'Be honest with yourself about what a real attack actually is: it is terrifying and violent, it is explosive, it is unpredictable, it is savage and it does not abide by any rules. Often it follows you home or it turns up at your place of work and gets really personal. If you underestimate it, real violence can shatter you. Too many people in the martial arts grossly underestimate it. I speak to folk all the time who have stayed so long is safe systems that they have sanitised reality, they have stripped away all the limb-trembling uncertainty and the depressive terror that a real fight brings, and they teach defence techniques like dance moves, as though applying them for real is a walk in the park. A walk in the park it is not...........................................All you need to do here is be brutally frank with yourself and with your art. This is the age of CCTV, we have all seen numerous real street encounter on film, or outside the pub. Be honest: how would your art and you ability fit into those scenarios?

I watched a ferocious gang fight in a pub when I was fifteen years old and a purple belt in karate and I knew, I just innately knew that my art, my ability and my preparation at that time would not survive an encounter like that. It simply would not fit into it. And because I could be honest with myself I was able to change the way I trained. I still practiced traditional martial art because I loved what it gave me, I still dabbled in the sport (even though I was not very good at it) because it offered challenge, but I separated the self defence element, I isolated it, placed it in its own box and practised it as a different art.
And self defence definitely is a different art.'
Geoff Thompson