Martial Arts-Based Safety Training

Robert Pater, SSA/MoveSMART Director
The Motivational Manager (August 2000)

Too much safety training is about lectures, rules, and incentive plans that may or may not reward the right behavior. "What most organizations do is the same old police approach of 'Do it or else'," says Robert Pater, managing director of Strategic Safety Associates. "If something's not working, write another procedure; if people aren't paying attention, you yell at them." Pater takes another approach. His program, MoveSMART, is rooted in the martial arts. It's not about breaking boards or fighting thugs, but about learning how to control and manipulate a person's attention. Strategic Safety Associates has coached people in 63 countries for organizations like 3M, Harley-Davidson, and Nabisco. Pater explained some of the techniques in an interview with the Motivational Manager.

MM: How would you describe MoveSMART?

MoveSMART is a process of helping people control themselves and their attention. What we focus on are movement-related injuries--strains and sprains, trips and falls, hand injuries, things like that. Our slogan is Safer, stronger, and more in control. It's based upon martial arts. All of the people in my group are long-term (25-30 years minimum) martial arts instructors who still actively practice. Basically, we're trying to get people to rethink safety. We think that safety can be a vehicle of exciting involvement and interest.

MM: How does controlling one's attention contribute to safety in the workplace?

One of my favorite quotes from Tom Peters is his statement that after 25 years of consulting, everything he's learned can be boiled down into five words: attention is all there is. What you put your attention to is what you get. We basically try to wake people up to the fact that all of us have attention patterns that are somewhat restrictive, that are useful in certain circumstances but mismatched in other kinds of situations. Generally people who are very good at focusing their attention and blocking out distractions also miss things in their environment. When you're driving, for example, you're looking straight ahead and you don't see things on the side. On a safety level, that can be pretty dangerous. We try to show people where they're good and where they're not good, and give them some specific exercises and techniques for broadening their effectiveness.

MM: What sorts of techniques do you teach?

One of the things we teach people to do is widen their attention. For example, you're probably very good already at listening to a piece of music and tuning into one instrument. We might tell you, "Okay, what we'd like you to do now is we want you to focus on a different instrument. We want you to selectively change and channel your attention, so you're not just focused on one, but you're focused on another and another." Then you start hearing the entire string section, for example, or how one part of the music blends in with another part.

We teach people things to do with their eyes, because a lot of people see right ahead of them, but they're physically unaware of what's going on at their sides. So we teach people to relax their eyes. There's a technique in martial arts called the "soft-eyes" technique. You're not letting your eyes blur, but you are letting them go a little bit out of focus. Let yourself look straight ahead, but be more aware of your peripheral vision.

Attention is very eye-control based. When people look up, they usually lift their chin up. When you do that, you're compromising your balance drastically. In a demonstration, we'll have people lift their heads up--like they're looking at the top of the stairs--and if you touch their chest slightly, with pressure, they fall backwards. So by teaching people to keep their chins down, relax, and look up with just their eyes, they'll be able to increase their balance drastically and marshal their attention better.

MM: How do you conduct your training sessions?

First of all, we believe that if you want to try and change an organization, you have to use a scissors approach: You've got to go simultaneously top-down and bottom-up. So we try to show managers that this is not just something you delegate. You manage safety no differently than you manage productivity, quality, morale, etc. That's the top-down part of the scissors. But mostly what we do is train hourly workers to train their peers. It's a five-day process. We teach them how to do the techniques well, and we teach them presentation skills. We have them practice teaching in front of us two times--in front of their class colleagues, so they get the kinks out and get some feedback. Then they go back and start teaching courses, which reinforces the culture.

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