The Combative Mind: Situational Awareness

First up is intensity.

If I asked you to articulate what intensity is,

to describe it,

we would all have roughly the same description.

If we were to describe it as sun light

we would say it was like this very bright,

almost overwhelming,

maybe put the hand up to shield your eyes

If we were to describe it as taste

It may be very hot or very spicy.

In most cases

You just insert the word VERY

 in front of what you are describing

Something is VERY,

 it is EXTREME

Sometimes to the point where it's overwhelming.

Something that can defeat the senses.

Within combat, we most certainly do not want our senses,

our will

or our structure

to be overwhelmed.

Intensity in combat

 is the amount of force

that can be brought to bear at a single point in time.

It is the amount of focused energy

that you can bring to a fight

or that your opposition

can bring to the fight

In simple terms, it asks how much of something do you have?

If I was asking you, in a work sense, how much spare capacity do you have, I would be asking, do you have the time and resources to take on another task.

Capacity is HOW MUCH of something?

So, when you are asked the question about capacity, it is how much of something, do you have AT THAT MOMENT IN TIME?

Oftentimes, for combatives, it comes down to training.

Real violence doesn't start at zero. 

This is because violence is high explosive. It is not a slow burn. On occasion you may have a delayed run up to the starting point, there may be precursors, signals, but as soon as the contact is initiated, as soon as it is go time, it is an explosion into violence.

There is no zero.

Some people have a greater capacity for violence.

Sometimes they are better trained, sometimes they have an upbringing of violence, or have been exposed to it throughout childhood.

Maybe they are able to focus their violence more intensely.

There is a commonly held understanding that you want to try and get your training as close to the real thing as possible.

This is true but HOW we do that is always an evolving process. If you inflict too much trauma during training phase, when the real fight happens this can have a detrimental effect on performance.

Optimal training is the very best, most appropriate, activity specific training that can be done at that time, on that day.

As a combat athlete, and as training staff,  you have to know what is the most you or your team is capable of both in training and in a real deployment.

If you don’t know what you can do in training then it is impossible to know what you can achieve in a deployment or violent encounter.

This is where you establish your capacity both on a personal understanding of your capacity and the commander gets an understanding of what his team can achieve.

Injury plays a big part in this and in many respects come down accountability and personal responsibility.

Masking or hiding an injury may reduce capacity in a deployment especially is there is a endurance element or distance insertion.

An emotional limiter is different from a mental health problem or from a personality trait or even disorder.

When we look at emotional intelligence, we try to understand how someone is feeling and the impact that has on them and perhaps even how to use that, to them or to help ourselves. For training and deployment, strong feelings, either positive like happiness or euphoria, or negative like anger or sadness can be equally debilitating. Often times more so than a physical limiter.

No matter what your physical limitation is in relation to a injured knee, injured shoulder, your emotional limiter, coupled with physical injury, or resource limitation, starts to bring you rapidly down the intensity scale.

The physical and emotional disparity at the start of an incident is compounded as the fight goes on.

At the start, when the violence happens, if you are emotionally absent from it, if you are distracted, withdrawn, looking inwards when you should be looking outwards is when you are most vulnerable.

In the run up to an incident is where all the information lies. Everything that we could have or should have known about an incident. We won’t always have intelligence, signals before the event but hindsight often comes to haunt us afterwards.

When we look at the intelligence gathering capacity before an incident we look at the timeline of information.

Sometimes you have a lot of time to interpret the information, sometimes the process is very short.

That's it for this Briefing, the fundamentals of The Combative Mind. 

As questions come in, and they are suitable, I'll add a new video. 

Stay safe, by being dangerous.

Niall