Diamond Defense Podcast: Ep. 02 – Confidence

Diamond Defense Podcast: Confidence

Confidence isn’t just a feeling—it’s action. Join Lisa and Kellie in Episode 2 of the Diamond Defense Podcast as we continue the conversation about women's self-defense & ways to keep ourselves from being targeted for attack. Our guest, Kelley shares a Chicago street story and shows how trusting your instincts (and your little monster) can keep you safe.

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Show Notes

Co-Host and Co-Producer: Lisa
Co-Host and Co-Producer: Kellie

Guest Storyteller
Kelley

Special Thanks
Ann Cobb, Kelley Ogden

Music
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Title: Fighter; Composers: Klotz Christina Elyse Panchal
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Title: Time; Composers: Suokas Sergey
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Sound Effects
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Transcript

Theme Music: I am a fighter. Checking my armor. I'm marching onward. Hey Hey.
I knew I couldn't outrun them, but my hope was that by screaming that in the middle of a dark street, I've brought attention. Putting out there that I do not have anything of value other than my person.

Kellie: Hi, Lisa. 

Lisa: Hey, Kellie. 

Kellie: Episode two. We're so excited. 

Lisa: Oh, my gosh, yes. This is awesome. Thank you so much for, um, continuing this journey with me. 

Kellie: I know. So speaking of the journey, we started with episode one, which is awareness, and this time we're going to be talking about taking it a step further with confidence, and I've learned from you and we're gonna learn more throughout the episode, that confidence is key in both creating the film that we're talking about, that you've created and in self-defense itself.

Kellie: So, in this episode, we'll explore how your belief that now is the perfect time to share self-defense training, how it parallels with confidence and awareness, and how those both parlay into keeping yourself safe. And we have a very special guest who's joining us to share her story about how confidence kept herself safe.

Kellie: And I think it's really important that you actually introduce her. So, tell us… tell us more. 

Lisa: It's an honor and a privilege to introduce her. The funny thing that happened was that, uh, we, so we did the first episode, right? And… I was listening to that episode after you had sent over the final version of that, and I asked my wife, Kelley to listen to the episode as well with me so that I could get just some… some feedback on it.

Lisa: And when we finished the episode and I was so nervous. Because of course, her opinion is so important to me. She said, “What are you doing for your next episode?” And I said, “We're gonna talk about confidence.” And she said, “I'll do it.” I was kerfuffled with just how… how wonderful it felt to have her confidence in us and in the work that we had done to the point where she wanted to come and she wanted to tell her story.

Lisa: And I knew she had a perfect story for this. And so, she's your bestie. She's my wife. She's a great storyteller, and she's probably the most confident person I know, so she is the perfect guest for us today. 

Kelley: Hi, I'm Kelley. I'm Lisa's wife and Kellie's best friend, and I'm just gonna need everybody to lower the bar.

Kellie: It's like the trifecta of everything we would want in a storyteller, you know, I mean, as a guest, like somebody we know very intimately and personally, and a hundred percent… one of the most confident people I know, and I'm constantly inspired by her confidence and her storytelling as an artist myself.

Lisa: Yeah. So, it'd be, it'll be great to, um, to hear her talk about how she, uh, how she's become her own hero in some very sticky situations. 

Kellie: So, we're gonna talk about, again, the short film that you've produced and created. And the first episode we talked about awareness, how that played a key, in... ‘cause you talk about three things in the film. Awareness, confidence, and destination. Correct? 

Lisa: Correct. 

Kellie: And this episode, we're gonna talk about confidence and really focusing on that and how it's important in self-defense. 

Lisa: Yeah. And I think, you know, some of these things, you know, some of these things we're al– we're already doing, right? The awareness, most of us tend to be very aware when we're out and about, especially if we're women and we have thought about our safety and we consider our safety.

Lisa: You know, some of us understand the need to project confidence. Um, we're gonna talk about destination next and how a lot of us already do these things, but I think focusing on each piece of it and understanding how they all play together to create the ability to lessen our chances of becoming targeted is really important.

Lisa: So even if it's something we already feel like we do, I think it's still important to really talk about it, to hear other women's stories. And see how they use these things, how we all use these things as tactics and techniques to protect ourselves and to be our own heroes. 

Kelley: I allow myself my little monster to exist and thrive within me when I need it. To me, that's confidence in myself. I love myself enough to have a dark side of me that I know I can let out if and when I need to, to protect myself. 

Kellie: If you could say, this is how I employ confidence in three words, what adjectives would you use or verbs or nouns, whatever kind of part of the language you wanna use.

Kellie: Defining how you can employ confidence. Three words. What? What would you say? 

Lisa: Posture, voice, body language. 

Kellie: Nice. 

Lisa: Yeah. We can display confidence by making a couple of small adjustments to our posture. At any given moment, we can roll our shoulders back, we can lift our chin up. Just that in and of itself, portrays confidence to someone else, even if we're not actually confident people, which many of us aren't.

Kellie: Fake it till you make it. 

Lisa: Exactly.

Kellie: Have you ever been alone on a street, in a parking garage, or even just walking to your car and suddenly you felt that shift? You know that moment when you realized you weren't as alone as you thought. And if that happens to you in the future, are you ready? Is your little monster, your instinct, your confidence, your hero, awake and prepared to do what you need to do?

Kellie: Let's listen to Kelley's story. 

Kelley: I went to school in Chicago and lived there for about six years. This took place shortly after I graduated with my undergrad, and I was living in a particularly rough neighborhood, uh, on the north side of Chicago. And I had gone to… to see a show that my friend was in and support them after the show, uh, he and I went out to the bar that was next door to the theater, and we played a round of pool, caught up.

Kelley: It was a lovely time, except at some point during the pool game, the purse that I had placed on a table next to the pool table had gone missing. So, my purse had gotten stolen from the bar. Uh, I was not in a great head space. I drove back to my neighborhood, parked, had to park because it's late at night, and this was still very urban Chicago.

Kelley: So, if, uh, you've ever been in an urban area, you come home, the later you come home at night, the further away you have to find parking, in terms of street parking. I found myself in a situation where I was coming home late at night and very pissed off. So, I'm getting close to my apartment. It is probably… I'm probably about four blocks away.

Kelley: And the streets are pretty empty. It's pretty quiet. And I start to hear footsteps, uh, on the sidewalk behind me. Multiple footsteps followed by male voices. So, of course I get a little bit worried because of the environment and the fact that I'm alone. So, I do an old trick where I use, uh, the windows of the cars parked on the street as well as the storefronts or apartment windows on the first floor, to look at reflections as I'm walking by to see what is happening behind me. My instinct is that if I turn around, uh, that will be an engagement and things will escalate. Whereas if I keep walking forward and just try and get an… an assessment of the situation, it buys me time. So, I'm looking in the windows and I can see it's four young men.

Kelley: And they are definitely in a group together, and they are walking about a half block behind me. As I'm making my way, I take a turn, they take the same turn, so my red flags go up again. Because the neighborhood is pretty dead at this point. Nobody's out, nobody's about, there are no cars on the street. I... feel a little trapped on the sidewalk because I am between cars, which can provide, um, a wall in terms of visibility. And then I'm also, on the other side of me are alcoves and doorways that are very easy places to get pulled into. And again, not be visible. So, since there were no cars on the street and it was quiet, uh, there were high rises kind of all around me, uh, high-rise apartment buildings. And so instead of continuing to walk on the sidewalk, I move into the middle of the street.

Kelley: So, I'm walking right in the middle of the street, and I can tell by the reflections in the footfalls that they have followed to move from the sidewalk into the middle of the street right behind me. So, at that point, I know I'm in a bad situation. And because of what had just happened at the bar, I was so pissed.

Kelley: Like I was just so... pissed! Like, like it wasn't enough for somebody to steal my belongings. Now, even now on my way home, I, I have this threat of harm to my being, and I realize I can't, I can't outrun these guys if I start running. I can't.... It's too long a distance for me to be able to try. So, I let my anger, and my frustration fuel some crazy. These guys, I hear them getting closer.

Kelley: They're getting closer. I make the decision. I cannot outrun them. And so, I turn around full on in the middle of the street. Because it's so quiet, I yell. And what I yell is, “Look, I don't have anything on me. My purse just got stolen, so I don't have shit. So why don't you guys just fuck off?”

Kelley: It was so funny 'cause there was this shared moment where we were all like, like even the guys, their faces got like, they were taken aback. And in that shock, I turned around and took off. I knew I couldn't outrun them, but my hope was that by screaming that in the middle of a dark street, I've brought attention by putting out there that I do not have anything of value other than my person that that would at least draw the parameters of what they would get out of this. Like if you're going after me, okay, there's nothing I can do about that. But if you're coming after me for money or belongings or credit cards, I don't have anything. It was also a way for me to do something instead of just freeze up. I think the shock of me having screamed at them gave them enough pause to question, do we really want this sort of behavior or do we want to deal with wild animal that we now have in front of us?

Kelley: And it also, it fueled my adrenaline to sprint all the way back to my apartment. And by the time I got within a block of my apartment, you know, there were some, some local residents that were kind of out a little bit. And so, I was back into a place of safety, and I got home and I… I continue to sort of be amazed at the chutzpah that I had in terms of, of saying that and acting in that way.

Kelley: I had let a previous violation fuel a confidence and an anger to force, um, the situation and, and make what I would think to be a… a rather bold move. It's so easy to, to question and doubt if you're reading the situation right. It's so easy to question and doubt your instincts because at least I feel like in my evolution as a woman in this world, the first thing I look for is to make myself perfect, right?

Kelley: To make myself perfect in a situation, to make sure that I haven't overstepped, that I'm not upsetting anyone, that I haven't gone too far. I think what propelled the confidence was a true, allowing myself to truly understand the threat that I was under. That I'd… I had already taken evasive measures. I had already done Herculean things to try and get myself out of the situation, and still they were behind me.

Kelley: I am somebody who has had my share of anger issues from a very young age, and I have learned that there are times when anger can be necessary to fuel action and to allow myself to have that anger and to express it. And to realize frequently that the world does not want, especially women, to particularly do that for a reason, and that's 'cause they're scared of it.

Kelley: I think what really ended up working well is that my anger made somebody else scared of me when they were trying to put control over me in that situation. It's not a new tactic, right? Frequently in Chicago, I think that I always discussed with my girlfriends the times when we just, we went… we went crazy because it is something that, especially male perpetrators, they fear.

Kelley: Okay, are you scared of that? Great. If you come after me, I'm going to go crazy on you. Because what do I have to lose? I think that was the other thing is that I didn't have anything else to lose except me.

Kelley: You know, I didn't have any other thing I could throw out to try and assuage them or to try and distract them. There was nothing else except me, my person. And you know, for listeners, I'm 5'1", maybe 5'2". I was 22 years old at the time when this happened. I, um, am a very petite, sort of pleasing, seeming person, and there's a reason Chihuahuas have to have big barks, uh, because they're small little dogs.

Kelley: Nobody's scared of 'em. Nobody's scared of me. But you know what, I'm… I'm an actor. I can make you scared of me if that's what I need to have happen. And it may not get me anywhere, but by… by darn it, it's a tool in my arsenal I can use to be willing to do extreme things if and when your lines are crossed, if and when your boundaries are violated.

Kelley: Then you know what? I'm gonna start to get a little crazy and you're gonna have to deal with that. And if you don't wanna deal with that, then you move away. And that's what I want in the first place. 

Kellie: I am tearing up right now thinking about Kelley's story for many reasons. One, I know her, and I love her, and like I'm so inspired by who she is as a person every day.

Kellie: But listening to her reaction and what she went through. But I'm gonna be honest, I'm also tearing up by what a great storyteller she is. Imagining that scene, walking by yourself at night and all of a sudden knowing that you're, you're being followed and you don't know what's gonna happen, but you're scared, and what she went through, like, what's your first reaction as… as to one, being in that situation yourself, but two, how she reacted? 

Lisa: It's so interesting as young people how… how we face threats differently than when we have a little… a few more years under our belt and sort of understand the direness of some circumstances. And like, I remember when that happened and, you know, we weren't, I think we were… we were courting, we weren't a couple yet, but we were… we were courting.

Lisa: You know, and I remember her telling me that story and just being like, “Oh, my God, that's such a badass thing!” And… and it not honestly striking me how incredibly dangerous and scary that situation actually was until I sat here today and I listened to her tell that story and I'm tearing up right now because I'm just imagining little baby Kelley, you know, at 22 years old, like having to face something like that. And I'm so proud of her, obviously for how she reacted from being her own hero. We always talk about, you know, being your own hero. It's such a perfect shining example of so many of the things that we teach. You know, distraction techniques, using your voice as a weapon.

Lisa: You know, trusting your instincts that something is not right, and being willing to take action based upon all of those different instincts that are telling you that something isn't right. And you know, those guys could have just been out for a midnight stroll, who knows, they might not have been up to no good at all, but she had to trust her instincts in that moment, and I think it saved her from something that would've been truly traumatic, and I'm just, I'm just so proud of her. 

Kellie: I am too, and I'm all for, you know what, you're scaring me and I'm not gonna wait to find out if you're actually gonna hurt me. 

Lisa: Yeah. 

Kellie: So, I'm gonna tell you to back off now whether it's a with a fuck you back up or– 

Lisa: Right.

Kellie: Screaming or, yeah, I don't know. Whatever you have to do just to stand your ground. 

Lisa: In the last episode, you know we talked about how some guys get it. Some guys understand, you know, we talked about our friend Josh will cross the street so that he's not just walking behind a lone woman. You know? And I think that… that… that's very important to this story as well.

Lisa: Like, okay, gents, if you aren't up to no good and you are just… you just… you don't have any, you know, bad motives in what you're doing. Maybe don't follow a woman, all four of you in the middle of the night, into the middle of the street, you know. So, the idea of I'm gonna react first I think is incredibly valid when you're put in a situation like that.

Lisa: And if… if they didn't wanna be yelled at or if they didn't wanna be surmised to be doing something untoward, maybe they should have been more attentive to what that situation was. 

Kellie: Yeah. Oh, well, you know, it's interesting. The last episode was about awareness and that really fed her confidence. 

Lisa: Yep. 

Kellie: She was aware of what was going on, so she was able to use the confidence that she had to catch them off guard.

Lisa: Yes, absolutely. To catch them off guard, to let them know she was aware of them, and to let them know that, hey, I am not gonna be an easy target for you. And we talk about that in the film, that predators want an easy target. They want somebody who's not gonna fight back. They want somebody who's not gonna make a fuss.

Lisa: So, the second you let somebody know who may be targeting you, hey, look, I'm not going to be an easy target for you. That can be a deterrence in and of itself. And in fact, it was the perfect deterrence for her in that… in that instance. 
Kellie: And I think what's interesting for her is she's an actress, so she's got the confidence in her voice and… and just that tool set, so–

Lisa: Yeah. 

Kellie: I think whatever you have to do, if you're listening, if you're maybe not somebody who likes to use a big voice or big body language, finding the tools that will help you do that, I think would be good. 

Kelley: Yes, having confidence is a deterrent, but I think that confidence is also, it's about how you access it. And trusting... trusting your instincts on when you need to access it and not apologizing. We have to do the most ridiculous things to get to work. We have to do the most ridiculous things to move through the world. We have to do the most ridiculous things to be safe in our homes or safe in our devices.

Kelley: So, if I have to go to great extents to do that, I need to know that I'm worth it. And trust everything my body and my mind is telling me in those situations to deter being a victim. 

Kellie: So, Kelley had all kinds of confidence and continues to have confidence every day in her life, and that kept her safe. You have had the confidence to do something new and make this short film that you've made. We talked about it in the first episode. What… what's the film called again? 

Lisa: It's called "Three Things." So, the three things are awareness, confidence, and destination. 

Kellie: Bum bum bum!

Lisa: It was a Morris Stein, Betty Grayson study that was done to evaluate how predators target people for attack. And if we are mindful of these three specific things, nine times outta 10, we can keep ourselves from being attacked or targeted for a threat in the first place.

Kellie: What kind of obstacles can we overcome to get ourselves to a place of confidence so we can act like Kelley? And take care of ourselves. If somebody else is not gonna help us, we can be our own hero. What can we do to find that confidence? 

Lisa: Well, I think it's, you know there's, there are things that we can do in terms of our body language, our posture, our voice, like we just talked about, that can portray confidence. Even if we are not naturally confident people, most of us aren't, you know. I'm certainly not a naturally confident person. Through my defense training, I've been able to, you know, up that a little bit, but we can be attentive to it. We can understand how to use our voice, we can understand what type of body posture says to someone else.

Lisa: Hey, she's not gonna be an easy target. She might fight back. And especially our body language and what that communicates, right? It's all about nonverbal communication in terms of body language, and then you add the… the verbalization to that of our voice and the ability to use our voice as a weapon and all of those… those things in concert with each other portray confidence. It can leak into you. You know. So, even if you're not super confident and you do these little things to quote unquote portray confidence. Sometimes that can help us become a little bit more confident and… and not just be portraying it.

Kellie: I like that. Well, I mean, confidence is an action a lot of times, right? Not just a… a state of being. It's an action. 

Lisa: That's right. Absolutely. 

Kellie: I remember years ago when I was living in San Francisco and I did the Bay to Breakers Race, and when you start, you start on one side of the city and you… you go to the other from the Bay to the Breakers. And at the end, we had to take like Muni, which is like public transportation back to our cars and stuff.

Kellie: And one of my friends who did it with me, she was an older woman, and we were all crammed into the Muni, and this guy was crouching up behind her and being really inappropriate. And she's like, “Kellie.” She… she was not a person who was a confrontational person. I don't like to be confrontational, but I was tired.

Kellie: And I wanted to not be encumbered with assholery. And so, I turned around and faced him and I said, what the fuck is your problem? Back the fuck up. And even if it was just me being tired and having done something that was physically exerting. That gave me the confidence because I just didn't wanna deal with it.

Kellie: He backed up, and then when she saw that, she turned around and said, yeah. And she found the confidence to speak up too at that point. So, confidence can be contagious, too. 

Lisa: Absolutely. And the other thing that I think is great about that story is that who knows if you would've done that, if it would've been you.

Lisa: I am betting there was a part of you that did that because it was her. Because he was inching up on someone you cared about. And so, in your… in your tired state, in your exhaustive state, which can bring things out in us at times that we didn't know were there, you got angry because this was somebody coming up on your friend.

Lisa: And I think that's, that's also a… another really important part of confidence in terms of thinking about the women that we love the most and what we would do for them in order to help them or to save them or to keep them from harm. Sometimes that thought process can help us do those same things for ourselves?

Kellie: Hundred percent. I learned a trick a long time ago when if for some reason you're in a situation where you're being hurt by somebody you don't know or somebody you love, would you let somebody do that to a small child and then find a baby picture of yourself and look at that child and say, would you let somebody do that to that baby child, which is you? And no, you wouldn't. 

Lisa: You can be the woman you love. 

Kellie: Yeah. Confidence is contagious. I think confidence is a verb. 

Lisa: Very much so. 

Kellie: And so, for the film, again, your character, your lead character, she finds confidence through the course of the story in the film to protect herself, right? 

Lisa: Yes, she does. Yeah. We watch her go from someone who does not have an understanding of these three things, to finding each of those things along her way. And so, I think that the, the confidence piece of that is it's… it's the middle of the three things because I think it's the anchor. It's the thing that allows the awareness to be actioned upon, and it's the thing that allows us to be propelled to a destination. 

Kellie: Taking that theme of confidence in the film, how confident were you going into creating a film? I know you mentioned in the first episode, ah, you've never done anything like that. Over the course of creating and producing that film, how did your confidence change in using a new media platform to tell a story? 

Lisa: Well, I think it goes along with what you just talked about with confidence being contagious. So, I had no confidence going into it whatsoever. I just had a… a purpose. It was something that I… I felt deep in my being needed to be done, and I trusted those instincts and so I went into it, and I hoped for the best. Um, and that I would figure it out along the way and trust myself. But as I worked with my producing partner, Brian, as you know, he took to it, as we showed it to the cinematography we were talking about working with, as we, you know, shared it with different people, the crew, and when we would see the message resonate with them. When I saw how excited the cinematographer got by reading the script to do this project, when I saw how involved and dedicated the crew was, the talent was that, you know, how much everyone else was invested in this project.

Lisa: Boy, there's nothing better for your confidence than other people having confidence in you. 

Kellie: Nice. I like that. Great job. 

Lisa: Thank you. 

Kelley: You know, one thing that always strikes me, um, especially, you know, in Lisa's defense work is teaching women to have the confidence to say no. That's the first step, is to just say or yell no.

Kelley: And yet women ha– are have such a hard time doing that for themselves and yet it's so easy to do it for others. If they were to imagine that they were protecting their daughter, their sister, their mother, their grandmother, we will go to great lengths for other people in a way that we will not do for ourselves.

Kelley: I think there is something about confidence in which you do have to… you have to have your boundaries and know when those boundaries are crossed to be able to go into action. 

Kellie: What is the one thing that we can do? You talked about the three things that people could do in three words to… to find that confidence, but what's one way that people can gain those abilities? Is it taking a class? Is it reading material? Is it talking to friends, like, what action can somebody who's listening right now, okay, I wanna learn how to be confident. Let me go do this. What… what can they do? 

Lisa: Well, there's no magic pill. I think if there was, it'd be a better world. I would like to take that magic pill myself if… if we could find that. But I think that there are… there are little actions we can take and absolutely one of them is to take a class, to take any sort of self-defense class that you can find. Wherever you are, whatever it is, whether it's, you know, an intro martial arts class, whether it's a women's self-defense class, whatever it is, you know, being around other people and learning curriculum that focuses on this sort of stuff is a, is a great place to start.

Lisa: Second, I think you have to acknowledge that it's okay if you don't feel confident. You do not have to feel confident in order to act confidently in the world. You know, it's the great, great phrase that we've used before. It's the fake it til you make it right. You hold yourself and carry yourself as though you are confident and sometimes the wonderful thing is, like I said, it can leak in. You know, they talk about the, uh, I read this study about the… the superhero pose, right? If we stand with our hands on our hips and our shoulders broad and our chin up, that actually helps us somehow, biologically, physiologically, it sort of leaks into our psyche and helps us to feel more confident.

Lisa: So, when you learn how to carry yourself with confidence, and again, it's just a matter of rolling those shoulders back, pulling that chin up even at a little tightening to the core is great. You know, those little, tiny movements, those little adjustments that we make to our posture, just even the shoulder rollback, can change how we feel about how we are interacting with the world and other people making those adjustments to your posture.

Lisa: And talking story. I have family in Hawaii and one of the sort of local colloquialisms that they use is called Talk Story. So, let's go talk story, and it's just for when you're just sitting around with friends and you are literally just telling each other your own stories, whether it's from that day, whether it's from your life, whatever it is.

Lisa: Let's go talk story. And so, I think doing that with our female friends, with our female colleagues, coworkers, family, whatever, figuring out how we all can support each other in finding more confidence. Like I said, there's nothing to instill confidence in someone than… than seeing someone else have confidence in you.

Lisa: So, a lot of times those exchanges can be so valuable just because you get that energy from your… from your friends. You know, from your ladies, you, you get their energy and that makes you feel more confident. And I think that that is a really important aspect of it as well. 

Kellie: A hundred percent. And if you know somebody else has experienced something that you have experienced or currently experiencing, then you're, you're like, oh, I'm not alone. Somebody else understands this and I'm not alone. 

Lisa: Yes. And there have been other women that have been in my position and. You know, I can be my own hero for myself. Yeah. 

Kellie: I mean, we have to, right? 

Lisa: We do. Absolutely.

Kellie: Oh, no, Lisa, I almost forgot. Our next episode takes us to Paris. Yes, Paris. A crowded station, a shopping mall, a gut feeling, and we learn how destination can lead you to safety.

Lisa: Thank you so much as always, for having your ears on this podcast, everyone. We appreciate you all so much. 

Kellie: And hey, do us a favor, do yourself a favor, like, share, subscribe so we can get the word out for this podcast wherever you're listening. 

Lisa: Alright. Stay safe out there everybody. 

Kellie: Watch out for motherfuckers. 

Lisa: And shine on, Diamonds.

Theme Music: I am a fighter. Checking my armor. I'm marching onward. Hey Hey. I am a fighter…