While defending yourself you can always use things that are near you. You need to assess your situation and find out if you can use something very normal to your advantage. This is a skill and you need to learn it. Any effective training will have this component because it is vitally important to understand things around you and be able to use them as weapons when necessary. Improvised weapons can help you to defend yourself better in a mortally critical situation.

Let's take an example. If you have the pencil with you, do you know that you can use it as a deadly weapon? You can use the pencil as a tool and weapon. Even though it cannot cut, slash or bludgeon, or cannot fire a projectile and will not explode, even then it has great potentiality as a weapon. Observation and assessment of the pencil can help you to understand how to use it as a weapon whenever necessary. It has a good point and it is also long enough to offer you a full grip. So, you can use the pencil to stab your attacker. But since it is thin and there is a possibility that it may break, you will need to provide as much support as you can using your grip so that you can use the stabbing power of the point to the full extent possible.

It will need some practice for you to use the pencil as a weapon. But with little bit of practice it is possible to use the pencil and for that matter the pen you carry with you. Once you learn how to use the pencil, you can also use other similar items like pen, chopsticks and other items. It is possible and easy to carry a pen or a pencil. You can take them into places where other personal weapons are not permitted.

Observation and assessment

Observation and assessment are very important to use any type of items as weapons. By simply observing and assessing the pencil, you are able to use it as a weapon. When you observe and assess other items around you, you will find that many of them can be used as weapons during critical situations whenever the need arises. You need the proper frame of mind to find out the items you can use as weapons.

Another advantage

Another advantage with such weapons is that when you have such items, you never seem to be armed at all. Those are the common items available everywhere and so it seems that you are not armed even though you have them. But being an observation and assessment expert, you know that such mundane things can also be used as weapons whenever the need arises. Since you never seem to be armed, you are not calling attention to yourself. You can move through different security zones and even bad areas of the town without attracting anyone. There won't be any inconvenience to you because you will seem like a normal person without any weapons at all.

It is like being invisible armed. Even though you are armed and you have the expertise to use any type of item as a weapon, you don't look like armed. You are never empty-handed and vulnerable to any security threat. You will always have something or other to fight with, which will increase the possibility of leaving a possible attack without being dead or wounded. You don't have to carry anything with you but even then you are ready to use anything that he can lay your hands on.

References
1. First Strike – Designed By Swat Team Leader
2. Use of force in self defence at the place of residence
3. Self-Defence and the Prevention of Crime