Control Your Fear

Believe it or not, I consider myself a fairly fearful person … in certain areas of my life. For example, I sport a fairly strong fear of heights. (I’m also afraid that the U.S. will eventually accept “heigTH” as a valid pronunciation. Let’s hope not.)

The one area where I have overcome most fears is in the area of martial arts.

What’s more important: I remembered how I overcame each fear. Plus, with my background in education (Master’s that emphasized teaching methodology), I have been able to help students solve their fears.

A couple of years ago, I started taking notes on martial fear. I witnessed students who were afraid to:

spar
get hit in class
get hurt in a real attack
hurt someone else
accept a promotion or speak in front of a class
walk through their rough neighborhood
train with weapons
encounter someone with a knife
encounter an attacker with a gun
deal with a dog attacking
And the list continued on …

I jotted down ways to solve each martial arts fear , combined those into chapters, and arrange the chapters into a book. Add the salt and pepper of a few anecdotes from my own experiences, and I had an ebook. The ebook was so popular that I had Kerwin Benson Publishing print a few thousand copies in soft cover.

You can buy it on Amazon or through one of my websites (Control Your Fear: in either ebook or paperback formats).

I think it did me a lot of good to write this book on controlling martial arts and fighting fears. Primarily, it showed me how far I have progressed in the martial arts. (I really was a wimp when I started.)

I also saw some really cool techniques for, what I call, overtraining. In the book, I teach how to metaphorically bring a gun to a knife fight. In other words, I show you steps to eliminate fighting fear by having way more than you need to handle the situation. That does a lot to reduce any panicky feeling.

I wanted to practice all of that again.

In fact, I became so enthusiastic, that I started writing more about crushing fear. And I included those “essays” (ebooklets) as bonuses, when people ordered (order) from one of my sites.

I may be afraid of heights, but facing an attacker is like settling in to a fluffy chair to read a familiar book. Ahhh.