477 Nicole Snell ~ Mastering Outdoor Self-Defense

Transcript

477 Nicole Snell ~ Mastering Outdoor Self-Defense

Released: Sep 12, 2022

You can listen to the original podcast here: hollyworton.com/477

HOLLY WORTON: Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into The Woods Podcast, episode 477. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another exciting guest.

Today, I am talking with Nicole Snell. She is another person I discovered on Instagram. Now I get asked a lot about how women can stay safe in the outdoors and I am so excited to invite someone on the show who is an actual expert in this field. Now women are often not worried about the practicalities of being outdoors. Stuff like the 10 essentials and bushcraft-type skills, but rather they are worried about human predators.

Now training in some type of self-defence type technique is incredibly useful not only in the outdoors but in our day-to-day lives and learning some form of self-defence is a powerful gift that we can give to ourselves: it serves as protection and it also has a ripple effect throughout our lives, increasing our sense of personal power and self-confidence. I hope you find this episode useful and I hope it inspires you to do some type of self-defence training if you haven’t already.

So who is Nicole Snell? Nicole Snell is an award-winning international speaker, facilitator and self-defence instructor specialising in sexual assault prevention education, gender-based violence prevention, and empowerment. She is the CEO of Girls Fight Back, Founder of Outdoor Defence and Lead Instructor with both IMPACT Personal Safety and IMPACT Global. Nicole has facilitated Sexual Assault Prevention workshops at over 90 military installations worldwide and speaks to gender-inclusive groups at colleges, K-12 schools, Fortune 500 companies, corporations, the US Military, outdoor groups, women’s retreats, and more both domestically and abroad.

Nicole is an NACP Credentialed Advocate and has been a guest on over 25 podcasts. Nicole was featured in the self-defence instructional video featuring IMPACT Personal Safety produced by Tastemade Travel that won a Webby Award in May 2020. In 2021, she was featured for her work in outdoor safety in the November issue of Women’s Health Magazine and was a guest on the Nike Trained podcast. She is a passionate solo traveler, hiker, outdoors enthusiast, and is an adventure leader for Black Girls Trekkin. Nicole is committed to ending violence in all of its forms and strives to empower people with the skills to live without limits.

What are you going to learn in this week’s episode? We talk about: why outdoor self-defence is needed. We discuss dangerous myths about women and personal safety; why intuition is such an important part of self-defence; how you can have solo adventures with confidence; how to overcome fear and anxiety around solo adventures; practical things you can do to feel safer; and Nicole’s top strategies for safety. We also discuss whether or not self-defence tools are worth using (stuff like personal alarms). Finally, we discuss how empowerment self-defence is different from other types of classes.

So again, I hope you find this episode inspiring and useful. Here we go.

HOLLY: Hello Nicole, how are you today?

NICOLE: I am well Holly, how are you?

HOLLY: I am good and I am really excited for our conversation.

NICOLE: Me too, thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest, I am honoured to be here.

HOLLY: I am so excited because I get so many questions about outdoor safety and it is never like wildlife safety and hydration safety, it is always two-legged predator safety. It is never the practical stuff it is always the human stuff.

NICOLE: Yes exactly and that’s why I do the work that I do because of that concern that so many people, especially women, have. In the same way that we would prepare for a long hike and make sure that we brought the right things in our backpack and the rights supplies and food and all of those types of preparations, I want to help people to prepare in case they encounter a human predator.

HOLLY: Absolutely. So why don’t you start out by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

NICOLE: Okay so my name is Nicole Snell and I am the CEO of Girls Fight Back. A little bit about how the company started: it was founded in 2001 by a woman named Erin Weed in honour of her friend and sorority sister Shannon McNamara who was tragically murdered. Shannon fought so hard for her life that there was enough evidence collected to prosecute her murderer. So Shannon’s mum didn’t want her memory to die, she didn’t want Shannon to be forgotten so Erin said, ‘I got this’, and started Girls Fight Back as a way to keep Shannon’s fighting spirit and legacy alive as well as to help the women in the community who were feeling very scared about what had happened.

And that’s how Girls Fight Back started and it started primarily teaching women in college and then we started teaching women all over the country and outside of the country. And then the company was sold to a woman named Gina and that’s how I got involved with it, I got involved with Girls Fight Back in 2014 and I became a speaker. Actually, I found out about the company and emailed for a job and emailed and said, this looks amazing I want to teach self-defence to women in college, how do I get involved?

And three months later they had an opening for a speaker and so I got trained, part of the training was to graduate from a 20-hour self-defence course known as impact personal safety. After I completed that I knew I wanted to teach that too! And so I became a speaker and started training with Impact and assisting classes and five years go by, I am promoted to senior national speaker, I am a lead instructor with Impact.

And, in 2020, the owner at the time decided that she was going to sell the company and I had been so passionate about this work from the first moment I got involved with it. I had been helping the owner create additional programming, we had expanded and offered gender-inclusive programming to all students. We started working with corporations and doing training for other groups other than colleges and I really just felt that I was the right person to keep it moving forward, because I was so passionate about the mission. And she said, yeah I think you would be great.

HOLLY: Perfect!

NICOLE: And so we worked out details and then Covid hit…

HOLLY: Oh!

NICOLE: Yeah that was a challenge figuring out how to bring a programme that is primarily live, a live event, and bring it virtual but I was able to do that and transferee all of our programming to virtual and added more interactive elements to keep people engaged with what they are learning because I try to make it fun. I mean I know that sounds weird, how can you make self-defence fun? You are talking about such an incredibly difficult topic and you often have survivors that are in your classes but I make it fun and entertaining as a way of helping to break down fears and to make the information accessible while also being respectful of the topic that we are talking about. So I believe that it can be both. And empowering yourself is fun, I think.

HOLLY: Absolutely.

NICOLE: And so that’s kind of how the company started and my involvement with it and now I work with so many different organisations, Fortune 500 companies, and the healthcare industry and retreats, the outdoor industry. That came about, me doing more work in the outdoors, because I love the outdoors. I have always been passionate about the outdoors, I grew up in the desert, I am always out exploring. I have travelled and hiked in 15 different countries and I have this passion of helping other people feel more confident out there.

And for years people had told me that I should put my two passions together, the passion that I have for teaching self defence and the transformation I see after someone takes a class, as well as combining my love for the outdoors and so many people have concerns about their safety, their personal safety in the outdoors. And I said, nobody’s going to care about that! Who wants to hear about that? I just don’t think it would be successful, I don’t think anyone would pay attention if I do something like that.

And then finally I had a friend in 2019 who just said, do it, just do it. Create something, just go film something on your phone and just post it. And I finally did and that’s what became Outdoor Defence in 2019. And then Covid hit and a lot of people are going doing things by themselves because we can’t be around other people and things and people are going outside because indoor things are closed and that really resonated with people, having something to offer them skills in empowerment and safety strategies for doing these things by themselves.

And I started working more with outdoor industries, outdoor running groups, retreats, outdoor retreats, brands, retail, things like that. And I just love that I can offer this training because, for me, it is about helping people open up their access to the outdoors because some people be limiting themselves, self-limiting and restricting their own activities out of this fear and if I can help alleviate the fear, then they are limitless and that’s what I want.

HOLLY: Absolutely, so outdoor self-defence, why is it needed?

NICOLE: Outdoor self-defence is needed because people have a fear. The outdoors itself is not inherently dangerous, women statistically are more at risk by people they know. 86% of the time women are assaulted by someone they know, it is not the stranger, it is not even the stranger necessarily when you are walking to your car at night. That’s what we are programmed to fear. It is more often the people you know; your partner; your friend; another colleague; a student you go to class with etc.

So that’s one of the first things that I try to break down to people is that I am not teaching this because the outdoors is so dangerous that people need this, I am teaching this because people are afraid that if something happens they won’t have the knowledge of what to do to handle it. And the skills that I teach apply to more than just the worst-case scenarios, learning how to set boundaries and use your intuition are safety skills we can use in all areas of our life, not just on the trail. But knowing that you can handle yourself even if a place where there is nobody else who can potentially help you then that can make you feel less fear and more confident when going into the outdoors.

HOLLY: Absolutely. So what are some of the other myths about personal safety for women?

NICOLE: There are so many myths about personal safety for women. The stranger-danger one is huge, the other one is that women are incapable of protecting themselves; that women are weak and… I see this so often even in news stories and every time I see it I just want to stand up and post an immediate response. I rarely do that, because I think this is someone’s opinion and maybe they just have not learned any different. But one of the things that I hear or see written is that the average woman cannot defend herself against the average man. And that is a complete lie, a complete myth, and something that I talk about in my classes too. When we are defending ourselves, it is not a fight like, oh we are going into a boxing match, we have this unequal pair up. It is not about that, it is you do what you can with the tools and weapons that you have on your body to attack somebody on a place on their body that’s vulnerable. And then you run to safety.

HOLLY: Exactly.

NICOLE: It is that simple. There is another myth, there is a very common myth that pops up now and then and that’s that teaching self-defence is victim-blaming. And that is definitely not true with empowerment self-defence. The thinking that has been, that I have seen and heard people articulate, is that teaching self-defence puts the onus on the woman to have to defend herself [rather than on the man not to do it], and I disagree with that way of thinking because we don’t want to avoid preparing for the possibility of violence by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

What I teach is known as empowerment self-defence and there is actually over thirty years of research that support the fact that this type of training can not only reduce violence but it has a host of positive effects afterwards, including: decreased fear of further victimisation if someone is a survivor; reduced self-blame if they had an experience; increased confidence; decreased anxiety; increased feelings of confidence and comfort dealing with the people they are interacting with in their lives; increased sense of self-efficacy; increased access to activities that they were self-restricting from, there is a lot of research saying the opposite.

The important thing about empowerment self-defence is that we very clearly articulate that the predator criminal is the only person responsible, the only person responsible for the crime is the criminal and teaching people skills for dealing with uncomfortable or dangerous situations is about giving them a choices, it is about giving them options and knowledge for how to handle something, because, unfortunately, we do live in a world where violence exists; we do live in a world where every 68 seconds someone in the United States is sexually assaulted. And one in four women; and one in six men; and one in two transgender individuals are sexually assaulted. So until those numbers are zero we are always going to need to have strategies for dealing with violence that we may experience in a moment.

Empowerment self-defence is not the only answer, it is not saying we don’t have to do anything else with our society, we just teach this. It is saying this is one option for dealing with these types of situations and setting boundaries and interacting with other people in your life — it is more than physical. While at the same time working with other people who are attacking the problem in other ways. It is going to take all of us working together to address this and I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and misconception about self-defence is and what empowerment self-defence is and that leads to that myth that still percolates every now and then and I just try and educate people as often as I can about that.

HOLLY: That’s excellent. So why is intuition such an important part of self-defence?

NICOLE: Oh my goodness, intuition is an important part of life in general! Oh my goodness I was on TikTok and I was watching someone had shared a TED talk of someone saying that women have…and I am going to butcher the actual statistics, so please nobody quote me exactly, go look this up for yourselves… but it was basically saying that women are absolutely more intuitive because we have more parts of our brain that are focussed on analysing that type of information. There have been other studies saying that woman’s intuition is a real thing, but this one went into more of the whys. Everyone has intuition but everyone usually knows that women’s intuition…most people understand that it’s a thing.

HOLLY: I wonder because we pay attention to it more and we take action on it rather than just being, ‘oh no’.

NICOLE: I am not sure of the neurobiological mechanics of it, if I was to read the article I would understand it more(!) but our intuition is designed to protect us from danger and there is a great book by Gavin de Becker called The Gift of Fear, which talks at length about intuition and how it is nature’s gift to us to protect us from danger and that’s really the only reason that it exists. Intuition is not going to send you down a more dangerous path. It is there to pick up on situations that you are walking through in life and helping you make decisions about it. I remember one time I was hiking on a trail that I hadn’t been on before, it is kind of around a neighbourhood, there were houses around and you could see the city, it was not super-rural or anything, and it was the evening and I was out walking. And I got to the part where I was going to go a little bit further on this trail that kind of hugs a ridge line and I just stopped in my tracks and I said, I shouldn’t go down that way today. 

HOLLY: Interesting.

NICOLE: Then I said to myself, Nicole you are being so ridiculous, just come on, how many times have you walked down this trail, you can’t see anything, there is full visibility apart from one tree, I could see it is going to be fine and then I realised, what was I doing? I was talking myself out of my intuition and so I turned around and I walked home because that trail is going to be there tomorrow. The next day when I went to do the trail I didn’t get any weird feelings. So you may never know what your intuition was reacting to and that is actually a good thing.

HOLLY: Yeah exactly, you don’t want to know!

NICOLE: No, no. And it is like we have this urge to try to explain it away or to judge our own feelings about it and this fear of, oh we are overreacting or we are being paranoid is a word that is thrown out a lot. No, you are trusting your intuition! You are responding to something that you may not have words to explain why you are feeling that way but just trust it. If you have got to turn around, turn around. If something is telling you hey I need to take a few steps back from this person or remove myself from this situation, it is ok to do it. And that trail, that place you were going or whatever will be there again if you want to go back on the trail.

HOLLY: Yes I think we are taught to value logic over intuition and I think that’s why we have to talk ourselves out of following our intuition, but I have always said that my gut is smarter than my head, because when I follow my intuition I never go wrong, but when I talk myself out of it, that’s when I get into trouble.

NICOLE: Yes exactly, that’s such a great way of putting it.

HOLLY: So many women are fearful of solo hiking and adventures and outdoor activities, so how can they have, or we have, solo adventures with confidence?

NICOLE: One way we can have solo adventures with confidence is first of all having confidence in ourselves and our own capabilities for protecting ourselves. One of the things that my training does, or all empowering self-defence does, it breaks down gender stereotypes. The stereotype we talked about earlier, oh women aren’t capable of protecting themselves, or they are weak etc. And I hear this from women when I teach classes with impact and we are teaching at a high school and I might have a student in class who will raise their hand and say, yeah I am really short and I am really small and I am worried I can’t do anything and they end up being the fiercest fighter in the class most of the time! So I am like, ok, let’s not reduce our own capacities and abilities based on these stereotypes.

And when people realise these simple things that they can do and what they already have in them and on their body to protect themselves. If I can help them click over that part of their brain that may have been self-limiting and saying, oh you can’t do this and instead saying, yeah, you can do this. I can do a solo hike or camping trip, my mindset isn’t, I am invisible nothing is going to happen to me, that’s not a helpful way to think but it is, I have the skills to know that I can deal with whatever comes and I am going to make the smartest decision for my safety based on what I am experiencing and that’s what it is about.

So I am going to go if something feels weird and if nothing ever feels weird then great, I just had a wonderful hiking and camping experience. So it is giving people the information and education so they can feel confident in themselves and their own ability to problem solve and their own knowledge of what they are capable of doing if they need to because then the worry isn’t, oh goodness, if something happens I won’t know what to do, it is ok, if something happens I can do this, I can do this, I can do this and that’s empowering.

HOLLY: And I imagine that reduces fear and anxiety around having these solo adventures.

NICOLE: Oh yeah absolutely, it is just like being prepared in any other sense, if you get ready to go on a road trip you make sure you have a spare tyre in the back of the car, you have some extra water in case you need to put water in your radiator, things like that. You map out where you are going so you can fill up before the desert, so you don’t run out of gas in the middle, and then if something unexpected happens well then great, you are prepared. Maybe you have AAA, which is great, but what if you don’t have a cell signal and you can’t get a hold of AAA, you are going to have to deal with that situation on your own and so long as you are prepared and have the knowledge to handle it then there is less fear about the unknown because you have more options available for handling it.

HOLLY: Absolutely, absolutely. So what are some practical things that women can do to feel safer in the outdoors? What are your top tips?

NICOLE: I try to avoid giving tips per se, because I don’t want people to think if you just do these things you are always going to be safe, or that they apply in every situation. My tips tend to be a little bit broader I hope that’s ok.

HOLLY: That’s totally fine.

NICOLE: The first thing I would say is trust your intuition always, that’s going to be key no matter where you are, just trust that feeling. And then, second tip that I’ll say, or strategy, is awareness. Being aware of your situation and that doesn’t necessarily have to be vigilance, it just means giving yourself permission to notice what is going on around you. It is ok to make eye contact if someone is making you uncomfortable, if you think someone is following you, turn around, that not only looks confident to that person, whether they mean bad or not it just looks confident to the person that you are looking behind you and now you can actually see what’s behind you, not just that person, and anything else that’s around. It can give you more sense of security of: ok, where am I? What are my options in this moment? And then that confidence of you addressing the person can be a deterrent if they were someone who had negative intentions. It is just opening yourself up to see and it is really great for when you are in the outdoors because, I don’t know about you, I love to stop and look at things!

HOLLY: Yes!

NICOLE: I will hear a noise and be like, what’s that? Ask anyone I hike with, I lead hikes with Black Girls Trekking and I am always like…we saw a dead tarantula on the hike that we just did and a tarantula hawk got it, we saw a tarantula hawk in the hike and I know it is the season for that and I think that’s what happened. If I had been just looking ahead and not looking around me I wouldn’t have seen it and they had never seen a tarantula dead of alive before, so I got to show them something. I am hearing something and finding lizards and… I was in Rwanda teaching self-defence at the end of July and I happened to watch a raptor with something in its claws, I watched it land in another tree and I was curious about whats going on up there. I zoomed my camera in and someone identified, I don’t know the name of the bird, but it was an African Goshawk bird and it had caught another bird.  

HOLLY: It snacked on it!

NICOLE: It snacked on the bird and I got it all on camera. And if I hadn’t been aware of my surroundings I would never have seen it. So awareness isn’t just about safety and being worried about people who might mean you harm, it helps you enjoy your hike I think, it helps you enjoy time in the outdoors. Another strategy that I give to people is to understand that you are worth fighting for, that really is such an important mental piece of it. There are people who have had no self-defence training at all who have successfully defended themselves because they just knew that they were worth it.

And I will take this opportunity to say, if somebody doesn’t fight, that doesn’t mean that violence is their fault. Choosing to fight back is a choice, it is just one of your options and whatever somebody does to survive a situation is going to be the right thing to do for them but if you choose to fight back and the people who have chosen to fight back and have successfully defended themselves, they haven’t always been trying in self defence, it is just that knowledge that I am worth it, my safety is worth it, my comfort is worth it.

There are folks that I have taught in class who have said, I don’t know if I could physically hurt somebody else, that’s really hard for me to think of, and a question for the is, what if you were walking with your child? Or your niece or your nephew or your dog even, someone who is smaller than you and you are in charge of caring for them and you are out and someone targets that person. What would they do? And their eyes narrow and they harden and there always an answer, oh no I would end that other person. And I want people to give themselves permission to do that for themselves.

HOLLY: Yes absolutely and I think that’s really important what you said about defence and fighting back being a choice and how there are many ways to fight back and there are many ways to defend yourself. I remember at the first self-defence course I took, that was like 30 years ago I did Model Mugging and in the introduction presentation to it, the woman was saying, if you are in a date-rape situation (because I was in college at the time), she said anything you can do to get out of that situation is valid. If you stick your finger down your throat and puke on the guy, that is a valid form of self-defence. And I was like, holy shit, I never thought of that! But obviously, that is going to be a deterrent, so totally valid.

NICOLE: Yes I love that you say that. I tell people this in class too. Anything you do to protect yourself, to get to safety, is self-defence. And there is this statistic, I still need to look this up, I have said this before, it comes from… the CEO of Impact has said this and I know there is a research study somewhere that has it I just need to find it, but it is that 75% of confrontations can be avoided with verbal strategies.

HOLLY: Yes that does not surprise me.

NICOLE: And when I am teaching and when I say, if you can get somebody to walk away and leave you alone, you just won; you just won a self-defence encounter without actually having to physically defend yourself, so using your intuition and turning around if you need to, that’s self-defence. Being aware of your situation that’s self-defence. Having confident body language is self-defence. Setting a boundary, all of it, all of that are forms of self-defence. And that’s why so often it is not just physical.

In fact, 90% of self-defence is going to be non-physical. And so, that’s what makes it so accessible; even people who have disabilities that may be worried about their ability to physically defend themselves, but there are so many other things that you can do which don’t require physicality that you can do to protect yourself. And if you have a physical disability there are other ways that you can use your body and your voice even if choose to, that could deter a potential assailant. That’s why I really love the empowerment of self-defence philosophy and why we teach it, because it makes it accessible to so many different people.

HOLLY: So how would you say empowerment self-defence differs from other types of self-defence?

NICOLE: Empowerment self-defence means that it is about offering choices and it is about offering options. There are no hard absolutes and it is not about restricting behaviour. So there is a lot of self-defence that has been taught in the past and I imagine that there is probably still some people who teach this way in the future, people are going to choose the classes that work best for them, so this is not me negatively analysing anyone else’s type of class, but a lot of times there are classes that advice people what not to wear; what not to do; that they have to carry certain things; there are certain restrictions on their life like don’t go out at night; don’t wear your hair in a ponytail; don’t wear high heels…

HOLLY: Yes, I’ve heard that.

NICOLE: We’ve all heard that and I don’t think it is very empowering. And so empowerment self-defence is about, you know what? Go out and wear those heels if you want to and here is how you can fight with your heels on; or take your heels off and fight. It is about helping people open up the world vs making it smaller. And I try to avoid giving people a list of dos and don’ts: don’t do this; and don’t do that; and here is this list that you should keep in your mind… I avoid that, because we already do that, we already have those lists in our heads!

And I want to help simplify our lives and simplify how we think about safety so it doesn’t feel like such a burden, so we do feel like we can go out and do what we want without having to think about 20 things, when I can just give you three things to think about and those three things allow you to do so much more. So that’s really the difference and the focus on verbal as well as the physical is another key part of empowerment self defence where we discuss that it is not just physical and we talk about ways you can use your voice and set boundaries and other ways outside of the physicality part of it, to defend yourself. So those are the real differences.

HOLLY: I remember years ago when I first started running, reading in this running magazine a list of dos and don’ts for women being safe on the trails. And one of them was, never put your hair in a ponytail because a man could grab your ponytail! For years afterwards, I never put my hair in a ponytail for running because I was like, what if someone grabs my ponytail?!

NICOLE: Yeah! I mean wear your hair in a ponytail and if someone grabs your ponytail I can show you how to handle them.

HOLLY: Yes, exactly!

NICOLE: Still how to defend yourself…and the ponytail is not what someone is targeting, they are not going around saying, ‘oh ponytail’, they are looking for other factors. There is so much research behind this and destroying myths like this is important to make people feel empowered in their lives.

HOLLY: So what kinds of things are predators looking for?

NICOLE: So predators are often looking for people they consider vulnerable. So they are looking at if you are paying attention, if you are aware, what your body language looks like. And they actually did a study where they took people who were in prison for various types of assault and robbery types of crimes and had them watch [shopping] mall footage and asked them to pick who they would target. And the people they targeted, they weren’t targeted based on gender, it wasn’t based on body size or height, it was: who was looking at their phone; who had their hands full of bags and was not paying attention; who was looking distracted…so it was often those types of things. Who had closed off body language.

And a lot of times the most common type of encounter that someone has is when someone has come up and is sort of talking to you and using, what in Gavin’s book he calls the tools of manipulation, to try to push through your boundaries. Maybe being really nice and charming to see if they can get a little closer to you to see if you are going to listen to your intuition or divert to the social contract of, oh this person is being nice and I don’t want to be mean to them so I will let them a little closer to me. And they used these types of strategies to try to decide who is going to be the person they are going to target.

Some of the things that I teach help counter those. What a predator is doing to try to see if you are going to be a target for them, I am teaching you ways to counteract those and try to show, ok no, I am not the person that you want to press here. And even something as simple as your body language can be a deterrent to somebody saying, oh I am not going to mess with this person, because they are not looking for a fight.

HOLLY: Exactly, they want it easy.

NICOLE: Yes, they are not looking to get injured. They are not looking to get recognised if we are talking about a stranger and they don’t want to get hurt…so they don’t want to get caught, they don’t want to get caught and they don’t want to get recognised. So anything we do to disrupt one of those things can be a deterrent for this person. So that’s why we talk about using a loud voice or setting a boundary and saying, look I am not interested in this conversation. Or saying, look you are too close, can you step back. And just being assertive in that way. Of course, there are no guarantees, because in life there are no guarantees, but those are things that have been shown to be effective ways at deterring predators and deterring violence. May I share a quick story?

HOLLY: Of course, yeah.

NICOLE: I tell this in my presentations now, because it is relevant. I was attacked in Madrid in December, and it was a stranger attack, so it wasn’t like the statistics say: I wasn’t alone, I was with a friend, we had finished dinner on Christmas Eve. Does anyone think they are going to be attacked on Christmas Eve?

HOLLY: No.

NICOLE: We didn’t have purses with us, because this restaurant was like a mile from the hotel so we walked but we decided to take a Uber back. We thought, you know it’s probably not a good idea to walk in the dark in this new city and decided to take an Uber. We called an Uber and waited until it was a few minutes away before walking out of the restaurant to wait for it, we were there for less than three minutes and in an area that was still lit, there were still tourists, it was 10 o’clock, that’s not late.

HOLLY: Especially not for Spain, yeah.

NICOLE: No. So there were still people around but there was a lot of commotion going on, and I remember turning to my friend and I told her, something doesn’t feel right, this doesn’t feel good we need to be out of here. And she was like, yeah, our car is almost here. We were waiting for our safety to arrive, right? So the car arrives, my friend gets into the car, she gets in first and before I can get into the car I notice something moving out of the corner of my eye and there was a man charging at me, just running at me. I had a split second to decide what to do and I knew that I could get into the car before he reached me.

My friend hadn’t moved across the seat yet and there was nowhere else to run to and if I moved, now she is going to be in clear path of this man, so what I did was I turned around and faced this man straight on in the double-boundary that I teach, with my hands facing up and out and I made eye contact and I just said, hey what’s going on? I figured if we are going to fight, it is better that I am facing him rather than him running at me from behind, especially now that I am aware of this problem.

And he stopped. He stopped about three to four feet from me, he was still too close but he stopped. And he just looked at me, he never answered my question, he never said a word, he didn’t try and grab me, he didn’t ask me for anything, we didn’t have anything flashy or bling on us, I will never know what his intentions were. I don’t even want to speculate, I don’t know. And he didn’t get closer to me but he didn’t go away, he kind of walked around me and my friend said, what’s going on? And I said, ok there is a problem and I am trying to figure out what to do and I just kept facing him with my hands up and it felt like dragged on even though it was only seconds.

A few seconds later he leaned back and he kicked out at my face but because my hands were up all he did was kick my open palm, he didn’t kick my face. If I had my hands down that would have been a straight, it would not have been a good situation. But all he did was kick my open palm and the moment he made contact three bystanders hopped in, two men came from the side, the Uber driver got out and rushed at him. After they rushed at him and kind of distracted him, I ran around the back of the car and got in on the other side and we closed the door and we locked it, and the driver came back a few seconds later and we drove away to safety.

That is a successful self-defence story that didn’t involve having to physically defend myself. I did all the things right: I wasn’t by myself, we took an Uber home instead of walking, we were in a part of town where there were other people; so all of those lists and rules are not guarantees of safety and I feel like it adds an additional burden. Those are things to be aware of and to help make decisions but those aren’t hard and fast rules that are always going to work so that’s why it is important to have information so that you can respond to situations that actually are arising.

What’s interesting is that the day before I had been walking around the whole city by myself because my friend needed to rest and I had walked around everywhere, I was by myself, I was asking strangers to take pictures for me in front of tourist attractions, I was out in the nighttime shopping because it’s the holidays and I had not one problem. So we finished our trip and I ended up being alone in Barcelona the last day because she had to go home early and I didn’t let what happened stop me because I knew that that was not something that is common, that is going to happen to the same person over and over and over, it was a situation, it happened, I responded and now I am going to continue living my life by continuing to trust my intuition and use my awareness and know that if something happens that I can respond.

HOLLY: That is such a good story to illustrate awareness and intuition. I remember years ago when I was living in Buenos Aires in Argentina I was walking down the street with my partner at the time, in the city centre but a nice part of town, Sunday afternoon, quiet and walking with my partner at the time and at the corner of my eye I see this man crossing the street directly at me. And so I look, I turn my head and look straight at him and make eye contact and he abruptly makes a turn and starts walking in the other direction. And seconds later I hear this woman screaming, ‘stop, thief! My purse, stop the thief!’ And I turned around and these women who were not ten yards behind me, he had gone to them and targeted them but he didn’t get me because I saw him. He was coming straight at me but the fact that I looked at him and made eye contact, he flew and turned, I was no longer the object.

NICOLE: Oh my gosh, I am glad that you were okay in that and that didn’t have to experience that, I mean I am sorry for those women who had that experience; your story and my story, there are so many stories like that. We are not saying that it is someone’s fault…

HOLLY: No absolutely not.

NICOLE: …that a crime happens. Unless there is a criminal there is no crime.

HOLLY: Exactly. You should be able to just walk down the street.

NICOLE: Yeah if the guy hadn’t of been there, you wouldn’t have had to experience that. But unfortunately, we do live in a world where there are people who mean us harm and are robbing people and assaulting people and things like that. So having the skills to know what options and choices you have if you encounter that, that can just help you feel more confident, if you know what I mean?

HOLLY: Absolutely.

NICOLE: But it is not a guarantee, at least it’s a choice and I feel like more education is always better than less education.

HOLLY: It gives you options. So are there any self-defence tools that you recommend like a personal alarm, or do you prefer to just use what’s on your body?

NICOLE: I prefer to use what’s on my body, that’s a personal choice for me, I don’t carry anything with me, I carry a multi-tool when I hike because I might need it for a survival situation, I have actually had to use it when… my pole broke on a hike, it was not retractable but they fold and so the metal cable was stuck so I couldn’t fold it so I had to saw through it with my multi-tool, because there is a saw on one end, so I carry that because I might have to do some trail repair or something like that. I am not carrying it to use it as a weapon because I am not trained in using that tool as a weapon, I don’t train with it every day.

HOLLY: Exactly.

NICOLE: Now, people always ask me about self-defence tools, weapons, and do I recommend carrying something, do I carry something? And what do they bring? I made a whole video on it because I got asked it so much, I have a video on it and I have a blog on it. And what I always say is, whatever you carry you have to train with it. I mean whatever it is, it doesn’t matter whether it is pepper spray, or something more heavy-duty lethal like a gun or a knife things like that, you have to train with it! Because adrenalin affects your body by reducing logic and reasoning and your fine motor skills, so you might not be able to get that tool out and aimed and accessible in the split second that you might have to respond if you are not training and practising with it. And even then, if you are training and practising with it, it still might not respond in the way you are expecting it to.

Your body and your mind are always going to be your primary tools. You are going to have to be aware of what is happening in order to reach for your secondary thing anyway. So your body and your mind are always first and those things you can always have with you, even in places where certain weapons aren’t allowed, you are always going to have yourself and your body and those are things that I want people to remember and to feel empowered by that and to not feel like you need something else to be safe. You have everything you need on you to be able to protect yourself, but if you do decide that you want to carry something and empowerment self-defence is all about choice, right?

If you decide that you want to carry something just train with it, understand its limitations, understand that it’s possible that it could be used against you and understand that you, as yourself, are already enough and you don’t need to put your safety and security and rely on anyone or anything else, because you are enough and that’s what I always try to leave people with. Sometimes teaching people about the adrenalin piece, sometimes people say, I didn’t even think about that! We imagine in our head how we are going to respond but unless you are actually practising with this thing, we are human and our neurobiology is going to respond when we are under stress and our adrenalin starts pumping. So we have to be aware of those facts.

And in the personal alarm part, your voice works as an alarm. And if you are someone who has a hard time yelling or can’t, or has an ability where you can’t use an alarm, or you can’t use your voice, then yeah, use an alarm. I carry a whistle when I hike, as a way to alert people, say there is an issue or I need to be rescued. I don’t know if you scuba?

HOLLY: I used to.

NICOLE: So you know you always have to have two forms of communication, you have to have a visual and you have to have an audible when you scuba. And exactly the same when I am hiking, I carry a signal mirror and a whistle in case I need to alert someone. As far as that it doesn’t hurt to have it with you but just understand that that alarm, especially when you are in the outdoors, you are using that to hopefully scare the person to get other people to hear you, but if you are hiking there might not be someone who can hear you. And I have heard those alarms, they are not that loud, even the ones that say they are really loud, yeah they are loud but you know what is more intimidating is for the person that the predator is targeting to say, ‘hey no, back up. I’m telling you leave me alone’. That’s going to be more of a deterrent than a sound.

HOLLY: And again, it is something that you have to practice because I think a lot of us aren’t used to screaming in public or screaming in the outdoors and one of the things that I learned in that very fast self-defence class that I ever took was every time we struck, every time we fought back, we had to yell ‘no’. With every punch, with every kick, it was ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’. And I remember thinking, this seems like it is a bit overboard. Years later I got attacked by this guy outside my office when I was working alone at night, he got me outside my car, started beating me in the head with a stick, pushed me on the ground to steal my purse and I’m there in the middle of nowhere and I hear someone screaming. And I was like, who is here? I’m alone, who is that screaming? And it was me. I wasn’t even making the effort to scream, it was just happening because I had programmed in this course and I was just so glad. I just didn’t have to think about it, it just happened.

NICOLE: Yeah, your voice is so powerful, it is one of the first weapons we have. Whether it is yelling in a fight situation, like you’ve experienced, or using our voice to set a boundary. Telling someone that we are hiking with, ‘you know when you say comments like that’s making me feel really uncomfortable, I need you to stop’. Things like that are all ways that we are asserting ourselves and asserting our needs. So yeah, your voice is so powerful. So if you are going to carry something like a personal alarm, that’s also something you need to train in, it’s like, where is it on your body? Is it easy to access if you plan to use it in a stressful situation or is it all the way in the back of your pack? And now… it needs to be accessible! And think in your head, when am I going to push the button? Am I going to push the button the moment somebody makes me feel uncomfortable? The moment I feel intuition? What is your threshold?

HOLLY: Yeah, what is the trigger?

NICOLE: And that’s the same for any type of personal safety tool that you decide to carry. Like you need to think about that as part of your training. When are you going to use it? That’s why I advise training being so important and why what I teach doesn’t involve having to have anything else because then we can focus on our bodies, we can focus on what we can say and what we can do and not have to split our attention and think, ok when and where and how am I going to grab this additional thing. We can just focus on, what can I do with my body right now? And get yourself ready to respond without having to split your focus.

HOLLY: That makes sense. So what kind of feedback have you received from your workshops and classes? How has learning self-defence changed women’s lives, not just in the outdoors but in other areas of your life? Because this has a ripple effect.

NICOLE: It absolutely has a ripple effect. I get such positive feedback from my sessions that it warms my heart. This is why I do this work, I want to make a difference. I want to make a difference and help women and people of all gender identities everywhere feel more confident and capable in the outdoors so that they can live limitlessly. I don’t want fear to be the thing that stops you doing the thing that you want to do. So a lot of times I have people say, ‘wow I didn’t realise all the things I had on my body to be able to fight with’. Or, ‘I didn’t realise that I was worth fighting for’. That really hit me hard! Or, ‘I definitely feel more confident going out on this trail because now I feel more capable’. And, ‘wow I didn’t realise there were so many things I could do other than physical for self-defence’.

And people sharing it with me that they have used it in other aspects of their life. I get testimonials from people who have stories that they share with me after the fact. Or someone will say, ‘I am getting ready to do my first solo hike and it is because of you! I just took my first solo camping trip, or my first solo backpacking trip and I did it because of you’. Or, ‘this person acted like this and I remembered what you said and so I responded like this and then they walked away’. All of these success stories and I am so happy that what I do is actually helping people.

HOLLY: Of course, of course, it is. Oh, that’s so great. So Nicole, where can people find you online and learn more about what you do?

NICOLE: I am on Instagram, I have ‘Girls Fight Back’ is one of my accounts and then ‘Adventures of Nik’, is my personal but also where I post my outdoor defence episodes which I post every other Tuesday. And in fact, Outdoor Defence, the Season 3 Finale, happens on October 4^th, and when that airs I will have done 60 episodes.

HOLLY: Wow!

NICOLE: So I am doing a big giveaway to celebrate the milestone and I will have information about that on my social media accounts, people should check it out. And I have my websites, NicoleSnell.com and then also GirlsFightBack.com and on YouTube channel it is Nicole Snell Outdoor Defence, they can also sign up for my newsletter on my website and I am also on Coffee, in case anyone is interested in tipping me for the work that I do, or supporting my work in outdoor defence and things like that, those are always appreciated as well.

HOLLY: Well thank you so much for joining us today, I think you have some fantastic tips and great stories and things to keep in mind.

NICOLE: Thank you so much, Holly, it has been a pleasure speaking with you today.

HOLLY: Thanks.