Prioritizing Needs & Skills

Self-defense is a huge topic. And there's a lot of different niches, a lot of different specialty areas and a lot of different concerns that you might have when you first approach developing your self-defense training plan. The first thing you're gonna wanna do is prioritize your needs and the skills that will help you meet those needs. So you've got needs, things like home defense. Well, home defense can be broken down into physical security as well as a response plan.

You've got personal defense, you've got personal defense from crime, you've got personal defense from physical assault. You've got personal defense in a vehicle, you've got personal defense at work. We've got things like family safety, maybe that involves children, that may involve things like communication. We can keep looking down the list of needs in terms of knowledge, what areas are you not currently knowledgeable about but you're going to want to research? Things like crime trends.

What are the exact things that are happening to people like you in your environment? Knowledge could mean understanding the skills that we're gonna talk about in a minute, could be understanding tools, could be understanding techniques. One of the other things that you might need is equipment. And not only is that the actual defensive tools, but also practice tools. We have expendable things like ammunition if we're going to get into defensive firearms use.

We also have security issues that are going to be equipment related, maybe better locks, maybe more secure doors, maybe an alarm system something like that. Maybe something like a dog to help with your home security plan would be under equipment. So we've got a lot of different needs. Now to simply walk in and say, "Well, I need all of this," is a daunting task. So prioritizing your needs is going to be really important.

Now, we always talk about understanding exactly what you're dealing with. So, knowledge of crime trends is gonna be really important, right? To a certain extent the knowledge is really what we're gonna start collecting first. Though we also wanna make sure that if we know there's a lot of crime in the area that you work, well, boom and that's gonna be a priority. If you spend a lot of time in a vehicle then that's gonna be a priority.

If you're obviously worried about your children as a parent, this may be something that you're going to prioritize. So not only making a list of all your needs but prioritizing what they are is going to be an incredibly important part of beginning your self-defense training plan. Figure out what you are most worried about, where you have maybe the largest gaps. Maybe you have a very secure home, but again you feel like you're at a higher risk when you're at work. Maybe your children are taken care of, you live in a community you feel is relatively safe.

Maybe you or your spouse are always with the kids for practical purposes. They go to school in a secure area. When you're at work they're with a babysitter or a family member. So you feel like the children are okay, that's not gonna be that important but because sometimes you're away from them, Yeah, we're gonna prioritize having a communication plan that if something in the big picture world a natural disaster, some kind of large-scale terrorist event in your environment, power outage, how are we gonna communicate? That may become a priority.

So going down this list thinking about yourself, your family, your environment, gaining the knowledge you need is almost always going to be a priority for people just getting started. And then applying that knowledge to help you figure out where your other priorities are, is an important step. The next thing that we're gonna look at is prioritizing our skills. 'Cause of course personal defense training with just a collection of tools or a collection of knowledge, isn't really enough. So what types of skills are we going to worry about?

Well, we may need to worry about unarmed defense your martial arts, striking, grappling, controlling and that may also include needing to become relatively fit. If you're not relatively fit, you're not gonna have much success with unarmed defense. Maybe you're worried about driving skills. Maybe you live in a remote area and you're worried about emergency driving, getting someone to the hospital, getting away from someplace, getting to a family member to help them. You're worried about driving skills.

Maybe you're interested in learning how to use knives for defense. Of course, a big area that we spend a lot of time on at Personal Defense Network is training with firearms. Medical training is going to be important. So we have emergency medical training that maybe a skill set that you wanna develop. So going through and then prioritizing again.

Well, if you're a registered nurse, we don't have to prioritize medical training, you've pretty well got that covered. If you know that you can't get a concealed carry permit in your environment or you choose not to have a concealed carry permit maybe you're not interested in the defensive firearm side, well, we're not gonna prioritize that. Maybe we are gonna spend some time up here with the unarmed defense and that's where we're gonna focus. Maybe we're gonna think about chemical or electrical areas, right? So we've got things like pepper spray, we've got things like tasers that could be used.

Maybe one of those becomes a priority for you because of the laws or because of your personal choices about what you think is the appropriate way to defend yourself in your highest area of need. Maybe you're not allowed to carry a firearm at work. Now for a lot of people they're gonna consider themselves already relatively fit. And they're going to want to be able to protect themselves in that worst case scenario possible. And that's where they're gonna really focus on firearms training, when they start taking personal defense and self-defense seriously.

Wherever your priorities are, it's important to understand all the skill sets that are applicable to filling the needs that you've prioritized and then understanding which ones you're going to focus on first, because again, your budget, your allocation of assets is always going to be limited. So prioritizing both the needs that you have and then the skills that you're gonna develop to meet those needs is how we get started developing a self-defense training plan.