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The following article was first printed
in the REALITY CHECK column of COMBAT magazine.
Used here with permission from Mr. Martin
This is the fourth, and final, part of the interview with Marcus Wynne. Like last month's section, this has never been published before.
The reason we are presenting this material is because we know it works. Having successfully applied NLP to tactical pistol training via the Mind'sEye Program we know that it works. Shooting is highly quantifiable, with variations in both speed and accuracy being assessed. Modern electronic timers measure speed to the fraction of a second, and paper targets provide a record of accuracy. The Mind'sEye Shooting Program has consistently produced improvements which are nothing short of amazing. We thus have high confidence that using similar training methodologies in less quantifiable, more subjective activities, such as unarmed combat, we can achieve great improvements in speed, power and aggression.
Marcus Wynne spent several years in Government counter-terrorism as a US Federal Air Marshal, the unit with the most exacting training of any Federal Agency. He flew world-wide as an operator in the Unit, and later became a Tactics Instructor and a Team Leader. During these years he worked in numerous countries and liaised with many foreign agencies. He was sent on various firearms and close-combat courses with many outstanding instructors. Since leaving government service he has been involved in training tactical personnel in advanced training technologies. In the last couple of years he has concentrated on writing, and his first book NO OTHER OPTION was reviewed here.
DM: On our courses I am frequently approached by guys who are interested in applying NLP to their CQB training, but when they try to find out more, most of the books are concerned with therapy. We both know that right from the earliest days NLP was deeply involved in tactical training. Richard Bandler did work for the US Intelligence Community, the Israeli Commandos, and the US Army weapons training branch. We have already discussed the Jedi Program which Wyatt Woodsmall and Tony Robbins presented. Books like "Turtles all the way down" are very far removed from tactical application! Have you any advice as to how readers can find out more of this aspect?
 The most important NLP aspects to apply to CQB training are behavioural cue acuity and state management, and that is advanced NLP work. The modifications to the therapeutic exercises that I've done and that you've built on and developed aren't really set down anywhere. The CQB student is likely to be swamped with a lot of useless information pertaining to therapy in their search, however, they can find some books on the application of NLP modelling to sports skills which might be a useful start. The intelligence and special ops community has hired consultants to do and develop training for them in NLP, but the state management piece and the specific elements of behavioural cue acuity as applied to CQB were things I developed. NASA, before they hired me as a consultant, spent two years searching for consultants who could do that -- they only found me. When I did a demonstration class for the head of paramilitary training for the CIA (our mutual friend Ed), he told me that the CIA had spent a great deal of money trying to do what I was doing in those classes -- and they'd failed to duplicate the results. So the short answer is that you and I and Rick Faye in Minneapolis and Dave Spaulding in Ohio, are the ones writing that book, and that is where the real advances have been made.
DM: So the concepts outlined in this interview series are a rare written distillation of what is needed to augment CQB with NLP and other neural-based technologies?
Absolutely!
DM: You mentioned your work with NASA. It's not widely known that the Space Agency is deeply involved in high-stress operational survival. I attended a presentation on mindset by the FBI and they referred to NASA as the lead agency in the field. Why is that, and what kinds of areas did you cover with them?
Well, if you think of the stress an astronaut goes through, when they're on the launch pad on top of the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb in explosive, and they have to ride that bomb into space, a hostile environment to life itself, and a long, long way from any help, it starts to become clear why they're so interested in high stress management. NASA is deeply involved in discovering and developing ways to manage stress in an operational environment, as everything they do is inherently dangerous. The Psychological Services Department in Medical Sciences Branch is where the work is being done, under the guidance of Dr. Al Holland, who I worked for and with on a number of projects. The areas I specifically covered with them included adapting neural based learning and accelerated learning protocols to the entire training flow and to the emergency procedures for the space shuttle and the international space station. I did a study of the training flow and it's strengths and weaknesses, especially in the area of emergency procedures. NASA is also deeply involved in the training and development of situational awareness, and I was able to draw on a lot of their research while I was down there, which helped me develop the situational awareness exercises which we've done together.
DM: Our good friend Dave Spaulding has written a great book entitled HANDGUN COMBATIVES, in which he deals with Mindset and Situational Awareness in a very thorough way. You have contributed a chapter on Neural based training, and I was very impressed with your emphasis on experiential-based training for CQB. Could you give COMBAT readers an outline of why it is so important, and how we can incorporate this in our regular training?
Dave's book does an excellent job in the areas you mention; I think it will end up being a classic like PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL DEFENCE or NO SECOND PLACE WINNER. Experiential based training? It's essential for combative skills or any skill set that has to be used under stress. Basically speaking, the state you learn a skill in is the state where you'll have the greatest recall of the skill. A state, for those who need to know, is the combination of your physiology (everything going on in your body, from hormone secretions to posture) plus your mental representation (which is everything going on in your mind). Common states include happiness, fear, anger, and so on. Each of those can be broken down into a specific physiology and specific mental representation. Quite often, we learn combative skills in a classroom or dojo or shooting range, and the state we're in when we're learning is one of being a student -- instead of being a practitioner using the skill. An example might be learning to swim. If you learned swimming only by doing the strokes on dry land, you'd have an understanding of what is necessary to swim in water; you might be able to demonstrate the various strokes. But until you're in the water using the strokes, you won't be proficient in the skill. Ineffective training teaches combat skills like swimming on dry land, but using those skills is like being dumped in the ocean during a storm. We train people on dry land and expect them to perform in open water during a storm. What we want to do during training is experience as much as possible the mental state necessary to survive close quarters battle ("ferocious resolve"), and to use their skills while in that state. Practising your basic skills while adding the mental representation of ferocious resolve accelerates your learning of those skills. Incorporating that element in your training will cement the retention of those skills in the part of the brain that will be called on to perform under stress when you have to use those skills. You can do this by adding visualisation to your drills, and emotional content. IN other words, if you're punching in the air to practice punches, visualise an opponent and add the emotional content of ferocious resolve to win and strike down your opponent. This is actually a part of all martial arts in the practice of kata or forms; if you're practising your forms as though you were actually fighting an opponent, those techniques will be available to you when you actually are fighting.
DM: I'd like briefly to discuss self-protection hard skills. In Part Two you mentioned a study which showed that operators from WW-2 were still able to perform CQB on demand. Recently there has been renewed interest in the teachings of Fairbairn, Sykes, Applegate and Styers. Would you recommend this approach?
On the hard protection skills and the WW2 teachings -- Fairbairn, Sykes, Applegate and Styers were doing neural based learning without calling it that. I want to stress that much of what we've talked about is something that martial artists and warriors of all stripes have known for centuries. It's just in recent years that we've had the scientific basis and the vocabulary to describe the state, state management and sensory acuity elements. I think there's a lot of valid material in the WW2 training METHODS, the way they used reality simulation and training while under stress. That's the important thing, not the specific techniques of hand to hand or shooting or knife work. What made those techniques work was the mental platform of the operator, which was forged in reality simulation and training while under stress. I think the most powerful use of the WW2 stuff is to study HOW they did the training, and then adapt that approach to modern TECHNIQUE, meanwhile using the new language and experiential training drawn from NLP stuff. You put that all together, like you've done in your shooting programs, and you have the results that are literally incredible. The readers should know that in your shooting program you did in South Africa, you were able to take shooters who drew from concealment on an average of 2.0 seconds down to 1.2 and in some instances sub 1 second -- in the space of an hour. That kind of increase is possible if you concentrate on the mental platform, which is what the work of Fairbairn, Sykes, Applegate and Styers is all about. Much has been made of their techniques, but in my opinion their really earth shattering advances was in the HOW of doing training.
DM: Your background in knife combatives is extensive, but the last time we trained together in edged-weapon work you were emphasising a very simple approach. You ditched most of the flow drills and carenzas in favour of a very direct, efficient system. My training partner Simon James, has done the same, reducing much of the Filipino methods he has mastered into a very solid core. Care to comment?
One of the reasons I went to a very simple knife system has to do with the simplification of my own personal combative system. I'm older, my body is beat up with old injuries, I'm not in the best physical condition and I don't train the long hours I did twenty or thirty years ago. I've applied the KISS principle across the board with my personal combatives. But the reason I ditch3d a lot of the flow drills etc. is that they are just that: drills. Too often students mistake doing the drill for doing the technique in the real world. Most drills are designed to instil attributes as well as technique, and the Filipino systems stress flow, and many of the drills are designed to give you
flow. Well, if you already have flow, and you have that anchored properly to the fighting state, then you don't have to practice flow so much. If at all. I found the same thing in shooting. I used to shoot
over 1500 rounds a month in training as a Federal Air Marshal. I now probably shoot less than 50 rounds a year. Despite that, I'm still able to shoot at an acceptable (to me) level of accuracy and speed, because I've trained that skill set in using neural based techniques.
With blade work, a lot of what we spend time in the classroom doing is developing flow and continuity. If you've developed that, then you can concentrate on the important aspects: getting the blade into play, making the first cut, defanging your opponent and going for the kill.
One of the advantages of neural based training is that you cut (pun intended) to the essentials of the technique. With the blade, what do you want to do? Get it out, cut the opponent before he cuts you, and finish the fight. that's of course if that's what you want to do. It's important to realise that practising blade work as a martial art,... well, martial art is concerned with process -- the doing of the training is what is important. CQB and combatives are focused on outcome -- what you do with the martial technique.
What's essential with any weapon system is to understand that the primary platform, whether empty hand, blade or stick, or handgun and rifle, is the mind and the willingness of the operator, and that's anchored to state access techniques.
DM: We reviewed your first novel "NO OTHER OPTION" here a while back, and it's become a best seller. Although fiction there is a lot of fact in the book, and I recognised several characters. There is also quite a bit of NLP isn't there?
There's a lot of NLP in there, especially in the action sequences that show Jonny Maxwell thinking through and doing state management, breathing control and the like. A couple of NLP practitioners of the therapeutic type have read the book -- but they won't talk to me anymore. Think it scared them off!
DM: I don't think the mental processes of a hard operator have been better described than in NO OTHER OPTION. How is your next book coming along?
My next book is titled WARRIOR IN THE SHADOWS and it comes out in hardback this September. The paperback of NO OTHER OPTION comes out in August. I've just finished the first draft of my third book, which I am in negotiations for publication right now.
DM: Marcus, many thanks for an invaluable series of interviews. I know COMBAT readers will gain much to enhance their existing hard-skills training.
© Copyright 2001 Dennis Martin
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