They tell me of all the money that can made from selling franchises or on-line courses; by charging more for instructor certifications, or by charging instructors licensing fees or association dues. These are legitimate money-making activities — none of which we do. When I run into these people, I’ve learned that they are NOT the people we want involved in our efforts. Over the last two decades I’ve found the most troublesome and least effective instructors are the ones who are only in it for the money.

The goal of the institute is to provide self-defense training and education to as many women as possible.  The method I’ve chosen to do that is to create a network of instructors — a tribe — which continually grows and spreads the message while still staying connected to the principles and concepts we use.

Tribes have connections. Tribes support each member. And they create an organic movement which can outlast the original tribal leadership. On the other hand, the kinds of relationships that are built on monetary transactions are less personal and have less commitment on either side of the equation. You pay for the item or service and the seller provides it. The transaction complete, the buyer either looks for another service or product and the seller looks for another buyer.

Success for the tribe is measured by the strength of the group. Success for the transactional relationship is determined by how many transactions can be successfully completed. Now to be fair, I want to make very clear that I am a complete advocate of the free enterprise system, and that a transactional relationship  can only succeed when the buyer feels they have received value from the product or service. The more value, the more that can be charged for the transaction. Or, if the transactional fee is low, but the product has value, then the numbers of buyers can be more.

However, when you are dealing with the very complicated and sensitive elements surrounding self-defense, sexual assault, pain, fear, shame, and violence the transactional model doesn’t work well. There is a huge amount of empathy, support and sensitivity involved when you walk down the path of being a women’s self-defense instructor.  The best and most successful instructors are those who are making these connections. They worry about their students. They take the time to understand and help them through their fears, instilling confidence.  Their students sense their commitment and develop a trusting relationship. These are the instructors who are making a difference.

Now here’s the paradox — you should teach for the love of it, but you should charge for your courses.

First of all, you have expenses to cover. Secondly, there is a very real phenomenon that attaches a perceived worth of a product to it’s price tag.  Martha Stewart tells a famous story about selling her homemade pies, finding out that she sold substantially more when she increased the price. When your courses are free, you’ll find that you literally cannot give them away. Strange isn’t it?

Charging a nominal fee for your classes engenders a level of commitment for your students as well. Paying for a course provides an incentive for them to show up and participate enthusiastically. The key for you to increase your network is to provide more value to your students than the $40 or $50 they might have paid for their course.

Follow up with the students, keep in touch with them.  Hold follow up classes. Providing value is easy when you do it for the love of it.

And go out there and make a difference in the world.

Tampa

Fight Like a Girl and Girls on Guard

March 3 and 4

New York

Fight Like a Girl and Girls on Guard

April 21 and 22

Both courses are being taught by Steve Kardian.  Contact him for registration at kardian@optonline.netx (just remove the ‘x’ at the end of the address before sending).

Interwoven into the story of Kyle’s deployments overseas and his brief times back at home are short sections supplied by Taya Kyle documenting her feelings and her side of the story. The combination serves to provide a poignant contrast between the brutalities faced by warriors in battle and the worry and emotions ripping through their families at home.

I get the feeling that Chris Kyle is a man of few words because his descriptions of events and memories tend to be on the spare side. But the author’s (Jim DeFelice) ability to capture the tone and meaning of Kyle’s stories is excellent. You can pick up the cadence and rhythm of Kyle’s speech with the one-liners leaving you chuckling. With a few haunting exceptions, there is almost always a comical or humorous side aspect to Kyle’s stories.

For those who want to pick up a lot of detail about being a SEAL or a sniper, you’re not going to get much. There are some nuggets in the stories that you can probably only mine if you have some knowledge of combat and shooting. For example, you won’t find a reference to a Mil-Dot anywhere. But, Kyle talks about using a tree behind some insurgents to help him on an extremely long-distance shot. Shooters will know what he is talking about. Others probably won’t get the significance of the tree. (His longest shot, by the way, was 2,100 yards taken to kill a bad guy getting ready to launch a rocket at an Army convoy). He fairly brushes over his experiences during BUD/S and Hell Week, telling the reader that the process is well documented in other sources.

There is a bit of treasure on p. 126 (Geared Up) where he does give some good descriptions of his gear and the reasoning behind his likes and dislikes on each piece. Likes? .45 over the 9mm; belt holster over the drop-leg holster. Depending on the mission he would carry an M-4, a Mk-11 (Knight’s Armament SR-25 in 7.62), a .300 Win Mag and, later, a .338 Lapua (which he used to the make 2,100 yard shot).

I found the book extremely fast-paced and I found the addition of Taya’s sections valuable in making this a very memorable account of their lives. I easily read it in a few sessions.

God bless Texas if the Lone Star State keeps producing heroes like Chris Kyle (and his buddy Marcus Luttrell). He doesn’t mince words and calls the situation like he sees it. His experience gives him some very simple, yet insightful, answers to situations that seem to perplex politicians. He is a bad-ass and he hands out copious amounts of kudos for others who are bad-asses. Not surprisingly, he has few nice things to say about cowards and those unwilling to commit.

Great book. Entertaining and worth the read.

Don Mann, Inside SEAL Team 6, p. 100

Mann is referring to the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre that happened while he was training in San Diego on July 18, 1984. Perpetrator James Huberty killed 21 people and wounding 19 in a McDonald’s restaurant over a period of 77 minutes.  Huberty was killed by a SWAT sharpshooter.

Lt. Col. Stephen Dade, USMC (Ret.), Marine Corps Gazette, Jan. 2012

Lt. Col. Stephen Dade, USMC (Ret.), Marine Corps Gazette, Jan. 2012

This particular course had representatives from the military, law enforcement and the security industry. There was also a very skilled martial artist taking the course as a way to get into the executive protection business.  Many of the students have experience at the highest level of the special warfare and special forces business.

The lessons learned by the experiences that happened during this course are the same that instructors will see time and time again — and they have direct applications for any one carrying a handgun for self-defense or for the defense of others. What this class presented to these students was a good dose of stress (much of it probably self-inflicted since they wanted to pass the shooting module to graduate from the course), movement and drawing from concealment. My observations:

1. Shooting a handgun quickly and accurately involves perishable skills.  All of the mechanics that goes into smooth, effective and accurate handgun shooting are fine motor skills — and that means they don’t hold up well over time without practice.  I witnessed operators with world-class experience right out of the hottest combat zones having a difficult time presenting and shooting their handguns well. I’m not saying they were terrible — they were adequate, but I could tell visually that there was a lot of rust in their technique and it was not what you would expect from this strata of operators. Their comments to me indicated they were not happy with their performance. The comments were not so much an excuse, but more of an explanation like “sheesh, I’ve not really shot my handgun in the last 18 months” or a lot of head shaking and muttering under their breath. It’s obvious there was room for improvement. (To be fair here, it’s a whole different story with other courses I’ve done with active military personnel that involve carbines. Obviously, the M4 is their sword and the one that they spend their time shooting and not handguns.) All of the students’ targets improved significantly as the course went on, some from getting back into the groove of their potential skill level and other because they were benefitting from the instruction and coaching.
2. Shooting is not a natural behavior. It’s a skill that requires putting together multiple actions over a short period of time. There is a grip, presentation, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger press and follow through. Then there are other aspects like ammunition management and the re-holster. That’s a lot of thoughts and actions in what should be a simple sequence. It’s a bit like golf in that regard. To become a superior golfer, you need instruction. To become a superior gunfighter, you need instruction. Practice and then get more coaching. Practice what you’ve been coached on. The most proficient shooters where those who have been taught an efficient drawstroke and delivery of rounds on target. They have practiced and can smoothly repeat the action over and over again. The self-taught and uncoached students were inconsistent and seemed to be searching for an answer to their inconsistency during the course. This second group of students did benefit significantly from the instruction (my point in #1 above), but they were still outshown by those who had good technique to begin with.
3. Practice with your concealment equipment. This is probably the number one problem I observed during this course. A good number of the students have not regularly shot from concealment. Police officers and military members are almost always overtly armed and carry a duty rig that is configured the same all the time. Security personnel and citizens almost always do their shooting on the range. But carrying covertly or concealed means you will have some sort of garment covering your holster. In fact, many people carry a different type or sized handgun for concealment than they do for duty or the range. Many people then use a different type of holster for concealed carry than they do for duty, range or competition. Let’s look at this — shoot all the time on the range with one handgun and one holster on a belt, but now carry a different handgun in a different holster under a garment for self-defense. See where I’m going with this? I saw some serious flubs on draws caused by unfamiliarity with the concealed carry. I saw draws that got tangled up in shirttails. I saw two students fumbling with the safeties and magazine release buttons on unfamiliar pistols. I saw a student literally draw his holster — his paddle-style holster was still attached to the pistol when he drew it. It had come right out of his waistband. I also talked with one operator who carried a compact .45 semi-concealed on his plate carrier in Afghanistan only to find out one day that it had become rusted sometime during his deployment. Practice with what you are going to carry. Shake down your set up. Does it work? Does it work under stress? You should probably rethink your handgun system. Take a look at having the same handgun in different sizes, i.e. duty, compact and subcompact. For Glock people that could mean a Glock 17 full-sized handgun for duty or range; a Glock 19 compact model for concealed carry or a Glock 26 subcompact model for deep concealed carry. In this example all of the models use the same caliber (9mm) and are the same size with the exception of shorter barrels and grips for the compact and subcompact models. If you are a .40 caliber fan, then you could repeat this system with a Glock 22 full-sized handgun for duty, a Glock 23 compact for concealment and a Glock 27 subcompact. Staying with one handgun system means the same manual of arms, the same sight picture and the same “feel” for all of the handguns.

Your super-stressful self-defense incident should not be the time to be figuring out your equipment. It should not be the time to find out that you haven’t kept up your skills.

There will be no warm up.

You will not have time to get ready.

You will have to be ready.

Train like your life depends on it.

Rep. Heath Shuler (D) North Carolina
Rep. Cliff Stearns (R) Florida

Source: the Washington Times, Nov. 11, 2011

Haley Taricani, Joe Salvati, Secret Brown, Samantha Cook-Watt, and Sherry Gelle successfully passed the requirements to teach

both the Fight Like a Girl (FLAG) and the Girls on Guard (GOG) modules.  The programs will be taught as part of the Marine Corps Readiness & Deployment Support. Taricani, the program manager for the department,  is using the programs primarily to reach out to military spouses — especially those with husbands on deployment.

“I want our families here to feel the empowerment that I felt after that training,” she says.

The new instructors were a great group with a defined goal for what they wanted to get out of the program, and a worthy goal of passing on this knowledge to the Marine Corps military families.

This theory holds that you are more likely to attract people’s attention by yelling ‘fire’ with the corollary being people are also more likely to respond since a fire effects them as well vs. yelling ‘help’ which dissuades people from intervening because they don’t want to get involved. I’ve always been skeptical of this idea.  It sounds good from an intellectual angle and enough experts have said it that is sounds reasonable so you think: That’s what I’ll do, I’ll yell ‘fire’ if I’m ever attacked.

But, the problem is that under stress you resort to emotional responses, not intellectual responses. You can tell yourself all day long that you’ll yell ‘fire’, but when you are attacked that all goes out the window. Notice in this story the woman yells, “Help me! Please someone help me!” and “Get off of me!”  We’ve found that in full-contact role playing for women’s self-defense, this is typical for defenders. Many even respond from a more fear-based level with exclamations like “Get the f*ck away from me!”

I maintain that you will naturally vocalize what is happening to you at the time. It’s a bit like telling yourself that you’re going to yell ‘peanut butter!’ the next time you have a near collision in traffic.  The two don’t fit.

Plus in this particular attack, the witnesses in the area said her screams were the very thing that alerted them to trouble.  One guy even goes as far as saying that she saved herself with her screams.  If there are people within earshot, it’s not a problem attracting attention and alerting people to your problem by yelling for ‘help’ vs. ‘fire’.  It might be another story whether or not they choose to help.  Let’s say people initially respond because they heard your calls for ‘fire’. But then find out that there really is no fire, instead you’re being raped on the sidewalk. What makes you think they will decide to get involved if they would not have responded to your calls for help?

Face it, people are either going to help you or not. Help may be in the form of a call to the police instead of direct intervention. I’d like to think people will help. Maybe I’m an optimist.

But the point is to attract attention so you have the opportunity to be helped and to make your attacker believe that someone might be on their way to help you.