How To Live in a Constant State of Readiness (Not Paranoia)
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Personal Security Starts Here
Situational awareness is the foundation of personal security. The process goes far beyond paying attention to one’s surroundings. In fact, paying attention is just the prerequisite.
True situational awareness involves not only seeing, but knowing what to look for. Situational awareness is about conditioning your mind to always be present.
When it comes to staying safe, how do you tune your senses and truly see? How do you distinguish what’s important from what’s irrelevant? How do you make these techniques second nature without living in constant paranoia?
Learning to practice true situational awareness could save your life.
Unfortunately, most people don’t bother to learn these life-saving skills. I meet so many people who say to me, “I am aware of my environment. I pay attention to things. I don’t put myself in harm's way or in bad situations”
This may be true, but as I said above: Paying attention is just the prerequisite.
Situational Awareness 101
“Situational awareness” is a term used in the self-defense and tactical communities to describe our ability to pay attention to our surroundings and to sufficiently feed our internal radar information.
Your radar is dependent on your senses. It can’t function in the absence of input and stimuli.
But what triggers these internal alarms?
We See with Our Minds, Not with Our Eyes.
There are three components to our radar systems—and all deliver more from our unconscious rather than conscious observations of our surroundings.
They are: Baseline, Intuition, and Rapid Cognition
Baseline
Baseline—your own personal sense of what’s “normal”— is a simple concept that explains how your radar processes and assesses various inputs.
Everyone has a baseline and all baselines are environmental.
This is why we are uncomfortable while traveling. That discomfort is our radar adjusting to a new baseline. In my experience, it takes about forty-eight hours to develop this new baseline, and then your mind starts to relax.
Intuition
The baseline serves as the foundation for the next component of your radar, your intuition.
Once you have developed a sense of what is normal, you are immediately able to recognize when something is abnormal, doesn’t fit the situation, or just doesn’t seem right.
Our intuition helps us know something is wrong without necessarily knowing why.
It is at these moments our radar triggers an alarm.
Rapid Cognition
Usually, after an alarm is triggered, the third component of our radar—rapid cognition—kicks in. Rapid cognition is our ability to make fast, highly accurate assessments based on limited evidence.
And this is where training comes into play.
Five Habits for Better Situational Awareness
If you are in an environment that makes you uncomfortable, it is critically important you allow your senses to pick up on all the possible signals around you. Here are five habits to help you hone your radar:
Habit #1: Scan left to right
Good observation skills are arguably the most important tools in your situational awareness toolbox.
We teach protection specialists to scan from left to right while on duty, anytime they enter a new environment, or while standing watch, and I recommend you do the same. When performing your scans, it is important to keep your mind open so your radar can alert you to anomalies, or suspicious behavior, or anything that might warrant a second look.
If your radar is alarming you something’s not right, you may choose to do a deep scan on the person of concern. Ask yourself, “Why is this person setting off my radar?” Is he using the environment for a dedicated purpose (see Habit #2)? Is he a watcher (see Habit #3)? Are you in an area of mandatory travel (see Habit #4)? And so on.
The added benefit of scanning is that the behavior can be an incredibly effective deterrent to crime all on its own. Always remember Bad Guys are looking for a soft target. They want to catch someone unawares. If you’re scanning the room or environment, you demonstrate your awareness in a way that would convince most Bad Guys to simply leave you alone.
Habit #2: Know that every environment has a purpose
Every physical environment you encounter serves a specific purpose. Your home is for shelter and relaxation. A public park is for leisure activities. A mall is for shopping. A road is for driving, and so on.
This second habit of situational awareness calls our attention to the idea that if you encounter anyone who is behaving in a way that doesn’t fit a location’s purpose, it may be cause for further observation
Habit #3: Watch for the watchers
One of my clients who lives in New York City once told me he summarizes some of my situational awareness for out-of-town visitors like this:
“In this city, there are three types of people. There are the people looking down; those are the New Yorkers. There are the people looking up; those are the tourists. Then there are the people who’re looking for who’s looking up and who’s looking down; those are the ones you have to watch out for.”
In many ways this simplified perspective is spot on, as the third habit of situational awareness, watching for the watchers, is an incredibly effective strategy.
When you combine watching for the watchers with Habit #2, it becomes easy to spot and avoid the people who don’t fit in.
Habit #4: Be on alert in areas of mandatory travel
Areas of mandatory travel are defined as natural choke points or spaces in which you must predictably travel if you are to move through an area.
While attacks can certainly occur in any location, the reality is the vast majority of attacks occur during what we call “arrival and departure” moments: when you are getting into or out of your car, or your house, or your place of work.
The world we live in is full of areas of mandatory travel, and every place inherently can be rapidly assessed as either soft or hard relative to the threats you are concerned with. The key is not to fall into the trap of thinking danger lurks everywhere and living in fear!
If everything is important, then nothing is important. Learn when to switch on and when to relax.
Pay attention going to and from the parking lot. Through the lobby of your apartment building. Near the entrance to any ticketed event. Anywhere crowds of people either congregate or funnel from one place to another.
Scanning left to right and watching for the watchers is not essential every second of the day, but these are the kinds of environments where it becomes particularly important when you need to switch on and pay attention.
Habit #5: Know your options
If you find yourself in an area of mandatory travel—or any other environment you deem to be a soft target—it is always best practice to identify your exits or other options as soon as possible.
This achieves two important goals: 1) it helps ensure that, if something bad happens, you immediately have a plan for how you will escape or respond, and 2) having this plan allows you to relax, lower that Jason-Bourne-level of situational awareness, and not spend your entire experience in some level of hypervigilant adrenaline.
Keep Your Radar On
The most critical thing you can do as someone who wants to stay safe is to not shunt your radar by intentionally ignoring your environment or blocking your sensory inputs.
Under most circumstances, you do not need to remain on high alert. If you’re in a known safe place, you can relax. But if you’re in a public place, or are uneasy about your surroundings or the people around you, pay closer attention, put the phone down, and turn up your level of situational awareness.
If you allow your senses to feed your radar input, you can remain calm, knowing your radar will alert you if there is trouble.
Your radar is always on; it’s just up to you not to block it.