Baby Steps

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You really do have to believe that everything requires baby steps to achieve success, expertise and proficiency in all things including martial disciplines and karate not to forget other martial practices such as European because over forty plus years of study, education, experiences and accumulated concepts, etc., it came to me that the only way, the path if you will, is baby steps. 

Sometimes we have to move quickly into certain things to achieve success especially when it involves survival associated with grave harm and death and as you can now imagine you must return to baby steps to keep that success and concept alive along with changes as things evolve. 

You might find yourself being attacked so you do what you know at the moment to survive, to stop the damage and to find safety and security until the aftermath arrives and is handled. Then, taking that experience you must return to the foundation of it all and proceed to build your skills, mentally and physically, to reach a greater understanding, level and accumulated concepts so the next time ...

As fledgling karate-ka who enter the dojo expecting to achieve confidence, especially in the self-protection arena, you need to accumulate things and this MUST be done through appropriate baby steps. You must know resist the temptations and gratifications of getting to the fun stuff. One must, as you already know, take the time, effort and steps (baby) to logically, with emotional maturity and intelligence, start to gather into a logical process of learning, understanding and applying ALL the self-protection skills and not just the technique based physical skills that are fun and used to classify the all consuming need of the status of a black belt. 

As an example, I began and trained and practiced and taught the very same stuff most still do today in the karate dojo. It took me over twenty years before the proverbial "oh shit paradigm shift hit me." Now I spend the majority of my time to learn what true and realistic self-protection...at least in most cases on a academic level cause I are an old codger and the requirements of the physical, and mental, are just too. 

Take baby steps; when you are forced to skip them make sure you return to the baby steps; when you actually achieve and recognize your dissonances and biases return to the baby steps; when you, and I hope it never happens to you, face violence of not just the criminal predator but those predators that make up the legal system and the stupidity of social reality of our modern times you get the change to return to the start to take those baby steps that will allow you to fill in the huge holes in your system when it involves self-protection defenses. 

In closing, “When you think you know; when you think you know what you really don’t know; when you think you have the skills and tools that your really don’t have…THEN…go back and begin with baby steps! BECAUSE what you don’t know, what you don’t know you don’t know will get you…KILLED or GRAVELY HARMED!: Not my words, the words of professionals who live, breath and die by them as violence professionals. Seek them out, let the knowledge and understanding they provide get in, you will NOT regret it. 

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