Impediments to Learning During Firearms Training

Rob you travel all over the country and you've been at this for a while now. I'm not saying that you're old, but you've been at this for a while now. You have thousands and thousands of students. What do you see at this point in time is the biggest limitation in terms of either teaching defensive shooting or learning defensive shooting? In terms of a student's ability to develop skill and learn what they need to learn for defensive shooting, I'll take a two-part if I can. Okay. The student that actually shows up to the range their biggest issue they have to really reaching what I think is human potential is their athleticism. I think their coordination, their ability to use their body well, their fitness level their strength, their alertness, their quickness. That's where people plateau. A certain amount of athleticism is going to be necessary to really reach the levels of human potential for efficient defense in a close quarters conflict. Outside of students that show up to the range, it's gotta be ego, and I think that's probably what keeps most students from showing up on the range and it works both ways. It's the under-confident person who says "I don't think I can do this, I wouldn't do well, I'm gonna be embarrassed, I'm gonna be frustrated, I'm gonna hold the class up, I have no familiarity with this stuff." All this negative self doubt things. And on the other side of the spectrum, of course, it's the cliched "I don't need training, I was in the military, my grandfather taught me how to shoot, I've been shooting all my life, I can handle it, look at my trophy deer, I'll be fine." It's those guys never show up to the- and mostly that's guys that never show up to the range. On the under-confident side, I think it would be really easy to try to generalize that as women and it's not. There are a lot of men. A lot of men out there who just feel completely out of their comfort zone coming into that environment. That's generic and human. I think the ego-driven overconfidence is uniquely a male issue. I'd have to agree. I typically see the over-driven ego with males who have typically sometimes taken additional different training or have some training under the belt. I see the under-ego problem sometimes with women but generally new shooters. Yes. And the younger they are, interestingly enough the more likelier they are to suffer from that problem. When people are coming to you for instruction and they're coming to you because you're well-known, let's face it you're very well-known in the industry, you're very well-known in the defensive shooting world with all the books and everything else. Do you find that tends to color their perception and affect that ego? Absolutely. There are people who have way too much ego investment in their comfort zone that they're just not gonna show up on my range. And not only because I may be perceived as an expert but probably because of the way I run my range because I teach very directly and we teach based on looking for people's failures. We wanna push people regardless of what level you're at to a level where you can improve. And a lot of the overconfident people they're not gonna show up on my range and I recognize that. That also works the other way the under-confident person, if they get to the internet and see some review where somebody said, "Well, Rob kicked my ass but I needed it and it was great," they may say, "Well, I don't want my ass kicked I'm not cool with that." And back off from training with me. The good news is we have a huge team. You teach very, very differently than I do. You're one of the best combat focus shooting instructors we've ever had in the program. And everyone has to earn that but obviously inside of that group, there's gradients and you've been incredibly successful dealing with a lot of different types of students as have I, but both in very different ways. And that's one of the things I'm proudest of when it comes to the combat focus shooting instructor team. Is that we've got a lot of different personalities to meet a lot of those different behavioral and ego needs of different students. I could see students that would never train with me flocking to your classes and students that might not want to train with you being really interested in spending time on the range with me, even though we're training exactly the same program in very different ways. So fair to say that options are the best way to get around the limitations of training? Absolutely. Great.