Hi Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Some good ideas on this thread. They seem to fall into the categories of declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, intelligences, and athletic attributes.
Declarative knowledge: factual knowledge that supports your personal protection, such as knowing to run when such-and-such happens because your likelihood of getting shot is such-and-such, knowing THAT you ought to avoid secondary crime scenes, etc... A lot of body language, pre-contact cues, etc. go here. The guy who doesn't for instance understand that the way a knife wrecks you is qualitatively different from how a blunt weapon or empty hand wrecks you, isn't going to move differently against it. This will hurt him. Declarative knowledge can be learned from books. And there are many great ones out there--you could do worse than to start with Sanford Strong's classic, "Strong On Defense".
Procedural knowledge: "knowing HOW..." rather than "knowing THAT..." If you know it by feel, it's really laborious to describe, but not to do, if it's knowledge that is acquired through practice rather than explanation, this is procedural knowledge. This covers a ton of stuff, most things you could name would go here: talking your way out, cq skills, knife, tactical shooting, empty-hand against knife. First aid could partly be here, but I think of it more as declarative knowledge because a) most of the stuff you need to know is diagnostic rather than procedural, and b) even the procedural aspect of the stuff is more memorized than routinized. First aid isn't "second nature" to most people. Defensive driving might be procedural because you train on a course, whereas the kind of tactical stuff like J-turns is for most people only declarative knowledge. If in the course of being assaulted it leaps to mind that you can tear off a car antenna and use slashing movements to cut the face and hands of the assailants, because you had heard this discussed in a seminar, this is declarative knowledge. Being able to fluidly take out three guys with it in a couple seconds because you have been doing kali for a few years, that's procedural knowledge.
Intelligences: All abilities to problem solve and reason are intelligences, but when I set intelligences apart from the other categories, I guess I'm talking about the more stable and generalizable stuff, like the observation skills, short-term memory, interpersonal intelligence that will defuse a dispute effortlessly (a sort of innate giftedness as opposed to learning a "few good lines" or "five conflict prevention tactics" which all of us can do), physical coordination, the ability to quickly see a range of alternatives and to eliminate from among them...
Athletic stuff: None of this means all that very much if you don't have power, endurance, tone, flexibility, etc...
I suspect my rough taxonomy will stimulate a few more answers...
Perhaps a fifth category could be some conative (as opposed to cognitive) features... the guy trapped in ice who saws off his leg and crawls ten miles for help obviously has some sort of "skill" that I personally lack.
