In Your AREA Podcast
In Your AREA Podcast
Part 1 - REALTOR® Be Safe
Have you ever been worried about your well-being while hosting an open house or showing a property to a client who made you uneasy? This two-part series on REALTOR® safety is a must-listen! Debra DeWaal of Safe & Sound Safety Training, Lynn Dueck of the Calgary Police Services Victim’s Unit and Jennifer Gilbert, AREA President, chat about trusting your “gut” and how saying less on social media can help keep you safe.
Welcome to In Your AREA, a podcast designed by AREA to update, educate, and refresh realtors, brokers, and industry stakeholders on topics that matter most to you. Listen on the go, in your car, at a coffee shop, wherever your day takes you. This is a podcast designed with today's busy realtor in mind. Here is today's host Jennifer Gilbert.
Jennifer:Welcome to In Your AREA, a podcast for Alberta realtors on the move. Podcasting from the boardroom of the Alberta Real Estate Association, I am your host for this episode: Realtor, be safe. I'm Jennifer Gilbert, associate broker at Coldwell Banker City Side Realty in Lloydminster. I'm also president-elect on the Alberta Real Estate Board of Directors and a member of the AREA Professional Development Committee. This episode is a special one as we have several subject matter experts in house to share their personal experience and expertise. This topic of realtor safety is particularly important to me because I have had some personal experiences. As opposed to living in fear, I feel it is better to live in a sense of awareness of mind, body, and spirit. I think the best tool that you can use to keep yourself from being victimized is totally free. It should always be turned on and fully charged. It's called your gut, your intuition, your sixth sense, and that funny feeling, the small voice that we need to listen to. Joining me today is Debra DeWaal, president of Safe and Sound Safety Training and Consulting Limited and a former Calgary police officer of 18 years. Also Lynn Dueck, victim assistance coordinator at the Calgary Police Service Victim Assistance Unit number 598. Thank-you ladies for joining us today. I guess we'll start with Deb, if you can give some suggestions of what realtors should be aware of in their environment.
Debra:I love your opening because you're talking about intuition. The two things are kind of tied together as far as being aware of your environment and also paying attention to your gut instinct because they are linked. It was kind of the more common sense tips. One of the things when I think about realtors, the biggest thing that pops into my head is when you're showing a home, making sure that you're never leaving. Meaning, you're not going into the rooms first, that you're following. You can invite people with a wave of your hand into rooms ahead of you. I always have this thought pop in of someone asking you to go see the dark room in the basement kind of thing.
Jennifer:That does happen.
Debra:It does happen and that is so avoidable for potential danger if you invite them in first. Probably another thing from a prevention idea is to get there early. If you're meeting someone at location A, you know the children's rhyme, stop, look, and listen before you cross the street. It's kind of similar in that you want to show up early so you can see your environment and make a safety plan before the client or prospective client even gets there. So you've walked the house, you've walked the outside, you possibly know if the neighbors are home, where are areas you could go to, where your exits are, where a choke point might be, meaning where you could get trapped in a confined space. Those dark, creepy basement rooms as an example. Getting there early, having the realtor lead in so you're not getting pushed into a corner, so to speak. Those are the two things that kind of highlighted for me right away as a start where we can begin. Through all those, of course, you're trusting your intuition.
Jennifer:Absolutely. Even having somebody at an open house getting too close to you or being within your personal space, that should be setting off alarm bells. I think one important thing for realtors to remember is that this isn't just about women. Safety is not about women. It's about both genders. If someone is in your personal space or doing something to make you uncomfortable, we tend to have this reaction that we need to be kind and we need to be polite to them. We can shut that down and a respect comes with that. When you say, whoa, step back, you're in my space.
Debra:You can also try to just step back for a millisecond if they don't get the social cue. If there's no nefarious intent involved, if they don't pick up on that, then that's another signal that this isn't right and then you can take that next step of saying that you need a little space here, can you please back up? You're right, it is creating a respect, a confidence for you if they thought you were going to be a victim. Simply by taking that action, you've become lesser of a target with that body language.
Lynn:I think we'll probably go back to honoring that gut feeling, which like you said, we tend to want to be kind or we want to be approachable come first and we push that down. We have to be conscious of that and some of the options that you can take if you are feeling that way.
Debra:Absolutely, body language is everything. Obviously, picking up on what they're giving off, the standing too close, the perhaps suggestive comments that might slip out, whatever it is or maybe even threatening powerful things and they're obviously trying to intimidate you. Not just watching their body language but also paying attention to yours. In many cases, victimization is a cause of power. They're selecting their victims based on their perception. I might not be a really tough person and if I'm giving that off that day, that's a weak body language, weak verbiage, not a strong voice. This is actually a prevention thing. Paying attention to their body language but also paying attention to yours. Standing tall, standing confident, chin up. From a sales perspective that's good as well so there's value added there.
Lynn:When you talk about the idea of making yourself not be that weak person and you express that, we're talking to men here too, we're not just talking about women being vulnerable. Men are also vulnerable in that respect but they can also be vulnerable where they may be in a situation where they are alone with a woman and that their behaviors can be misconstrued or somebody may be there to cause trouble. You will also have to be aware on the other side that you don't want have yourself in a situation where you're being accused of something which is not happening.
Jennifer:I guess if the situation ever does arise, the ideal would be flight, right? As opposed to fight. Previewing that open house space, previewing that neighborhood. One of the other pointers that I always like to mention is having your vehicle be able to exit, have somebody not be able to block you in. Have a good exit route so you can get out of the house. Also, not bringing things into the home like your purse or a whole bunch of additional items and making sure that you're keeping your keys and your cell phone easily accessible to your body. While you're in the open house, you're not leaving your car keys sitting on the kitchen counter for anybody to pick up and wander off. That's not a personal safety measure unless of course, you leave the open house and you're in the middle of nowhere and your car is gone.
Debra:Or you have no keys because they can take it.
Jennifer:Exactly.
Lynn:Those points are part of the training that we have for our volunteers when they go out on emergency calls. All of the tips about parking are drilled into their heads, that you don't park in the driveway where you could be blocked, the purses, all those things may seem like it's overkill, but you never know what can happen.
Debra:It's just common sense. If you make that as part of your normal everyday safety plan, it's not you being paranoid, it's you just taking steps to be cautious. There's a big difference between paranoia and caution and it becomes part of your routine.
Jennifer:Awareness affects every part of our lives, from grocery shopping, traveling, all these types of situations. As opposed to living in fear thinking, oh my God, something can happen, I'm afraid. If you're living in that constant sense of awareness, when something does step out and appear different, It's not so fearful and it's far easier for you to react.
Debra:It's almost like you inoculated yourself against the stress of the real event because you're paying attention to it. So you're not one of those people who thinks it's from out of nowhere. An interesting model that would be really applicable for realtors, men, women, pretty much everyone in general, is called the awareness spectrum. It was created by the US military many, many years ago. It's purpose is to educate soldiers on what level of consciousness/awareness they should be in at any given time. If you recall, many years ago, 9/11, there were many circumstances on the media where you'd h ere that we are now in code orange or now in condition yellow. Does that sound familiar? That's from t he awareness spectrum. How does it relate to us in our day-to-day life? It's five color codes, code white being the least amount of awareness. We see t his e veryday walking down the street and this applies to realtors-- she[Jennifer] is indicating for those of you who c an't s ee u s right now, her typing on her phone--that's exactly what I was going for. Code white are people completely unaware, texting. I can just picture r ealtors amongst everybody else doing the same thing when they're waiting for someone to show up with headphones in and completely unaware. Those are the people who get victimized the most. Kick it up to code yellow which i s a calm state of alertness. I would like to suggest that's where people need to be. You're not paranoid, you're not looking around every corner expecting a bad guy to leap out at you because that's paranoia, which is actually unsafe because you can't tell fact from fiction. If real i ntuition i s coming in being a problem or if it's just something you're making up in your head. So c alm state of alertness.
Jennifer:So you have the awareness that there's a guy across the street. I've made eye contact with him but I'm not afraid of him. If he crosses the street and continues to come towards me, that's where you elevate.
Debra:To condition orange. Yes, great segue. You're exactly right. You go from the calm state of cautiousness to condition orange, which is alarm. It's neither negative or positive, it just means that something has happened. You made eye contact with that fellow across the street and now he's directly making eye contact with you and coming forward to you in a fast pace. Something has happened. There is something you need to do in condition orange and that is make a plan. So code white is unaware, code yellow is a calm state of alertness, code orange is alarm and make a plan. So he's coming towards me now and I'm going to make a plan. Either I'm going to confront this head on, put my hand out and say,"stop. What are you doing? Why are you following me"? All the way through to"is there something I can help you with"? If the plan fails, if he continues at you, then you go to code red. Code red is action. Meaning you have to implement the plan you created in code orange. In the worst case scenario, that could be in the situation of a personal attack. What do you do if someone's literally attacking you? Now we're getting into that worst case scenario. There are three things you must do if you're attacked. Number one, any guesses? First thing, you must do? You have to make noise and there's a couple of reasons for that. Obviously, you want to make noise to attract attention but you also want to make noise if there's no one around. We talk about that dark, creepy acreage in the middle of nowhere where nobody is. Even if there's nobody around to hear the noise, you still need to make noise because it does something for us personally. It actually makes us stronger. It's a physiological response. It sends blood to your extremities etc. Just know that it works. It will make you stronger when you need it the most. You're going to be screaming your full head off or yelling your full head off and then you're getting into the fight. What does that look like? It can be absolutely anything. My experience is post Calgary Police Service. I've taught self defense courses for decades now and we've always done the padded attacker. That's through our company. It's a fascinating experience because it's fake. What I've observed over the many years of watching people, it never looks like TV. We've never taken a martial arts bend to it because you actually revert to gross motor skills when you're under stress. We're kind of blending into the freeze factor, which I'll carry on about in a bit, but I want it to be gross motor skills. What it looks like in real life is people flailing, people scratching, people biting, kicking, punching, whatever it takes to get away. That's the third thing. Your main objective is to get out of there. Yell your head off, fight, and get away. I don't care what it looks like, just flail. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite self defense techniques is to act like a six year old child who doesn't want to be picked up. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where they do the arms and teeth and scratching and whatever it looks like only enough to get away. Now backing up a little bit, yell, fight, runaway. The fight part, I'm going to add to that. Fight or not fight but make that choice and make that ahead of time. What I'm getting to here is I believe personal safety really boils down to two things. Number one, having a clear bottom line, meaning having a decision made in your head ahead of time. In this scenario, would I fight or not fight? How you do those things of course has to work for you with any kind of physical limitations you may have. Making that decision ahead of time with clarity and conviction is what will help you prevent the freeze factor. Having that decision so you don't have to think it through in the heat of the moment.
Lynn:In the case of the guy coming across the street in your mind, you say, okay, if he gets to this point I'm running or I'm yelling and I'm running. Instead of letting him get that extra two feet close to you and then you have to fight.
Debra:Exactly, and when he's that close, now you're in an extremely stressful situation where our motor skills leave us. Having that decision made ahead of time is critical. Will I fight, will I not fight, follow through with a plan that works for you, again, made ahead of time, even visualized.
Lynn:That can happen in a split second. It can happen just as that person has made eye contact and is now coming towards you. You can have that thought process happen. It doesn't be a written out plan.
Debra:You can be showing a house and someone comes in, everything seems to be ordinary, and someone comes in when no one else is in the residence. That makes you feel very uncomfortable. It could literally be in that moment where you're thinking it through. This is making me feel uncomfortable and I'm not exactly sure why. It doesn't really matter, I can pick it apart later, but if I'm going to say A, and if he or she responds with B, that's when I'm going to make my exit or implement the plan I created in code orange.
Jennifer:There's so many different plans out there that we as realtors can access before we're in code orange where that intuition is kicking in. Something isn't right. Having a personal safety app, having a buddy that you can text that is like a"weirdo at my open house" so maybe that's initiating that buddy, being in the neighborhood, driving over to visit the open house, making a phone call to you. If you're showing a property, making sure that people know that there's someone expecting you elsewhere. There's tons of plans that we can, we can put in place like that we don't have to think about in that moment.
Lynn:Even say that you're expecting somebody else to be there momentarily, even if it's not true. That puts a thought in their head that someone is coming here.
Jennifer:If we have those tools in place ahead of time, then when we start accelerating into that situation where something is getting uncomfortable, the options are already built in for us and it doesn't take a lot of thought. It just takes that this is wrong, I've got to move into this next tool.
Debra:It will come to you. If you've created that tool ahead of time, in those stressful moments, they will come to you. Just that preparedness. Have a clear bottom line. Will you fight or not fight, follow through with that plan that works for you.
Jennifer:This would be a good point for me to bring in an amazing book that I've been reading. It's called the Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. It is just amazing to read through. Totally applicable and some great tools for safety, all types of different safety, financial, and employment. It goes into disgruntled employees and workers in all types of different, amazing situations. Again, having that information allows us to build these tools so that when we are put in these situations, we have all of this information that we can go to.
Lynn:The book really, bottom line again talks about your intuition, that gift of fear, and that we push that aside. We need to listen to that uneasy feeling. Again, it's not paranoia, but be conscious of it and respect it.
Debra:I talk about this in some of my presentations, sort of alluding or attributing it to the Gift of Fear. People who are 10 feet tall and bulletproof, the type that thinks nothing bad would ever happen, this is an everyday common thing, nothing ever goes wrong. They have overdone confidence.They are at a higher risk for violence because they will never see it coming. It's like they deadened or closed off their intuition. On the flip side, I've worked with a lot of real estate agencies in the past where I've met some realtors who are on the other end of the spectrum where they have too much fear. They have overdone fear and that's where the paranoia comes in. If you can imagine this, the reason why they are also in a high category for violence is because when the real signals come in, that person standing t oo close or the phone c all sounded a bit odd, they don't pick up on it because they're creating survival signals that don't exist. When the real one comes in, they can't discern fact from fiction. It's finding that happy medium of being prepared, having your ducks in a row, having your plans made a head of time, and living in a calm state of alertness. You'll be more confident in your day-to-day life, not just at work, but walking to and fro and going out and experiencing your world. You're not going to have that getting caught off guard by being 10 feet tall and bulletproof, and you're not going to be living that fearful life that will sometimes limit your professional abilities b ecause you don't want to travel or you don't want to stay in hotels or etc.
Jennifer:I guess that kind of leads into the fact, especially with the Gift of Fear as the book, that tons of different ways that that safety can affect us. Not necessarily just in a one-on-one in an open house and there's another live body in the room with you, but things like harassment and constant phone calls. I myself had a personal experience with some harassing text messages from a pay-as-you-go phone where there were multiple realtors in my area affected by this and we'd reported to police, but we never made the connection between each other that this had something to do with the industry. We had no idea who this fellow was. Eventually, connections were made after a fairly long period of time where some of us were continuing to put ourselves at risk because this was a client that we were going out and showing. We just hadn't connected the dots. There's other dynamics of safety and going into that technology aspect of it where people can still have access to us. Do you ladies have any recommendations on anything that we should be doing for safety for ourselves in the public eye from a technology perspective?
Debra:Oh my goodness, you've got material for a whole other podcast on that. Of course with social media, with all the benefits, especially in sales, there are some drawbacks because in some ways you're similar to an occupation like home care workers or social workers, anyone who's visiting someone else's home, more than likely alone. Many of the experiences I've had, certainly as a police officer, but also as owner of Safe and Sound working alongside these industries, social media can be their worst enemy because people are talking about when they're going on vacation, when their homes are empty, maybe a little too much personal disclosure where they find your areas of weak points. You brought up harassment or stalking. If you put out there every detail about where your dog goes to daycare, where you run, the events that you attend and someone has bad intent, you've just armed them with everything they need to know about where you're going to be and when. It doesn't take a rocket scientist
Lynn:And the fact that if you have a family, if you're single, all of those things are put out there for the world to see. It is a double edged sword in some respects.
Jennifer:One thing that has come up in different safety training that I've taken for realtors is to keep your personal social media personal. My personal social media page that goes into details about my life is very closed up for those people that are my friends and family. I have a separate business page where clients and the general public can access details generally about my education, my properties, the events, and my work.
Lynn:You also still have to be aware, even if you have a personal social Facebook page and then a professional one that it still doesn't guarantee that that information is going to be limited to the people that you have in that circle. All it takes is a share or something else where and it goes out there. It doesn't mean that it's bad, but I think that there just has to be an awareness.
Debra:There's potential risk. Anything you put online, there is potential risk of it coming back.
Jennifer:Professional realtor photos as well. Making sure that everything that we're putting out there is professional will maybe help eliminate some of those people from approaching us.
Debra:Sure. One of the lines I've always thought about when it comes to what you're posting is, if you are comfortable with whatever you post being front page news the next day, then it's probably okay to post because there is that potential. There is that potential always. People can find out a tremendous amount about others in front of a computer, should they find it necessary to try and track you down. They can.
Introduction:Join us next time for the second half of Realtor, be safe.