Situational Training & The Unconscious Mind

Neuroscience tells us that our unconscious mind is our “now” mind, and our conscious mind is our “historic” one. For many people this may seem the wrong way round, but what you are thinking about in this moment, is not what is going on around you in your environment, but the words that you are reading; and as you read them you are applying, and constructing thoughts around the words – you are not actually in the moment, but your unconscious mind is; it’s the one monitoring for changes in your environment, and if they’re important enough to bring to the attention of your conscious mind, it will. Driving is a great example of your unconscious mind at work. If we had to consciously think about speeding up and slowing down, changing gears, looking in the mirrors, etc., we wouldn’t have the mental bandwidth, to plan our day, or listen to the news on the radio. In fact, it has been estimated, that if we processed everything in our environment with our conscious mind, our brains would have to be around five times larger than they are. If something in our environment changes, such as a car suddenly pulling out, our conscious mind will be alerted, and we will be shaken out of the daydream we were having. Recognizing this has significant implications for the way we train. How we train is often more important than what we train, however martial artists and self-defense practitioners are often happier to talk about the usefulness and effectiveness of techniques, rather than the appropriateness of the training methods, that are responsible for getting them to work in real-life situations. Understanding that the unconscious mind is responsible for the “now” of a situation, means that it is this that we need to train to make us decisive and quick to respond. Decisiveness is one of the most important skills we can develop, and trumps technique i.e. a sub-optimal technique that is enacted decisively, is more effective than an optimal technique that is employed with delay/hesitation, or not at all.

If you are constantly, consciously aware, you do not have good situational awareness. Your conscious mind can hold and rotate about four things in it at any one time, that means if you are actively scanning and looking around you, a threat might be the fifth thing, that you’ve missed. Your unconscious mind is able to process, and assess, much, much more information than this, but it has to know – and more importantly – have experienced (in some form) what danger looks like. It is one thing to know about an aggressor’s target glancing, scanning and synchronization of movement, as pre-violence indicators, it is another thing to have witnessed and experienced these things. The good news is, they can be created in the training environment, so that our unconscious mind has a reference point from which to work. If this is coupled with a strong emotional response, it will become better anchored in your mind. This is referred to as experiential learning and is recognized as the most effective way to educate the unconscious as to what it should be looking out for. If we only ever practice knife attacks, where our partner stands in front of us, with the knife displayed, we are not training for real life; we are training for a situation in which a person stands in front of us with the knife on show – this is not reality. If we have our partner move around, glancing at us, scanning the environment, and then move towards us, hand(s) hidden, etc., before they make the attack, we are starting to train our unconscious mind, to bring to our attention these pre-violence indicators, should we experience them in the real world. Now we might have a chance of dealing with the situation; by exiting the environment, making our would-be attacker aware that we have spotted them, and/or preparing and positioning ourselves to make a defense, and put in play a solution.

Indecision in a high stress situation, is a direct result of not having experienced that situation before. If we are to prepare ourselves for reality, we need to experience situations, not simply practice techniques. We can do this in a number of ways. One way is to do proper and full scenario-based training, that replicates all phases of a conflict, from non-conflict through to post-conflict. It is not enough to have a training partner sit in a chair, tell them that this could be a situation where they are sitting on a bench at a train station, and somebody attacks them with a knife. The “story” and all its phases have to be experienced: the attacker has to move around, act out the selecting of a target, approach them, hide their hands, possibly engage them in conversation, etc. Explaining the scenario and then practicing a technique based upon it, is not the same as “living” it, and it won’t educate your unconscious mind. Although not a replacement – because it lacks an emotional context, that even a contrived scenario has, to a degree – visualization is a great way to reinforce scenario-based training. Here, the scenario can be imagined and run through in the actual context of the situation e.g. you can imagine yourself at a train station, with crowds, sitting on a bench, when somebody picks you out as a target. As with all visualization, first imagine watching yourself as an actor, and then again, from your actual perspective as you would see it.       

If we can educate our unconscious mind – the one that operates in the now and brings important changes in our mind to our attention – we stand a much higher chance of dealing with an attack, because we will recognize what is happening sooner, than if we simply practice techniques. Practicing a technique will increase your technical competence but not your operational competence; and in the real world this is the one that matters. It should also be noted that to train effectively, your models of violence need to be accurate; it’s why I believe self-defense instructors need to have a proper understanding of what violence looks like, and can’t simply take their ideas from watching The Bourne Identity, etc. Our models need to be accurate and up-to-date, for them to be relevant. Because we don’t want to experience a situation or incident for the first time in real life, we need to experience them beforehand, so that we can recognize a situation as it develops, and not be indecisive in dealing with it.