The next question is how to build that indignation if it doesn’t come naturally.

Know What You Would Live, Die and Fight For

A question I get all the time goes something like this: “I can do the techniques, but I don’t believe I could ever really hurt someone.” The answer is the same every time. Take this idea away and, in your own quiet time, contemplate loss.

Start by looking at your life and asking two questions.

• What do I want to live for? My children, my partner, my friends, my family, my life. The things I love.
• What would I be prepared to die for? To protect them, and to protect myself.

Would you die over a parking space? Over someone pushing in front of you in a queue? No. Don’t engage in violence over trivial things.

But if a threat could take you from those you love, fight until there is nothing left to fight about. For the things you love, you would be willing to die, and willing to kill.

Your compass: internal and external boundaries

These are your values. You have to understand why you would do something. You need a compass with both external and internal boundaries.

• External boundaries: I don’t want to break the law. I don’t want to go to prison.
• Internal boundaries: I won’t fight for ego. I won’t fight over a place in a queue. But I will fight to protect those I love, and myself.

Now apply it. Say you’re in a train station and someone steps out with a knife and robs you. You hand over your money, but it isn’t enough; they want more. There’s now a good chance you’ll end up in a struggle, and they could kill you, on purpose or by accident. In a situation like that, you could die. You have to decide, right now, what you’d live for and what you’d die for.

By the numbers: Australian police recorded 10,591 victims of robbery in 2025, including 2,012 in New South Wales. Most people will never face this, but it is a real risk, not a hypothetical one.

I know that firsthand: I was robbed myself when I was younger, growing up in Bankstown. (ABS, Recorded Crime – Victims 2025)

Adrenaline, the Freeze and the Reality Gap

Picture two men jumping out at you in an alley. It’s unfamiliar. The first thing to hit your body is a massive dump of adrenaline, like nothing you’ve felt before. You won’t be thinking clearly, and if you’re not careful, you will freeze.

If you freeze, you’ll be attacked without responding, and the result could be your death. People die in street robberies all the time. And the reason is often that the first feeling was fear. You capitulated. You had that moment of realisation: this is no longer training, and there’s a real chance I could get hurt.

If you’re not used to getting hurt, that realisation often causes a mental freeze. 

You won’t be able to access your skills, and you won’t want to do anything, just in case you get hurt.

The freeze is real, and it’s involuntary. A Karolinska Institute study of 298 women seen at a Stockholm emergency clinic after sexual assault found 70% experienced significant “tonic immobility”, an involuntary paralysis under extreme fear, and 48% experienced extreme immobility.

Freezing is a biological reflex, not a character flaw. It’s also why we train: the more familiar your body is with fear and aggression, the less likely the reflex is to take over.

(PBS NewsHour on Möller et al., 2017)

Make it just another day at the office

That’s why, in training, we get very familiar with getting hit, and with adrenaline, aggression and fear. We replicate them in scenarios so often that they become just another day at the office.

It’s not exactly the same. There’s the training hall, and there’s the street, and between them is a big reality gap. The only way to close it is hard scenario simulation training: real aggression, violence and non-compliance, where there’s a chance you could get hurt or knocked down. It will never be the same as real experience, but it’s closer.

What the research says: A 1996 meta-analysis of 37 studies on stress inoculation training, the method of practising under controlled, escalating stress, found it reduced performance anxiety and state anxiety and improved performance under stress. Pressure-testing works. (Saunders et al., 1996)

Image: a scenario drill in progress: an instructor in a padded suit pressing a student against the wall, other students watching. Action shot, slight motion blur is fine.

Nothing prepares you for the event like the event

Imagine an instructor offering to take you to work the door of a rough nightclub next Saturday, with the guarantee that you’ll end up in a fight. It would be morally wrong, and there’d probably be legal issues. But it would help, because there’s no better preparation for the event than the event itself. Hence the old saying: ten seconds on the street is worth a year in the dojo.

Since you can’t (and shouldn’t) seek out that live experience, you must simulate it. Use robust, aggressive role-play and dialogue. If you’re not familiar with aggression, the first time someone is aggressive towards you, you’ll capitulate and freeze.

The Exercise: Contemplating Loss

Go back to the knife robbery. The attacker is going to stab you unless you fight. You choose not to fight because your first emotional state is fear. You’re so scared you freeze. The result: you’re stabbed, and you’re dead. Your life as you know it is finished. All your hopes, dreams, and plans are gone. Everyone who loves you has lost you.
In your own time, sit with that and walk through it step by step.

• The knock at the door. Picture a police officer knocking on your front door and telling your partner that you’ve been killed. Visualise their face. What is their first expression? How do they hurt, feel and react?
• Telling the children. Now imagine your partner telling your children that you’re gone. How do they react? How do they cry? Picture them sobbing in their sleep at night. This is loss: you’ve lost them, they’ve lost you, and you’re looking at their pain.
• A few months on. Perhaps you were the main breadwinner, the one paying the rent or the mortgage. Now you’re gone, and the bills can’t be paid. The house is lost. Your family moves somewhere smaller in a rough neighbourhood. The kids change schools, and that upheaval hurts them too.
• One year on. Your children are starting to smile and play again. They’re resilient; they’re children. They still think of you and cry, but they smile again.
• Eighteen months on. Your partner has finally moved on and met someone else. Every night they lie down next to someone who isn’t you. Think about that.

From sadness to indignation

As you visualise this, your first response will be emotional: you’ll feel sad. But that sadness quickly turns into indignation. You start to feel angry.

Now throw the picture back to the attacker in the alleyway with the knife. All of this loss is because of him. All of it happened because, when he attacked, you froze, because you were scared.

How do you feel now? Angry. And if he were in front of you now? You wouldn’t freeze.

That’s the shift. Having contemplated loss, your emotional response changes from “please don’t hurt me” to “come on.” The second one is far more useful for dealing with the problem.

Hindsight is useless

After the event, hindsight is worthless. “In hindsight I should have done this” comes too late. So don’t wait for hindsight. Think about it now. Visualise loss and notice how it makes you feel.

To be clear, this is not about blaming anyone who froze in a real attack. As the research above shows, freezing is a reflex. The point of contemplating loss now, in safety, is to give your mind a different first response to reach for if the day ever comes.

It gives you the understanding that nothing is more important than those you love and those who love you. That is the essence of life, what you live for. Above everything, that is what you’d be willing to fight for and die for, because it’s all you want to live for.

With that pre-conditioned fury in your head, any situation that even remotely threatens that loss lets you instantly access the right mental state. Not one that says “please don’t hurt me,” but one that tells the attacker you will not be taken.

Software and Hardware: Fuse the Two

So the power base for controlling adrenal stress comes down to three things:

1. Self-importance: I’m too important to lose. Too many people need me, and I need them. I must prevail.
2. Indignation: if you threaten that, I will meet you with everything I have.
3. Confidence: I’ve trained for this. If anyone is prepared to deal with violence, it’s people who train for it, like you.

If you train for this, you need the correct emotional software to back up the physical hardware. 

No amount of physical skill, no weapon, no high-calibre firearm, no shiny tactical gear is any use to you without this mentality. You have to fuse the two together.

Think of violence as a big, ugly fire. To put it out, you need a big, ugly hose.

Go Beyond Survival: Aim to Prevail

Many self-defence instructors say you’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive. But if survival is your ultimate objective and you don’t survive, you’re dead. It’s finished, and there’s nowhere left to go.

So aim beyond survival. Make the objective to win, to prevail. Nobody ever truly wins a violent encounter; there are always consequences and potential comebacks. Prevailing means the attacker is the one left on the pavement and you are the one who goes home. Do whatever it takes to make that happen.

If you don’t win, you should still survive. That gives you somewhere to go. Even if you’re beaten, be the toughest second-best they’ve ever faced. And if it truly is your time, then it’s your time. But you must have this mental component in place.

Your Homework

In your own time, take a few minutes to sit, contemplate and visualise.

Work out what’s important to you. What would you live for, die for, and kill for, if anything at all?

Find where your line is, and define it.

Once you’ve found it, think about losing it, all of it, because everything can be lost over something trivial.

Don’t fight over trivial things. Don’t fight over a parking space or a place in a queue. If it’s petty and stupid, let it go.

But if you’re a cornered animal and all you can do is fight, fight until there’s nothing left to fight about. Become the worst thing that attacker has ever met.

This is rage with reason, not red mist. Controlled, explosive aggression. Everything you have, physical, emotional and spiritual, focused into a spear and driven through the threat.

When you carry this attitude, it’s easier than you think. 

That’s what it means to approach every problem with a 10 in your head.