Where you should look for good self-defence training?
Back in the old days, if you were on the search for a good master to teach you proper fighting skills, you would have probably ended up in some mystical monastery, high up at a difficult to reach and deserted mountain. They would shave your head and bald-headed you would daily carry gallons of water up the mountain for years until one day you would become really tough and ready to face the dangers of the outside world.
How important is your self-defence instructor’s background?
If you follow my posts here, you already know that my views on parts of the self-defence community are somewhat critical. After a lifetime being involved in martial arts on one side, but also with real forms of violence on the professional side, I just happen to have an opinion on certain things. You would probably be surprised to find that despite my vast personal experience, I believe to be far more open-minded than many of my industry colleagues out there.
What self-defence training should look like
OK, so you’ve decided that you need to do something for your personal safety and you want to learn some self-defence. That’s a good decision, but where do you go to? Do you just sign up at the closest martial arts studio? Does it matter what martial art you train and do martial arts even teach you proper self-defence? Once you type self-defence on your search page, you will discover that there are actually a lot of different providers offering some form of self-defence training.
Identifying if you are at risk
Sadly the world is not all sunshine and happiness, there are some unpleasant individuals out there that might want to do us some harm for various reasons, I assume we can all agree on that, if not read this post first. But what exactly are you supposed to do about it? Should you now hide from the world to be safe or walk the streets in fear? How do you actually know what kind of threats are of real concern to you personally and could you eventually simply ignore some? Let’s find out, shall we?
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Think about safety before it’s too late!
I have made it my mission to educate people on how to stay safe and I do so by writing this blog, posting videos on a Youtube channel, and organizing practical self-defence courses. Over time I have discovered that there is one major factor that significantly contributes to the fact that most people do not know how to react in a critical and dangerous situation and it might surprise you that I am not talking about criminals or individuals with ill intentions, but actually our own ignorance.
Understanding personal safety
Are you prepared for the worst?
If I would be writing this article anytime last year, probably no one would ever read it. I mean let’s face it, who the hell thinks in normal times about potential crisis & disasters that might or might not happen? Well, governments do, and so do organizations and all kind of corporations and businesses, at least the big ones. There is actually a whole industry out there that deals with the preparation and proper response for any kind of crisis & disasters.
How awareness helps avoiding dangers
The ability to detect and avoid trouble and danger before it actually occurs, is probably far more important than knowing how to fight. Many unpleasant situations one might find himself in, can be prevented, simply by paying attention to your surrounding and reading the signs. Personal safety is where all your mother’s wisdom comes back in 😉
The End is near, or is it not?
There has been a lot of hype over the new Corona virus pandemic and certainly the media was playing a big role in all this, but governments around the world did they part too, as an unseen mass hysteria has been created. It was end of February, I traveled back from a business meeting in Dublin to London and the local Newspaper cover page only had five words written in huge letters covering the whole page “The killer virus is here!” At that day, the first infected person in Ireland was confirmed.