Here in the 2nd installment of the Safety Series, I’m going to explain SITUATIONAL AWARENESS.
The term “situational awareness” is too often tossed around in the safety and self-defense industries without the toss-er actually really understanding what it is, how it happens, and what to do with it. The term is often thrown out there to stand alone by itself, as if it’s one of those “no explanation necessary” things. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Most people who have heard the term probably heard it defined, if defined at all, something like this: “Paying attention to your surroundings”. Or, if you were lucky, you got “paying attention to your surroundings while doing other things”. Well…duh. I mean, you do that every day on some level. And can you imagine trying to do that at a very high level? You’d never get anything done because you’d be constantly scanning and, to be effective, analyzing what you see. It’s a full-time job.
People also tend to overestimate their level of situational awareness, mostly because people also falsely believe they can multi-task. Human beings are basically incapable of multitasking. True story. What we as humans actually do when we THINK we’re multitasking is called “Switch-Tasking”. Now THAT’S probably one of those “no explanation necessary” terms, but I’ll do it anyway. Switch-tasking is simply switching our focus between more than one thing at a time, albeit very quickly.
So, knowing that you are not capable of multi-tasking for real, and that you are really just switch-tasking, ask yourself…WHEN do you switch task? Let’s use office/computer work as an example, and I’ll use MYSELF in real time to illustrate. As I am writing this article, my phone buzzes quite often (I get a TON of notifications all the time). When a notification comes in, my screen stays off but a preview of the message or notification pops up. IF I decide to look at it and read the preview, I slow way down or stop typing all together. I have to DECIDE to look at it, and DECIDE to read it. While reading it, I, along with 97% of the planet, stop typing words while we’re reading words. I’ve even found myself typing the words I was reading, and in a few cases typing the words I was speaking to someone on the phone! Have you ever turned the stereo in the car down when you were looking for your destination or a parking spot? LOL same thing.
Take a moment and try it…pull up a blank document or new email and while you’re reading this article, type a letter to a family member off the top of your head. You MIGHT find yourself trying really hard to do both, and if so, you’ll notice that you’re reading the article sort….of….like….this…one….word…at…a…time. You are switch tasking. Your typing probably slowed to 50% speed or less as well. But you DECIDED to switch task to do this experiment!
Let me bring this together for you now. Most people think that they have enough situational awareness to, at some point before a catastrophe, recognize danger and avoid it. Often because they think they can multitask. Be honest. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been on the phone, talking, typing, or reading, and bumped into something or tripped over something. 🙋🏻♂️ me too, of course. As I hope you can see now, situational awareness REQUIRES A DECISION. Here’s the good news…you can very easily train yourself to respond to cues that remind you to decide to be situationally aware! I’ll explain…
Here’s how I define Situational Awareness: Consciously and Purposefully Switch Tasking. Sounds easy enough, right? You need to DECIDE to be situationally aware. But WHEN? Again, if you try to do it constantly, you’d be exhausted in 30 seconds and get absolutely nowhere. You’ve felt this before when walking through a graveyard or spooky place when you were younger (or still now LOL). You DECIDED to look everywhere, listen hard, and become basically a paranoid mess for a bit waiting for a ghost to pop up from behind a tree. You would have had a hard time carrying on a decent conversation at that moment.
Since you can’t 100% of the time be consciously and purposefully switch tasking, you need to train yourself to do it at certain times, what I call “triggers”. Everyone can define their own triggers and on some level you should because everyone’s environment and situation are different. But I can give you the top-down approach.
Depending on your job, hobbies, lifestyles, you should all have triggers based on ‘thresholds.’ Thresholds will be any arrival or change of venue so to speak. For instance, when you walk into a restaurant, or if you are a LEO and you are just arriving on a scene of an accident, when you put your car in park, that’s a threshold. If you are an EMT and you just walk into someone’s house where someone is experiencing a medical event, that is a threshold. These are all physical and environmental trigger points that you can easily practice. When you are at a threshold, consciously and purposefully decide to switch task and STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN. (Just don’t stop in the doorway, people hate that). One of mine is whenever I pull into a parking space in a lot, like at the grocery store for instance. Before I turn my vehicle off and get out, I stop, look around, and listen.
The harder trigger to practice is probably THE most important one. And that is the signals from your sympathetic nervous system “pinging” your conscious brain. That is, when you get “a feeling” something is off. Let me assure you that the “feeling” you’re getting isn’t some magical energy that you are uniquely tuned into. That feeling is actually REAL input from your environment hitting your senses and being collected by your subconscious mind. When you subconscious recognizes something that could potentially harm you, it “pings” your conscious mind in the form of a “feeling”.
Case in point…have you ever been driving down a multi-lane road and you just had a feeling that a certain car was about to merge into your lane dangerously, and they actually did? It happens all the time. That feeling was actually your subconscious mind processing your peripheral vision that happened to pick up the reflection in that cars side mirror of that human face glancing in the mirror the way we do before merging.
There are two main parts to understand about your brain that will help you dial in your triggers. First, your sensory cortex is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to keep you from harm. It’s constantly talking information from all your senses and filtering through it all. Second, from the day you were born your subconscious brain, the Hippocampus to be accurate, has been constantly collecting and storing that sensory information that ended up actually being threats and harmful events. When something happens in your environment that “reminds” your hippocampus of a bad thing, even if you don’t consciously process it, it sends a silent alarm in the form of a “feeling”. I can bet that at some point in your life you’ve woken up in the middle of the night because you think you heard a noise. Well, you did. Your sensory cortex was listening for danger. Your conscious brain was on vacation, so you don’t know WHAT that noise was, but the sudden noise caused your hippocampus to send a signal to your amygdala that said, “WAKE UP!”. But then you woke up and froze…waiting…waiting…
You waited for confirmation to identify the noise so you can choose a course of action.
Trusting that your brain is working to watch your back and it’s never going to lie to you (though it may be wrong), and your hippocampus is a database of threats, the biggest trigger for you to decide to be situationally aware, to Stop-Look-Listen, should be when you get a feeling! There is something in your environment that matches something in your hippocampus that is familiar as a threat. Again, it might NOT be an actual threat, it just reminds you of one. So you have to wake up and look for confirmation or otherwise.
And there you have it. Having true Situational Awareness isn’t about being paranoid. It’s about training yourself to remember to consciously and purposefully switch task and to stop-look-listen to your surroundings at particular times, and especially when you get a feeling. Do it well, and your friends and family will be convinced you have Spidey senses.
In my next article, I’ll dive into exactly WHAT you should be looking for when you get a “feeling” about someone in your vicinity or that you are interacting with by diving into the body language of fight or flight.
Be safe out there! ~James
You can learn more on these topics and more with interactive presentations by James, Shannon, and Colorado Krav Maga by booking a seminar for your group, company, or agency. Visit https://bit.ly/KravSeminars for more information.
