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By Root 1194 0

can save lives. I taught self-defense in New York City when I was 25, training many top executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. I remember presenting to a major oil company when the chief of security said that he thought self-defense training was a bad idea. “People will get false confidence and probably get in more trouble.” I asked him if he had any kids. He had a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old daughter. Two weeks prior to that meeting there had been a horrible situation in Queens where an 18-year-old girl was dragged onto the roof of her building, sexually abused, and then thrown off the roof to her death. I asked if he remembered the story. He did. The girl had the attacker’s skin under her fingernails, showing that she had made a gallant fight. In a life-threatening situation, you’re in one of two categories: either you have no training and you’re guessing, or you’ve had training and have very specific ideas of what you can do. I asked the executive which category he’d rather his daughters be in: trained or untrained. He said, “I see your point.”

It’s the same with any area of your business. When your employees confront any situation, they’re in one of two categories. Either you’ve addressed it and trained them and they have the information they need to deal with it, or you haven’t addressed it or trained them and they’re going to be guessing. Which category would you rather your staff be in?

Some people fear that they won’t remember things when they’re in crisis. But your brain has a crisis scan function that kicks in during those situations. When adrenaline is pumped into your system, your brain speeds up, searching for what it has available to get you through the crisis. Over the years of teaching self-defense, I heard many examples of this—where someone in a crisis would not just remember what to do, but would even remember me teaching him the move.

When I was 18 years old, I drove a car off a cliff while racing a friend on a rainy night (not a very smart move). As I was coming around a curve, the car broke from the wet ground and there was another car coming at me. I punched the gas and spun the wheel at exactly the right time to avoid crashing into the oncoming car and regain control. But the road curved again and there was no way I was going to make it. I had sped up to get out of danger and now I was going too fast. The car slid off the road and hit a lawn at 80 or 90 mph. I felt the car double its speed as it careened across a slick lawn. The car hit a tree, spun sideways around the tree, and toppled 265 feet down a cliff. An untrained body would have stiffened up with fear and broken every bone.

The only reason I’m still here is because of my karate training. As my brain signaled “crisis,” my body knew from years and years of karate practice not to tense up and resist, but to relax. I was floating around on the inside of that car. I was bouncing off the sides, the steering wheel, the roof, and before each impact, I would block my face from being hit. The car finally came to a crashing halt in the treetops. I survived that night because of training.

The point is that any kind of training can intervene in a crisis or in any situation that you want to change. Here’s another example of a situation that was not a crisis but that posed a serious challenge in my company. We have a massive radio campaign that is driving leads to our sales team. People call in response to the ad to get more information sent to them about what we do. We tell them that in order to send them the right information, we need to know a little more about their business. We ask a few questions about what they do and then we ask them what their two biggest challenges are in growing their business. In the process, if it seems appropriate, we mention that, as an alternative to just receiving information in the mail, they can sign up for one of our training programs on the Web.

We had five new salespeople who started in a single week and about five out of 10 prospects responded to that alternative offer by saying, “Well,