A layered approach distinguishes skills’ importance, weighing applicability range and emergency utility. For example: throat punches are great in emergencies and useless almost everywhere else. De-escalation, by contrast, is useful many places but less helpful once the shooting starts. Layering a personal protection plan requires individual risk assessment based on lifestyle, etc. but there are some general pieces worth acknowledging.
Awareness
Awareness of environments, yourself, others, patterns, victim profiles, violence dynamics, etc. helps layer a self-protection plan, as it rates highly in both applicability range and emergency utility. A student will spend her life in spaces, around people, and living in her body; awareness of those elements will remain relevant whether she’s in danger every day or never faces another threat and knowing the best escape route after stunning a predator can definitely save her life.
Authority
Chiron Training’s Rory Miller lists awareness, initiative, and permission as central concepts. Giving yourself permission is the internal process of lining up an action with your ethics, making it possible, or easier, to execute. Authority goes beyond willingness; it is the right and responsibility to take the action. Authority stems from a sense of duty to protect your life for yourself, loved ones, and the greater good. That responsibility can empower, expanding accessible levels of force everywhere: from the HR call on a harassing coworker to smashing a predator’s knee.
Boundary Setting
Awareness and authority set the groundwork for boundary setting by providing models for boundaries worth defending and authority to enforce them. Setting, communicating, and enforcing boundaries dissuades predators and gives a clear impetus for taking action, avoiding the confusion predators can induce. Boundary setting has a high usage rate across a variety of circumstances but is less useful once an emergency has begun. It can direct levels of force during the fight (“if his knife comes out, I’m going lethal”) but that’s hard for the less experienced. However, prior to the event, boundary setting remains extremely important for helping a student act when she needs to.
Social Skills
For regular folks (not cops, soldiers, bouncers, etc.) self-protection often boils down to four words: don’t be a jerk. It’s not sexy but the tactical application of social skills covers most violence against civilians. De-escalation, threat assessment, people reading, etc. all help avoid or quash problems well before they go physical. Social skills also assess the intentions of others and distinguish between jerks and predators. Once the emergency is on, however, social skills become harder to use, though fighting the mind by reading, misleading, etc. is still possible.
Physical Skills
In violent emergencies breaking the bad guy can help. But, frankly, putting hands on people is dangerous; the higher the force level, the messier the potential outcomes. Social consequences, legal hassles, physical damage are all distinct possibilities, even when in the right. This is why physical skills are the last line of defense in a potentially violent situation: they solve a very narrow set of problems in ways that can create damaging fallout and are useless beyond said confines.
Layer your self-protection plan, even with the stuff that’s less visible in the next John Wick movie. When training, look for classes/instructors who focus on purposeful skill building more than mindless melee. Also remember that, aside from protecting you, most of the elements listed above have the fringe benefits of making you more popular, more successful, and happier. I’ve yet to see where paying attention or being socially skillful exhibit a downside.
Be safe, be well
Coach Malcolm
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