Striving Defense as a Proactive and Practical Approach to Self-Protection

Self-defense and situational awareness help prepare a person for unexpected situations, but proactive and practical self-protection can help an individual develop increased mental and physical health. When you strive to learn self-defense, it naturally increases your self-confidence. This will enable you to trust yourself fully, knowing that you understand what appropriate action is needed when you find yourself in a potentially dangerous situation.

What Striving Defense Means to Me

Striving Defense means proactively guiding yourself to a safer, more confident you. What I mean by that is through the very sense of the word strive, which is defined as:

To make great efforts to achieve or obtain something
To struggle or fight vigorously

Let’s look at the word strive in its literal sense. Let’s say you are in a situation where you need to defend yourself, so you might physically be struggling or fighting vigorously to defend yourself to obtain that freedom and sense of security.

However, we can also look at it because maybe you are struggling mentally to find that sense of security. Perhaps you are not feeling safe, or you just moved into a new home, and you are afraid about being alone. It could also be that your car was broken into, and you are afraid it could happen again. You will be striving to find the sense of inner peace and safety that you need.

Striving Defense is here to help you develop that sense of security and obtain inner peace in the process. Through this proactive concept of self-protection, it can help you go from physically or mentally fighting with yourself to someone who is making significant efforts to achieve and obtain that sense of security within.

The Goal of Striving Defense

The goal of Striving Defense is to take you from that physical or mental state of worry or uncertainty and help you proactively achieve that sense of security, confidence, and knowledge and build it within yourself. You need to strive to defend yourself because you are worth defending.

Self-defense is about:

Confidence
Security
Awareness

Some individuals, when they think self-defense, think about martial arts, and learning how to punch or do some fancy kicks. Self-defense is so much more than that. We all need to understand the extreme importance of this topic. Self-defense can help when you find yourself in a compromising situation, even without learning how to punch or kick as ninjas do.

The topic of self-defense is one that can be easily ignored and often overlooked. It appears the reality of self-defense centers around getting pepper spray or reminding someone to lock their doors and then tell them good luck. When we talk about our safety, it does not work that way. Pepper spray may thwart an attacker, and locking your doors is a smart thing to do, but that is not everything.

Have you ever genuinely stepped back and thought, “What if something like _____ happened?” What if someone grabbed your arm while you were walking to your car? What would you do? Some people with false self-confidence may think that they would be fine, and others would think otherwise.

Some have not thought about this because it has never happened to them or their loved ones. Even though that may not be your reality, does not mean it is not THE reality. There is another group of individuals who have been attacked, and before that moment, any thought of danger may not have crossed their minds. Nonetheless, they may have thought that could never happen to them, but it did.

There is no undo button in real life. When something terrible happens to you, you cannot simply take it back. If something terrible happens to you, it will now be YOUR reality. This is not about scaring anyone or trying to make people think about past traumatic events. I want to spread awareness. I am trying to proactively guide you to the safer, more confident version of yourself. I want to create this space to offer knowledge and insight in hopes that it CAN protect you and make you more aware of your surroundings. Bad things happen in this world. Murder, rape, and kidnapping are a reality for many people.

Striving defense means striving to foster a certain level of mental strength and inner self- confidence that enables individuals to instinctually exploit the time and space when facing an unexpected situation. By developing these skills, having a confident self will allow you to respond to unforeseen conditions with lightning speed.

Start today. It is better to know this knowledge and never need it, than to need it and never know how.