As I mentioned in a a previous post, I've been working on a project that includes a detailed review of Jeff Cooper's Principles of Personal Defense. Here I address his second principle, decisiveness.
Decisiveness
“When ‘the ball is opened’ -- when it becomes evident that you are faced with violent physical assault -- your life depends upon your selecting a correct course of action and carrying it through without hesitation or deviation.” (p. 13) Jeff Cooper has not left you in the dark about how foster a decisive mindset.
He says you must learn to think tactically. “By thinking tactically, we can more easily arrive at correct tactical solutions, and practice -- even theoretical practice -- tends to produce confidence in our solutions, which, in turn, makes it easier for us, and thus quicker, to reach a decision. (p. 14)
Although he does not elaborate on the concept of theoretical practice, from the context, he obviously means running mental scenarios. You think to yourself, “If someone did this, then I would do that.”
Psychologists have found that mental practice produces results almost as good as real-life training. To achieve it, however, you must visualize the scenario -- the more vividly, the better. You will also achieve better results if you see the scenario in the first person, everything happening as if you were seeing it firsthand.
In addition to what Colonel Cooper recommends, I will caution you that predators can mask their intentions. They don’t want you to know their intent until after the attack has begun. They will do their best to get you to suppress that gut-level warning telling you something is wrong.
Too often, they succeed with victims afraid of seeming impolite. You must realize that a street attack does not follow the fictional rules of a schoolyard fight where one boy draws a line in the sand with the toe of his shoe and dares the other to cross it. That’s not how it happens on the street.
When a stranger approaches, and your gut warns you, “Something is wrong,” you do not need a literal line in the sand. You can and should have in place a series of mental lines which let you know exactly how close the predator has come to making his attack. No matter how much he smiles or uses words to try to throw you off balance, as he crosses the lines, he will make his intentions plain. (I talk about drawing a verbal line HERE and HERE as well as HERE. Go HERE to see my series on Lines in the Dirt.
Other lines include the following.
The line of verbal manipulation (I cover these in my review of The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker.
The line of physical pre-contact cues (Tony Blauer discusses HERE)
The line of personal space
In each case, you must plainly tell the predator to break off his contact with you. Refusal to do so provides you with moral justification for the use of force against him. I will discuss legal justification in my review of Cooper's principle of aggressiveness.
Decisiveness
“When ‘the ball is opened’ -- when it becomes evident that you are faced with violent physical assault -- your life depends upon your selecting a correct course of action and carrying it through without hesitation or deviation.” (p. 13) Jeff Cooper has not left you in the dark about how foster a decisive mindset.
He says you must learn to think tactically. “By thinking tactically, we can more easily arrive at correct tactical solutions, and practice -- even theoretical practice -- tends to produce confidence in our solutions, which, in turn, makes it easier for us, and thus quicker, to reach a decision. (p. 14)
Although he does not elaborate on the concept of theoretical practice, from the context, he obviously means running mental scenarios. You think to yourself, “If someone did this, then I would do that.”
Psychologists have found that mental practice produces results almost as good as real-life training. To achieve it, however, you must visualize the scenario -- the more vividly, the better. You will also achieve better results if you see the scenario in the first person, everything happening as if you were seeing it firsthand.
In addition to what Colonel Cooper recommends, I will caution you that predators can mask their intentions. They don’t want you to know their intent until after the attack has begun. They will do their best to get you to suppress that gut-level warning telling you something is wrong.
Too often, they succeed with victims afraid of seeming impolite. You must realize that a street attack does not follow the fictional rules of a schoolyard fight where one boy draws a line in the sand with the toe of his shoe and dares the other to cross it. That’s not how it happens on the street.
When a stranger approaches, and your gut warns you, “Something is wrong,” you do not need a literal line in the sand. You can and should have in place a series of mental lines which let you know exactly how close the predator has come to making his attack. No matter how much he smiles or uses words to try to throw you off balance, as he crosses the lines, he will make his intentions plain. (I talk about drawing a verbal line HERE and HERE as well as HERE. Go HERE to see my series on Lines in the Dirt.
Other lines include the following.
The line of verbal manipulation (I cover these in my review of The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker.
The line of physical pre-contact cues (Tony Blauer discusses HERE)
The line of personal space
In each case, you must plainly tell the predator to break off his contact with you. Refusal to do so provides you with moral justification for the use of force against him. I will discuss legal justification in my review of Cooper's principle of aggressiveness.
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