My "Mind & Body" Power Development activity

1. Xavier BARILLER
xavier.bariller@gmail.com
1
EVERY WEEK, I trained, coach people to develop
their inner power, their ability to do something powerful,
to do something that has an impact.
Doing something powerful is doing something that has a positive impact,
and that brings you closer to a specific goal.
I’m doing this within the
Realistic & Integrative System of Situational & Intuitive Defense association.
RISSID (SIRDIS in French) is all about what the name suggests it is!
So, of course, during training sessions people deals with aggression, self-defense issues.
It is in this frame that I train, coach people to become and act more powerfully.
But everything that is acquired, developed during the sessions is transferable to social
and work life situations.

2. Xavier BARILLER
xavier.bariller@gmail.com
2
A different approach, because … different purposes!
At RISSID, we consider aggressions, conflicts are not fair.
Self-defense situations are not knight fights, made by gentlemen that play by the rules.
There also won’t be any arbitrator.
Counting the points has no interest for us.
We don’t want to play a “win or lose” game, and we are not fighting chickens.
If you happen to be aggressed, very likely it’s because your aggressor wants something from you or
through you and believes he has an advantage over you:
he takes you by surprise / they are several/ you are distracted/ he’s a bit drunk / he is angry,
desperate/ he has a knife/ they come in your back/ you sit down when they are stand up/
he believes he has the law for him…
The purpose of training people to self-defense is training them
to think and act, to integrate the idea that
1) the most important is to limit the risk of severe injury,
2) to not produce the conditions that will generate a fight, a conflict,
3) to do nothing that will escalate the conflict and if possible deescalate it,
4) to do everything possible to end the conflict, the aggression as quick as possible
without over-violence,
5) to consider there are potentially several opponents.
Just to make sure we are on the same wave:
we don’t do fight sport, we don’t do mixed martial art either –it is sport also.
And we don’t do traditional martial art as well.
There are 2 reasons
- Fight sports have rules to protect participants, with things forbidden to do. The over-use of
body protections – that are necessary during the training- does not fit our purpose:
limiting as much as possible to be injured and ending the conflict as soon as
possible. It may sound counter-intuitive, but more you are protected, less you care
about yourself and others.
Also, fight sports will anchor mind and body rituals that may make fight sport people’s skills
unusable in real situations.
- The “traditional” martial art learning pathway is not adapted to a realistic and situational self-
defense training.
For most of them the learning pathway has been designed to FIRST TEST the
motivation, the endurance of the students before giving them the “real deal”. Later,
maybe some 70 years ago, the goal became to retain students for years, and giving
them rewards with colorful belts.
Don’t get me wrong, I love traditional martial arts, but not so much the way they are
often taught.

3. Xavier BARILLER
xavier.bariller@gmail.com
3
So, concretely what do I teach, coach people to achieve?
First, people develop a self-care attitude: taking care of themselves.
They improve, recover, and maintain their body flexibility, their moving abilities.
They develop - an others-care attitude,
As we practice with the help of others, we must take care to not blindly hurting them.
- a personal awareness about how their body and mind are reacting, functioning in the
present moment: mind and body awareness,
- an ability to read situations: situational awareness,
- a “response-ability” to stressful situations,
- a repertoire of responses to stressful situations,
- intuitive responses to aggressions,
- assertiveness, self-confidence in handling stressing situations, while gaining
awareness about their own limits and tending to expand their boundaries,
- resilience,
- appropriate mind states to different stressful scenarios,
- how to use biomechanics to their own advantage,
- verbal and non-verbal communications abilities,
- a can-do attitude, a can-make-it attitude,
- their presence,
- a kind of “I’m not going to be your victim” mindset, a kind of “winning” mindset.
So, concretely what do participants deal with?
They deal with FEAR – fear of doing wrong, fear of being hurt, fear of pain, fear of hurting others, and
(more or less consciously) fear of dying.
And so they improve their fear management abilities.
They deal with pain.
And so they improve their pain management abilities.
They deal with their emotions and the emotions of others.
And so they improve their emotion management abilities.
They deal with stressful, aggressive situations.
And so they improve their stress, aggression management abilities.

4. Xavier BARILLER
xavier.bariller@gmail.com
4
Is there anything I personally developed?
I have developed what I call the “Infinite Warm-Up” that aims to prepare the body and
the mind for the rest of the session.
It aims
- to develop, maintain, recover the mobility and warm up almost all the articulations of the body,
- to warm-up almost all the muscles, ligaments and tendons of the body in a 10 to 20 minutes
frame,
- to develop a “body state” and a “body in space” awareness,
- to develop body reflexes and a certain way of using the body, the limbs extremely useful for
self-defense situations,
- to calm the mind and then to put the mind in a positive state.
Can I share a few lessons from the practice?
Over-violence is in most of the cases not necessary, neither appropriate.
The way you communicate, you behave will make a difference in almost any situation.
The world tends to respond to the way you show up!
MOVING IS THE KEY!
Moving allows you to avoid, deflect aggression.
It allows you to be in a more favorable situation.
It will give you an edge, an advantage.
It will give you more space and time to manage the situation.
The mind state makes a difference!
The devil is in details: very small details turn upside-down situations, in a matter of less than a
second you can switch from unfavorable to favorable.
This is why working real situations (instead of talking, fantasizing them) is so valuable in
terms of awareness development, abilities development, wisdom development – at least situational
wisdom development.
Role playing situations brings awareness about the reality of the mind states, about what is
reasonably possible and what’s not, about the usable skills, about the usable knowledge. It develops
some kind of wisdom. Knowledge for knowledge is useless if not applied, if not put in situation.