Goals Forward + Resources Backward is not a super common cognitive paradigm. This may be an evolutionary thing. How
much food does our little band of homo sapiens have? Hmmm, doesn’t look good –
time to hunt. The resource assessment determines today’s agenda, the goals. How
we shift to goals-forward is something to noodle around on and I’m super
tempted to follow that rabbit trail but it’s not why I sat down at the keyboard
this morning.
I tend to be fairly goals-forward when attacking a problem.
Or a person. Or I was when I first started training. It may be why TKD was
frustrating because the goals were about tournaments and belt progressions and
after a while, it just wasn’t a meaningful enough goal to hold me. Krav Maga was a little easier to sink my teeth into, the
goals worked for me -move in, cause damage, prevail, get out. Those
goals made it easier to get connected to the idea of rank testing and other
achievement-based benchmarks within the progressive system of a combat art.
During the early days of becoming an instructor, 99% of my
instructors were men. Big surprise. Periodically, I needed reminding that I
wasn’t 6 feet tall, 250 pounds and I wasn’t bullet proof. They weren’t wrong.
My instructors were pointing out that my attitude was fine but my tactics
sucked. You can’t be 6 feet tall when you are – ummm – NOT, no matter how much
attitude you bring to the event.
Size matters (I know…I know…jokes abound). While I
stubbornly, slowly began to acknowledge this reality another affordance snuck
in and tainted the way I thought, assessed and taught. The impact of mass
differentials in the physics of a violent encounter is a thing. What creates
the potential for a distortion in thinking, is how we relate to the terms “advantages”
and “disadvantages”. This is a resources-forward way of thinking. What do I
have? What am I lacking? How do I work with that?
A question crept in a while back, it didn’t have words to it
so I couldn’t articulate it but now there are both words and what feels like an
answer. Resources-forward as a useful
paradigm in self-defense has a limited shelf-life. Limited like buying milk the
day before it goes bad, limited.
I am guilty of teaching this way. The size comparative of
person A and person B may be immutable. The goal
is dynamic and it is the goal that dictates the strategy and the ensuing
tactics. This is a painfully obvious statement.
It’s a useful statement though, perhaps. As I dig deeper
into developing #500, my first steps are in researching mindsets, instructional
approaches, the good/bad/ugly of women’s self-defense and in this research am
finding an unfortunate little fallacy that crept in to my own affordances over
the years. Size is a disadvantage from which to compensate.
Or not.
Size is a factor. But if it’s one piece of a larger
equation, whether it’s an X or an A in: a+b=x doesn’t, by its nature, determine
whether or not it is advantageous or deleterious to the equation.
What happens if we drop this paradigm. If we stop telling
women (specifically but not exclusively) that they are at a disadvantage and
need to compensate. Size advantages/disadvantages is a resources-forward paradigm.
Goals-forward is…well…about the goal. Damaging a human body just isn’t that hard.
And resources-forward may also be one of the culprits behind
why most programs are solely focused on the worst possible situation – the physical
encounter because that is about fear. When we are counting resources in
light of potential problems, this is fear running our thinking instead of
something more useful.
