BikerRN,
I've been re-reading Lt Col Dave Grossman's great
On Combat. Grossman is well-known as an expert in human aggression, an Airborne Ranger infantry officer, with over 23 years experience leading US soldiers before he retired from the Army in 1998. Here's what he has to say about this subject:
A trainer should never declare his students to be dead, and if a student ever states that he is dead, the right answer is, "No, you aren't dead! I don't give you permission to die. I don't train people to die. I train them to live!"
I know of gangbangers who have sucked up a dozen 9mm rounds and drove on to survive. If they can do it, you can too. When a training scernario does not go the way you wanted it to, then do it again, but do not ever think you are dead in an exercise. ...
Ken Murray, author of Training at the Speed of Life and cofounder of Simunition, the company that developed the most widely used brand of paint ammunition, says to his officers who have been "shot" in training, "Yeah, you're hit, but you're sure as hell not done ... now finish this bastard." His officers hear this so often in his training program that they "take him into battle" with them. In the event they are really hit, he wants them to hear his words--"Yeah, you're hit, but you're sure as hell not done"--and then do what needs to be done.
Another book I've been re-reading this past week is David Klinger's compelling book
Into the Kill Zone. Klinger intensively interviewed 80 officers who, between them, had been involved in well over 100 situations wherein they had needed to shoot a criminal in defense of self or others. The results of his study were submitted to the US DOJ and can be accessed online at
http://www.killzonevoices.com/finalrpt3.pdf He also wrote a book filled with extensive quotes from those interviews:
Into the Kill Zone.
One thing that jumps out of that book, over and over again, is how the things that people say to you during your training, or even elsewhere in your life, tend to surface during stressful moments. For instance, one guy tells the story of a criminal throwing a knife at him. The knife, a 13-inch butcher knife, actually embedded itself in the guy's head! He was awake and alert after it happened, and reflexively reached up to grab the knife. But immediately as he did so, what came to mind was his mother's voice saying, "If you get something stuck inside you, never pull it out ..." so he knew not to reach up and rip the knife out of his skull. He 'heard' what she said in the moment of stress, and that helped him avoid doing something that could have killed him.
Human beings are creatures of thought. "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he," said a wise man a very long time ago. And it's true. The way you think of yourself, the thoughts you build into your mind, will certainly affect your behavior under stress.
So no, there's nothing at all wrong with a little motivation. The only problem with it is the human tendency to simplify beyond the reasonable. Motivational sayings are only as useful as the
complete thought they express, and how thoroughly the student really understands that thought. But any trainer worth his salt already knows that.
pax
