The Paradox

To be proficient in self-defense one must have experience. Not just any experience but meaningful experience. The most meaningful experience a person can attain in self-defense is real-life experience. You just can't beat it, it teaches you the truest lessons and leaves the hugest impressions. Here is the rub tho ....

Most of us in self-defense, martial arts, will never, ever, never get the opportunity to acquire a large enough real-life experience in this discipline. Self-defense participants often go to this training after one incident or after reading about one incident that makes a big impression causing a knee-jerk reaction, "I just have to get some self-defense training!"

Then there is the professional. Everyone that becomes a professional, i.e. police, prison officer, military, etc., has to begin at ground zero or almost ground zero. This professional has to enter the realm of danger long before building a real-life set of experiences. This creates a paradox for both the pro and the self-defense student. You cannot afford to wait until you're in a real-life situation to learn from the mistakes you will make. 

You need to be proficient. When entering this world for the first time you have no real-life experience or it is very, very limited. This brings us to meaningful experience, i.e. those you get from other means other than real-life. You have to train and practice using real-life meaningful experiences as your foundation.

Another issue with modern self-defense is often, more often than most think, the teacher too has no real-life meaningful experience to draw from to teach. It does not mean they are not good teachers or shouldn't teach. It does mean that the foundation from which they teach must be based on someone's real-life meaningful experiences. 

It is the lessor avenues of gaining meaningful experience that will build the person's abilities to at least handle the first time real-life encounter with some ability to act, if needed. Not just acting as in applying self-defense techniques but act as in taking the appropriate steps. i.e. mental models. 

You create from meaningful real-life experiences a recognizable pattern that is a base for your action scripts. You than, through training and practice, test these action scripts through mental simulations, i.e. a form of visualizations along with reality training based on real-life meaningful experiences, to develop your mental models the intuitive mind can draw on for you to act appropriately. This will provide a holistic approach to dealing with initial real-life experiences so you have the opportunity to gain real-life experience. 

As you can read I am trying to work this out as another viewpoint or perception that one can use to make it all work when it is most needed. I suggest that we take this and other knowledge to find an appropriate way to learn self-defense. As for the professional, it is my understanding and moderate experience as a Marine that these concepts are already used well. They just may have different names, etc. for how it is done.

In the end whether you call it this or that is moot as long as what you get in the end is right, effective and gains you real-life experiences.