Kill or Get Killed! (NLP? Zen? Blood and Snot?)

we have a responsibility to our students and to ourselves to cut through the illusory, presupposed garbage that clouds our pursuit of martial arts skill... sometimes with a dramatic shift in perspective!

Psychology of Tenacious Resolve

tenacious (t-nshs)

adj 1: stubbornly unyielding "dogged persistence" "dour determination" "the most vocal and pertinacious of all the critics" "a mind not gifted to discover truth but tenacious to hold it"-

T.S.Eliot "men tenacious of opinion"[syn: bulldog, dogged, unyielding] 2: (of memory) having greater than average rangeFrom Latin tenx, tenc-, holding fast, from tenre, to hold. See ten- in Indo-European Roots.

re·solve (r-zlv) n.

Firmness of purpose resolution. A determination or decision a fixed purpose. A formal resolution made by a deliberative body. [Middle English resolven, to dissolve, from Old French resolver, from Latin resolvere, to untie : re-, re- + solvere, to untie see leu- in Indo-European Roots.]

What you are about to read are the state of the art techniques, tools and tactics you need to overcome all doubt and fear and take rapid offensive action.

The best defence is offence. Get inside your opponents space, keep moving forward. Your primary objective is to intimidate, confuse and overwhelm. There are some basic concepts of performance psychology and NLP that need to be covered first before you start hardwiring your neurology to reach your objective successfully.

Terminology: STATE: the combined subjective experience of the individual in the physiological, psychological, emotional spheres. That is whatever he or she is feeling and experiencing at any given point in time. The term state is much cleaner and more specific than mood or emotion because it doesn't come loaded with preconceived notions and implicitly indicates the responsibility of the individual to manage and control their own state.

ANCHOR: any distinctive trigger or association to fire off the desired state. Anchoring is the process of creating a strong neural associative conditioned response to a particular state. The anchor could be from any sensory sub modality, ideally it should be something unusual and combine several sub modalities. SUB MODALITY: The sub modalities are the sensory coding which constitutes the individuals subjective experience of internal and external reality. Simply: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. E.G.: You smell a particular type of food being cooked and it takes you right back to a certain time and place where you felt happy and relaxed. An olfactory sub modality fired of an anchor in your neurology causing you to change state and access a new state in which you feel a certain way. OR A physical confrontation is imminent, so you deliberately and consciously fire off a particular anchor which is: touching your fingers together in a certain way (kinaesthetic external), saying a particular phrase inside your mind (auditory internal), seeing a particular thing inside your mind (visual internal) and moving your body into an on guard posture (kinaesthetic external). This combination fires off a state in which you feel confident, are thinking clearly and are filled with tenacious resolve.

STATE MANAGEMENT The most important part of the whole process. Managing your state is the process of guiding and changing states from undesirable ones like confusion or stress to more desirable states like confidence and clarity. The quality of your technique and performance is directly proportional to the quality of the communication with yourself and your environment. (see ooda loop) Why should you manage your state? You want to be able to respond effectively to all types of assault? Do you want to be able to react with skill and intelligence in the pursuit of your objectives? Manage your state. If you can control and change how you feel, you can determine how you will think and act. Which is a very important point to make at this juncture. If you are reading this manual because you are a social recluse who would rather stay in your bedroom sharpening your weapons than going out and expanding your social circle, its time to manage your state. Go outside, smell the air and hear the birds sing. If you are paranoid, moody and aggressive and would like to get what you want out of life by scaring people, put this book down and invest your cash in some good counselling.

Sometimes the best defence is a smiling, confident demeanour.

In Zen Buddhist Thich Naht Hahns classic "Mindfulness and Psychotherapy" he points out:

"Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace"

If you assume the world is out to get you, you will prove yourself right. If you are genuinely happy and experiencing good states (like euphoria, clarity, confidence, generosity, humour etc) regularly you will get in to far fewer physical confrontations. You get what you train for. If you practise feeling good more than you practise feeling bad, you will feel good more than you feel bad. Whatever you want out of life- learning to manage your states is essential to your success.

People in good states make good decisions and perform well. People in bad states... don't! You must have had a training session when you were performing really well, when you were flowing from movement to movement with ease, when you were really seeing your training partner clearly and almost psychically predicting their next move.

Wouldn't it be good if you could switch that state on every time you felt a confrontation was imminent?

Richie Grannon... bio at http://www.streetfightsecrets.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleDiner.com/