Bruce Lee's Influence On Me

1986. San Clemente, Ca. Filming the original Panic Attack videos for Panther Productions.

We had already been doing force-on-force scenario training for 6 straight years.

• Cerebral Self-Defense and our fear management program were well established and eventually evolved into KNOW FEAR®.

• The SPEAR System® hadn’t been created yet. And the High Gear Suit hadn’t even been sketched out.

The 80s was my incubator decade.

The three verticals that are our core products and services were all developed during that period.

Here’s a small glimpse of the journey!

1986 - Filming PANIC ATTACK Series

I'm a “Modern Traditionalist”.

Many consider the SPEAR System® a ‘modern combat’ method.

I consider it traditional.

• We have no rituals.

• No one calls me Sensei/Sifu/Guru - all are replaced with ‘Coach’. We practice “managing violence” all the time.

So how is it I consider it ‘traditional’?

The word ‘tradition’ implies many things, however, its essence is: “A set of customs and usages viewed as a coherent body of precedents influencing the present.”

How I relate to this is simple:

Warriors before us learned truths about combat (the hard way) and their writing and research should influence us.

However, we must also integrate and respect the important and obvious changes that time and evolution have engendered.

For example, I read, respect, and quote Musashi, but I don’t practice katana disarms (most people I know don’t carry swords). I do practice gun defense because that is a modern concern.

Musashi’s psychology on training and fighting is timeless, but his paradigm is dated.

(In the future, when space pirates carry lasers, those who practice gun takeaways will be considered traditional, not modern.😉)

The mainstream populace has always feared change and this same ‘clinging’ mindset prevails in many respects in the self-defense world.

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Schopenhauer

When a system is first developed, irrespective of its virtues, it is generally labeled or type-cast as radical, irreverent, rebel-like, and a host of other PC and not-so-politically correct terms commonly used to describe ‘breakers of tradition’.

But today’s ‘modern eclectic’ will become tomorrow’s traditional.

Necessity is the mother of invention and the arts must change to adapt to the reality of the street.

We must move past traditional roots to address the problems that we face today.

As the world gets meaner and more violent, serious martial art instructors need to offer educational havens for those seeking solutions to the very real problems of fear and violence.

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A WORD TO THE WHYS

1985 teaching at my first school in Montreal.

I started teaching self-defense because it was a way for me to practice self-defense.

I might've worked out 7 days a week without students, but I wouldn't have worked out 35x a week - which I did because I taught every class, day and night, for over a decade.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but I soon realized that every time I taught, I got better and safer.

And that realization became part of my pre-event mantra. That became my North Star as I intuitively explored practical ways to protect myself and those that trusted me to guide them.

To this day, I thank the class for the opportunity to teach and coach them and remind myself that I am training too.

And this is now part of our trainer’s code and something I remind all my staff about before they teach for me around the world.

Like many, I was inspired by Bruce Lee, his message and ethos were about simplicity and directness related to self-defense. Even though I never met him, Bruce was a mentor, he was a spiritual guide. He was the reason I started training. He was the reason I never quit too. One of his quotes was a secret maxim that kept me going while life, naysayers, and others tried to deter me, it was:

“To hell with circumstances, I’ll create my own circumstances.”

And I did.

In 1975 I knew what I wanted to do.

I loved all martial arts and dreamed about how amazing it would be if this were my career, to be able to do what I loved.

So I made that happen.

I've been teaching self-defense since 1977 - approaching 45 years of studying, training, teaching, coaching, writing, and sharing.

It always feels like we’re just getting started!

Thank you all.

Without you, the readers, the students of SPEAR, most of this wouldn't exist.

Coach B

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STANDING BY TO HELP MAKE YOU SAFER, STRONGER, OR MORE SUCCESSFUL

1. If you’d like to be a part of our worldwide mission and teach our system you can apply here.

2. Not ready to teach, but hungry to learn? Here are two options: Monthly training in the Garage Gym or our FOUNDATIONS course, a 3-hour intensive to take the system for a test drive.

3. Don't forget, we all move faster when we convert fear to fuel, get KNOW FEAR® here.