You see it in the news every day. People – men, women, and children – are getting attacked along with robberies, rapes, kidnappings, car-jackings, and muggings. Face it! There are some scary, freaky people out in the world today. We all realize that it is time to become more aware of these situations and our potential to be a part of it regardless of our stations in life. What to do, what to do?

People are becoming a whole lot more proactive about self-protection and safety, but the needs of men, women, and children, and the ways each group is able to go about learning self-protection, can be very different in approach and the instruction methodologies that need to be used. Having delivered thousands of self-protection seminars and classes over the years, I recognize that there are a few denominators that help an instructor to meet the student’s general needs.

The truth of the matter is this – the needs of individuals are going to be very different depending upon their ages, genders, and maturity levels. Their physical, emotional, and psychological needs should not be lumped together into some hodge-podge one-size fits all format. Many instructors lack the knowledge of the realities of street defense, teaching toy poodle assessments for pit bull situations. This is disgraceful and a betrayal of public trust. When they come to you, the expert, they have decided to put their vulnerability in your hands with the expectation that you will be giving real answers and solutions that they will be able to use “out there in real attack land.” They can’t hide behind Zen philosophy and neither should you!

Here are some raw boned facts from my file to yours. The mass media continually bombards us with communications intended to teach us about risk and fear; they use movies, television, and commercials to reach us.

Women are prime targets. I personally find that standard to be aberrant and unacceptable. Observation be damned – that is the portrayal. Society sends double messages to women. On one hand, women should not offend; they are vulnerable and need to be protected. A woman’s main danger will come from a man, who may victimize her on any number of different levels. When a woman who has never been attacked is asked to visualize attack situations, she will often describe the feeling of being a helpless, passive, and unwitting victim. I pose this question to the experts: What are you going to offer in your self-defense course that will help a woman to concretely eliminate these emotional and psychological fears?

Here’s where I need to stop for a moment and rant. If I hear another person tell a student to simply “be aware” or “be alert,” I am going to stick my fingers down my throat! You absolutely cannot teach “technique #14″ as a solution when you have a person in a paranoid or hypervigilant state of mind.

Moving on. Men, in contrast, when seeing themselves in a self-defense situation tend to see themselves as either compliant or very aggressive. Their attack visualizations tend to be more definied and rationalized.

What if a person who comes to you wanting to learn self-protection has been the victim of abuse or of a violent past, or is engaged in an ongoing situation? This is yet another factor you need to consider in curriculum design before teaching a self-protection class or seminar. When a person turns to martial arts as a vehicle to learn self-defense, it is really a search for safety.

The complication? How can the instructor best meet the expectations of each attendee, while getting past the personal mental barriers of each individual, and still manage to deliver solid information and skills through the actual experience that is offered? Understanding the risks members of society will face has become a fundamental key to understanding the ways that people understand and manage themselves, their bodies, and their interpersonal relationships. Social, cultural, and political change has resulted in an increase of isolation, fear, and uncertainty. The resulting factor is a decrease of self-identity and purpose.

People will come to you to learn personal safety. Big responsibility? YES! Make sure that you really know your craft. Lives depend on it.

I will answer any and all questions on this subject. I don’t claim to be the final word, but “Let he that has an ear…HEAR!”

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