Be the Warrior in the Room

 The heading of this post comes from a quote by Matt Larsen - the Director of Combatives at the US Military Academy at West Point. He spoke with Joe Saunders on the Managing Violence Podcast. I find this expression interesting. What does he mean by being a warrior in the room?

Is this the only concept of a warrior?

Its a fascinating concept "the warrior". The simple definition of a warrior is a person engaged or experienced in warfare. However, as Matt Larsen says in his interview with Joe, "the proportion of a country's population that makes up its military is significantly smaller than in ancient times." (I am para-phrasing here). So does this mean only those people in the Armed Forces are warriors? 

This requires us to define a warrior in our modern day setting. Matt Larsen believes a warrior is someone who can protect others or keep them safe. So what does that look like?  Does it look like the large, muscular guy standing in front of his girlfriend?  Is it the person who trains week after week in their chosen martial art? Is it the person who has trained in First Aid, in case it is needed when they are out and about with family and friends? Is it the person who has taken a Defensive Driving Course so he or she is a better driver and is more likely to perceive threats on the road while transporting his or her family?

It could be all of the above if the motivation is to protect someone and keep them safe. Now, motivation is important here. This is not about ego. If you go to the gym to get that fit, strong physique to impress a member of the opposite sex, you are not showing a warrior mentality. If you are doing hours of practice in your martial art only to obtain a black belt and prove you are better than everyone else, you are not showing a warrior mentality. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with having those motivations, but don't call yourself a warrior. 

In this day and age, a true warrior is a person that is going out of their way to keep innocent people safe. Members of the Military, Law Enforcement, Emergency Services - These people are warriors. A friend of mine is a paramedic, to me, that man is a warrior. He intentionally seeks to help others and keep them safe. You might think that is a bit lame to hear but think about it for a minute. You don't need a weapon to be a warrior. 

Of course, we are not all in those professions. Can we still be the warrior in the room? Well, that depends. Often the warrior in the room appears in a moment of crisis. He or she has always been there as a friend, or a workmate or even the stranger on the street. You wouldn't know they are a warrior until a situation calls for them to act. It could be anyone. It doesn't have to be the athletic twenty-something. Let's look at some examples.

A car accident has just occurred. Some people will drive on, pretending not have noticed. Others will stop, flick their hazard lights on and call the emergency services. Others might cautiously move up to the cars involved to see if they can help. Those who saw the accident but chose to ignore it are not warriors. They were not seeking to protect or keep others safe.

What about this scenario,  A training mate has a hideous accident one night on the mat. He severely dislocates his elbow. He is in a lot of pain as the nerves are stretched beyond their normal length by the odd shaped elbow. What does a warrior do in this situation? Someone might get on the phone to an ambulance. Another person might try and make the guy as comfortable as possible, maybe placing a punching pad under the injured elbow to ease up the pain. One of your buddies might be cracking jokes to keep the guy's attention off the elbow. The fourth guy is outside ready to signal the ambulance to the right entrance. All of these guys are being warriors. They are trying to protect their friend. 

A final scenario. Your teenage daughter comes home and explains how a boy at school is making lewd comments and trying to hit on her. This makes her uncomfortable. What would you do? You could find out the boy's name and contact the school to alert them to the problem. You could give your daughter advice on how to deal with the unwanted attention and see if she can sort it out on her own terms. You could confront the boy and threaten him if he doesn't leave your daughter alone. What is the best option? Again, this depends. It depends on the type of person your daughter is. It depends on the severity of the boy's comments and actions. A warrior wants to protect and keep people safe. If the boy's unwanted comments can easily be put down by your daughter's strong rejection or firm boundaries, then confronting him and thumping him is not keeping people safe. In fact, it could land you in more trouble and take away your options for protecting your family in the future. 

So what's the take home message in all of this. If you want to be the warrior of the room, be prepared to act to protect or keep safe those you value or love. To ensure you can do this proficiently, train accordingly, in whatever pursuit you see fit. Learn to improve your situational awareness, take a First Aid course, stay mobile and fit, keep practicing your martial art.  Speak up for yourself but more importantly speak up on another's behalf if they can't. Drive considerately and appropriately for the road conditions. We are not professional soldiers but we can still protect!

Good luck and train safe!

Size and Psychology

 I want to touch on a topic that came up in a podcast I was listening to. The podcast was called Managing Violence by Joe Saunders and it was an interview with Savannah Archambault. Savannah shares openly in the discussion about her experience of rape and sexual assault and the impact that has had on her and the way that she teaches martial arts. It was refreshing to hear a woman's perspective on the martial arts. I highly recommend it!

During the discussion, Savannah is asked what the key factors are to teaching female students. She answers by saying that to her, gender doesn't matter. What matters more is the psychological state of that person and their size. In martial arts, size DOES matter. She admits that having a woman only class does help a female student recover from trauma initially but ultimately, once the student can move past some of those triggers, having a mixed class is more beneficial. This allows women to work with men and to see that the techniques being taught can work on a male. 

So I would like to explore the ideas of the mental state and size of  a person in martial arts.

Size does matter.

Firstly, size. To me, this is simple physics. The greater the mass of an object, the harder it is to move. I weigh 76 kg and stand 186 cm (6 foot, 1 inches). Think of a thin pole - that's me. Now if I am training with someone who is 110 kg and 168 cm (5 foot, 5 inches) I am going to have a hard time. I am giving away a lower centre of gravity and have less mass than my training partner. Of course, if I get my technique right I can move the other person around but I will have to have very good technique or I will most likely fail. I mean, this is the reason they have weight classes in sporting martial arts like judo. We discuss this very thing with body throws in TSYR. If we are trying to throw a person that is absolutely huge, then rather than take them over our hip it might make more sense to chock their ankle or leg and have them fall at that point. It still requires good martial principles such as taking their balance but there is less chance of injury for both parties if it goes wrong during training. 

Consider a tall, strong woman who is into training and conditioning, perhaps she goes to the gym, perhaps she is a competitive rower. Now, put her up against a smaller man who is fairly inactive. Perhaps he spends most of his days behind a computer screen at work or playing video games at home. The size and strength difference will be obvious, we can ignore the genders of either training partner because in this situation, the woman will most likely have an easier time of performing the technique than the guy. This is what Savannah was getting at. Size matters more than gender. Yes, this is an unusual situation but is possible. My wife is of Dutch descent, she is 183 cm (6 foot) tall and weighs more than me (I will not be stating her weight here, I have some sense.) So this makes her on par with me for height and reach but I give away a little mass. However, I have trained and conditioned my body for many years in martial arts while she prefers daily walks and yoga. If we have a fun, play-fight and wrestle about on the floor, I can prevail. However, I believe should she want to (and she doesn't), with a bit of training she would be formidable because she has the size already there. 

So with all things being equal, size IS more important that gender when training in martial arts.

What about the mental state of a person? I have already talked about mind set in one of my other blog posts so you will know how important I think this is. No matter your size, if you think you can't beat the other person or you think you can - you are right. Attitude is so important. Confidence is so important. Often we think of women being the victims of abuse, and while this is statistically, most likely, we mustn't forget that men can also be victims of abuse. Men can come to the dojo with trauma. Again, this is Savannah's point. Gender is second to the psychology of the martial artist. 

Where is your head at?

I started my budo journey in Aikido. Historically, it is a martial art that has a higher percentage of female practitioners than some other martial arts. So from the very start I have trained with women. I now teach Aikido to children and only one of my students is a boy, all the others are girls, my daughters included. If I look at my two daughters, their psychology is different, they bring a different energy to the mat. My youngest is a rough and tumble kind of kid and throws herself (sometimes literally) into her training. My older daughter is more considered. Here we can see, within the same gender, a difference in attitude. Both do Aikido, both are strong, confident girls, but approach their training differently. 

In Shindo Yoshin Ryu: History and Technique by Tobin Threadgill and Shingo Ohgami a past female student of Takamura sensei talks about how she was treated differently to the male students as she could not match their power. He had high expectations of her all the same and demanded that she surpass their speed and precision. He asked that she become deliberate, determined and dangerous. Just think about those adjectives for a moment. If that isn't all about psychology then I don't know what is!

I would like to add my own thoughts to Savannah's. Although gender is second to size and mindset, I do believe males and females communicate a little differently. My years as a secondary school teacher have taught me this as well as raising my daughters. Women and girls like to talk things through while men and boys like to just do it. While this is a generalisation, on the whole I find this to be true. As an instructor it is important to find a space for both approaches. Letting females talk out what they understand, at the right time, helps them. Letting a male just get on with trying the technique, helps them. The trick is making this work in a mixed class and of course, there are exceptions to every rule. 

Hopefully, I have given you some things to think about in this post. 

Train safe.

What are your win conditions?

When we bow onto the mat, whether it is judo, aikido, kendo or some older budo, we engage in controlled violence where there are set rules, limitations and boundaries. No matter how hard I train I know that I will still be getting in my car afterwards and driving home, healthy and happy.

That is a good thing. I want to reuse my training partners from week to week and we all need each other fit and healthy. Unfortunately, this mentality doesn't lead to good self defence psychology.

I have been re-reading Rory Miller's book, Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence. I also have been listening to an Australian podcast called Managing Violence by Joe Saunders and another podcast called Walking with the Tengu by Matthew Kreuger. These three men have left me with many thoughts about my own martial arts training.

Joe Saunders has created the Violence Survival Pyramid. He talks about four factors that go into increasing your chances in a violent encounter. From the most important at the base of the pyramid to the least important at the top. If you have a look you will notice that he puts physical techniques at the top (the least important factor). Rory Miller writes about dealing with sudden, violent encounters. Although he wrote a whole book on the subject, most of his writing is not on physical techniques, why? Finally, many Walking with the Tengu episodes mention win conditions. Despite the different topics this podcast host explores, he often returns to win conditions. 

These thoughts and ideas have been percolating in my mind. I keep coming back to win conditions. What have you decided is your goal for any given confrontation, whether it is verbal or physical? In sport karate it is scoring a clean touch on a designated area. In MMA it is getting the tap or the knock out. In kendo it is getting a clean strike on a designated target area while showing strong spirit. As a high school teacher managing challenging student behavior, it is deescalating the situation to a point that allows learning to continue. For a police officer it may mean the restraint of a person with handcuffs. To a soldier it may mean killing the enemy. 

All these win conditions set up very different training regimes for the people above. It makes no sense for a karateka training for his next tournament to learn the verbal deescalation techniques of a teacher. The teacher does not need to learn how to fire a rifle to get the focus of students in a classroom and teaching an MMA fighter how to strike with a kendoka's shinai is not going to help him much in the cage. This may seem obvious but people still have arguments over 'the best martial art' or 'the best technique' when what they should think about is the win conditions assumed with each of those statements.

If I am put in a self-defence situation where my life is threatened and I may be able to escape,  my win condition is to get away. Everything I do in that moment is to try to make that a reality. Any actions I might perform that aren't helping me achieve this goal are pointless and in this case, potentially deadly. 

If you are practicing a martial art I hope you have thought about the win conditions that have created the training paradigm you are involved with. Is this what you thought you were training for? Is it not clear what you are training for? I started aikido in 2002, I joined because a workmate of mine had been practicing a long time, he was a black belt and because he was a nice guy. I thought the dojo must be pretty good to churn out a guy like that. I went into it with the thought that I would do it as long as life didn't get in the way. Little did I know that martial arts training would become part of my life. However, my reasons for training in aikido changed over the years and so did my assumptions about its practice. You could say that my interpretations of what the win conditions were changed. At first I considered the win conditions to be the resolution of conflict through superior technique. An aikidoka could skillfully use his opponent's force against him and the adversary would see the error of his ways. The more I trained, the more I found this difficult to believe. So I started to doubt my practice and the purpose of my training. That was a confusing time for me. Because the win condition was not clear, it was hard to decide which elements of my training I should focus on and which parts I should forget. Then I decided the win condition of aikido was still about conflict resolution but through deescalation and we were practicing a physical metaphor. It was more about training a mindset that was open to resolving conflict through deescalation be it verbal or physical. The physical training kept me fit and flexible and wasn't that practical. For me, this was particularly true of aikiken, the wooden sword training. At this point I had started as a high school teacher in a co-ed state school and the mental skills I had learned in aikido practice paid off. I could see a link between my training and my profession. My training found renewed purpose. I could also blow off steam on the mat. 

I still had my doubts about all the sword swinging I was doing. That didn't seem to fit into my deescalation paradigm very well. In 2011, I was introduced to Takamura-ha Shindo Yoshin Ryu. This is a classical Japanese sword school. Everything I thought I knew about using a Japanese sword was wrong in this training paradigm. The win condition in TSYR is very clear. Kill the other guy. However, do this in the context of medieval Japan. The mindset is different. Deescalation is not important. You have to have the mind of a predator in this martial art. Everything I learn and train for in TSYR is to gain advantage over an adversary to kill him. This makes training so much clearer and straight forward. If I perform a movement that gives an advantage to the other person or is done in an inefficient manner I am 'dead'. There is something very pure about this type of training. 

The funny thing is, I still practice some aikido. I teach it to children. My TSYR training has clarified the win condition of my aikido practice. It most certainly is not the desire of my aikido training to kill the other guy. That, I am very sure of. So what is it? 

 I believe it is beneficial to learn to be strong of mind but willing to deescalate a situation. That is the win condition I have for my students. Do what is needed to deescalate and no more. That is a valuable skill I can give them to take into the world. 

So I go back to Joe Saunder's "Surviving Violence Pyramid". We see mindset is the very foundation of this diagram. As he says, "get your head straight" and everything else falls into place.  Rory Miller discusses the psychology of both attackers and victims in his book. He understands that the mindset of a person is key. Know what your win conditions are and train hard to ensure you can achieve them. Your win conditions will decide your mindset, your mindset will decide your training parameters. Then you can train with sincerity and purpose, without distraction and without the 'fluff'. 

When I step onto the mat I will be one of two people in that moment. If I am practicing TSYR, then I am the predator, seeking an opportunity to kill. If I am practicing aikido then I am the mediator, seeking to find a solution through deescalation but not devaluing myself in the process. As my mindset shifts, so too does my training. This gives me a sense of clarity.

So, what are your win conditions?

Train safe.