How do you prepare?

When you first learned to drive a stick shift, how did you learn? You practiced and learned how to mash the clutch, shift the stick and then let out the clutch slowly while applying the gas, right?
I'm sure you had many a jump and bump and a stalled engine too! And after a while it just became second nature and you could do it just as flawlessly as anyone else could. You learned the gross motor skills necessary to drive your car smoothly down the road.
If I gave you statistics that showed that one in 100 women will be the victim of a car accident due to the inability to properly drive a stick-shift, what would you do? YOU WOULD PRACTICE YOUR ASS OFF!! You would do everything in your power to not become a statistic right?
Well the FBI has published reports that prove that 1 in 4 women WILL be the victim of some kind of violent crime, rape, sexual assault or beating in their lifetime!
So how do you prepare? Well, some women will not do anything thinking "it won't happen to me", some will take a weekend course on "women's self defense" and feel that they can handle a bigger, stronger attacker. (Remember the stick-shift? How long did it take you to get really good at that?) Some will enroll at the local dojo and learn some form of martial art, where they are going to teach you some new moves and techniques that you have never done before and hope they will work! (STICK-SHIFT? How long to get those gross motor skills refined?)
The only way to really learn and make it stick is this.....make it simple, make it real and make those gross motor skills an everyday part of your life.
When you are faced with a true violent encounter, and not the movie world kind (ones that will never happen in your life) you will go through a series of changes in you mental and physical being that will make you forget some of your basic skills, like breathing, vision, thought patterns (ever hear of tunnel vision?) if you can't remember some of these skills, how are you going to remember a complex series of movements to render a larger more determined attacker non-functional?
You need to work those gross motor skills until you can protect yourself at any time.
Take the time, make the time to learn these skills so they become part of your life, then the statistics don't matter.
Until next time.......
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