s going to have a different answer, and if you don’t already have one you should think about it.
But there are a couple things you should know before you decide where the line is…
I began training when I was in high school, around the same time I worked as a cashier in a really terrible seafood restaurant.
One night two guys came in to rob us, armed with a handgun. I remember being distinctly aware of having a choice — I could give them the money or get to work injuring them. I weighed the choices, seeing branching outcomes, but in the end my read on the situation — their faces, body language, the tone of voice — was that this was purely antisocial. They wanted the money and to get the hell out there. They were nervous and in a hurry.
Processing what was happening, reading the situation and making a choice all happened in a blink of an eye that seemed to take minutes. I felt no fear, just a cold calculation, and so I made my choice. They could take property, but if they went after people, I would cross the line, too.
It was over in minutes and when the police arrived I was the only person with enough composure able to provide a detailed (very detailed) description of the men. The officers marveled at my recall and commented that they wished they had more witnesses like me.
Meanwhile, my coworkers were shocked into either silence or terrified crying jags.
Of all the people there, I was the only one who slept that night.
I was also the only one who could identify the weapon and point the two men out in a line-up. (My coworkers freaked at seeing the men in the line-up and played stupid so as not to be involved.)
I was the only one to turn up in court and take the witness stand.
Now, while all of this sounds like superhuman braggadocio, the simple (far less legendary) truth is that the only thing I had that my coworkers didn’t was a choice.
To tighten up our seminars I spoke with a number of instructors to collect data on where they saw problem areas — what kinds of things did our clients have the most trouble with?
I had my list, but I was interested in getting some different perspectives, to create an exhaustive list and see where we could tweak things to whittle that doubtlessly huge list down over time.
Everybody hit me with the most common errors they saw over and over, I added it to my list and the grand total was…
…three.
It turns out we all had the same list.
The thousands of people we trained over the last couple years all had a hard time nailing down the same three things:
Being too far away.
The natural proclivity is to want to stay at arms’ length and reach out with a limb to touch the man, usually connecting with the target only once the limb is fully extended, pretty much removing body weight from the equation. Also, if the man happens to stumble back from the limb-slap, you’re now two steps away from him.
10 years ago Tim trained a group of business executives in a Target-Focus Training class held just blocks from Ground Zero.
The class ended only 2 days before the tragic 9-11 events at the World Trade Center towers in New York.
In 3 weeks we’re hosting a 2-day live session in Las Vegas that will wrap up on Sunday… the 10th anniversary of that fateful attack.
We’re planning a few special things for the class to be announced next week (including copies of the DVD video series shot back at that class in 2001).
Time is short… as is space.
Flights into Vegas are cheap… as are hotels compared to even 3 years ago.
Here we go again, if only because putting the loop on infinite repeat is less enervating than personally shouting into the whirlwind:
I claim “self-defense” as my moral imperative and as such, I will be able to plead it in the aftermath. But I cannot in good conscience use it to describe what I practice and train.
“Self-defense” as a moral imperative, preceding the action, means I am choosing only to use violence when provoked or threatened. I won’t go looking for it and will do everything in my power to avoid it. Many of the things badasses believe are worth the risk to their own lives and livelihood — a personal slight, loss of property, territory, or social status — really aren’t. I can think of few things more stupid than dying over a barstool. Or doing prison time for the same.
“Self-defense” as a legal ruling, after the action, is society giving you a pass for a criminal act, ruling a criminal act as non-criminal. Living by the moral imperative above makes it more likely such a finding will occur in your favor — if you didn’t go looking for it, did everything you could to avoid it and still found yourself in the middle of it, chances are good the State will understand. Not a guarantee, but better than if you use violence frequently to get your way.
“Self-defense” as an action, however, is balling up and hoping for the best.
…Is the fact that the prison gang enforcer in the last post only ever sees himself as the attacker… the standing man… even when he’s on the ground.
He just plain doesn’t identify with the downed man — for that would be identifying with the loser, the victim, the one getting done. In the absolutes of his experience, that means identifying with the dead. And in his world, anyone who does that enters into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He enjoys an impressive win rate and continued life due entirely to the directness of his action, which can only proceed from an uncluttered perspective. When looking at the picture of the upright man and the downed man he never sees a puzzle or a problem to be solved, but only a solution almost completed.
It’s a terribly illuminating thing to listen to killers speak of killing with your social filters turned off.
With them on we naturally recoil, feel like prey and try to figure out how to counter all the atrocity he’s talking so blithely about.
The killer’s perspective flies in the face of principled self-defense, moral rectitude, and general fairness, these things we cling to deep down inside even when we profess not to.
With our social filters up we are shipwreck victims scrabbling at the remains of the SS Social Contract as the maelstrom that smashed it rages around us.
But if we can let all that go and simply look at the mechanics of the thing it’s all really very straightforward and simple. Not the complicated flow-chart of tit-for-tat self-defense or fighting, but the straight arrow to the heart of it and done.
In a documentary on a notorious prison gang, I was particularly struck by how an enforcer for the gang — with 11 inside kills to his name — spoke about how it all worked.
The image I chose on the left functions more as a cypher to show your expectations and where you see yourself in violence than having a right or wrong answer.
It’s an inkblot test, or one of those optical illusions where you can see either a vase or two faces — people immediately see one or the other, some see both and can flip it back and forth in their heads, others can never see the inverse of their initial impression.
What’s interesting to note are the very different responses you get from two distinct populations: the sane/socialized and the sociopathic/or otherwise experienced in the use of violence.
Sane & Social
See themselves as the man on the ground, reacting to thwart the standing man (parsing attacker-defender, classic self-defense)
Are intensely interested in the story leading up to the image (who’s the good guy/bad buy, who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong)
Sociopathic or Otherwise Experienced in Violence
See themselves as the standing man (parsing winner-loser)
Are uninterested in the story or social roles (pure mechanics of winning)
As a teaching tool the goal here is not to shame those who reflexively see the image through the social lens, nor to reward those who know the “right” answer and parrot it because they think that’s what we’re looking for — the goal is to show you what’s inside of you, your most basic assumptions about violence and the role you expect to play in it.
“A man who tried to rape a woman on the streets of Hunting Park this morning ended up in the hospital himself when his intended victim fought back with a vengeance.
“Around 2:25 a.m., the 43-year-old man tried to rape a 19-year-old woman on 9th Street near Lycoming, according to police.
“But it was the man who got the surprise when the woman pulled out an unknown instrument and stabbed him twice in the stomach and once above the left eye, police said.
“The man was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition, according to police. His name and the charges he is expected to face have not yet been released.”
This incident, and the way it’s reported, highlight the importance of perspective in training.
If you think like a victim and train like a victim…
you’re preparing to be one.
