Totally agree. It also makes it difficult to teach.

One of my failings, or disadvantages, is that I’m an introvert, quite shy. In fact I regularly avoid eye-contact. Friday, however, I was *determined* to not let that aspect of my character out and to actually face in this guy’s direction.

I like the “aspect of a fox” concept. I must admit, though, sometimes I opt for the wily coyote concept myself. Coyotes seem to be able to think outside the box more than foxes.

The tough thing about preventative self defense — awareness, use of intuition, body language, boundary setting skills — is that you can’t measure its effectiveness. Simply by being aware of the man in the train station, you may have warned him away. He probably noted your fox-like look and went to find a rabbit.

As evidenced by the comments here, intuition/instinct is something a lot of women just “get”. Men on the other hand seem to rely more on rationale, logic and processed thinking.

“If my husband had ignored his inner radar and kept to more “logical thinking,” who knows what might have happened?”

A good point. One of the downsides to intuition is that often times the only way to prove your inner voice is correct is to ignore what it’s telling you.

I mean just this Friday past, I was sitting on a train station with my fiancée Mandy, late in the evening, when I noticed a man not too far away glancing over at us.

Immediately I felt something wasn’t right. I also didn’t feel comfortable as he went to walk behind us not once, but twice.

Of course, nothing untoward happened and now, sitting here thinking back over it, I find myself questioning whether it was my intuition or an over-active imagination. I’d already given a lot of thought to self-defense that day.

Your take away exercise (and Janice’s comment) reminds me of something I read years ago about the Native Americans and their medicine wheel.

The process of sitting quietly and merely observing others is something that was described as being the “aspect of a fox”. It’s something that has stuck with me all these years.

Thanks for the insightful post Lori.

Hi Janice,
Thank you.
Stared the guy down, eh? Way to go. “Calm, but highly alert” is a good place to be when watching over kids or ourselves.

Hi John,
Assumption, according to Wikipedia, is ” … a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were true based upon presupposition without preponderance of the facts.” This is not the intuition I discuss. Intuition transcends the presuppositions and the facts. My husband and I avoided a tornado strike when his intuition told him to take a different road out of town. I grew up in Tornado Alley, and I know tornadoes, and the little storm cell we avoided — according to all my facts, experience, and supposition — said it was “just a little storm.” But, if we had taken our originally planned route, we would have been right where the tornado hit on Interstate 25.

When our little voice talks in our heads, there’s some assuming going on. And assumptions are based on things you know.