Re: Introduce Yourself

[JDNichols]

Hey Legion Members, I’m Jim Nichols and I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and share how I became a Legion member and what’s happening at the Self Defense Company of Winchester. Some call me Jim some call me JD and some even call me DA Monk, I guess that one comes from my Shaolin Do Kung Fu days, along with this shaved head I sport. I was training in Combatives before Combatives were cool. I actually started about 1971 as a young boy in order to keep the knots off my head and keep my lunch money while riding the school bus. Later on I studied other types of martial arts and furthered my hand to hand in the United States Army. A few years ago I began to teach self-defense to a few select friends who had the need. That blossomed into a friend of a friend and so on. My problem was I didn’t have a formal program so what I taught was a few select hand to hand combat techniques and ten self-defense techniques from the Shaolin Do system.
The training I provided would sure enough get someone out of a jam if they were good at it, the down fall was it took a great deal of time to learn and some of the techniques took some skill that only come with years of practice and not everyone was good at it. It was easy for me since I had years of practice but for the average Joe or Jolene it took more time than they could invest to really be good, and the biggest question was in a high stress situation could they remember how to use them. That made me very selective of who I trained and resulted in me turning some people away and in some cases it was people that really needed the training. My fear was I would set them up for failure because training for, and being in; a high stress situation is two different things. If they were in the middle of a scrap they wouldn’t be able to say let me try that again, or hold on I did that wrong, they had to know. I even thought about not training people at all. The problem was the people wouldn’t stop asking me to train them so I started to search for the best possible way I could get it done.
Here’s where I found Damian Ross and The Self Defense Company. I started researching self-defense systems I would say hundreds of them, the problem was, they were almost all martial arts based, or so technical they would take years to learn and 90% of them were just plain silly. One night while surfing the internet for some reason I typed in combat self-defense and The Self Defense Company came up so I started to read. The thing that really got my attention was reading Damian’s Bio here’s a guy that is proficient in Tae Kwon Do, Jujutsu, Judo, Kickboxing and Wrestling and he doesn’t try to sale that for self-defense. I must know more, so I filled out the online form and Damian contacted me. After talking to him over the phone I knew he was the real deal. What I couldn’t believe is why didn’t I think of that, I’ve been doing this most of my life. But that didn’t matter I found what I was looking for and why reinvent the wheel It would cost me thousands and thousands of dollars to do what Damian had already done.
Since joining the SDC family I have opened two locations and will open another this coming spring I have a one year contract to provide fitness training for 3 hospitals in their after hour’s fitness centers and I now have 3 employees helping me. I personally give self-defense classes 6 nights a week and a 1 hour Combat Fitness Class 7 nights a week, it takes a lot of work but I love it. I saw a post on here that a gentleman had been instructing part time for over 40 years and was looking to do it full time and wanted ideas of how to do it, it’s simple, do it! You have to talk to lots of people 1 in 20 may be serious. I still have seminars that hardly anyone shows up but you just finish it and move on, the next one you may have to turn people away, it’s the nature of this business. Anyway that’s a little about me, it’s your turn.