Why Situational Awareness Fails

Avoiding Danger - Why It Fails and What You Can Do About It:

I want to take a few minutes to talk about how to avoid danger, or as we like to call it, "sidestepping" danger and the rules we need to follow to make it work.

What do I mean by that?

Most people, when they think about self-defense, they focus on the attack—fighting, combat, that kind of thing. What do I do if they have a knife, or they have a knife held this way. 

We need the physical for sure, but it’s our backup. It’s like the foundation of a house. You need it, but if you stop there, it’s a pretty crappy house. There’s no end of big, angry self-defense experts out there who are great fighters, but that's all they are, and they'll find a fight even if it's not there. You’ve probably heard the expression - to a hammer, everything is a nail. Same here. We need to build a complete house, a warm and cosy and positive home that protects us from ALL the ways the bad guy can come at us but also it has to be a place we like living in.

Think, positive and happy. After all, what are we fighting for?

When we talk about sidestepping, that’s the moments leading up to an attack. It hasn’t happened yet and our job is to make it not happen at all. What can we do to step out of the way? We’re not going to change the bad guy—he’s still going to be a bad guy—he’s going to attack someone - but we can make sure that isn’t us.

I think this is a big deal. We need to change the way we talk about personal safety and self-defense. I love the way Emily puts it best: If enough of us know this stuff, bad guys will be too afraid to be that bad guy.

Nothing is guaranteed. But most people don’t think about safety until danger is already right in front of them. And by then, it’s often too late.

What we need are practical, specific rules to live by. We need to practice them when we don’t need them so that they become habit and simply work when we do need them.

Here’s a rule: when danger is close, we don’t need a perfect plan. We just need ANY plan that will take us one step closer to being safe.

Let’s park here for a second because a lot of experts don’t like rules. They think rules don’t work. They think life is too messy, that every situation is different, and that even a good rule simply won't apply to whatever situation you find yourself in.

It’s not the rules.

What breaks is that we get confused by the situation, make a bad decision, then later we justify why the rule couldn’t possibly have worked. It wasn’t the rule. We just became our own worst enemy.

So why does that happen?

Pride: The wrong things are important to us. If we let our pride guide us when stress is not high, it’s for sure going to guide us when stress is high. And dollars-to-donuts, that pride is going to push us closer to danger, not farther from it.

Practice: Most of us aren’t well practiced in making any sort of decision, even when stress isn’t high, so when we add stress, when we have to decide what to do in a fraction of a second, we freeze, or we make a really bad decision. Buy who has shown us how to make decisions just in general? Making decisions is a skill like any other, and if we learn it piecemeal as we stumble through life, there's a super-good chance we suck at it.

Too Specific: Sometimes the rules we’re given are too specific or they’re not explained so there’s a lack of depth or understanding. That means we don't value the rule. So why wouldn't we abandon it the minute it becomes inconvenient? If we don't truly value why a guiding rule is in our life, it's not really there. It's a meme, a catch-phrase, a nifty thing to say at cocktail parties.

When faced with a threat, you don’t need the best plan. Remember that one? Okay, but for that one to work, here's a cool rule: nobody gets to ask you why, argue against that first decent plan, or negotiate a different one. If the plan is to get up and walk away, just do it. No apologies. We call that one the veto rule.

If you haven't signed up for our online course, you gotta do that. We explain everything in short videos and if you're like me, you'll appeciate that we always break it down into simple language. So check us out at www.selfdefensethatworks.com.

One biggie rule is the whole idea of trying to calm ourselves down when we’re facing a threat. It’s better to not try. Instead, focus the sensations that are occurring in your body when you feel this thing called fear. Respect the feelings, give them their time. Honor them as the signals that they are (that's all they are - signals) and then follow rules like, when I feel this sensation I say this, I breathe like this… You’re not trying to calm down, you’re raising your ability to function well within this emotional state.

Now don't worry about what those specific rules are right now. This is just an introduction to convince you that rules are good. For less than the cost of a good meal, we explain everything in the course.

If you've every found yourself in an unavoidably dangerous situation, don't worry, you are in good company. Just about every martial artist I've known that considers themselves world-renounded will talk about how it's important to avoid a fight, and just about every one of them is in a fight every weekend. "Do as I say, not as I do".

So how can you do better?

We need rules to live by. Keep in mind, we don’t have to like them. We just have to respect them.

Here's a basic one that nobody every explains: Never look down. I don’t care if it’s with your eyes or your head. I don’t care if its to look at your phone, the ground or your feet while you walk, or if you’re in the habit of glancing down when someone makes eye contact.

Right beside that one is: Walk with purpose. NOT hurried and NOT as if you’re tough. This includes how we hold our body, our stride, how our whole body moves in sync while we walk, and how we move through a crowd. A shorter than average stride makes you look weak. Imagine a lion hunting zebras, watching a herd. They’re looking for the weak, but on a primal level, that mostly shows up as one zebra that stands out from the rest. You want to blend in. That short stride - that's just like zebra with a bad leg - and that lion is looking for a meal!

A stride that is too long or too fast is just as bad. It doesn't really matter WHY you stand out.

A tough-guy posture that says “don’t mess with me” is just as bad. Think of it like this - if you really were too tough to be messed with, you wouldn’t have to rush or be so tense or try to so hard to look tough. So looking tough or angry is actually a primal signal that makes you a good target.

Stay relaxed, hold a good posture, and blend in.

We could talk about good posture in depth but today let's just keep it simple. Think of the distance between your ear lobe and your shoulder. Now make that as large as possible.

Whether it's your walk, your posture, or how you hold your elbows, use a video camera to record yourself. Mirrors don't work.

So, about those rules...

The whole idea about rules is, don't think about what you've been told. Put yourself into the mind of a predator. Don't know how? But who has every shown you how? Don't worry - we've got you covered. The course is dirt-cheap. www.selfdefensethatworks.com.

Always be scanning. That's a good rule. But who ever does it?

Before you leave a building, scan what’s outside. Who ever does that?

When you leave a building, pause. Step out of the way and stop. Adjust your clothing if you need an excuse. Take 3 or more seconds to scan. Notice people. Take note of what's going on. Read the room, so-to-speak.

If you make eye contact with someone, keep scanning. If you make eye contact a second time, well, flukes happen. But the reality is, we’re all so absorbed in our own lives that we don’t make that much eye contact with people. So keep scanning. Try to make it look casual. If you make eye-contact or even get that feeling that they're still paying attention to you - that's no fluke. They are tracking you. Maybe they like your hat. Maybe they want to know where you bought your shoes... yeah, but maybe not. I'm not saying it's time to freak out, but, you definitely want to take notice.

And you can’t do that if you don't see, and you can't see if you don't scan.

The more you scan, the more you’ll be able to do it smoothly, naturally, so it doesn’t look like scanning. That's a good thing - looking casual, looking relaxed, like you're at home here (wherever here is).

There are only a few basic "attacks". Let's talk about that for a bit.

If someone wants to attack you or grab you or whatever, there are basic ways they do it. They can walk toward you as if they intend to walk past you, and then suddenly they make their move.

They might ambush you. They know where you will be or a place you might walk past or go past and as you do, they make their move. If you’re scanning, your gut will actually do most of the work. You just have to let it. That "feeling" might say, "walk wide around that car", or you might feel an urge to turn around and go back into the store instead of going to your car where that van is parked really close. In cases like this, the rule is: always listen to your gut.

You don’t need a plan for every type of ambush, all you need to do is be aware that ambushes are a thing. Denying it won't prevent it. Accepting that it might happen will let your gut do the heavy lifting. So here's the rule: trust your gut, and change what you were about to do - do something else.

Another approach they use for the attack is to pace you, like walking behind you or beside you at a distance but getting closer so they meet you at some distant point, such as your car or the doorway to your apartment. This is nothing more than a moving ambush. Change what you were about to do. Do it casually as if you had just changed your mind.

Now you might call it a gut feeling, intuition, instinct, heck - you can call it chicken soup if that works for you. Here's 20 years of deep study in psychology boiled down to the nitty-gritty: Think of your primal self as an internal radio that want to send you signals. Its job is to keep you alive, not to be accurate all the time so it would rather error on the side of over-reacting than under-reacting. Suppose it detects a "maybe danger", so it sends out a low signal - call that background static - the speakers are making a noise but you don't know what that noise is. Cool. That's your gut feeling.

If you don’t pay attention to that, your primal self turns the signal up, now we call it fear.

Ignore that enough times or don’t spend enough effort on formulating what to do about it, and now your primal self figures it has to turn those speakers up full-blast. At some point it just figures that no matter what it detects, it's just going to blast out some noise at speaker level 10 and let you figure it out because it thinks that's the only way that you'll pay it any attention.

That, my friends, is what we call PTSD.

I realize that I'm painting with a broad brush here but you’d be amazed at how trauma just melts away when you have rules and plans and someone shows you how to make them work together.

Just because I want to, let's talk about some more rules.

If they want your wallet, give it to them. Don’t throw it. Be calm like it doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t.

If they want you or your children, do not under any circumstances comply. Fight like your life depends on it. Does not matter if they say - do this and I won’t hurt you, do that and I won’t hurt your children - they’re lying. Fight like you’re possessed.

Once you start moving, don’t stop until you are home, behind locked doors and are with someone you trust.

Include your children in your self-defense planning. Use plain language. Be mature and calm. Your children will pick up on your calmness and absorb it all with an astounding level of maturity. If you talk to your children like children, it won't work. you have to talk to them like adults. Make it plain language but in a calm setting.

Establish a 3 rule system. You can use "green light, yellow light, red light".

Green light - everything is normal.

Yellow light - something is wrong. They might be tired, doesn’t matter. They might be hungry, doesn’t matter. They may be angry and in the middle of a tirade - does not matter. Their rule is this, if you suddenly and unexpectedly say “yellow light”, they stop what they are doing and pay attention. They might not have to "do" anything, yet, but they have to be ready to do something and until you tell them that it's okay to go back to green light, nothing else matters.

Red light - this is action time. This is the time to move. Maybe you have used “yellow light” to remind them of what to do, or maybe you jump right to “red light”. There will never be a red light situation that does not require moving from one place to another. Red light means “imminent danger.”

If you knew me from ages ago or if you have heard me talk about Rule 1, Rule 2, and Rule 3, then you know these were a little bit different, but this is a more gentle age, so let's go with green light, yellow light, red light for now.

Machete man - machete man was rule 2.

The Veto rule: Honestly, if the course only every covered the veto rule, it'd be worth it. This sucker is a game-changer. Here's the short-and-sweet version: When you say “its time to go” everybody is out the door before you get to the word "go", and nobody ever (like, never-ever) asks for a reason.

That's all for today folks. The bad guy does not fear the law. We have to make them fear us. Live free, live without fear.