Your Mind is Your Best Weapon.
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
The unprepared can be easy targets. This can have fatal results in a violent confrontation.
We need to think about our safety as seriously as we think about the other basic needs of everyday life. By investing time in defense training and planning, and the shedding of the victim mentality that comes with training, you can have a higher chance of discouraging an attack from happening. If an attack should occur, a prepared person will stand a reasonable chance of saving their life.
When you invest in your safety and security, you make a statement about your sense of self-worth. Whether you take a basic self-defense course, devote serious study to martial arts training or at the least, start paying attention, you are making an investment in your overall well-being.
Your ability to think under stress, to use situational awareness to assess a given situation are skills that must be developed. Predators use these skills to choose victims [see fail the interview] and they plan, practice and get on the job training. It is a matter of success and survival for them. You must develop and use these skills as well. If you are not thinking about where you are and what you are doing you are not using your mind as your first line of defense.
We can lose track of this idea during the course of our daily lives. This is complacency. It is the recognition of this fact helps your mental training. Think of the moments when you say to yourself “oops wasn't thinking about that” This is the moment of recognition. This is the moment that begins to prepare your mind. Complacency is your enemy. Training your mind to be your best weapon and complacency don't work well together. But cultivating recognition can help prevent complacency. The caveat to this is that we can not live our lives at a high level of awareness and stress. The trick is to recognize when and where we need to be aware and awake to the situations around us
The prepared mind is aware that something can happen and that something can be done. Action MUST be taken. The result of action is survival. Here are some ways that the prepared mind takes action.
- strong situational awareness [where you are and what you are doing]
- personal radar [if it feels wrong... or being sensitive to danger]
- self-talk [NOT I think I can but I KNOW I can]
- not wishing that things would be different [delusion / denial be HERE and NOW]
- focus on motivating survival instinct. [I must do this to survive]
- the goal of getting home [survival this MUST be your only goal]
- ways to make that happen [be creative / engage in violence to END it]
So in the end YOU are the one in charge of your best weapon. You must strive to learn about situations and areas where you are in danger and train to do something about it. Take a good training class, read books about self defense awareness and constantly assess where you are and what you are doing. Ask yourself questions about this and engage in self talk to envision scenarios. Learn to be prepared.
