Session 11: Orienting Toward the Threat

The second one that we're gonna talk about is, orienting towards the stimulus which in our fight mode, we need to remember comes from the threat. But technically the natural reaction is the orientation towards the stimulus, towards the sound, towards the pressure, the contact, towards the motion. That's the natural reaction. Now in the case where we're, observing the stimulus of a threat we're orienting towards the threat but that's incidental. 'Cause remember walking down the hallway that person comes around the corner, doesn't matter if they hit us, if they are hugging us or if they're just oblivious to us our reaction is the same. So we lower our center of gravity and we orient towards that stimulus, regardless of its intent. In the case of a fight mode, we're orienting towards the threat. Survival positive. Well, I'm focused on the threat, I'm gathering more information. Visual information is incredibly important to our survival system. That's how we learn and gather information. So boom, I look at the threat, and if nothing else I learned to recognize, I take that information in so that I can recognize what to do next in the perfect world or I can make something up, I can improvise something. I can determine is it a friend or a foe? Is it something I need to fight or something I need to run away from, or something I need to hug. What is it? So that's the survival positive. And this also by the way there's a subtlety here to where this is something you can see in the surveillance cameras very easily. But somebody in a mall put loud noise over there they orient towards it. This may happen but they're gonna very quickly orient towards that threat, that's natural. The head lower center of gravity the hands come up towards the sound, there might be a turning away depending on how loud it is, because that's a proximity issue, but very quickly there's gonna be an orientation as a natural reaction. So that's the physiology. That we turn towards the threat, we wanna get our eyes on this stimulus. So our eyes are moved by our head and our body tends to follow. So we orient physically towards the stimulus but we have to remember that subtly, this is also an internal natural reaction in some ways, 'cause what we can't see on the video is our mental focus. Remember what I said, if we're thinking about chocolate or vanilla stand in the ice cream shop and the bad guy comes in and shoots the clerk, we don't say chocolate I want chocolate. We stopped thinking about ice cream. We are oriented on the threat, we are focused on the threat. The effect on our training Very simple, very straightforward. So we are going to train ourselves, to remain oriented and focused on the threat whenever possible. We're not gonna turn our body away on purpose, we're not going to think that we would look away on purpose even if it means for example, we're shooting to focus on the front sight, unless we need to, whenever we can we are gonna train to be able to defend ourselves while don't we remain focused on the threat. We're not gonna rely on visual information, about things other than the threat when we don't need to. That's another effect on training. We're not going to assume that we are cognitively processing other issues that aren't dealing immediately with that threat, that we're trying to stop because we are focused on the threat physically and mentally. We are oriented towards that threat and the stimulus that they're giving us. Okay.