What is your Safety Quotient?
Level of Confidence Creates Your Safety Quotient
How is your confidence level when it comes to self-protection and your safety quotient? If you were to give it a number from 1-10, your ‘safety quotient’ would be at what level?
Knowing you can absolutely take care of yourself, should a challenging situation arise, is self-confidence because it isn’t thinking you would do this, or you would do that. Being ‘cocky’ or arrogant is not confidence either, as those are just masking fear (but that’s another story).
Your safety quotient relies on a full ‘library’ of movement
This ‘library’ works by going on auto-pilot so that your nervous system tells your body to move, or not. Muscles must be trained in order for your nervous system to give them the okie-dokie to go into safety-defense mode, since your reactions will mirror the memory they currently have programmed into them.
The current ‘untrained’ memory might not be best suited to react favorably, given that movement has to be automatic. Only you know your truth about your safety quotient. Either way, what do you rate yourself right now, from 1-10?
Repeated training will make all the difference
Why is ‘fighting’ so foreign ?
Were you lucky enough to grow up learning self-protection skills, simply by ‘play-fighting’ with your siblings, cousins, or friends? Did your caregivers teach you to ‘not talk to ‘strangers?’ Without your body knowing how to move, this does very little for your safety quotient.
Most women were taught, as girls, that fighting was just for boys, consequently, as adults, many women have no clue how to defend themselves (which is, honestly, learning how to fight…yes, I said fight).
Do you think about it?
Over the years, I have heard all these reasons:
• You don’t think you will ever be attacked
• No one has ever attacked you, therefore why think about it
• ‘Busy-ness’ takes over your life, with too many things to do
• It’s against the law for others to attack us (FYI, perps don’t care), so you think you don’t need it
• The police will help; or someone will come to the rescue (boyfriend, spouse, brother—simply because he’s a man, and they do martial arts/MMA/kickboxing)
• You’re a lover not a fighter
• Fighting is for males, and besides, it is violence
• If you don’t think about it, no one will attack you
How many other reasons hold you back?
All this thinking can set you up to say ‘it’s not for me.’ After all, there’s:
• shopping for groceries
• taking the kids to school
• board meetings
• work
• housekeeping chores
• filling out forms
• dentist appointments
• calls from kid’s school
• volunteering for the next event
• meeting friends, work trips
• vacations
• school
• homework
• special events
• taking a shower
• getting school supplies
• family celebrations
• kids homework
• date night
• doctor appointments
• lunch/dinner
• salon time
• and on and on
Or put simply, “I’m just too busy.”
Is it important to spend time leveling up your ‘safety quotient?’
Why use up your time training, if you don’t think anyone will ever attack you? The truth is we get ‘attacked’ almost daily.
Have you ever been in situations where someone said something to you, about you, or cut you off before you could finish? How did your body react? Was there a momentary ‘freeze’ because you couldn’t think of anything to say (or do).
Daily, you make choices. People come in and out of your life. Sometimes you can be left with a brief encounter in which you were unable to respond as you wanted to. This can leave you coming away feeling just a bit depleted since they got the ‘best of you,’ or they got their way (again). IOW, they took some of your power (and that is because you let them).
Think about your daily interactions with others
You truly DON’T know what you will do in any situation, trained or not. That’s simply because you can’t predict the future. Only in the moment will you know for certain. If you are caught off guard, the outcome can be anywhere from disheartening to devastating (or successful!).
What is your ‘safety quotient’ training about, and why even train?
Training is about you. In your entire world, who is the most important person? Taking care of youself first allows for the care of others from a balanced perspective. You’ll simply make better choices for everyone involved.
Given that confidence will inspire others, you’ll become an inspiration. Plus, a myriad of other good things will happen when your confidence levels rise.
Building the muscle memory that I talked about earlier requires training the body. It’s not your brain that defends you; it’s your body.
It gets its messages from the nervous system seeing that the nervous system sends messages to the brain from what your eyes perceive. Those messages immediately go to the body, and the current programming within the body.
Whatever memory is in your body will create your reactions. Just thinking about it won’t replace the old memory in your body (for most people, anyway).
Physical reactions and powerful verbal strategies require training time (for reprogramming your body). Time is necessary to integrate the new memory—time actually spent on moving thru the motions and movements. Even more time is required on learning the words to say in difficult situations. Quickly getting past the ‘stuck’ or ‘freeze’ reaction in the ‘flight-fight-freeze’ responses is critically important to bring your ‘safety quotient’ up..
Repetition is key for your safety quotient to increase
All the repetition ingrains voice commands, and this helps to create powerful muscle memory—because your body is more brilliant than your mind. Your body rules your world.
Our legs are for more than just walking
Knowing you have instantaneous reactions, builds confidence. Instantaneous reactions come from repetition. If you absolutely know you can knock out a perpetrator, this also builds confidence. Your body requires repetition. When you can control the body of another person, this builds your confidence. This too requires repetition. Is that a waste of time?
Let’s look at how else this confidence, from all the repetition, could benefit your life
• How about ‘commanding’ respect? (different from demanding)
• When you speak people actually listen
• Speaking your mind when you see a ‘wrong’
• Saying ‘no’ when you mean no, and ‘yes’ when you mean yes
• Standing up for others?
• Giving a presentation to a boardroom full of (mostly) males?
• Asking for the raise
• Letting your co-worker know s/he is a bully
• Facing up to overbearing/bullying parents?
• Being able to stand up to your own kids? (yes, this happens)
• Quitting your job
• Getting up on a stage and speaking
• Making your own choices, daily
Does any of this connect with you?
Building confidence through learning to fight is not just about physically defending yourself—it is about standing up for what you believe to be true and correct, standing in your center, and making unwavering choices. Knowing you have something to back it up creates the “badass” of your life.
Learning to defend yourself is not hard. What is hard is admitting it out loud (even to yourself), that you need some training.
I’ve never been attacked (ok, lol, in 7th grade once, this bully girl who did not like me, caught me alone and hit me once, then walked off). she never approached me again and I never encountered her again face to face (and don’t even remember if she got in trouble for it).
Yet, years later, training in self-defense became important to me in order to feel safe. At first it was fun, and then I really wanted to feel that I could defend myself (fight) when all alone. Continuing to train became a priority because of the confidence it built within my entire body. During the process, my thinking changed, and as a consequence, I continued because so that I could pass it on to others.
It’s up to you to be able to help yourself when the police, or anyone in your support system, aren’t present. You must empower your body. Children in your life need to learn skills and strategies for defending and protecting themselves too.
Wherever you are on the safety quotient spectrum, more training will be good…always. If raising your safety quotient matters, and you know that ‘someday’ you’ll get some training, my question to you is ‘how long are you willing to wait?’ Every single day is the day to commit. Start. Do it. Cultivate your #BadassCourage starting now. Be the #Badass Boss of your Life. And do it with Respect and Love.
Upcoming training: Learn more HERE.
Sincerely,
Clara E Minor
#BadassBoss of MINORSAN Self-Defense & Fitness
Master Trainer/Instructor
831-58-0900
Or Contact Me HERE