I  was running a martial arts session with a group of schoolgirls recently and we were addressing the idea of self defence as part of our lesson.  I asked them whether they’d had any previous self defence training.

The general response was that they were shown a lot of techniques that they probably wouldn’t be able to remember.

And therein lies the problem when teaching “self defence”: Too much focus on technique.

Self defence is not about learning techniques. Self defence is about learning a mindset. More precisely, self defence is about learning to deal with confrontation.

If you’re going to begin to teach self defence to anyone, you need to cover the following topics:

Awareness

Is this person, place or situation dangerous?  How long would it take me to get from here to a safe place?  Is there anything that makes me appear vulnerable to a potential attacker?  Am I tired, injured or scared? Am I under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and if so, to what extend does that impair my ability to defend myself?

Dialogue

Every day, each new piece of information your brain encounters causes you to poses two questions to yourself:  “What does this mean?” and “What should I do?”.Unless you habitually moderate your self-talk, you’ll be unable to understand HOW you feel in response to a threatening situation.  If you don’t understand how your mental processes work, you have no hope of changing them.

(This is built on the skill of developed awareness).

FEAR

Many will tell you that “fear” stands for “False Evidence Appearing Real“.

Others will tell you that it really stands for “Fuck Everything And Run“.

People respond differently when facing fear.  It’s useful to be aware that it’s a perfectly natural response to threat.  It’s also useful to be able to process it effectively (dialogue) and move on.  Fear can completely paralyse you.  Make no mistake.  Learning to move beyond the sudden dump of adrenaline and act effectively is important.

More importantly, it’s important to decide, quickly, which way to interpret your fear and take action.  If it is false evidence, by all means move on to technique selection.  If not, fuck everything and run.  Fast.  Being brave and dead isn’t valuable to anyone.

Technique

First: learn to deal with realistic attacks.  This is not the simulated, slow-motion attacks you’ll find in most self defence classes.  If you can, train with someone who scares you a little.

Second: face up to some healthy doses of your own fear.  Go skydiving.  Try bungee jumping, or enter a full-contact sparring match.

Technique training should be about developing the above skills FIRST.  You’ll notice we haven’t addressed “how to stop a 6 foot hairy guy from stealing your wallet” yet.

Once you’ve worked on techniques that address your awareness, your internal dialogue and your fear – Then (and only then) can you begin to think about adding actual self offence techniques to your arsenal.

Remember – the best self defence technique you can have in your arsenal is an alert mind.

Master that, and you won’t find yourself in  99% of the dangerous situations that “regular” people stumble into.

The other 1%…  Well, that’s where martial arts may come in handy.

“It aint about how hard you hit,” says Rocky. “it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”.

As a martial arts instructor, this is what I’m looking for: Someone who can learn to take the “hits” and keep coming back for more.

Do you put yourself through the gruelling 4-hour grading process? Do you willingly submit to year after year of bruises, breaks, blood, sweat and tears? And once you’ve done that, do you continue to look for harder and harder ways to test yourself?

Martial arts aren’t about learning to fight. The Rocky movies aren’t really about boxing, either…

This is an unfortunate situation for poor Johnny, to be sure. While not life-threatening, Johnny’s condition certainly makes it challenging for him to go about his regular daily routine.

There is good news for Johnny, though. Recent medical advances mean that with the right medication (and a little time) his condition will improve.  Once his current bout of AVR has been treated he can once again be safely considered “in remission”.

Unfortunately for Johnny, the statistics say that his odds of relapse are very high.

While Johnny is in remission, though, he’s a completely different person.  You’d never be able to tell that he was ever as miserable or as dysfunctional as he when he’s suffering the effects of his condition.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are plenty of people who suffer from acute viral rhinopharyngitis – better known as the common cold.

How many of people do you know, though, who like refer to themselves as “viral pharyngitics”, “AVPs” or “cold sufferers”?

You are not your diagnosis. You are far, far more than any diagnosis of mood disorder or schizophrenia.  You’re not defined by your condition (unless you choose to be).

Great communication.

Not the startling revelation you were hoping for?  Ok, stick with me.

I spend time working with young people with mental health issues, and I think it’s important to understand just what it might be like to actually be a teenager with a mental health challenge.

Now there’s a couple of approaches you could take here.  Go ahead and find a young person in that situation, if you like, and say this:

“Hello there young person.  I’m adult and I want to understand you.  Please describe for me what it feels like to have Bipolar disorder“.

Then sit back and put on a thoughtful, caring  and understanding expression.  You can even pull out your clipboard and pen if you like, and prepare to take notes.

Maybe you can imagine the probable outcome of that conversation.

Or you could go to YouTube and you might find something like this:

Now stop for a moment, and ask yourself this:  Have you ever felt frustrated with teenagers who seemed unable to communicate?  Have you thrown your hands up in frustration wishing that a certain young person would just open up to you, and “let you in”?

Would you consider the person who made that particular video incapable of communicating clearly and effectively?

So here’s my question:

If I’m attempting to communicate with you right now, who is responsible for making sure that my communication is understood correctly?

I ask this question of young people a lot, and do you know what the most common response I get is?  It turns out that most people (adults included) have never stopped to think about it. Now, that should be a revelation in itself.

If you are trying to get a message across and you’re not sure who has to do the work of creating the correct meaning, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Another common answer to the question is also “Well, I guess it’s 50-50″.  In other words, I create half the meaning, and the rest is up to you, the receiver of my communication, to make of it what you will.

Others will tell you that it’s 100% the other person’s job to assemble the communication, make sense of it, and respond.  Have you ever met someone who says something like this:

“I like to speak my mind and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem!”?

Look at it like this:

Imagine, if you will, that you had a hundred thousand dollars in cash.  You can’t make it to the bank (let’s say for the sake of argument that you have a broken leg), but you don’t like the idea of having that much cash sitting around.  You have a teenage son, and you figure that he might be able to take that money and put it in the bank for you.

You figure if you can deposit that hundred thousand and let it sit in a term deposit, at some point in the future the value of that money will have grown.  The magic of compound interest is a wonderful thing.  Maybe it will have generated enough interest for you to be able to purchase your son a new computer, or something else he’ll find useful in his own life.

Of course, he’s a teenager and it’s natural for you to be worried that he wouldn’t understand how to set up a term deposit, or that he’d be careless with the money, maybe lose a bit on the way to the bank, or spend some of it on stuff he wants instead.

Would you want to make sure, in that case, that your communication to your son was as clearly understood as possible?  You probably would.  In fact you’d probably take great pains to make sure that he understood every single thing about that transaction.  If he messed it up, after all, there’s a chance that hundred thousand dollars of yours could become much  less valuable.  Not only would there be no interest, but there might even be built up resentment about the loss of value, due to carelessness of your son!

It’s up to you, folks.

In order to communicate effectively and clearly with young people (none of this applies to any other sort of communication, of course!) you need to take full responsibility for the communication.  You can’t “hope” they understand.  It’s your job as an excellent communicator to ensure that your message is received and understood just as you require it to be.

There’s no doubting it exists. I’m sure that you can think of plenty of examples of it from your own experience.

When I was in High School I was regularly described as a “problem student”. Whether that was because I was a pathologically troublesome teenager or because I was simply bored and frustrated with the education system, I’m not sure.

I am sure that I heard the canned speech about the impact of peer group pressure on my behavior more times than I care to recall.

I mixed in some rather interesting social circles during that period of my life, to be sure. Much to my parents’ exasperation I regularly chose to associate with the smokers, the long-haired, heavy metal loving kids, the academically challenged and the general misfits of the school.

As a result, I found myself in a lot of situations and participating in a lot of activities that were at best dangerous, at worst illegal and perhaps (in some cases) even potentially lethal.

Now my point is this: It’s pretty clear that if I had chosen instead to hang out with the “goody-two-shoes” kids, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time in the Principal’s office or in detention. The peer group was undoubtedly a catalyst. But by calling by behavior a result of the influence of “peer group pressure” I think we’re kidding ourselves:

• We’re kidding ourselves that the inclination to go along with what our friends are doing is a conscious process. Especially as an adolescent where concepts as “identity” and “maturity” are being constantly redefined on a daily basis.
• We’re kidding ourselves that by pointing out that kids are doing what they are doing because of peer group pressure will actually cause them to have a “lightbulb moment” about it, and be instantly capable of switching off that unwanted behavior.

Peer group pressure is social proof.

Social Proof, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon whereby, when faced with uncertainty about required behavior, an individual looks for consistent patterns in the behavior of people around them and models their behavior on that.

There’s volumes of evidence on this (go check Wikipedia if you’re interested.)

If you’re attempting to influence a young person, talking to them about “Peer group pressure” is probably counter-productive. It’s like talking to them about gravity: Would you expect someone, having realised the effect of gravity, to be able to unshackle themselves from it and fly?

Social Proof is a human characteristic. It’s a survival mechanism. You don’t want to be the antelope running toward the lion when the rest of the herd is running the opposite direction.

I don’t like labeling it “Peer Group Pressure” for a few reasons:

• Firstly it carries the suggestion that the peer group conspires to influence an individual toward unwanted behavior.
• Second it carries a negative connotation. You never hear teenagers who work together to achieve positive results referred to as having done so “under the influence of peer group pressure”.
• Finally it neglects other, broader influences on the child’s behavior: Social conditioning, environmental concerns and parental, cultural and gender conditioning.

Behavior is not created in a vacuum.

If you’re attempting to influence a teenager (or indeed any person) to change the way they behave, you need to consider the entire spectrum of possible influences on that behavior.

Telling kids that they behave in an inappropriate way simply because they associate themselves with the “wrong” people does everyone a disservice.

• It teaches young people that people they like may be fundamentally “bad”, bringing into question their moral compass.
• It teaches young people who fail to counter the effects of social proof (an instinctive trait common to all humans) that they may just be failures.
• It teaches young people that they be incapable of thinking for themselves, that they are stimulus-response animals at the mercy of external pressures.

The phenomenon exists. No doubt about it. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to influence someone, you’re going to need to look deeper than a blanket diagnosis of “peer group pressure” if you want to be able to influence them in an effective way.

Please remember that our focus is here is only a very small subset of the community.  When we get to discussing the numbers,  remember the narrow focus, despite the large volume of people we’ll end up describing. More importantly, remember that these are just those who are affected by only one type of psychiatric disturbance.

The prevalence of Borderline Personality Disorder in the general community is estimated to be between 2 and 5 percent. ^[1]

How about this: Its prevalence is highest amongst people in their mid to late teens.^[1] In other words, school-aged children.

In Victoria in 2007 there were a total of 379,187 kids enrolled in secondary school education; 66,710 students enrolled in year 9 alone. ^[2] (Year 9 is primarily made up of students aged in their “mid” teens.)

In the same year there were 565 schools in Victoria offering secondary education ^[2], putting the average number of year 9 students per school at a little over 118 kids.   The average number of secondary students per school comes in at 671.

What does that mean?  It means that, statistically:

1. In year 9 alone there were over thirteen hundred kids suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder in Victoria.  That’s an entire 6-carriage Connex train jam-packed to capacity (not just seated) with schoolkids.Think about that next time you see an overcrowded train pull into the station in the peak hour rush.  (Remember, this number is just kids in one year level, in Victoria.)
2. Not only that, there are at least two kids in every year 9 level in every school in the state with the disorder.
3. Each secondary school in the state of Victoria has 13 kids with the disorder.
4. There were at least 7,583 kids of secondary school age with the disorder in Victoria alone.

Obviously that’s just a statistical average that bears no concept to reality, so let me give you some reality:

These are your kids.  If they’re not your kids, they’re your kids’ friends.  People that spend time in the same educational environment as your children on a daily basis. And they’re hurting, mentally and physically. They may even be suicidal.

My point is, people with this disorder may not be visible to you. If they’re self-harming the scars are usually covered with long sleeves or otherwise disguised, but they’re there.  Over seven and a half thousand kids in Victoria alone in 2007.

If you’re watching the Australian Open Tennis finals, that’s more than half a capacity crowd at Rod Laver Arena.

How much time did your school spend educating kids on how to deal with their demons?

How well are your kids equipped to cope with their own mental health challenges?  Did you even know what Borderline Personality Disorder was before you followed the link to the Wikipedia article?

Mental health awareness is about more than educating the public on statistics.

I’ve worked with a number of kids who were diagnosed with this disorder.  I can say with certainty that most kids (hell, most adults) have no concept of how to manage their mental well-being effectively.

There needs to be greater emphasis placed on teaching life skills and coping skills in our education system.  It’s no exaggeration to say that you kids’ lives may one day depend on it.