Strategizing Your Self-Defense.

   Everyone who accepts responsibility for ensuring their personal safety and security should invest a good deal of thought about how they intend to do that.  There are a variety of elements that require serious consideration.

1. What kinds of risks are presented to you personally?  Are you involved in any high-risk activities in your professional life such as carrying quantities of money to or from a bank for your business or employer?  Is there anything going on in your personal life that might cause someone to be angry with you or hold a grudge against you?  Do the patterns of your life take you into areas that have higher incidence of criminal activity?  Are you a Super Model like me?  Could someone be stalking you?  If you had to respond affirmatively to any of the previous questions, you should be concerned about your safety and you should be making preparations to ensure it.

2.  What is your level of vulnerability?  What kind of physical condition are you in?  Do you suffer any disadvantages in your ability to see or move?  What kind of tools could/would help you overcome your disadvantages or disabilities?

3. What about your sensibilities?  What are you willing to do in order to protect yourself?  Many people don’t give much thought to how an assailant might be harmed in the process of defending yourself from him or her, but many people do.  Will your conscience allow you to incur dramatic changes to the quality of an assailant’s life?  Or does your personal ethos require you to inflict as little damage as possible on your assailant in the process of defending yourself?

4. What are you allowed to do in order to protect yourself?  You will need to do a little legal research to determine what the state and local laws you are subject to allow you to utilize for self-defense and what they prohibit you from utilizing for self-defense.  The local laws in many areas prohibit or otherwise regulate when and where certain self-defense tools can be be carried and/or used.  Not only do you need to survive the assault, but you need to survive the inevitable legal scrutiny as well.

   When you’ve answered these questions to your personal satisfaction, you are ready to begin strategizing how you intend to protect yourself.