Rory Miller's Blog, page 25

The Sacred Questions

I know that there are more, that this just scratches the surface of a way to look at the world, but I know two, and only two, of the Sacred Questions.

What is a Sacred Question?  You probably aren't ready for this, but:  life is about questions, not about answers. Not a single one of your answers will survive death.  The Sacred Questions recognize that.

The First Sacred Question is, "What is the goal here?"  If you know what you truly want, you can make it happen.  If you know what someone else wants, you have absolute control.  But the real goal is almost never the declared goal.  The part of the brain that comes up with stated goals is the exact same part of the brain that comes up with excuses for all stupid behavior.

If I know what you want separate from what you say you want and separate from what you think you want... I own you.  This is the heart of strategy.

The Second Sacred Question I learned earlier, from Tom Brown.  "What is the lesson here?"  There are no successes, no failures.  Only lessons.  And the lessons are everywhere and in everything.

Some Thoughts on Scenarios

This came up in an e-mail exchange, and I wanted to expand here.
Most stuff in real life can be avoided or de-escalated.  If you have been around 100 people today, there was at least one situation you could have escalated.  Odds are you don't even remember it because we are all constantly adapting to and manipulating the people around us.

Violence isn't a normal distribution (Bell curve).  It's a hockey stick distribution.  There is a lot of low level stuff and a very small quantity of very high intensity stuff.  That stuff is rare and high-stakes.

One of the important things in scenario training is to not make the exceptional ordinary.  I don't means in terms of just quantity.  There should be more high-end things than happen in real life... but you should avoid avoidable/preventable scenarios where the role players act exceptional.  That creates bad training artifacts on multiple levels.  In other words, if you (because of role player ego or facilitator decision to get a specific result) don't let the student disengage or de-escalate, when it would work in a real encounter, the student is conditioned not to try things that work.  And pushes them towards strategies with risks.

Going hands-on is never a guaranteed approach.  There is always a chance it will go bad.  If the guy has weapons or friends, then bad is relative, but almost certain.  It won't end well.  The only scenario that has no chance of injury and death is a scenario where no one gets touched.  No matter how good you are there is the chance, maybe a miniscule one, that this will go to a bad place.

In that hockey stick distribution (I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here) 90% of things in the world can be avoided or de-escalated. Another five percent can be handled with a shove and a shout.  3% you
must and can fight out of.  But there will always be 2% where you HAVE NO HOPE.  Wrap your brain around that, because it is a big, bitter pill for martial artists to swallow.  There is stuff that can crush you like a bug on a windshield.  Steve likes to talk about the Chinese army coming over the hill or the shotgun at twenty feet or the sniper.  But it doesn't have to be that.  Any waiter who has ever handed you a steak knife in a nice restaurant could have had you.  There are a very small percentage of criminals who will kill you after you give them your wallet (and the reason the percentage is so small is social and logical.  Maybe I'll write about that later.) and they will do so after putting you at your ease that you played it right.  There are no win scenarios.

So, training corollary #1: If you give them hopeless scenarios, they learn to give up.  It's called 'learned helplessness' and you may have seen it in bad bosses.  The ones who talk about initiative all the time but punish any they actually see.  The ones who must find something wrong or don't feel they are doing their job. And you will see it in a lot of sensei.  If you will get punished no matter what you do, your hind brain learns that doing nothing is the safest solution. Bad.  This training method conditions people to freeze.
_Talk_ about the no-win scenario, by all means.  Explain it.  It's a great place to talk about glitches and values and one of places where I advocate changing the definition of a win (from survive and escape to 'leave enough forensic evidence this guy will not get away with this)  But don't TRAIN no win scenarios.  Don't practice losing. It's not something you want to get good at.

Training corollary #2.  Remember hands on is always dangerous?  It can always go bad.  The five-year-old with the knife can get lucky and stab you... or you could both die or... 

So fighting has to happen when not fighting would be worse.  This is a game of odds and reading the situation.  If you skew the odds in training your students will go into the world with a warped sense of what the odds are.  If you teach them that the wrong things work OR teach them that the right things fail, you are sending them into the world more confidant and less capable then when you got them.
Scenario training ingrains conditioning hard and deep.  Unrealistic scenarios are unforgivable.

Go back to basics.  IScenario training is not about the scenarios.  It's not about style or system or even self-defense.  It's about the student.  Take a look at each individual.  What does he/she need?

The big tough guys?  Test their judgment.  Do they know when it is safe to intervene as a third party or when it might make things worse? Can they choose when and how to intervene at the lowest level?  Or do egos get involved and they try to win?

The little guy who is a great martial artist but has some insecurities?  Put him in a fist fight.  (I have a scenario I stole from LawDog that sets that up really well)

The student who is much better than she believes herself to be?  Throw her into the sudden stranger attack or waking up to a knife wielding intruder.  Let her see what she can do.

 Scenarios are a tool and a great way to cap and integrate previous training.  But don't fall in love with them and don't do scenarios just to do them.  First question for almost everything in life is: "What is the goal here?"

RIP

I'm late to this.

Tim Bown's book, "Leading the Way: Maximize Your Potential as a Martial Arts Instructor" is out and available on kindle.


He wrote the manuscript.  And then he died.  First day on the job with the Canadian Border Patrol (the real job, he'd completed the academy) Tim collapsed.  Dead very quickly.  Autopsy found him eaten up with cancer.

Editing it was hard.  It's a first book from a brilliant instructor.  One of the few people who ran a successful dojo without dumbing it down or selling out.  Tim could fight and he could teach and his students were good.  But it was still a first book.  And a last.  Had he been alive, the editing process would have been very different.  There would have been lots of late-night phone calls, "What did you mean here?  Double check that, US law is different.  Too much on the writing process."  And each question would have turned into a long talk.  And I would have learned.

Posthumous, the process is different-- make sure the book is all Tim.  But there is a lot of regret over the conversations (and the brawling sessions and the scenarios) we will never have.

Enough about that.  Tim was a premier trainer in scenarios, the best role-player I have ever worked with.  And this book isn't about that.  It's about running a traditional dojo (a lot about teaching kids, which is the bread-and-butter of many schools) and doing it effectively and with integrity.  He covers a lot and he covers it well.  I don't know another book on teaching MA of this quality.  And it will be his last book.  All proceeds go to his wife and daughter, who he adored.

Tune Up

Good unwind weekend.  Talk, swing swords at each other, mix it up unarmed a little, talk some more.  Got some of my internal assumptions identified and challenged.  And all bleeding (on my end) was minimal.  Someday I will learn that no matter how much fun I am having, I tend to bit my tongue when I'm smiling and get clipped.  But it's hard to imagine brawling without smiling.

Later, K said, "That's a good group.  I haven't seen people who can play at that level that safely in years.  I might even play next time."  That would be cool.  She moved away from this kind of play when the injuries started stacking up.

At the same time, I don't think anyone else would look at this group and think, "Safe."  But it is.  Everyone involved, whether because they play with swords or because it was a professional requirement, needed to be utterly precise and controlled.  Almost everyone in that room had hurt people, hurt them badly... but not by accident.

There's a friend I haven't seen in years.  Barry is one of the knife gods.  Fast, ruthless, skilled.  And it is absurdly simple to defend yourself from this very dangerous man: don't threaten his family.  That's all.  Like most dangerous good guys he is very, very dangerous in certain ways and to certain people and under certain circumstances.  And outside of those circumstances, you are safer if he is around.

This was a room full of this group.  And it was fun.  Maija is working on a manuscript on deception in dueling.  She demonstrated some and more and more I love the way her mind works. R is a blast.  I love playing with someone big, strong, skilled and ruthless.  And with the control and trust to not hurt each other (or my gimpy knee, got the 'good' knee popped sideways a few weeks ago.  MRI this morning, no results yet.)  Ivy likes playing just to play.  I think E rarely likes to just play.  We have in the past and it's fun but one of the elements of play is that it has to last a lot longer than you would let anything real last and E recognizes that as a bad habit.  So do I, but it's still fun.  Even when I bite my tongue.

Physical part, good.  But the talks were huge.  And not just with players but with spouses.  It is eerie how well our wives know and understand us.  And to be in a group where you can share some of the things that bubble up without people flinching, where you don't have to constantly navigate the minefields in other people's heads.  That's comforting.  It makes a place feel like home, or like the quiet of the desert.  My happy place.

Unnaturally Good

Building from a piece of the last post and from Neil's comment:

"Also, couldn't it be argued that this behavior is related evolutionarily to how many animal species treat the smaller and weaker of the litter ?"

Bullying.  Predation. Abuse and exploitation and even slavery...all are very, very natural things.  Ants milking aphids (or is it the other way around?).  Cats toying with mice.  The new leader of a pride of lions killing the cubs of the previous leader.  This is where we came from.  All of us.

A lot of it is very cold math.  If your tribe is starving you MUST take food or land from a neighboring tribe.  There are only three options-- 1) Refuse to take the land.  You and your children starve. None of us are the products of this choice. 2) Try to take the land and fail.  You leave no descendants.  None of us are the products of this choice. 3) Try to take the land and succeed.  We are all descended from people who made this choice.

If lion 'A' kills the previous leader's cubs and lion 'B' does not then B's cubs start out at a disadvantage. The killers win the darwin game.

And this is where people glitch.  There is an automatic assumption in our world that natural=good.  Most of what we call good is profoundly unnatural.  And it is still good.  Compassion for others outside our immediate gene pool? You will search long and hard for this in nature and if you can find an example it will be because the very oddity has drawn attention.  Natural sanitation systems?  Where is the gender equality in a pride of lions or a herd of deer or any other social mammal?

Do we have gender equality now?  Of course not.  But we have the idea. An idea not found in nature.  And we have decided it is good and many, many people are working for it.

You may or may not agree, but I like this civilization better than the natural world.  I love that I can cherish K instead of thinking of her as a commodity or a 'helpmate' or a gift from her parents to cement ties who could be traded off...

But this civilization, this concept of good, is an act of mass will.  It takes work and effort and conscious decisions every day.  Being a bully is natural.  Even the weak do it when they get the chance.  Exploiting is natural.  People do it unconsciously every day.  Seeing your impulses and choosing another course, a better way...

That is unnatural.
That is an act of will.
That is what being human is all about.

Bullying as Human Behavior

I was asked a while ago to put something together for Bullying.  It's getting a lot of press.  There are a lot of programs, and people seeking more.  I refused.  The simple fact is that the people who want those programs want a magic solution and there have only ever been two things that work in preventing bullying:

1) Not being interesting enough to be targeted in the first place or
2) Being too expensive to victimize

That's it.  Not making friends or telling jokes and definitely not complaining to a teacher, especially in an environment where the teachers can do so little.  Be invisible or make the bully pay.  And no one wants a program that advises little kids to band together and beat the bully up on the way home.

There is a lot of bullshit about why bullies are bullies.  I don't think it's complicated.  Bullies are bullies because it is fun.  The sense of power may be working on some Freudian security issues, but we don't have to look all that deep.  Expressing power is fun.  The perfect judo throw.  Center shot out of a target.  Overhearing people talk about something you've made.  Putting up a bookshelf.  Anything that affects the world is inherently fun.  Including making weak people scream.  We have to learn to get over that (a toddler doesn't automatically know that squeezing kitty is bad and if the kitty makes noises but doesn't use claws, the toddler will continue to squeeze)  and whatever needs are fulfilled, we learn to fulfill them another way.  This is maturity and growth.  But don't assume it is natural.  It is an act of will and rarely an internal act.  We are taught to be kind.

 That's a lead off.  Last month I witnessed a superb act of bullying.  It was targeted, organized and even orchestrated... and not one of the people hurting others for fun realized they were doing classic bullying.  Bullying is not just the strong targeting the weak.  The weak will bully too, if they get the chance.

Can't go into too many details here, so bear with me.
A certain organization had organized an event to talk about a community.  They had done this many times in the past, very successfully and were very well received by people in that community.

Another group of self-appointed advocates for that community demanded to know who at this event were in fact members of that community.

The organizers didn't know.  And you know what?  They couldn't know. HIPPA prevents even asking the question.

The self-appointed advocates (I think I can safely say I'm at least on the fringe of that community and I sure didn't appoint them) started a massive (for this area) e-mail and tweet campaign.  And they got what they want.  The organizers cancelled the event.

Bullying worked.  But it wasn't enough.  That one sign of weakness triggered more vitriol and demands for an apology.  And that's the thing, whether the bully is weak or strong and whether the bullying is done with messages or fists, the purpose is to hear the victim squeal.  To revel in the power of forcing the victim to obey.

And some of the scheduled participants, on their own, held an informal talk anyway.  Because they didn't like being bullied.  And you know what?  They weren't bullied.  None of the ones who stood up.  But the complaints and slurs and bullying redoubled on the ones who had given in.  Bullies hate being defied.

You get the idea.  It's easy to look around and see all the bullying behavior done by people who label themselves 'victims'.  And it works on compassionate people.  It hurts the people who are most inclined to help.  But whatever they say, whether protester or community activist or self-appointed spokesman, it is about reveling in the power to coerce others.

Much harder to look at yourself and see where you do this.  But you probably do.  It's human behavior.  It's also human behavior to grow out of it and find the thrill of power in protecting and helping.  Or so I hope.

Hi Again

Over two weeks.  That's a new record.

Lots to recap.

Upstate NY.  Good time.  The groups were small, and that was cool because it gave me more freedom to play and improvise.  The format was new.  Randy and Dave wanted four-hour chunks.  It flowed well, except I sometimes caught myself referring to an earlier block of training that some of the people hadn't attended.  And I've been teaching this a lot, with what seems like few breaks... so I would occasionally want to gloss over things.  Constant reminder to all instructors: Just because you've said something a thousand times doesn't mean your students have heard it a thousand times.

Randy was a kick.  Genuine, warm, really clever and bitingly sarcastic. Perfect companion for people watching, especially when you feel a little mean about people.  He is also a delicate flower and I had to take his man card away when he asked for a decaf pumpkin spice coffee.

Dave is solid.  Former cop, gun guy, and a thinker.  We had a long drive to talk and listen.  Good man. The students at the Rochester event were a mix.  Some had got into firearms because of age and fragility.  That's a viable option.  And think it through, for those of you who teach the hands on stuff.  At what point is it no longer safe to even practice some of what we do?  The handgun is the big equalizer.  But it takes practice and a good teacher.  It's a tool, not an answer and it shouldn't be an amulet.

I also got to spend some time (not enough) with Scott C.  An old friend (old friend kicks in at about four years, right?) and one of the best men I know.  And like a lot of the best of the best, he can't see it in himself.

Finally met Tim B in person as well.  Another excessively self-effacing good guy.  Turns out we both like the blues...
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Home is good.  I've been being a hermit to the best of my ability.  Petting dogs, fixing the goat fence and working on a second edition of "Violence: A Writer's Guide."  Should kick ass.

Scheduling for next year.  Which, BTW is now officially open.  If you didn't get the announcement e-mail and you wanted it, sorry.  If you're interested in hosting, e-mail is rory@easystreet.net.  january has stuff in Washington DC and Granada Hills CA already.  Return to the UK in February.

Fiorella's Cafe

If I did poetry worth a damn, I would have written some today.
Two long days of training-- twelve and eight hours-- with a very good group of people.  Long talks each evening with Scott and Jason.  Helped break in Brandon's new indoor shooting range.  Not yet open, but the old St. Bernard's range.  It is going to be a fantastic facility, and Brandon has big plans and a boatload of credentials to make something special.

Then, today, on his way out of town Jason dropped me off in the French Quarter.  Showed me around enough that I could keep oriented and he hit the road back home, far away.  (Thanks, J.)  So, a day to walk and explore.  The River Walk.  French Quarter.  French Market.  Beignet's for breakfast.  Jazz in the streets.  And Fiorella's cafe.

Here's the beauty of being a writer:  I can walk in a strange city until I am tired, stop someplace and order food, coffee and a drink, get out my laptop and I'm working.

Today I did my working at Fiorella's Cafe. Kayla in service.  Nice.  Knew everybody.  Talked to people passing by in trucks.  Native but with almost no accent: "My mom was a school teacher and hated the New Orleans accent," she said.  The kind of waitress who is right there if you look up, but leaves you alone when you are writing.  Awesome.  And Yvonne running the bar.  Well done.  Best dirty martini I have had and I have her recipe for a burnt martini...and I don't even usually like martinis that much.  And the fried chicken.  And the red beans and rice. There are some things I love about the deep south.

So, New Orleans.  Nice people, great food.  Going out to listen to some of the music in a few minutes (Smoky Greenwell).  Stupid tourists (one, obviously drunk was doing tarzan yells and challenging women to strip from a balcony-- "He's not from around here," Kayla apologized.  "I can tell," I said.)

The seminar.  Small group of fantastic people.  We got dirty.  We covered a lot of material.  We broke some barriers.  Scott was a fantastic host. I got to see David again (Slovenia and now NO).  Exhausting.  Wonderful.  Amazing how often those two go together.  Lot's of experience in the group.  Lot's of Katrina stories and post-Katrina stories.  Gratifying, in a way, to see the reflexive preparations that people who have been through something like Katrina make.  And sad, because more people should be ready, should be thinking, "Just in case."

It's been over a week since writing on the blog.  A lot of it is because things have been going too well.  The handful of things that might have gone bad have been avoided or de-escalated.  I have little on that score to write about.  Teaching has been going well and I have to guard against complacency there.

Part is business and travel.  Most of October was spent either in frantic activity or exhaustion.  Writing time has been spent on other stuff.  Under K's publishing company, finally put out "Horrible Stories I Told my Children" under a pseudonym.  Didn't want to use my kid's real names.  You understand. Kami did the cover and the internal illustrations.
"Horrible Stories" on Kindle
"Horrible Stories" at SmashWords

Also working on a second edition of "Violence: A Writer's Guide."

And opened the 2013 calendar.  Contact me if you want to host a seminar.

Fiction

I don't have much of a fantasy life.  Rarely daydream in the traditional sense.  My mental resting state is a half doze where images float across my mind.  Never stories, and I'm not in them.   It's almost like watching clouds change shape.

What fiction I have written so far (and may be publishing, we'll see) has almost all been written because K and her writing group challenged me to do it.

The lack of imagination hasn't always been that way.  Some aspects of early life were rough and fantasy, from fiction to detailed daydreams, were escapes.  And I had all the usual ones: superpowers, swords, spies and saving maidens in various apocalyptic worlds.

When I went to college, the transition from a homestead only one notch removed from a survivalist cell (no electricity or running water, graduating class of six-- and I was sixteen when I graduated) to a state university was intense.  So I can't say college was boring, but it didn't feel complete, either.  Lots of reading, mostly fiction.  SCA.

Always a voracious reader, I first turned away from fiction at Ft. Sam Houston during 91A school.  I was coming off of BCT (Basic Training) and BCT had been intense.  Not earth-shaking.  Basic skills and fitness were fine going in.  The use of time.  From before dawn until late was non-stop movement.  PT (Physical Training), skill development, learning.  Any spare moment was spent reading, studying the SMART manual (can't remember what it stood for) the Common Tasks manual or reading the Bible.  (I'd brought a bible because it was the one book I was sure the Drill Sergeants wouldn't confiscate-- so I have read the Bible cover to cover.  Twice.  Primary reason I'm not a Christian.)

At AIT (Medic school at Ft. Sam) I wondered if I could keep up a BCT level of intensity on my own.  There was a lot of training, PT and studying, but far more free time than in Basic.  So I decided to use the time.  First step was going to the base library and instead of just looking for a fun read, I grabbed a guide book to local plants.  Started practicing tracking again.  Discovered MWR (Don't think we called it that back then but...)

Morale Welfare and Recreation.  I went in and found out that they had a complete lapidary shop.  I'd been taught to cut and polish stones when I was 13 or 14.  Just cabochons, nothing fancy. So I got back into that.  And one of the old guys who volunteered at the place to teach soldiers taught me to cast silver.  I made K's engagement ring there.

Life got as full as I could keep it.  Nonfiction was just as entertaining, but infinitely more satisfying than fiction.  But then something else changed.  About two years into working with the Sheriff's Office, spending more waking hours with bad guys than with my own family, dealing with bad stuff and aftermath, I started to find most fiction not just unsatisfying.  Most was aggravating.  The things that authors seemed fascinated with were not the things that resonated with or bothered me.

Fiction is on my mind.  K wants me to publish some of the things I wrote when a member of her writer's group.  I'll be spending next weekend at the Oregon Science Fiction Convention.

Time for a Ramble

Wake up call at 0330 in Budapest this morning.  Maybe this morning.  I think that would have been 1830 yesterday for this time zone.  Lots of flights, but everything worked like clockwork and it looks like an early flight home... so good.  Tired.  Roughly fourteen hours by train followed by an evening in a hotel before the flights. Three new countries and passed through two more...

Atilla and Armin handled everything.  Each and every detail was handled with care and precision.  Extraordinarily good men.  Very different from each other, but very good men.  And Atilla is doing a seminar somewhere in the UK this weekend.  I'd post the details if he had sent them on.

Thursday night was a low level force class (locks, pain compliance, stuff like that) at the Lower Saxony  Police Academy.  Saturday and Sunday was the scheduled seminar.  Mostly for martial artists, but a quarter (about) of the people who showed were officers (and one I got to meet in person for the first time-- Hi Chris!) and a quarter weren't martial artists or studied only weapons.  And that made it very cool.

Even cooler was the venue that Armin scored-- The headquarters of the Highway Riders MC, Bad Wildungen.  Perfect place for a brawl.

And a perfect juxtaposition-- Thursday night wine and Italian food with one of the senior Academy trainers, an impressive man.  Great talk, great insight.  Monday morning coffee with the president of the motorcycle club and one of his road captains.  Impressive as well, in different ways.  The Prez was an old fighter, now mostly crippled up, did medieval recreation on the side (which the Germans do with an intensity) and, judging by familiar paraphernalia around the house entertained an alternate religious view.  And trained wild birds.

1991, drinking chichu with a reformed cannibal in Ecuador.
2008, drinking scotch with a general heading a foreign intelligence service.
2012, Wine with police trainers and coffee with Bikers.

And every last second of it has been fantastic.

Knee got popped on the trip.  Won't be sure how bad until I can make time to get it checked.  Something else for the 'to do' list.

Meet at Firearms Academy of Seattle tomorrow.  Help them with some research. (Read: "banging stuff out").

Orycon coming up.  Should be fun.

Gigs in upstate NY and New Orleans in November; Orlando first weekend of December.

But, most important, in a few hours home and K.