The why, what and how?

Questions are a natural part of life and as we grow up we learn the different social rules of asking and listening. Through asking and listening it's possible to get information and understanding. But the usability of this information really depends on how good the asking and the listening is, which again is based on your personal experience.

When learning something new like a new move or a new style, we are building up a new experience/foundation/set-of-truths. In these cases we build experience by ourselves or have a mentor/teacher/coach to help us. In this sense we are building our understanding on our own experience or on somebody else’s experience.

To speed up learning, understanding and getting by we use assumptions. It's a way of life: we assume that if the car started yesterday it will start today, if it rains we assume that the roads get wet, hitting somebody hurts or learning from an expert(assumption; they know what they're "talking about" and understand the how's and why's.)

Another way of learning is to simplify the amount of variables of what are your learning. In martial arts this would be classical basic techniques that only take into consideration 1 movement from the badguy/uke/opponent. This could be a straight punch, and from there building up to more complex punche(s). But to practice the straight punch you have some assumptions; stance, pre-movements, fixation of impact, follow through. If you did the straight punch without these assumptions the punch would be too complex for most people to learn to defend against.

When moving along from basic towards more advanced techniques or scenarios, you need to move your assumptions and basic ideas with you so they follow suit. And if your interested in self defense the complexity has to move into this realm hand in hand with assumptions.

To ensure what your doing is in the realm of self defense it is important to ask why am I doing this? To what means? Is this really what is going to happen?

Use the questions to make your assumptions based on reality, and keep asking not for the sake of asking but for the sake of your life.