| Motivating Female Shooters |
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This article first appeared in the Network's membership journal. An Interview with Vicki Farnam by Gila Hayes In our previous two journals, we’ve addressed aspects of the knotty problem of self-defense tactics and planning for armed citizens with family members for whom skill with a firearm is not a priority. During an interview that started as research for the August journal, Defense Training International vice president and instructor Vicki Farnam emphasized that a lot of women are willing to learn how to defend themselves and their family, they need only the opportunity and the right kind of encouragement. Drawing on 20 years of teaching experience, Vicki Farnam partnered with researcher Diane Nicholl to write two books entitled Teaching Women to Shoot and Women Learning to Shoot (see this month’s book review). In these books, Farnam and Nicholl define impediments they’ve identified to women learning to shoot. Once recognized, removing those stumbling blocks may be all it takes for a formerly reticent woman to begin enjoying firearms and self-defense training. And now, to preserve Vicki Farnam’s succinct and knowledgeable presentation, we’ll switch to the Q&A format with which our readers have become familiar. eJournal: When you teach women, what are the common reasons they give for coming to training? Farnam: The biggest is, “My husband wanted me to come.” In the majority of cases, when I hear that, I wish it were different. Within that particular circumstance, some of the women say later, “Oh, I didn’t know it would be like this and I’m so glad I came,” and others find they don’t like it just as they predetermined. Still others, in spite of themselves, find that there’s a certain satisfaction in hitting the target. eJournal: What do you tell men who ask you how they can get their wives interested in self defense? Farnam: I remind them that it has to be a personal decision. When a man comes to me and says, “How do I get my wife motivated?” I say, “She has to make the decision on her own. You can help her by talking about what the reality is, that there could be a danger lurking out there in her future that could threaten her and that she is the only one that may be able to save herself. But she has to be able to think about that and process it until it becomes her own decision. And then, she is motivated. If you drag her here [to class], she may never reach that point. It’s like deciding to lose weight or stop smoking, it doesn’t matter how many times somebody else tells you to. It doesn’t work until you make up your mind to do it yourself.” eJournal: Not everyone can get their spouse to a class. How do you feel about spouses teaching spouses? Farnam: Sometimes that’s the only way that’s available. Husbands can certainly teach their wives, as we know. Probably 95 percent of what I learned when I first started was from John [Farnam, the other half of DTI], but husbands have to understand that just because their wife picks up a gun does not mean she picks up the philosophical overview—that she will become a warrior. eJournal: What starts the mental processes? What encourages a self-defense mindset? Farnam: I always divide my classes so I begin with the gun handling and accuracy skills and only when they have succeeded with the skills will I start to talk about how you utilize the skills. I don’t want them thinking about HOW to use this if they are attacked in a dark alley until they actually know how to do it. From the very beginning when I started working with John, it was always very clear to me that I needed to know how to do this before I started thinking about how I would use it. Most classes plunge into a combination of mindset and skills simultaneously. eJournal: What transforms a hesitant or resistant student into one who will vigorously defend herself? Farnam: Well, I think you have to back up. For so many women, it’s easier to ignore and deny that unknown threat lurking some place in the future. So, many of them go along for a very long time, thinking, “If I don’t think about it, it’s not true and I won’t experience that threat.” Then, they end up at a course and they discover, “If I look at this simply as a skill that I am learning, like driving car or using the computer, I can do this.” And once they can do it, then sometimes you see that transition happen, where they think, “Well, it is not so difficult. If I can hit the target, then maybe I can defend myself.” Before, it was, “I could never do this. I don’t want to think about the threat, because how would I ever confront it?” It has all been a mystery until they say, “I can do this.” So we just give them the skill and now they think, “Maybe I could [defend myself] if I absolutely had to because now I have some confidence in myself.” eJournal: Does this come about more easily in women’s only classes? Farnam: It does for some women, though I would not go so far as to say that is true for all women. I’ll give you a couple of examples. In April, I worked with a group of women in Colorado who all know each other and are part of an exclusive community in which there had been an incident. One of the husbands who had been a student of ours for many years came to me and said, “My wife and her friends are really thinking it is time they learned how to shoot and to take care of themselves. Would you teach them?” And I said, “Of course.” The morning the class started, the comments were, “I’m scared to death. My stomach hurts SO bad! Is anybody else as scared as I am?” But by the middle of the second day, it was like, “Wow, we really can do this.” But they wouldn’t have done it in a group of men. In a group of women they had the comfort that they could work through it because everybody else felt the same way. The other example I’m going to give you is a woman who’s husband had been urging her to come to class and she had been putting him off and putting him off. Last spring she finally got to a [women’s only] class. I just had an email from him and he said, “My wife has raised the question about an intermediate pistol course for women.” She wants to continue with all women, because they all started out at somewhat the same level, they watched each other, encouraged each other, saw each other stumble, and succeed, and she liked that format for learning. The prominent issue in the all-women’s class is the pace. There is more time to talk and they get to express their feelings and their emotions as they go along. eJournal: Do you mean that emotional expression is vital to the woman’s learning process? Farnam: Absolutely, because women like to confer with each other. They like to hear what other women think. They like to confirm the conclusions that they come to. eJournal: There’s such a broad spectrum between extremely feminine and not-so-feminine women—where do the different extremes fit into women’s only classes? Farnam: I’ve heard women say, “I don’t want to be with a bunch of giggly women.” But the women’s only classes aren’t filled with giggly women; the students are just striving to understand, and they realize that it is going to take them longer to learn everything than it will a typical group of men. There is one place where we’ve taught for many, many years. One year, I was asked to teach a women’s class, but that only lasted for one year. The next year there was a guy who wanted to come over [to Vicki’s class] and then it evolved into doing two, simultaneous classes with John doing X, Y and Z at John’s pace, while I’m on another range doing X, Y and Z, but at a slower pace. You decided which class you wanted to go to. At many ranges, we run two classes and I do an all-women’s class, in which we move at a slower pace. We cover all the same information, but there’s lots of time for discussion. eJournal: So you’re going at a slower pace, yet covering the same material? Farnam: John may run more drills than I will run because he has that faster-paced group. In my class, I hear, “Wait a minute! Can we go back over that? Can we take this a little slower to make sure we get it right before we go on to something else? Because if I don’t get this correct the first time, I will be lost with every subsequent thing that you teach me.” That is the crux of the women’s worries: they want smaller pieces of information and a greater amount of time to absorb it. They want to make sure that they’re getting it right, where as guys will figure it out as they go along. Men will absorb it faster. There is an intuitiveness to learning to shoot that the majority of men have, so they can move faster because they don’t have to think through the process as much. That is the crux of the two books. Men understand spatial relationships intuitively. Spatial relationships are part of the men’s world. That’s why men are architects, fighter pilots, and baseball players: occupations that are based on spatial relationships. Only a small percentage of women reach towards those things. The concept of aligning the sights while simultaneously pressing the trigger in order to get an accurate hit is something that women have to mull over in their minds and confirm, “OK, front sight and rear sight and target in line with my eye, hold all that steady while I press the trigger at the same time.” Women have to see what happens when they fail, thinking, “OK, I did it wrong this time, because I moved the front sight. Now, if I don’t move the front sight…” but it takes a while to get that ingrained. So many of our classes are mixed classes where we have women in the class and while they can get to the same spot as the men, in most cases they are still not as fast because they haven’t done enough repetitions to allow them to speed up. You know, speed always comes naturally when you start to flow through all of your moves. The speed comes by itself. But women don’t reach that point of having the skills flow as quickly as men because they are working so hard to make sure every single step is correct, and the men just start doing it and the speed and flow eventually comes. eJournal: When do women begin to let go of thinking through each step slowly, and start flowing through the sequence of motions? Farnam: It is different with every single woman. It only comes when they recognize their competence. When they recognize, “OK, I can go from A to B to C and I don’t have to stop and think.” They say, “Oh, I didn’t have to think about each of those steps individually. I just let it flow.” eJournal: You and Diane Nicholl literally wrote the book on teaching women to shoot. How much of this is in Teaching Women to Shoot and Women Learning to Shoot? Farnam: Not all of it, but a good portion of it is. I’m always looking for things that will help women go through this faster. eJournal: Is a third book underway? Farnam: Not a third one, but a second edition of the first one. You know, there is so much that we’ve learned since we wrote the book and so many more experiences that we’ve had. Every time we teach, we just keep going back and analyzing what we did, what we saw, and how it turned out. eJournal: Well, we will surely look forward to seeing the updated version, too, though there is plenty to study in the first two books! Please be sure to let us know when the second edition is done. Meanwhile, thank you so much for sharing what you know with our Network members! Copyright © 2008-2010 Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network. All rights reserved. Reproduction without written permission is strictly prohibited. |
