Questions I Wish You'd Ask pt.1: How Good Do I Need To Be?

The answer sounds simple, but it’s not.  The answer is that I can never be good enough at fighting to save my life and the lives of those I love enough to protect. 

A principle that gets talked about often in the defensive community is that I won’t know the place or the time of my defensive encounter until it begins to unfold, and in the same way, I will not be able to predict or assess the skill level of the attacker until the attack has initiated. 

Let’s make this personal. 

How fast do YOU want to be able to respond to a deadly threat on your life or the life of someone you love enough to protect?  Would you rather respond in the beginning, middle, or end of the attack?  What kind of subconscious competencies do you need to possess in order to be able to respond in the timeframe that you just thought about?

If you can identify the skills subconscious competencies that you feel the need to possess, there’s another hard question I need to ask.  When was the last time you trained, tested, and timed that skillset?  Do you have it on video so that you can analyze your skills for your own improvement?  Is there a subjective measurement to it in terms of speed, accuracy, strength, or skill?

A phrase that I picked up somewhere that I appreciate and use often is that “we are always training, but we are never trained.”  I tell my students to train to be better than yesterday, and not as good as tomorrow.  If that’s a principle that gets understood and lived in your life, then you are setting yourself on a path that will lead you in the direction that you want to be.

Lastly, I believe that the greatest motivator in all of this is love.  Who do I love enough to protect?  My first thoughts go to my wife and children. There’s plenty of other people I would choose to protect with my life, but for the sake of this writing, I’ll just keep it about my wife and kids.  I love my wife and kids SO much that I would do just about anything in order to keep them from harm.  In that same line of thinking, that also means that I will not allow anyone to take my wife’s husband from her.  I will not allow anyone to take my children’s father away from them. Love always protects. (More on that in a future article).

When assessing how good you need to be at this, spend some time thinking this through, and perhaps even write down some of your thoughts.  It’s a great question because the answers to it are deeply motivating.