Internal Battles

Its not easy to for me to write this kind of stuff.
Inbuilt in me is a need to record some of my thoughts on martial arts/self defence, and to share them. Unfortunately the very act of formulating all this material, in order to put it into words tends to become so long-winded that the thought has then passed on, morphed into something else or been discarded for more pertinent information. Perhaps the act of writing is a good exercise, a way of stretching my communication skills by describing a coherant shape to things that were unformed.

Another part of the difficulty that I battle with whilst writing is to do with the martial arts/self-defence topic itself. This content is very sensitive because of the simple fact that I don't want to spread any mis-information. If I'm going to write anything down on this subject I want to be as sure as I can be that its fact, or at least workable and practical. Its one thing to teach martial arts as a means of attaining fitness, since this is relatively easy to achieve if you're leaping about room for an hour trying not to get hit by someone. Its a totally different animal to teach someone to become more aware of their surroundings, and equip them with a means of coping better with violence should they encounter it.

I know in my heart-of-hearts that some of the material I can offer is worthy of reading by the right audience. Its sometimes difficult to acknowledge or have confidence in this though, because the standard of information and the quality of delivery from some of my sources is so solid.
That may seem like a pair of contradictory statements, but look at it this way; There's no point in me regurgitating information straight from the likes of Iain Abernethy and Rory Miller, they deliver it far more succintly than I ever will - you're better going straight to the source. That means in order to have something to say I need to add value to the debate, and quite honestly thats a tall order.

I guess Sgt. Miller has said this already though in a far more succint way:

"I’ve put as much personal experience into my teaching and writing as I can, along with advice from people I know and trust to be experienced. I also quote or paraphrase researchers (many of whom have never bled or spilled blood in either fear or anger) when the research sounds right. Take my advice for what it is worth. Use what you can use. Discard anything that doesn’t make sense. Test everything."