As an American law enforcement professional, you are a special individual who has followed a higher calling, voluntarily defending the lives and property of others. You have set yourselves apart as the true warriors of our modern society.
In a perfect world, if everything went as planned, you would show up for work prepared, always performing to your true potential. Far too often, however, this is not the case.
Between the day you are hired and the one inevitable day when you face a confrontation that tests your fighting skills, a lot can happen to limit your perception, your confidence, and your ability to control your emotions and maintain concentration.
Personal Stress
After all, even though you have taken on the responsibilities of a police officer and you are highly trained, you are just human. And in being human, you are prone to all of the life issues that affect everyone else on the job. You get married, you get divorced, you face financial shortfalls, you go bankrupt, you get injured, you get sick, you burn out on the job, and all of these things can weigh on you emotionally, breed anxiety, and affect your performance in a physical confrontation.
Everybody experiences the stress of their own lives. What sets us as police officers apart from most people is that we also experience the dynamics and baggage from the lives of others. The conditions of our job stick us in the middle of other people’s problems, frequently altering and framing our attitudes and perceptions.
Law enforcement is a stressful occupation. We know this. We knew it going in. But it still takes a toll on us. The stress we experience on the job and in our personal lives can lead to long-term health problems.
Worse, it can distract us on the job and lead to our defeat in a physical confrontation with a suspect. Anxiety, both the anxiety that we carry from day to day and the anxiety we feel in a fight, must be conquered if we are going to win.
Out of Control
One of the most stressful things that we can experience on the job is a feeling that we are losing a fight with a suspect.
Why is the bad guy winning such a fight? Perhaps it’s because our training isn’t working as planned and the techniques we are using have failed to achieve the desired results. Nothing will raise your anxiety level faster than using your best move on someone in a fight and having him or her counter it.
Consider the following scenario. You arrive on the scene and, despite attempts to prepare emotionally for the intense challenges presented by the call for service, you find yourself unprepared and under attack by the bad guy.
Doubt sets in and it begins to dominate your thoughts and emotions. Attempts to control your negative thoughts aren’t working. When you try to mentally organize, you get distracted and can’t focus long enough.
The early stages of panic set in. You tighten up physically and emotionally, paying more attention to the physical symptoms of growing anxiety, magnifying your feelings of apprehension and doubt.
Anxiety is a fierce, destructive cycle. And it’s hard to pull out of the spiral once it’s begun. Worse, the longer this cycle is allowed to last, the greater the likelihood that you will make a mistake that could be tragic.
The thoughts you experience during combat are heavily influenced by your concept of and attitude toward both your opponent force and yourself. This collection of attitudes, opinions, and feelings helps determine the emotions we feel during the conflict.
The emotions we allow ourselves to feel in any situation and how we respond to them will depend on four prime factors: our individual personality, our level of control over our emotions, how we react to our emotions, and our level of emotional flexibility.
Generally, the individual who allows himself to be consumed with negative thoughts and emotions will have a marked decline in performance over an individual who maintains positive control over those emotions. The difference between negative and positive thoughts and emotions is heavily influenced by our individual self-concept or how we feel or believe in ourselves, which is, in turn, created by our individual record of past experience and performance, as well as our self image and the attitudes of significant people in our lives such as supervisors, spouses, peers, and trainers.
Under the stress of physical conflict, the other stresses in our lives can manifest as negative competing thoughts, interfering with our subconscious, causing us to either overreact or under react to the situation at hand. Controlling these emotions is done by controlling the thoughts that cause them.
Maintaining Control
In most conflicts, regardless of whether they are fistfights or running gun battles, it is not the individual who has perfect textbook performance who wins. The winner is usually the combatant who makes the fewest mistakes and can recover quickly from the mistakes he does make.
Mistakes will be made and the unexpected will happen in a physical confrontation. So it is critical that you arm yourself not just with fighting skills but also with methods and techniques for letting go of distractions, refocusing your concentration, and maintaining control of your emotions. If you have the proper defensive tactics training and emotional control, you can meet the challenges of any physical confrontation.
The Benefits of Confidence
Consider the following scenario involving a highly trained and highly confident police officer. The officer is involved in an intense physical clash with a violent suspect and, at some point during the battle, the officer senses that he is losing his advantage.
The perceived loss of this advantage sends a message to his brain, which tells his body that something is wrong. The message is further perceived as a threat and causes near immediate changes in the officer’s body.
His muscles tighten, his breathing becomes shallow and rapid, and his heart rate accelerates. The officer’s concentration narrows and his body and mind automatically start trying to regain control of what has been lost in the fight.
But the confident officer is aware of what is happening. Instead of panicking, he regains control and he refuses to fail. His confidence, built on solid training and experience, allows him to let go of any negative thoughts or concerns, almost immediately relaxing and regaining his edge over his opponent.