One afternoon several years ago, I was running on my treadmill in the garage. Between the treadmill’s noise and the radio I had blasting, it was a little loud. A police officer comes to the garage door and is almost yelling so I can hear him. I shut everything down and go speak to him. He asked me if I had seen a little girl walking around the neighborhood. I hadn’t, which I told him. He told me a 3 or 4-year old girl had gone missing. As we were talking, I walk to the front of the house where I could get a good view of that area and, of course, nothing there. I do the same to the rear of the house, and nothing there either. If you know me, you know I am not at all assertive. I will give you information if you ask for it, and if you choose to ignore it, I don’t really care. But for some reason, I was assertive with the police officer, and for some reason, he went along with it. I told him there was a circular trail through the woods behind my house and that if the little girl came in our direction, that’s where she would be. I told him to take the west side of the trail, which ran along an old fence line, and I would take the east side, and we would eventually meet in the middle. I asked for the little girl’s name so I could call out for her, and he told me her name was Emily. We split up and started our trek. About two-thirds of the way down the trail, I can hear the officer saying he found her.
I don’t think this was a critical situation, and it almost certainly would have turned out OK without my help, but you never know. There is a lesson here, though, and it’s an important one. Consciously, I had no clue where that little girl was. Subconsciously though, I had an excellent idea, and I listened to that subconscious voice. Good police officers all do this, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it. You can do it too, and it might even save your life. If you are in a situation where you think something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. Listen to that subconscious voice and get yourself out of that situation.
P.S. If you’re interested in a self-defense mindset, I wrote a series of 4 articles when I was teaching karate that you can find at http://www.karatecorner.com/survivalrules.htm. They are less about karate and more about some basic principles on surviving violence. They are based on some concepts from a book called ‘Strong on Defense‘ by Sanford Strong, probably the best self-defense book ever written. In that book, Mr. Strong analyzes several violent crimes, what the victim did right and what the victim did wrong. Most often cited as what they did wrong was ignoring that gut feeling that something wasn’t right.