With 2015 well underway, and those flimsy New Year’s resolutions underwater, here’s an easy project. Tune up your mindset and increase your awareness. And without breaking a sweat you will increase your personal safety.

A great book to read about this is Jeff Cooper’s Principles of Personal Defense. First published in 1972, and reprinted a couple times since then, it is a self defense classic. In short, he explains seven qualities that you should cultivate:

  • Alertness: Trouble can appear at any time — know what is behind you, and pay attention to anything out of place.
  • Decisiveness: Decide instantly upon a proper course of action to be carried out immediately, without hesitation.
  • Aggressiveness: Whether it is a counter-attack or a pre-emptive attack, give it everything you’ve got.
  • Speed: Be fast, not fair — end it before the loser fully realizes he has bitten off more than he can chew.
  • Coolness: If you know that you can keep your head, that you must keep your head, you probably will keep your head.
  • Ruthlessness: Anyone who willfully and maliciously attacks another without sufficient cause deserves no consideration from you–don’t hold back.
  • Surprise: The criminal does not expect his prey to fight back — surprise him!

Track down a copy and read it. In the meantime, here is an exercise Cooper mentions in the book to increase your awareness:

“Make it a game. Keep a chart. Every time anyone is able to approach you from behind without your knowledge, mark down an X. Every time you see anyone you know before he sees you, mark down an O. Keep the Os ahead of the Xs. A month with no Xs establishes the formation of correct habits.”

Try it for a week or a month and see how you do. Increase your awareness and you never know what you might notice.

Stay safe and we’ll see you in class.

 

By Alan Hines