Keep It Simple

To survive a self-defense confrontation, you must be the one who controls the action; you must become the attacker so that your potential attacker has to defend him or herself. Once an attack occurs, it is too late for you to act, the best you may do then is react and defend. If you wait until an attack is imminent before you act, you may misjudge when the attack might occur and not act soon enough, which means you are again the defender. The time to act is when you determine an attack is inevitable. Then you must take actions that are simple and easy to perform.

By being the first to act, you take the upper hand and make the attacker into a defender. When a person is defending, attacking is not on his or her mind.

Once you decide to act, your goals should be to:

• Strike first
• Work the angles
• Keep your balance and keep the attacker off-balance
• Eliminate the attacker’s threat
• Escape

The ideal situation is for you to make the first strike, however, if the attacker makes the first strike, you should step forward and to the side while defending the attack and making your own devastating counterattack. Do not stand in front of an attacker, always work the angles to keep the attacker off-balance so he or she cannot prepare for, and execute effective attacks.

To defend yourself effectively, you do not need years of training in the martial arts and you do not need to be a big, tough, aggressive person. You only need are a few simple, but effective, techniques, and you must have the will to use them ruthlessly.