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Why Realtors Need Self-Defense & Situational Awareness Training

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Show Summary

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, self-defense expert Carmen Gulliksen discusses the importance of self-defense training, situational awareness, and the psychological benefits of martial arts. She explains how training can enhance personal safety, decision-making, and resilience in everyday life. Carmen also highlights the need for accessible self-defense training—especially for women in high-risk professions like real estate—and why regular practice is essential to maintain skills and confidence. The conversation also explores how self-defense training can positively impact mental health and workplace productivity.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Carmen Gulliksen (00:00)
    So there’s a measurable cost of anxiety, stress, burnout, on performance and productivity. There are a lot of studies in published journals that show a direct correlation between those things. Your productivity goes down when you’re stressed and anxious and distracted, and your confidence is just not there because you have to deal with these extra variables. Then you have, in the realm of business, you have turnover and attrition.

    Dylan Silver (00:07)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (00:29)
    If someone burns out, if someone is constantly stressed at work and is not really able to just focus on the technicalities of their job, like closing a business deal, then you have heightened turnover, attrition and stress from that.

    Dylan Silver (02:18)
    Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Carmen the Momba Gulliksen is a self-defense expert. She designs evidence-informed training programs for people and organizations operating under pressure with a focus on decision-making, personal safety, and adaptive resilience. Carmen, thanks for taking the time today.

    Carmen Gulliksen (02:35)
    Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

    Dylan Silver (02:38)
    Now, before we hopped on here, I mentioned to you, I’m a big fan of, you know, combatants training, martial arts, and not just for the physical benefits, but also how it kind of transforms your situational awareness in life, right?

    Carmen Gulliksen (02:53)
    Yes, absolutely. The mental acuity that you have to develop when you are going through the scenarios of training, when you’re learning how the basic movements of the body affect you, that actually helps you just perceive things around you a little bit differently. A lot of times we talk about learning the awareness of a martial artist, knowing your environment, being aware of where the exits are, little things, reading people better.

    Those are all things that you learn and you kind of subliminally, subconsciously kind of integrate into your everyday life.

    Dylan Silver (03:27)
    One of the things I can just say this in my own limited training, and I mentioned to you, you know, I’m a proud three-stripe white belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, is, you know, I have noticed, you know, just hand placement. Like I’ll look, and I don’t think people even think about that, but when I’m having a conversation with someone, every couple of seconds, I might just gauge where their hands are at, just to make sure, right? And it’s things like this that I think most people…

    are just not looking at. And I know from, this is a very public thing that happened. If you remember when Chris Rock was like slapped at the Oscars, I remember watching that and I’m like, he let him close the distance. You can’t let that person close the distance that much. In your background, know, and we talked before the show too, you’re very highly educated as well.

    Carmen Gulliksen (04:01)
    Yes.

    Dylan Silver (04:13)
    When did you start to realize that having that level of physical assuredness and combative skill can also translate into some other realms as well?

    Carmen Gulliksen (04:24)
    Well, when you’re talking about just the day-to-day life, that actually comes fairly quickly. You don’t need to have super extensive training to already notice that you’re starting to look at things a little differently and to be able to integrate some of those skills right on, right off the bat. But it was later on where I really realized that the training that I was receiving was

    put me at a little bit of a different level with regards to just understanding people in general. And that to me was very important because when you understand people and read people differently, the body language, like you said, you know, he should have never let him come so close at, you know, the Chris Rock situation, but those things happen almost automatically and they’re very subtle a lot of times. just understanding that,

    helped me realize that I was actually deescalating situations before they even became real situations. There a lot of situations where I was in and I was like, wow, if I hadn’t had the training five years earlier, this would have possibly resulted in a conflict when this time it didn’t.

    Dylan Silver (05:37)
    That’s 100 % right.

    You you mentioned something that is so critical, which I think a lot of people, especially people who don’t come from a martial arts or a self-defense background, have a misnomer, which is if you train all this time, then maybe you’re more apt to use it, where in my case, I’ve like literally never had to use Jiu-Jitsu once. And it’s because, and I have to say, like I feel like I grew up in a relatively, you know, rough,

    Carmen Gulliksen (05:55)
    No.

    Dylan Silver (06:05)
    I mean, it was middle class, I mean, middle class, but definitely some rough young people growing up where I grew up. And one of the things that I noticed was I would then…

    Realize just like you mentioned, Carmen, the situations that I would be putting myself in, I would start to kind of survey, hey, is this going to potentially end badly? And I would remove, I would be quicker to remove myself from those situations and just kind of have a situational awareness. What would be the term to use for, just when you’re aware of your surroundings more? Situational awareness, the correct term?

    Carmen Gulliksen (07:32)
    Yeah, situation of awareness or QT.

    Dylan Silver (07:36)
    I think, know, that it’s surprising even to me, as I’m mentioning this year, you would think that that might be something that you would have automatically, but I definitely can relate to once going through some level of physical training that that has increased really quite significantly. Why is that?

    Carmen Gulliksen (07:55)
    Well, there are a couple of things. Number one, you’re to realize how things connect, right? You’re starting to realize when you’re standing in front of other people and they actually talk you through it and you start focusing on body movement and such, how much you can actually learn from it and how much information it gives you. And I think people inherently are curious and they like getting information. They often just don’t know what to look for and how to analyze it.

    But once that door opens, you intuitively do it because it’s a healthy thing to do for survival, really, honestly. But humans are inherently curious, The other thing that you need to consider, too, engaging in a training scenario kind of environment and realizing how you can actually be extremely skillful very quickly.

    and managing those things coming at you. Let’s say someone throws a punch at you and you learn how to just slip or move or that you can just block it. And you can see the punch coming at you. So it’s fairly easy to move out of the way in most cases, in most scenarios. That right there gives you a confidence that you really didn’t have before. People really undervalued and underestimate the capabilities that they have and the things they can do.

    And training helps you understand that you have these capabilities. And to your point earlier about people sometimes think that if you train, you actually have greater tendency to get engaged in conflict. know, studies that have done on bullies, right? A lot of times, most of the time, a person who bullies another person has an inherent deep down confidence issue. They’re very insecure.

    And that’s why they’re trying to overcompensate by engaging in conflict with people they perceive weaker, either because, well, as the bully, I have all my friends with me that are behind me now, or I have some other advantage. And that’s why they pick on someone that shows some sort of weakness, someone who’s a little shy, someone who’s a little bit demure, someone who might not be pushing back. They don’t go for the challenge. They don’t go for the person who can just clock them or…

    Dylan Silver (09:59)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (10:15)
    you know, be stronger than them, they go for a weak person, right? Because it helps them build up the confidence that they inherently don’t have a lot of times. So once you start building that confidence through your training, you need for proving yourself and getting that hit of confidence externally somewhere, like a bully, for instance, would, reduces dramatically. So you’re like, I don’t need to prove anything. I’m good. We can just diffuse it. I know I can get hurt. I know when I engage.

    Dylan Silver (10:38)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (10:45)
    someone will get hurt. So we’re good. I’m fine. I don’t need to anything. ⁓

    Dylan Silver (10:50)
    That’s a great point you

    mentioned about the people who might be more prone to bullying others. I definitely was on the receiving end of the bullying, which is why I got into Jiu Jitsu. And it’s interesting because I think a lot of people, especially in advanced martial arts circles, sometimes fall into the categories of they were like an amazing athlete and then they transitioned into this, or they came from some level of background where maybe they faced bullying.

    Jor St. Pierre, GSP, would talk about that. And so I can certainly on some level relate to the idea of feeling like, look, my back’s against the wall and I’m maybe under built, I’ve got to know how to defend myself. I do want to pivot here though, Carmen, and ask you specifically about where people can start. Like I’m a realtor and I mentioned to you before hopping on here, real estate.

    and retail, real estate specifically, is very female dominated. And so, for folks, men and women, but specifically women who may be looking at, where do I get started with this? No self-defense background. Where’s a good place to start?

    Carmen Gulliksen (12:32)
    Well, there are a number of different avenues you can take. One of the things that I have done, I’ve built a business around exactly that. And one of the things that we’ve just accomplished, we in Virginia are getting our license together to be able to teach CE courses specifically focused on security and awareness for realtors. But one of the big things that realtors, or really anyone who is interested in,

    some self-defense need to know is really what to look for in those schools that offer different self-defense. I always believe taking some self-defense is better than no self-defense, right? So just because of what we just said, having some exposure to learning about your body dynamic and all that in psychology, you pretty much get that in most environments of kind of schools, right? But you do want to look for some specific things if you’re in those high-risk environments. For example,

    specifically nurses that I’ve worked with, they’re not allowed to leave marks on their patients. So they might get attacked by a violent patient, but if they leave marks on the patient, they get in trouble, right? So they need to be very conscientious of those little details too. So generally I would be looking for schools that train the more soft styles.

    Dylan Silver (13:26)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (13:46)
    the grabbing, the holding, the locks, the wrist locks, the getting out of it. I describe a lot of the stuff in the book too, right here, about what to look for, a kind of list of check marks to make. But one of the big things that you need to realize when you’re thinking about just trying to defend yourself is that you need to engage in martial arts that focus on very close corner combat.

    Dylan Silver (14:13)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (14:14)
    I love striking martial arts, don’t get me wrong. I have a big background in kickboxing and boxing and all those. But especially for women, the first true indication that there’s a physical conflict about to happen is when they already put their hands on you. When they’ve already put their hands on you, you have to have methods to get out of that and get distance between you and them.

    Dylan Silver (14:39)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (14:40)
    And that means you usually have to engage with martial arts that have grabbing or some sort of techniques, defense techniques where you can do that. I sometimes see people say, well, just get a gun. Well, there are a couple of issues with that. Number one, you’re not allowed to carry it everywhere. Number two, you really need to have some distance, like 21 feet. Even the police says 21 feet is the minimum distance you need to have in order to draw your gun safely.

    You know, if you have any kind of weapon, guess what? They can be taken from you. If you have pepper spray, are you going to go through your purse? Hold on a second. Go through your purse, trying to get the pepper spray out to now engage with someone who’s aggressive towards you. No, but then they have the hands on you. They have the hair grab, they have the wrist grab, they grab it by the shoulders, they’re having a bear hug. So those are types of things that you need to be able to get out of to get the distance.

    Dylan Silver (15:13)
    That’s right.

    Now, one of the things that I’ve often thought about as far as grappling is concerned is like,

    Carmen Gulliksen (15:39)
    Mm-hmm.

    Dylan Silver (15:40)
    everyone goes to some level of ⁓ gym class when they’re growing up in school. Isn’t this something that would benefit from everyone having some level of grappling training? I’ve heard, when I’ve said this to people that, everyone who’s, let’s just say if you’re doing well in school, or if you’re getting by, you should be able to have access to this for free, just like the same way you can go and play basketball at recess, that type of thing.

    Carmen Gulliksen (15:58)
    or every part.

    Dylan Silver (16:07)
    Do you agree with that, that everyone would benefit, society as a whole would benefit from some level of this style of training?

    Carmen Gulliksen (16:15)
    I definitely agree, yes, they would. Unfortunately, with liability issues, especially in the United States, from my experience, schools tend to shy away from it because they’re concerned about increasing liability for the school in case something happens, right? Which is kind of a short-term perspective, but that is a big hurdle that we are facing with regards to bringing it into schools as training programs.

    Dylan Silver (16:31)
    Yeah.

    Now, for the schools themselves that are privatized outside of the schools, I’ve even seen this, because I’ve been like, hey, can I spar here? The schools themselves are worried about this litigious climate that they’re in. So hard sparring might be more and more uncommon. Have you seen that as well?

    Carmen Gulliksen (16:54)
    Yeah.

    Yes, 100%. And we don’t even try to get in with horse barring. We’re trying to get in, hey, we’re teaching self-defense. We’re just teaching defensive moves. You have to be very, very diligent about keeping everything as a defensive disengagement kind of scenario. And that really is limiting to an extent. I mean, it’s a start. Again, don’t get me wrong. Something is better than nothing, right? But it does limit the possibility, especially with younger people, to work with that.

    Dylan Silver (17:20)
    piano.

    You know, on this note, one of the things that I think about is, you do want to train for real life. And, you know, of course you want to also mitigate your exposure to these circumstances. And you also want to be aware when you could potentially be entering into a potentially dangerous situation. But you do want to train for real life. Does it help from both a psychological perspective and a physical perspective?

    to have maybe, I’m not saying every month, but some type of quarterly refresher on, hey, I know I trained in self-defense a year ago, but I’d like to do this in January or in May because that’ll help me recalibrate, if you will.

    Carmen Gulliksen (18:43)
    Yes.

    100%, 100%, doing a regular engagement like that is really key. And even honestly, some of the police force gets like once a year and it’s not enough and that’s why I love them seek training outside. But if you could do something, say once a quarter or once a month, that would put you, I would say 80 % up psychologically to be able to manage situations better, media risk better.

    making sure that you’re not getting yourself into the situation so much. For example, at Realtors, one of the big things that they’re obviously dealing with, and I hear that, I actually just recently heard that from a gentleman and you would never expect that. He’s probably about six foot three. He looks like he could have played football or basketball in college. Young man. And he told me straight up, it’s like, it’s great what you’re doing. I’m scared going to my showing sometimes.

    You would never expect that from a gentleman like that, right? And now imagine a six foot, five foot six lady going into a showing, right? Meeting three guys wanting to look at a house, you know, or some strange man who is obviously going to outperform her physically, you know, most of the time. so giving someone like her or even him training on a regular basis,

    Dylan Silver (19:58)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (20:18)
    is going to be making a tremendous difference in a couple of categories, like two main areas that we always look at. One is just from the business lens, right? You have a couple things, the bottom line from the executive view, and then you have the human lens, the real world experience, behavior under pressure, trauma related long-term stresses, right? Or conflict events, right? So when you look at a business lens, think about it this way.

    So there’s a measurable cost of anxiety, stress, burnout, on performance and productivity. There are a lot of studies in published journals that show a direct correlation between those things. Your productivity goes down when you’re stressed and anxious and distracted, and your confidence is just not there because you have to deal with these extra variables. Then you have, in the realm of business, you have turnover and attrition.

    Dylan Silver (20:52)
    Yeah.

    Carmen Gulliksen (21:14)
    If someone burns out, if someone is constantly stressed at work and is not really able to just focus on the technicalities of their job, like closing a business deal, then you have heightened turnover, attrition and stress from that.

    Right. And then on the third level, just the business side, you have things like liability, right? We talked just about school liability. Now imagine a brokerage having an incident.

    where one of their real ties gets in situation, they’re too stressed to really act properly or optimally, I don’t wanna say properly, but optimally. ⁓ And they didn’t have proper processes in place to maybe record the events and deal with the follow-up and follow-through and then recovering from it to come back to work. Those are all liabilities and well, who cares that? The brokerage.

    Dylan Silver (21:52)
    Ciao.

    Carmen Gulliksen (22:08)
    Right. So from a business side, that can be very, very expensive. All three different factors of that. Now I give one quick moment to what I just said about the recovery. One of the things if you have you ever read Lieutenant Colonel Grossman’s book on combat? It’s a fantastic read. You should maybe check it out. One of the things that he addresses is any kind of training that someone engages in.

    Dylan Silver (22:26)
    No.

    Carmen Gulliksen (22:38)
    any kind of understanding of what interpersonal conflict is at the level that we just talked about. When you actually then get into situation of being in interpersonal conflict situations, assuming obviously you survive, so we don’t want to be super dramatic, but let’s say you make it through it, you come out at the other end, but the capacity to make it through and move on with your life with minimal PTSD, trauma,

    and other things that are commonly associated with those types of conflicts is much, much, much, much higher if you engage in some training, the possibility of you not having to deal with these stressors. So if you have no training, it could very well be that you survive a situation, but then you mentally and psychologically get so damaged by it that you still cannot really move on with your life.

    Dylan Silver (23:19)
    Hmm.

    Why is that? does the training help? Why does the training help?

    Carmen Gulliksen (23:36)
    Because a prepared mind can conceptualize what happened better, can work through it better, and can then move forward better. If you have never thought of something being able, possibly happening to you, to me, then when something does happen to you, the gap between your expectation and what actually happened is so much greater that the mind just tends to shut down and…

    I don’t want to say overreact, but it reacts much more severely because there’s such a gap between your expected reality and what actually happened.

    Dylan Silver (24:13)
    Yeah, that is so key. I’ve never had someone in the self-defense space or otherwise talk about the recovery portion of it. You know, it doesn’t have to, I don’t think it has to be something as, I would say, you know, life or death is war, right? But it could be, you know, returning home from, you know, a stressful job, right? Let’s say that you’ve been working long hours and you’re just kind of like on edge, right?

    I could see training being very critical in that type of environment and setting as well, just to help you cope with what’s going on. And I think honestly, there should be more training. And we talked about that here today that in many cases, either due to lack of exposure or lack of options, sometimes people feel like, I’m not gonna get started or I don’t really know where to go, or there may just not be that many options from where they’re at. But I do think that

    Carmen Gulliksen (25:04)
    Yep. Yep.

    Dylan Silver (25:06)
    for all the reasons that you mentioned, the psychological, the recovery, know, physical, situational awareness, it has so many great benefits. We are coming up on time here though, Carmen, any new projects that you’re working on and then as well, what’s the best way for folks to get in contact with you?

    Carmen Gulliksen (25:22)
    Well, the biggest project that we’re working on right now is really rolling out the CE courses for realtors. Right now, it’s going to go across all of Virginia. That’s our main base. And then we’re going to spread out to other states as well. But the biggest way to possibly engage right now is we can come and we come to the location of the businesses or the teams that want our services.

    for seminar style training. So we can do one or two hour sessions and we have other materials to offer to support that for everyone to go through things after the fact a little bit, have their little manuals and everything, right? And we’re always open for answer questions and other little workshops. But really just get started of doing something. And if you just have any questions,

    and we can point you in different directions. If you need help finding a school, we can even help with that, right? If you need to figure out what kind of school you want to go to, we can help with that too. But right now our biggest focus is realtors, making sure that we offer brokerages access to training for the realtors so they can make sure their bottom line is steady and their realtors are protected.

    Dylan Silver (26:39)
    Carmen, thank you so, so much for what you’re doing and then thank you for your time today and for coming on the show.

    Carmen Gulliksen (26:45)
    Appreciate you, Dylan. Thank you so much for having me.

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