The Nuts & Bolts Of Awareness – Part 2

This post is part 2 of a 3-part series on Self-Defense Awareness.  If you haven’t already read it, you can click on this link for Part 1.

Effective Self-defense Requires a Map

The brain’s ability to recognize and understand anything is a result of having a mental map or blueprint relevant to that experience. Psychologists call these maps, “schemas.”

Schemas consist of our accumulated knowledge, experience, beliefs and habits.  They are activated when we recognize cues and patterns associated with them.

A good mechanic can detect what’s wrong with a car by the clunks, squeaks, and rattles it makes. Paramedics can diagnose unseen injuries by the patient’s symptoms. Hunters can track an animal for miles based on broken twigs, displaced soil and clues invisible to the untrained eye. They have the mental maps that allow them to do this.

Detecting And Diagnosing A Potential Confrontation Requires Self-Defense Maps

In his book, “Vital Lies, Simple Truths,” psychologist Daniel Goleman describes how schemas work.

“The (process) that organizes information and makes sense of experience are ‘schemas,’ the building blocks of cognition. Schemas embody the rules and categories that order raw experience into coherent meaning. All knowledge and experience is packaged in schemas. Schemas are…the intelligence that guides information as it flows through the mind.”

Schemas allow us to make sense of the world and influence what we recognize, understand, notice and ignore. They allow us to interpret patterns, predict outcomes and respond in appropriate ways to what happens in our lives.

The Four Ingredients Of Schema

Schemas develop over time and accumulate to make us the people we become.  They consist of the following:

1.  Knowledge

2.  Experience

3.  Beliefs

4.  Habits

“The Three A’s” – Evaluating Your Self-Defense Schemas

Effectively defending yourself requires an accurate mental map about self-defense situations. Assessing your own schemas is difficult.

We tend to resist, ignore and even defend anything that challenges our existing position on the world. Schema enhancement is impossible without humility, an open mind, and curiosity about the way the world actually works.

In order to evaluate your own mental maps, and determine where they can be improved, consider the “Three A’s.”

Accurate:

Accurate mental maps are essential to effective self-defense. You establish and refine them by learning about violent and predatory situations; how they happen, where and when they happen, who they are perpetrated by and so on. This involves learning to recognize pre-assault patterns and developing an inventory of skills and strategies to resolve confrontations.

We build experience by using what we have learned. The longer and more deliberately you study self-defense, obviously the more knowledgable you will become.  It is important however to take in new information with “a grain of salt.  It could be accurate and useful or it could be total bullshit.

Hopefully, your experience in the area of self-defense isn’t limited to the “school of close calls and hard knocks.”  The truth is that violent altercations happen so infrequently that we can not rely on exposure to them for experience.  Experience can be “manufactured” through mental imagery and scenario training.

Beliefs dramatically affect your perceptions and behavior. Do your beliefs empower or disempower you when it comes to protecting yourself? Are they realistic and functional or based on fantasy and misinformation? Evaluate your beliefs about your rights and the ability to defend yourself.  If they don’t contribute to your skill, resilience, and ability to respond, then change them.

Habits are automatic behaviors that we do on a regular basis and have a dramatic impact on our personal safety.  As I wrote in the post on “complacency,” your goal should be to incorporate and automate safety habits in the “absence of a perceived threat.”

Absent:

When you lack knowledge or experience in an area, your maps about it don’t exist.  They are absent. Absent self-defense maps result in people being naive about their safety.  They are more likely to place themselves in risky situations and be oblivious to signs of danger. If someone with an absent map encounters a confrontation, they are more likely to panic, freeze or react ineffectively. In self-defense jargon, that’s called, “Not Good!”

Assumed:

An assumed map occurs when a map associated to experience is flawed, inaccurate and erroneous.  A map of Winnipeg is useless is Chicago. A map that is wrong won’t help you produce the results you desire.

Assumed self-defense maps are more prevalent than you might think. Even trained martial artists often hold an unrealistic perception of what a “real fight” is like.  The misguided belief that their fighting ability is their primary weapon to keep them safe is an inaccurate map of reality.

They confuse their preparation for the chaos of violent encounters with their sparring practice. They confuse complex martial art techniques with what will actually work “in the mud and the blood and the beer,” of the real world. That’s like equating hockey with golf!

Studying self-defense is about developing and refining accurate mental maps of violence. We must build an accurate mental database of knowledge, experience, beliefs, and habits about self-defense situations and our power to respond effectively to them.

Note: In this discussion, I don’t mean to imply that people without extensive self-defense training are helpless or unable to respond to threatening situations. Far more “untrained” people successfully defend themselves from assault than those with formal training. We all possess the instinct to survive. More important than learning self-defense skills is respecting, re-awakening, and tapping into existing instincts that have been neglected, denied, or suppressed. Self-defense training is not always a matter of “installing” new maps but “dusting off” the ones we already have.

So What Can I Do About Absent Or Assumed Mental Maps?

How can you use this information about schemas? Here are some examples of activities and exercises that will improve your awareness and the accuracy of your mental maps about self-defense:

Accept Full Responsibility for Your Safety

Unless you take full responsibility for your safety and make it a priority, you are less likely to detect and recognize danger cues. You are more likely to be selected as a target.  Especially at the beginning, developing accurate mental maps about self-defense will take deliberate observation and study.

Identify situations in your own life requiring a higher level of vigilance

You can’t be on “full alert” all of the time, nor do you have to be. Identify times and situations in your own life where a higher degree of vigilance is merited. When out jogging alone? When commuting to and from work? When staying in a strange city? When out socializing at the bar?

Build and refine your self-defense maps by continuous learning

If personal safety is important to you, read books and articles about it, take self-defense courses, etc. You may not want to join a self-defense club or spend all of your waking hours studying self-defense. You don’t have to. However, don’t read a single book or take a single seminar and consider yourself “finished.” Make an effort to periodically review what you know and continuously build on what you’ve learned.

Analyze the News

Analyze news events to familiarize yourself with criminal patterns and factors associated to violent crimes. Apply the questions who, what, when, where, why and how to these incidents and use your acquired knowledge to stay out of the news yourself!

Practice Observations Skills

Pre-determine specific things to look for as you go about your day-to-day activities. For example, when going shopping make a “game” of spotting as a particular item or characteristic of a person.  Next time look for something else. Consider the fact that “playing” awareness games makes you appear more observant to a predator who may be evaluating you as a potential target.

Establish self-defense habits

If you knew you were going to be attacked the next time you went to work you just wouldn’t go. The truth of the matter is that you never know when you may be targeted as a potential victim. Assaults happen at all times of the day and in all types of settings and situations. The most effective self-defense strategies are those that you build into your day-to-day behavior. They become unconscious habits through repetition and consistency.

Awareness In Review

In Part 1 I define Self-Defense Awareness as having three ingredients:

1.  Know what to pay attention to

2.  Discipline yourself to pay attention

3.  Match the degree of vigilance to your current circumstances

In the next part of this series, I’ll be discussing the concept of “Attention.”

In the meantime, if you have any comments or opinions you’d like to share, please feel free to jump into the conversation by adding your comments below…