It had been a long time since I taught the last Lethal Ladies course. Too long. What with all the other events and classes going on, along with the move last year, our women’s self defense course got lost in the shuffle but it’s now back for good and better than ever.
Sometimes when you teach so much you forget. I certainly forgot how quickly the women learn to defend themselves and how powerful the Lethal Ladies teaching progression is.
I have taken, attended, assisted teaching and finally led my own women’s self defense courses over these almost three decades of training. Of what I saw, a few were good, most not-so-good and several were a waste of everyone’s time.
I must admit that when I first started teaching I was making the same mistake that every other martial arts teacher was making, and still making–trying to teach martial arts techniques to women who had a short time to learn and use them, usually only one day.
I consider myself lucky and infinitely grateful to have found the particular teachers–with their unique skills–that I have while dismissing the teachers who I knew couldn’t help me.
I have similar challenges as the women I teach have–I am a smaller person who needs every advantage possible to defend myself against bigger, stronger attackers. A good deal of what some teachers showed me I knew I could never pull off so I scrapped those lessons and moved on.
I told the ladies on Saturday that my job was to condense a life-time of martial arts training into 4 hours. How is that even possible? I had to travel the world to find teachers who showed me not only that we could do this, but that I could teach a group of non-martial artists to do it in a day. The results of this training still astound me.
Here’s just one difference between how Lethal Ladies learn versus how other women’s self-defense classes are taught:
The way others teach women is like trying to learn Spanish by sitting down and memorizing an entire Spanish/English textbook then trying to have a conversation with a classmate who is also just learning Spanish.
In contrast, Lethal Ladies get dropped into Mexico City with a few important lessons on Spanish and start immediately speaking to native Spanish-speakers. They are 100% immersed in the culture and scenarios where they active participate in random, one-of-a-kind interactions. (this is the same principle as the equally effective Rosetta Stone language program)
Which one do you think is going to fare better in a random, stressful encounter?
Like I said, I (their teacher) was blown away at how fast these ladies learned and applied the lessons to Full-Force, Full-Speed attacks–and prevailed.
I am so proud of these (now) Lethal Ladies that it felt like I just graduated a room full of Black Belts. It was that cool to see.
Bravo, Ladies!
P.S.
It was great to be back, and I could tell by the smiles and comments from the ladies that it was none too soon.
The next Lethal Ladies module will be held in February.