Action Triggers
We can all stand in front of the bag and deliver kicks and strikes that would knock an elephant over. We can probably deliver them with speed and even without telegraphing them. We feel massively confident about our skill at targeting and can put combinations together that would confuse a chess grand master.
Yet, put some spitting, swearing, massively violent, angry man in front of us, at the same distance as we were working on the bag, and, all of a sudden, we are at 180 degrees to our confidence about our capabilities. It was 1970 when it dawned on me, as I started working as a doorman in Manchester, that what I had done a million times or so, suddenly wouldn’t come out when I wanted it to. It’s a bit like lying in bed, half asleep and needing to go to the toilet. You send a signal down to your legs to move, but they don’t obey. Signals to your arms to move the bedclothes off your body go unanswered and often it’s sheer desperation that makes us get out of bed and, probably sheer desperation that forces us to deal with the angry man, but often that desperation can come too late.
When I’m teaching, I use an analogy to explain what happens to us when we know we need to move to action, when faced with the potential for violence and serious harm. I choose a line on the floor, usually a painted one if I’m in a gym and stand on one side an ask everyone to watch carefully in case they miss anything and then with a suitable, tension-building pause, I step over the line. I step back and ask if anyone saw it and offer to repeat it if Sergeants and Inspectors miss the technique if it’s a police audience, or similarly black belts if it’s a martial arts audience. I step over the line again and then ask how complex or difficult the action was.
I now change the scenario and say that now this isn’t a line on a gym floor, but the edge of a parapet with a 1,000 feet drop below. I’ve got my toes on the edge and have one very thin, elasticated rope tied to only one ankle and I’m expected to bungee jump off the parapet. Now, and this would definitely be me in reality, I rock backwards and forwards, look tense, have arms out for balance, and allow no-one to come near me whilst I now try to ‘psyche’ myself up to take that step into the unknown. I then start the mind games with myself, for example, that I’ll go when the big hand of my watch reaches twelve, then it does and I still don’t go and have to think of something else to force me off. Eventually, (and this would definitely be the case with me and heights), I can’t take that step to get off the parapet. And yet, how physically difficult was the action needed, no more difficult than simply stepping over the line on the gym floor, but now it’s practically impossible to do it. What changes? Its one thing and its very simple, and its covered in the word – ‘consequences’. We’re standing on the edge of the drop, weighing up all the consequences of our forthcoming actions, death not being the last of them!
Because of the stress, we will have been inundated with a range of ‘emergency hormones’ and we can feel the sensation of them and its not al all pleasant. We are suddenly highly stressed, highly aroused and endeavouring to do the one thing that psychologists tell us we are particularly bad at under stress – and that is to make a decision. In fact, psychologists say that one of our first faculties to fail under extreme stress is our decision-making powers. Second, we can only make a decision about anything when it’s based on information, good or bad, which we would normally put on a pair of scales and weigh so as to decide how to act.
The parallel with the bungee jump is the angry man. When in front of the angry man, what did we have to do? Well, if the situation so demanded and you believe your actions to be reasonable in the circumstances, you can pre-emptively strike, just as you have been doing time and again on the bag, but now its like that step over the parapet, you want to do it, you can do it, it will work if you do it, but you can’t. As I said earlier, we can summarise it as consequences and these may be such issues as, injury (ours or theirs), ineffective technique (which may only serve to annoy him further), the Law (a possible prosecution), public perception, inappropriate choice of technique and if you are a police officer, discipline and complaints. Add to all this the feelings of distress created by the hormonal release, which may cause us to have muscle twitching, drying mouth, pounding heart, churning stomach, feelings of denial, weak legs and a whole range of other psychological problems.
We stand there frozen into inability, with our mental scales weighing the pros and cons of our actions. Now though, unlike the bungee jump, you can’t step back from the brink when you’re facing someone who you know, instinctively or through experience and the warning and danger signs, will attack. This was where I was when I first started on the doors and what confused matters even more was the range of options (techniques) I had.
What was required was something that took away the decision-making process at the time of greatest stress. Don’t think I’m saying that no decision-making has happened, it has, its just that it has happened sooner and that should be before some monster is spitting swear words at you or issuing threats only inches away. What I realized I needed thirty years ago was an ‘action trigger’ i.e. something that would work for me with no more mental difficulty involved than turning on a light switch. Always a student of psychology, I realized the answer lay in what is known as ‘classical conditioning’ or by its other name ‘Pavolvian conditioning’ and in simple terms it is about associating some conditioned response to an outside stimulus, which through repetition takes on an automatic and instant quality.
What I put together was a word associated with a strike and the way I built it into an automatic response was to stand in front of my old six fee punch bag and talk to it. This is not recommended in more public establishments, but as mine was in the garage at the time, it caused no problems. The scenario in front of the bag was a conversation with the angry man who was about to attack and during a sentence I brought in the chosen word, at which point the strike takes place. If it’s repeated hundreds of times, it becomes a ‘conditioned response’ and you have your ‘action trigger’.
Another situation is using Cooper’s Colour Codes or a variation on a theme. A very simple ‘heads up display’ that you visualize off to one side based on a traffic light is equally as good, and I’ve used both. At some point I’ll write more on the use of colour codes, but suffice to say that these are only two examples of my own action triggers. Geoff Thompson always used the question, whilst someone else I know got the person they were facing to repeat something they’d said and strike when he’d got to a particular word.
Just before I finish, I’ll repeat what I said earlier and that’s that you are pre-empting an imminent attack, which you have assessed from various signs and signals is about to take place and that you hold an honest belief that your pre-emptive actions are necessary, reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances. If all that is met, you are acting within the Law and should not allow the assailant to get the first blow in. If in doubt, refer to a case precedent Beckford v The Queen. If you look at certain words I’ve underlined in this paragraph, these will give you all you need for your decision-making.
Peter Consterdine