The 5 W's of Personal Defense - Wrap Up

William, I think your 5 W's approach is really unique in the way we approach preparation for the confrontation, for the violence, because it does put so much emphasis, not just on who the bad guy is, but also on who the good guys are. If you had to recap the things that are really special about your presentation, things people maybe need to go back and look at again or pay attention to, what would they be? I had a patient who was a funeral director, and he used an expression that apparently is very common in that field I had never heard before. Pre-need planning. Now, he meant pre-need for a funeral, and I thought, "that is genius." Pre-need planning, I think, is the thrust of what this talk is about.

Have you thought about all of the situations your choices have put you in? Now, when you reach that point, there's no time for learning. You're going to do the best you can with what you have. The time spent now investing in "do I want that end product?" This is the time to revisit those decision processes. "I've decided to carry a gun.

Would I ever decide to stop carrying a gun?" I can see plenty of people where that's the right decision. So time invested beforehand in this pre-need planning, I can't stress it strongly enough. It's the most important part. And that sort of takes the emotion out of it. Very much so.

There's no learning under stress. It's employment of skills, fragmentary skills, and wish fulfillment: "I hope this works." And now's the time to try and make clear-headed decisions, lucid decisions that will get us closer to what we want, the outcome that we want. Happy, successful, productive. The other part is, we have very little power to influence the other side of the coin, so to speak. When we engage with a violent criminal actor, we have very limited power to dissuade him.

We can only have an agenda, and that carries all the way through to physical training, that it can't be reactive and has to be responsive and self-directed. And so thinking about ourselves is not wasted time, far from it. And it should guide the training. When you put this information together, you eluded to at the beginning of the DVD, the idea that you're a student first, and the idea that your desire to understand and know, and I would agree with this wholeheartedly, is fulfilled, in many cases, by being able to explain it to others. Yeah.

Because other people will ask questions you may haven't thought to ask, and then you have to do the research and figure it out. Absolutely. A question comes up at least once during every talk that I had just never thought about. But the real hook for me was walking out of a class on legal aftermath, and I heard a fellow student say, "wow, I hope I never have to shoot anyone." And I thought, "he just paid for that wisdom." He bought that wisdom and he got his money's worth. If he decides, "I never wanna shoot anyone, so my defensive practice will be limited to avoidance, deterrents, deescalation, and running fast and far," you couldn't object to that.

Because he found that he was not able to bear the burden of a decision that he thought he had made. Right. And that's education, that's how it works. Where can people go, where can people look, whether it's a specific source or just a bigger picture concept, where do people go to learn more about this stuff and become more informed? It's an emerging field, but there are some courses being taught in the interstitial spots, the gray areas, if you will.

Craig Douglas teaches a course called Managing Unknown Contacts that forces you to go through verbalization skills, pre-fight physical skills, in-fight physical skills, and in and out, and with the role play, allows people to present each other multiple modes of being that stress them out in ways that traditional training doesn't, you know, putting on gear and banging. But even with individual, or let's say small group training, if you play through scenarios, this simple scenario: a mugging scenario, but where the mugger on some occasions does and doesn't actually mug the good guy in training. Just appears to. It stresses the role players, and they don't know how to respond. It's a mugging scenario, I was gonna wait for the move and I was gonna go to guns.

But by introducing uncertainty about what's going to happen, you make it much more real for the student. The student doesn't know what's going to happen, just like in the real world, and has to manage the unknown in that context. Right. And so scenario training, then, especially I'm a big fan of scripted role players and very highly choreographed scenario training from the instructor side, so that the student doesn't know what's gonna happen. Exactly.

You push them into those decision making and reaction and recognition and response processes. Because in that role, you can alter the inputs. And a lot of times in a class, if you hand me a sims gun and put a mask on me, I determine it to be a shooting problem, and then you present me with a scenario where the win is not to shoot. To disengage verbally, or to give the person a dollar and have them go away. You've broken a rigid mold where every problem is a gun problem.

Yeah. And Ken Murray in his approach to, especially law enforcement training, talks about how all the solutions should be there in a good scenario, which are talk, run, fight, or shoot. Absolutely, sure. Fight meaning hands on. For a law enforcement officer, obviously the run is gonna be less often an option.

But for personal defense, if your scenarios only include shooting, that's called paintball. I couldn't agree more. When someone leaves this body of work, they have this in their head, they go about their daily lives, what do you hope is the biggest change for them? That they're thinking about some things that they thought they were through thinking about. Many times people have reached a decision, but it wasn't actually a decision.

They didn't actually lay out pros and cons. The first most satisfying response was the one chosen. And you have to think it all the way through to the ground to really decide, "is this, in its full value, going to be my posture going forward?" Well, that's a great outcome, that would be a great takeaway, I hope you do get some things to think about, maybe some things you did already think that you had thought about enough, and now you're gonna spend some more time with. William, thank you very much for going over the 5 W's with us, I think it's a great perspective and an important one for you to think about in your preparation for personal defense.