Hello there everyone it looks like there is a new front end on the block. There have been many lately and frankly it makes me happy because I see each one as an opportunity to reach a new audience. For those that have not seen my previous posts on steemit or one of the other platforms I would like to introduce myself to you all.
My name is Paul, I'm 45 years old and live in Alabama. I've lived in a small town here my entire life though I have travelled quite a bite in the last 10 years. I am the sole proprietor here of a small business that allows for that travel. In my younger years I worked in a lot of factories to make ends meet. Some where nicer than others. Eventually I was just miserable. I was working as a copier repair guy for a company called Oce' which would later be taken over by Canon. It was cool for awhile I had the company car and all that good stuff. I'd work a route everyday working mainly for state agencies and schools as well as power plants which included coal, hydro, and nuclear. We'd had 6 managers in a 4 year period and they all wanted something different. The one thing in common is that they all knew about management ideas but none of them knew shit about human beings. That is when I saw an opportunity.
I'd grown up doing martial arts my entire life. I currently hold black belt ranks in 4 different martial arts the highest rank being a 9th Dan in an art called Anjing Banfa. I also hold black belt ranks in Judo, Jujutsu, and Ninjutsu respectively. During those years I was working for that company I had been studying making martial arts more reality based. The things I had seen taught as self defense were just not realistic. Through some combatives training I received I had hooked up with an organization out of Chicago called the International Combatives and Self Defense Association and was a featured instructor at conferences in Chicago and Houston for them. I had to use my vacation time for this of course. I became the special projects director for the organization about 2 years before it became inactive. During that time I saw a great deal of courses come through there. Many of these courses were designed for police and had great technique but the method of instruction sucked. It was designed for people to memorize but not learn. There is a huge difference between the two. When I'd finally had it with the 6th manager at my job I decided that this would be my calling. I decided to start training law enforcement agencies for a living and get the hell out of that job. So that is what I have been doing the last 10 years. During that time it's been feast or famine. There's good money then there is nothing, currently right now it's more famine than feast but it goes in cycles I'll be fine.
So as I started to travel this country I wanted to go to places that I saw on television. The cool places other people in the town never got to visit. I enjoy taking photos when I travel. That is where a lot of my posts come from. They are places I've travelled to in which I trained law enforcement but went out on my days off to take photos. There's mostly landscapes because that is what I prefer but also cityscapes and historical things as well. I know one of the highlights for me was visiting an art gallery on the Oklahoma University campus and getting to see an actual Van Gogh.
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Being able to travel has been a blessing to me I really enjoy it and I feel lucky to be able to do it for a living when I can get it. Of course with my background I don't only post photos. I have done several videos on a variety of self defense issues. You can see those on my steemit blog. In the past I'm done videos on here such as:
Violence and Awareness Avoidance
Mindset for Threatening Situations
The Basics of Verbal De-Escalation
The Science of Countering The Bystander Effect Parts 1 through 3.
The next series will be a 3 part series on memory encoding and retrieval and how to teach it. I hope to start that one Monday.
Through studying learning methods and alternative methods of teaching I have also grown very fond of philosophy and developed a real interest in cognitive biases and the pitfalls that affect our society today. I hope to be posting on that soon I have some interesting ideas for videos on that subject as well that are very timely and relevant.
I was also somewhat of a musician in my early 20's and even played bass in a punk band for a couple years. I'm a huge music fan and from time to time I do reviews of classic rock albums like Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Santana, etc
So I wear a lot of hats and do a lot of different things hopefully some of you will like one of them. I'm only been on Steem for just over a month and before that I didn't know anything about cryptocurrencies so it's all new to me. I do have a lot of content though from past blogs that I've ran as well as two youtube channels so I can definitely fill some space for sure. It's great to meet you all and I look forward to conversing with you and getting to know you. Have a great day!