Rory Miller of Chiron Training:

Here’s the way I see it.  I will assume 100% responsibility.  If I am the teacher it is 100% my responsibility to be understood.  And if I am the student, it is 100% my responsibility to understand. These percentages and the concepts of teaching and learning, the relationship of teacher to student are not exact realities. A huge amount of every interaction you have with other people is being created in your head. Humans don’t deal, almost ever, with objective reality. We ascribe meanings from our own histories, and interpretations from our own internal connections to everything we hear and everything we see. You can and do control this process. A fairly large amount of it you can control mindfully, consciously. And some you can only influence…

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Rory Miller of Chiron Training:

Some of the tenets of adult education versus childhood education are:

• In order to interest an adult, you must show the adult the value in the lesson
• You must tie in what you are teaching with what the adults already know
• You just fit the new information into the world that the adult lives in
• It is better to use the adult’s current skill and knowledge as a jump board…

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Rory Miller of Chiron Training:

Unlike police or military force training, you will use your skills alone the first time. Police and military do everything in their power to make sure that rookies don’t go into their first bad situation alone. The new officer is paired with a FTO (Field Training Officer). The infantry private is assigned to a squad with, ideally, an experienced corporal or sergeant as fire team or squad leader. A civilian will not get into his/her first violent assault with a partner who is a veteran of multiple self-defense situations. You’ll be alone.

And unlike anything else, in this unexpected problem experienced under pain, surprise and adrenaline, you will be held to a legal standard. Your decisions will be scrutinized by people who were not there, who did not feel the adrenaline or the pain. And they will question whether you needed to use force and if so whether you used too much.

These are the things that make teaching real self-defense such an incredible challenge.

Challenges and Possible Solutions

I could probably write a book about these challenges and possible solutions. (Hmmmmm…) Truth is, I don’t have answers. But I have some ideas. Here are a few.

1) Teach the way humans naturally learn…

Continue reading at YMMA…