 This is Shepard Humphreys, and I wanted to chat a bit about why it is that I teach personal protection for women, women's self-defense classes, and why that's an area of interest for me. Of course, I think most human beings don't want anyone to be assaulted, battered, injured. However, I just wanted to give you a little background on why it's important to me. When I was about four years old, my mother was dating a man named Adam Turtle in the back hills of Tennessee, where we lived, and he was overall a pretty great guy, except I recall one night, as he and my mother were breaking up, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her down onto the muddy ground, the driveway, and I'm just a little four-year-old boy looking at this, and oh my gosh, I was scared. This had such an impact on my life. I just, I couldn't believe this. I was, it was huge, and so of course, I carry this with me, and I'm not traumatized by it or anything, but you know, it's on my mind, and a couple of years later, we see, we're visiting a neighbor, and we look across the yard, and the next door neighbor to them, the guy is beating his wife and slams her head into the hood of the car and is yelling and cursing, and oh, that just, that was so, so awful to see and to witness as a six, seven-year-old boy, and so of course that had an impact on me, and I don't really know what all went on in my, my little head, but as years went by, I had more and more of an interest to, to prepare myself to be able to defend others, and I later became a police officer, and I thought that that was going to be a way that I could help protect people and keep them safe, and I had the best of intentions, but I didn't realize that at that point, I was young, I didn't realize that government wasn't the best way to provide protection for people, and so I did that for about 10 years, and realized that wasn't one doing the trick, and I'm not pretending here that my whole life is dedicated to, to helping women protect themselves, but I'm just sharing with you the, some of my life experiences that have led me to be kind of passionate about this, this topic, so after law enforcement, I have a security consultation business and executive protection business, and I provided advice and some tactics and training to various women that were facing bad times in their lives and tried to help make those times better, and so that has kind of led us up to today, and for the last many years, I actually started in college, I had special guest Gary Fairhurst, who's still teaching self-defense today, great, great teacher, great guy, I had him come down to Central Wyoming College where I was at the time and teach a self-defense class for women, I think that was probably 92, 94-ish, something like that, and ever since then, every few years I've been offering classes here and there, I unfortunately find that most women are not as concerned as they should be, and there are statistics saying that one out of every six, or one out of every four, or one out of every eight women, is going to be physically attacked at some point in her life, and of course this varies, I know that it's not nice to be slapped as somebody walks away, but my main area of concern is an ongoing aggressive attack that's going to end in serious injury or rape, that's what I really want to prevent, and I have complete respect for everyone that's passionately pursuing emotional assaults, if I don't actually don't think the word assault would work for emotions, but those that are doing things that that lead to others not feeling happy or to lead them to feeling sad or scared or that kind of thing, I really appreciate the people that are working on that. My particular area of interest is preventing the attack, and then if the attack does happen, best preparing oneself to defend against that attack, and then after the attack thriving in the aftermath of it, not falling into the victim mentality after the victimization is over, not letting this last for years and years, and to move on from that point and grow and build a wonderful, happy, healing life helping others. So that's my area of interest, a little bit about my background, and I hope that at some point, if this is of interest to you, if you're a woman, that you will come and take one of our classes, encourage other women to do so. Our classes are appropriate for anyone that is, I'd say puberty on, adolescent age, on up to however old a person wants to come. And getting back to who this class is appropriate for, I mentioned statistics earlier. I think that every woman should take a class of this sort, whether you take the one that we offer or another one, please, please take a class like this. Even if the statistics are lower than most people say, even if it's one in ten women, that will at some point be seriously physically attacked in her lifetime, it's really worth doing this. Think about your probability of being injured in an automobile collision. Pretty slim. This, one out of ten, that is a pretty high risk, and yes, a two-hour class isn't going to solve everything forever more. However, if it can help you reduce your risk by 20 or 30 or 40 percent, it seems to me as though that would be a valuable investment of your time. And I hope that all parents kind of take this seriously enough to say, hey teen daughters, we're gonna go do this, we're gonna have fun, we'll go out to dinner after work, we're gonna have a good time, but you need to listen and pay attention. This could save your life or keep your life from getting really messed up later on. So please parents, bring your teen daughters, come as a, you know, the two of you, mom and daughter. That's perfect. You guys will be experiencing the same thing and can talk about it later. I urge you to come. We've been asked about our entry fees for this class, our ticket price, and they range in different classes from five bucks to 20 bucks. And why do we charge anything at all if this is such a passion? Well, first of all, I'm a big proponent of the free market, and in most of the training that we provide, we are pretty much at the top of the market, at least in the United States. This particular area is not something we do for money. We do this because we care about women not getting hurt and we charge only because we have discovered in the past. If we don't charge, everybody promises they're gonna come and nobody shows up. So we want you to have a little bit of skin in the game. We want you to spend a few bucks, take the effort to sign up, and then we know you're gonna show up and learn and care about it. And we hope that you will agree and make the choice to come and learn how to better protect yourself, and as it turns out, those you care the most about.