Copyright © 2023 by Jeth Randolph
All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
I will be resuming workshops from tomorrow after the summer training break, which has been spent travelling, training and writing a large amount of material that I intend to start publishing here and in print.
I get enquiries that often mention the word “confidence” as a desired training result from both men and women.
I wanted to write a few brief words here about how this can start to be achieved for newer people.
I say “start” as I do not wish to purvey some kind of over confidence which is an altogether different problem.
I anticipate more posts this week, with the workshop notes from tomorrow for those that attended and other stuff upcoming.
Thanks to you for your continued readership and especially to the paid supporters that keep this - and me - going.
J
While the net ( and it is a net in many ways, as you can get caught up forever in these cognitive dead ends) is replete with videos of wacky techniques being shown by various martial masters as their solution to being physically victimised and the resulting vilification in the comments section, for lacking reality by the proponent of some other style or system and his worshipers.
Some of these examples are genuinely worthy of the criticism they receive, others are just not understood by the viewers or viewed without background context that might change a viewer’s mind (actually maybe that still might not happen, but anyway).
There is a different example of efficacy doubt however, that sometimes silently slips by unnoticed.
“Will this work for real”?
I’ve heard instructors say this of quite basic tactics that they were teaching and in one case of a whole approach he was charging others to learn from him!
This should NEVER even be a thought in your mind if you are training for a real solution to aggression.
If the training is adequately replicating combat in various ways, then you will KNOW that what you do will work if applied in the correct circumstances to another human (or perhaps, less than human) being.
How will you know?
Because you will be at some point, ready to be receiving and experiencing the force of a tactic and also having to take care of a partner when applying it yourself.
This gives you a full understanding from both sides which is part one of gaining confidence in your fighting ability.
Being then able to achieve it against increasing resistance and in more and more chaos, will build this further.
Related:
Confidence is built by doing the work and practicing whatever your chosen tactics are again and again.
There are no short cuts.
You simply put the hours in.
You are what you do.
Practice does not make perfect excellent.
Perfect Excellent practice makes perfect excellent.
What you repeat must be of good quality.
One workshop a week will start to ingrain certain ideas and skills within you but you need to be responsible for your own further practice to progress more.
Making time to repeat ideas throughout the week will build a confidence that you know the stuff much better and can start to judge whether it is a good solution for your personal safety context.
Related reading:
Practice it until you own it.
You can only practice a finite number of things effectively.
The more you spread yourself thin, the lower progress will be across the board.
This is very common because of marketing that makes you believe that you always need something more to be perfect.
But based on the time investment of an average working person with a family who learns skills for fighting as a regular activity, this is really unrealistic to try for as your ability to devote yourself to a large area of continuous study and practice all these areas will be highly compromised by… life.
The more years you have trained, the more you see overarching principles rather than thousands of isolated techniques and things become more understandable wherever you find yourself problem wise.
Once the basic ideas of fight training for your context are mastered, finding something that works for you in the training space and doing it over and over until you own it is a better key to real progress.
Consider your circumstances carefully and choose a core handful of personal tactics that work for you.
If you find a better tactic, replace the old one with it.
If your abilities change through age or physical limitation of some kind, adapt to this new reality and carry on.
Just as older people can start to rely on mobility aids, so too can their personal safety start to refocus more exclusively on the use of “defensive aids” to address a growing disparity of force between them and others.
This subject is addressed in detail in the following book:
Click here to purchase from Amazon
Ultimately, whatever you choose as your solution for physical aggression will be cemented in your mind as an absolute certainty in terms of effectiveness.
KNOWING this is where doubt is silenced and confidence starts.
Got a comment or question?
Hit the button below OR feel free to email. You don’t need to create public accounts, just drop me a line at info(at)forcenecessary(dot)co(dot)uk
Anything I answer here for you and other readers will be anonymised.
Thanks, Jeth