Please note that we are NOT the original writers of this blog post. All credit goes to the original writers. Find the original post as published at this link: http://invictaselfdefense.blogspot.com/2014/06/learning-how-not-to-fight-to-defend.html
Four of the pillars of any effective self-defense system should include rigorous fitness and strength training, technical and tactical training, learning how to fight and how to not fight.
The latter of those pillars may raise a few eye brows but the fact is that the best self-defense training involves learning how to avoid a confrontation or fight or in other words, prevention.
Prevention can take many kinds of course but let’s face it, it isn’t sexy, it’s difficult so that it requires training and because of this it isn’t practiced or discussed widely enough. Here are a four reasons why we should all learn how to not fight.
Running and walking Away is tough
It Isn’t easy to swallow your pride, take your ego out of the equation and walk away from a
confrontation. In fact, it takes a lot guts, discipline and self-awareness to run or walk away from a bad situation. For Example, walking away from a confrontation with an aggressive individual in social situation, like when in a bar with friends and when there is alcohol involved, can be hard. A situation like this requires you to take responsibility for a situation and see the larger picture. This requires training since such a high amount of self-awareness is not always the natural response and demands some self-confidence to understand that’losing face’ in front of others isn’t the issue. A person has to have the self-confidence and training to alter their behavior when confronted with a tricky situation, especially when their natural impulse is to respond first, think later.
Decision making is key
The stress of being confronted frequently makes people to behave irrationally or without believing and this can often lead to poor decision-making. Thinking straight in a stressful situation requires practice and training. As an example, when walking or running out of a circumstance, you must know where to run and how to appeal to help. It isn’t always a case of just running from a situation, you have to ensure that you’re running towards an exit, toward a frequent object you can use to defend yourself or towards help.
Knowing when not to get involved
Civic responsibility allows contemporary society to function but we cannot put our lives on the line for the sake of everyone we meet, every situation we witness or faced with. This is not to suggest you should never get involved merely that every responsible citizen has a threshold of tolerance and different sensitivities when getting involved in a situation that could lead to you getting hurt. However, preventing an attack on somebody else requires you to read a circumstance, know your own boundaries in addition to getting out of it.
Recent research supports two-system method in the brain for making decisions: left vs. right brain. The left brain controls systematic processing, which involves assessing all the available information before making a decision, whereas the right brain activates heuristic processing, which involves a quick,”intuitive reaction.” This is the kind of processing we use when faced with an unexpected threat.
Of course, there are occasions when the left brain should take over (like when deciding in your 401(k) contributions) but in sudden, unexpected and potentially life-threatening situations, there is no time for complex analysis. Gut instinct has been proven as a successful basis for evaluations, trivia games and other conditions that require a snap judgment. So if your instinct is so critical in making life-saving decisions, how can you hone it? Part of that is confidence in your judgment such as trusting that you are able to defend yourself should you have to. The reason most survivors survive is that they think they can.
This is not to imply that the skills and tools you need to defend yourself are less important and prevention is the most significant problem as just as often as not, prevention is not feasible. However, prevention is the first problem in any timeline and it is the very best tool available.
