Real Training!

13 Sept 07

Operant training is always "personal."

All training is simulation. Particularly with regard to firearms, we can make training only so "real." In Western Civilization, a high level of training casualties will not be tolerated, as it is in other cultures. Any training that becomes excessively hazardous, to the point where trainees and others are seriously injured on anything more than a extremely rare basis, will be shut down immediately. None of us doubt that.

Under these restraints, and in the short amount of time we have to work with our students, how do we train them to be routinely victorious in serious fights, when most of them have never participated in any kind of physical fight and are inclined to take little of what we say seriously? Short of actually shooting at them, how do we "wake them up" and ultimately inspire them to start thinking in terms of personal victory?

It is my contention that, sometime during their training, students must attain a personal, emotional involvement/investment. That is, at some point they need to get mad! They need to get angry with themselves, with their equipment, with the challenge at hand, with me. They need to be exhausted, exasperated, and personally embarrassed by their own performance. Once they become annoyed to the point of anger, it all suddenly all becomes personal. And, once I set that emotional hook, real learning will finally start. I can touch their hearts, and my students will, at long-last, begin to benefit from what I am trying so desperately to share with them.

We trainers are only too skillful at presenting information in the abstract. In fact, many of us are accomplished showmen, cleverly, garishly acquainting student with facts. But all too often, while the circus proceeds, both we, and they, remain too emotionally removed, too content to sit back and be entertained, too accustomed to being in the bleachers rather than in the arena, too used to aspiring only to the minimum necessary to meet some arbitrary, and ridiculously low, "standard."

Accordingly, getting students out of their "comfort zone" and in the arena has to be a primary goal of anything that legitimately claims the title of " training." Students should never be led to expect a relaxing, comfortable, " fun" training session. Scant will ever accomplished thus. Until training becomes "personal," we're mostly running in place.

/John