About Us

Hello, my name is Michelle Kirk and I am founder of Pink Diamond Defense.  I chose that name because it signifies how a woman can be both beautiful and strong at the same time; and well pink is just my thing.    For the last couple of years I have been totally frustrated at trying to find a good women’s self-defense program in the Knoxville area.  I found a lot of co-ed programs, but they fit my needs just as well as my husband’s jeans.  When I couldn’t find what I was looking for here in Knoxville, I started looking on the internet and found the Fight Like a Girl program and Mr. Steve Kardian in Westchester County, New York. I am very proud to be able to bring such a high quality and needed program back home to the women of Knoxville.  Come join us and find out what it means to…FIGHT LIKE A GIRL!

WHY I TEACH FLAG:

 In October of 2007 I started taking some cardio kickboxing classes at my children’s dojo.  Since we were already paying for a family membership, I thought I’d give it a try.  I loved it!  In the first two weeks I lost 15 pounds and a couple of pants sizes.  I was making some new friends, and the energy and self esteem that I had was growing as my waist shrunk.  It was awesome!   After three months I had lost about 40 pounds and went from barely wearing a 16 to barely keeping up an 8.  It was the first time in a very long time that I really felt good and liked what I saw in the mirror.  I wasn’t the only one noticing.  When I started having some issues with a guy at work, the pride I was feeling about my body began to turn into fear.  Memories from my past began to surface and overwhelm me.   I started being more interested in the self defense classes. I spent three months learning how to escape a wrist grab at the same time the guy at work was laughing with other co-workers about how he would like to assault me.  After closing (I was waiting tables) he would offer to walk me to my car.  I began wondering if I would ever feel safe again.  I changed dojos (and jobs) and spent another year learning a self-defense style that was based more on leverage.  It was good stuff, but it was becoming more and more obvious to me that it was going to take a long time to learn.  I increasingly did not feel that I had a long time.  I wanted to feel safe now!  I would go home and try to show my husband what I learned and I wouldn’t be able to duplicate it or I wouldn’t be able to remember what I had just done in class an hour prior.   One day in class I tried to do a hip toss and instead of throwing my partner, I ended up lying in his arms in a much more vulnerable position than I started.   With everything I had going on in my life, that freaked me out!  My “self-defense” class became more & more of a S.W.A.T. class because that is what the instructor was comfortable with.  I wasn’t learning what I felt I needed to learn.  After spending over a year in co-ed “self-defense” classes, quite a lot of money, and a really big fall out with my instructor,  I started looking for what I really wanted… rape defense.  
In February of 2009 I found the Fight Like a Girl program (FLAG) and Steve Kardian.  I learned more from Steve about being and feeling safe in a handful of e-mails and a couple of phone calls than I learned in over a year of martial arts classes.  I began to understand what my other classes were missing.  There was a lack of information and a lack of truly understanding and discussing what a woman really faces during a sexual assault.  Just from reading what Steve Kardian (Eastern United States lead instructor) and Brad Parker (the original creator of the FLAG program and director of Defend University) had written on their prospective websites, I started to finally begin to feel safe again because I finally began to understand what self-defense really is.  The concept of the FLAG program so impressed me that I decided it was worth going through the instructor training in New York just to get a chance to go through the program since there wasn’t an instructor in Tennessee.  In the meantime, there were several very high profile rape/murder victims in the news, both nationally and locally.  I made a promise to myself that somehow their deaths would have meaning and would not be in vain.  I decided that I had to teach what I was learning to other women.  Going to New York and getting my certification to teach the FLAG program was one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done for myself.  I’m very proud to know and to teach other women how to“FIGHT LIKE A GIRL.”