I'm a massive advocate of the soft skills of self protection. I think that Avoidance should be the first and every option up until the last resort of physical.

Avoidance can only be achieved if you have good awareness and assessment skills along with good self control and control of your ego.

When you ask most self protection instructors they will always say that avoidance is their preferred technique, but then spend the rest of their classes teaching you how to punch and kick

So, how do you train or teach the soft skills?

What exercises do you encorporate into your training to hone these valuable and vital skills?

Stay Safe & Have Fun

Al

Al,

I would agree.... Soft skills are essential...

Avoidance will only come with awareness.... Situational awareness was something I used to try and 'bang home' when teaching cp students...

Initially we would sit them down a let them watch a clip of TV footage (a snip of Spooks was always popular) and then ask them a number of questions about the clip... What was the number of the bus?... that sort of thing..

Then whenever we went out off the building, when we got back, we asked them questions about things that we, the instructors had noted, not related to the lesson or scenario that was being run...
what was the guy walking the dog wearing?

The students slowly picked up on the fact that they would be constantly asked questions on any range of things and this, slowly but surely increased their awareness of their surroundings....

Al,
Your bloody psychic mate. This is something thats been on my mind for a while and getting it right is hard. The thing i have found is if your not careful you can create a level of paranoia in students. Giving them a belief that there is a bad man around every corner. The thing i found most helpful was from Geoff when he asked us to read 'The gift of fear' by Gavin Debecker.The book is an absolute must to read and highlighted to me that we all have an inbuilt early warning system on these matters. Its just that over time these vital skills have become somewhat lost due to varying lifestyles. The other book i found helpful is reading the Desmond Morris book 'People watching'. But at the end of the day its a book and you can never be sure how much of it people have absorbed.
So i would love to here how people have trained these skills and what degree of success they have had. I have tried a few things with very different results.

Dave

Hi Griffin - great ideas, and something I do similarly on my Women Only Self Defence days - which are 80% non-physical courses
I demonstrate with video footage just how difficult awareness is, how attentional distractors affect your level of awareness and how conscious awareness needs to be replace by sub-conscious awareness if it is to be natural and continuous without a great deal of effort

Dave - the paranoia thing is very important. Something I am acutely aware of when running my corporate personal security seminars. One thing I don't want are my clients leaving the boardroom feeling paranoid and not wanting to leave the building for fear of all the bad things that can happen.
Balance is essential. One of the first things we learn in martial arts is balance - froma physical perspective. But then we start to develop a balance in our personality, our lives and ideally, in everything we do. Including our personal security.
I get my clients to think about the good as well as the bad - looking out for the criminals and also the good guys, places to avoid and places of safe haven, etc etc
This gets them to start thinking and looking for positives as well as negatives - and after a while they start to realise, there is still alot of good stuff out there too

It's all about balance

Thanks guys - keep the suggestions coming

AL ;-)

Dave... Paranoia!!! How right you are!

In a security professional a certain degree of paranoia is needed, but it needs to be controled and relevant... And when members of the general public start feeling paranoid about their safetly the bad guys have won!

Its a hellishly difficult balance to find when teaching!!!!