The Bad Guy Decides When. You Decide How Soon You Notice.

Most people think situational awareness is about constantly scanning for danger. The reality is far more interesting and far more important: it's about recognizing danger sooner.

In this solo episode, Terry Vaughan, former Royal Marine Commando and TEDx Speaker, breaks down the three biggest reasons good people miss obvious threats, even when those threats are hiding in plain sight. Drawing on neuroscience, threat recognition, body language, and real-world defensive training, Terry explains how the brain processes visual information, why normalcy bias leads us to explain away danger, and how simple changes in how we scan our environment can dramatically improve our ability to spot trouble before it reaches us.

You'll learn why your eyes aren't actually seeing the world the way you think they are, how inattentional blindness can make you miss even the most obvious warning signs, why most people talk themselves out of trusting their instincts, and how establishing baselines allows you to identify anomalies long before everyone else notices them.

Most importantly, you'll walk away with practical tools you can use immediately to become more aware, more confident, and far more difficult to surprise.

In This Episode

• Why the only thing you truly control is how quickly you recognize a threat

• The science behind saccadic suppression and why your brain literally hides information from you

• How to use Terry's three-ring scanning method to see more than ever before

• Why hands, faces, and attention reveal intent before action

• The dangers of inattentional blindness, cell phones, and transition zones

• How normalcy bias causes people to miss threats that seem obvious afterward

• The power of baselines, context, and behavioral clusters

• Why prolonged eye contact and attention can reveal more than words ever will

• How to become a harder target through observation, pattern recognition, and deliberate practice

Because the bad guy controls the when, the where, and the how.

The only thing you control is how quickly you notice him.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've always taught that there are essentially five components of personal safety. Self-awareness, how you interpret sensory information, how you process incoming visual, auditory, and other data. Environmental awareness, your ability to put yourself in the shoes of a predator and ask yourself if you were going to get you, how would you do it in this environment? And then modulating your attention in conjunction with that assessment so that you are dialing up your attention in environments that are high risk and dialing it down when the environment changes and it's less risky. Then there's situational awareness, and this is where body language comes in. Baseline, context, clusters, your ability to recognize what body language signals fit this environment, and then obviously which ones don't. All of that, of course, which is based on the circumstances in which you are seeing those signals. Plans, skills, and adaptability. You better have a plan because you're not going to pull something out under a lot of stress, certainly nothing that is good. You then need the skills to support your your plan. I can't tell you how many people over the years have overestimated their skills or their endurance. And the reality is when the shit hits the fan, it all falls apart. Adaptability is important because effectively the trouble is never going to find you on the day you're ready. It's going to find you when you're not ready and it's unexpected and it's the worst time possible, and you weren't paying attention, or certainly not as much attention as you should have, and then it arrives. So you need to be able to adapt. A imperfect plan put into action swiftly is going to be better than a perfect plan 10 minutes after you needed it. And then perhaps most important, and this is my fifth thing, it is the willingness to prioritize safety above everything else. In other words, if you're in a situation where you feel doubt, really, that means there is no doubt because you default to a reaction that gets you out of trouble, gets you away from that situation, or you have time to enact a plan to deal with whatever threat you suddenly find yourself facing. Circumstances beyond his control. So I'm flying solo. And I thought, well, what better way to come into this particular podcast than with information that helps individuals that are protectors or self-defenders, depending on how you want to categorize yourself, be better. Improve the likelihood and the chances that you're able to recognize a potential threat in time to do something about the information. Because unfortunately, when it comes to threats, the bad guy gets to choose the the location. They choose the when, they choose the where. They also decide whether they're going to attack alone. They decide whether they're going to use deception, sp uh surprise, speed, violence of action. We don't get a vote as a defender in any of that. The only thing we truly control is how quickly we recognize what is happening. And every second that we can be efficient and every second we can get ahead of the potential threat that is us giving ourselves more time, hopefully more space, and definitely more options. When I think about situational awareness, I don't think about situational awareness being it's us trying to see danger. I think of it as it's us trying to see danger sooner. But the person who recognizes that reality has changed, the one who does that first usually has an advantage, even if it's over even if it's only over the rest of the population. So today I'm going to talk about the three biggest reasons I think that most people miss obvious threats, and probably most importantly, how you can bloody fix them. Because at the end of the day, knowing the problems or the challenges of being more aware is one thing. It's how to maximize and overcome some of those shortfalls. In most cases, shortfalls that people weren't even aware they had, in such a way as to put yourself in a position to be more observant and more in tune with what's going on around you than ever before. So without further ado, let's get rockin' and rollin'. First thing I want to talk about, psychadic suppression. And by that I mean we don't view the world like a video camera with everything running smoothly. Our eyes jump from point to point to point, known as fixations, in any environment that we go into. On average, we move our eyes three to five times a second, and we arrive on visual points of interest, and we stay on that point of interest, that fixation, for between two and three hundred milliseconds on average. That means that we are taking in very little information from what we ultimately stop on. And between these points of fixation, our brain suppresses incoming visual data in order to give us the perception of a smoothly viewed environment. So we effectively, our brain, in its infinite wisdom, and in a in a way to try and make us as efficient as possible and not overload us with movement and extraneous information. We're suppressing data in every environment that we go into. Couple that with the fact that let's say between point A and point B, we blink before we arrive at point B. We're prepping our eyes to be ready to do the job we want them to do when they arrive at point B. We are literally blind between these individual points, these fixations. The brain suppresses the data, we blink, we miss things. We don't even know we're doing it. One of the ways that we overcome this is to scan every environment that we go into three times. The first initial scan, go wherever you want to go. I recommend that you start close in and then work out concentrically for each of the scans, but it's entirely up to you. Sometimes it can be easier to just let your eyes go wherever they want to go. And if nothing bad is seen during these uh scans, then go back for a second time, only this time look past beyond through around those original points of fixation. Staying aware of where we look first and that nothing bad was there during that first scan, and then going back for a second scan but looking around past through, opens our visual uh scanning of information up exponentially, as does the third scan if nothing's found during the second. One of the things I would also encourage you to do is during these points of fixation, as your eyes land on whatever you've decided to look at, give yourself about a half second to actually look. Because two to three hundred milliseconds, which is the time that we normally stop at any point uh any point of fixation for visually looking, is too short to take in as much information at all. Extending the amount of time that we actually plant on that visual point of interest means we give ourselves an opportunity to take in more information than we ever have in the past. The third scan is probably the one where you go out the furthest, starting close, middle ground in these concentric rings, and then furthest, because if nothing in close proximity to you is a problem, then let's go further out. Let's take that jump out to a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet, depending on the on the environment, and look for a third time. If you do this at every environment that you go into, there's a very real chance that at very least you'll take in the potential for a threat at distance if they are holding off looking for a potential victim. But the other thing it does, these three practiced, measured scans of the environment, gives anyone who might be looking for a target the impression correctly that you are in tune and a much harder target than everyone else around you. Because you bloody well know that the next eight people behind you heading out into the parking lot are all probably buried on their phones or lost in thought, they're not paying attention. So giving the impression of being in tune with what's going on is an advantage in and of itself to say nothing of the fact that taking a three-scan approach, looking past beyond and through any of the original points of fixation in any given environment empowers you with more information than you've ever seen before. It makes you look like a bloody hard target, which of course, if you can put somebody off, even approaching you, and they go on to somebody else, that's a bloody win. Another factor of our visual scanning skills is also the limitation of what's known as foveal vision, and that is the central cone of vision that's actually HD. The majority of what we see is actually peripheral, up to nearly 180 degrees. The central foveal vision is actually very narrow, like one and a half to two degrees of focus. And to give you some perspective on how narrow that really is, if you put your thumb out at arm's distance in front of you and focus all of your visual attention on your thumbnail, depending on the size of your thumb, that's around one and a half to two degrees visual field of view. That thumbnail should now be crystal clear. You can see it in all its high definition glory. Everything you're seeing outside of what your foveal vision is focused on is peripheral, and thus legally makes you blind. You're not getting details. Our foveal vision effectively was set up primarily to notice movement, to see if we're about to be ambushed. And then that would drive us to turn and orient visually towards that movement to find out what kind of threat potentially that movement is associated with. For the most part, we see a tiny amount of detail in any environment that we are looking at. And because that narrow focus is exactly that so narrow, when you are scanning people, assuming you you do scan people, and if you do, you're already in the minority. If you're looking at people, the primarily what we tend to look at is faces. We want to know who's looking at us, and we look at them, and we try to get a measure of who we think that person is from their emotional displays. Perhaps, depending on your background, you make a decision to also look at hands. But again, that's one step further than most people go and put you into an even smaller group of people when it comes to situational awareness and scanning. What I want you to do is to look at people in your environment and know that your foveal vision is limiting the details of what you're seeing to just the faces or just the hands. And what I want you to do is after you look at faces, if you're not already doing it, consciously make a decision to look at what they're holding in their hands. Now, the good news here is 99.9% of the time, it's not going to be anything more threatening, most likely, than a phone or keys or just empty hands, although I'll probably have the hands in their pockets. It's going to be something less than nefarious, harmless. But if you make that conscious decision and you will have to work this reminder into your sort of SOPs, your standard operating procedure for scanning for several weeks before it becomes habit, if you do that on the one time that it is a bad guy heading into a public venue location carrying a firearm, you're much more likely to notice that they're carrying a weapon or a knife or a machete. And you would be amazed to know when I'm teaching this in front of a live audience. I've got a multitude of videos that shows perpetrators of violent crimes heading into public establishments carrying pistols, rifles. Hell, in one case, there was a woman carrying an axe. Nobody noticed. Yet, no one I'm not even it's funny, but I'm not even joking. They didn't notice an axe being carried into what looked like a gas station. We'll get into the cognitive elements of that in a minute. But if you make a conscious effort to look at hands when you are scanning the environment after looking at faces, or if you look at hands already automatically go to faces, if you make this conscious effort part of your everyday scanning vernacular, eventually it'll become second nature and you won't have to think about it. Everything we're going to talk about changing today is going to take effort to begin with. There's no easy way around that. It's like when you first learned to drive, right? Everything was bloody hard. You had to think about all the movements, all of the mechanics that went along with driving the vehicle safely, looking out of the vehicle to predict what everybody else was going to do. There are all these components that are very overwhelming when you first start doing it. And then after a year or so, you are literally driving on autopilot. There are times, I'm sure you can relate where you've driven from point A to point B. If somebody said, tell me about that drive, I'd be hard pressed to give you any details. Why? Because the subconscious picked up all of the heavy lifting and left me consciously and cognitively able to think about what I'm going to do when I get there, the list of things I need to do later that day, the phone calls I need to make, all of those other things that take conscious effort. I had the capacity to do that because the subconscious was doing the driving. The same is true of scanning. You've got to get yourself to a place where the subconscious is doing the heavy lifting, freeing you up to be a little bit more loosey-goosey about when and how and where you scan. But understanding that you have a very limited, um, high definition visual processing tone is incredibly important because it means that if somebody is, let's say, within 20 feet of you, unless you consciously look from face to their hands, you will likely have no idea whether they have something in their hands. And that conscious choice to scan and look at them objectively like that quickly, could be the difference, especially in an age where people are blaming society for all of their um failings and taking that out on the general public in the form of active shooting attacks. Inattentional blindness, which is something that we all suffer from at different points, different places, is where we are cognitively, visually focused on one specific thing. Now the biggest uh culprit of hijacking where our attention is focused, of course, is in our bloody pockets and its cell phones. And the phenomenon that is known as inattentional blindness, or what psychologists refer to as selective attention, is where we become so engrossed in whatever we're looking at on that device that our brain effectively screens out anything that is going on outside of that very narrow field of focus. When our attention goes somewhere, our awareness effectively abandons or leaves somewhere else. And when it comes to our phones, that means anything outside of our screen is basically just completely ignored. So that so with that in mind, I think there are specific times when we absolutely should not be on our phones. And at any point that we are going through a transitional space, moving through an environment that is transient in nature, gas stations, parking lots, anything of that ilk, these are environments where our attention should be solely focused on what's going on around us. If you've got an email or a text or something you've got to absolutely have to answer, stay inside the building you're in, assuming you were about to leave, put your back to a wall somewhere, lift your phone up, take care of your business, your emails, your text messages, whatever it may have been, and then when you're ready to start walking around again, put your phone in your bloody pocket and get back to being aware of what's going on around you. There was an experiment done at one of the colleges where students were asked to count how many times a basketball was passed around between a team of people. I think the group that was passing the ball was in like white shirts, and the people that were just sort of meandering around, maybe they may have been passing another ball, were in dark black t-shirts or something like that. People became so focused on counting how many times this ball was passed, nobody noticed, as I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen this video before, nobody noticed the guy in a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the scene, stood there, beat his chest, and then walked out. Now there were some people that did notice it, but the majority did not. Afterwards, when they said, okay, how many times was the ball passed, and they gave them the number, and some were accurate and some were not, they then said, Okay, and at what point did the gorilla enter the scene and people were like, What frickin' gorilla? Like, it is it is crazy to think that our brain burns about 20% of the calories that we utilize in any given hour, that our brain seeks efficiency above all else, and it knows it only has finite cognitive resources. And because of that, once we're focused on one singular visual task, all else tends to just be sort of filtered out. And even knowing this and knowing that that is how the brain works, we then fall often into the trap of thinking that won't happen to me. And yes, it will. It's happened to me. It's happened to everybody at different points throughout the course of a day. The the way to correct is to have in the back of your mind that I only have so much cognitive focus available to me. I need to make sure it's applied at the right time in the right places to benefit me and to help keep me and mine safe, particularly if you think of yourself as I do as a protector. If I'm with people, it feels like it's my responsibility to help keep them safe because I know damn well know, and you probably do too, that most of the people you're with are not going to be as attentive as you are. They might not have your experiences and aren't even looking for the same thing. So when in a situation like that, you owe it to yourself and to them to be as singularly focused on the one primary task, being safe as possible, and not let, when possible, the distraction of an electronic device hijack your attention and leave you and the people that are with you potentially vulnerable. Other areas where I think you should be uh upping your attention, upping your focus, and certainly not allowing yourself to be uh cognitively, consciously hijacked by inattentional blindness on a device or even deep in conversation with someone are what criminologists refer to as choke points, transitional zones, parking lots, elevators, that's another good one, any doorways, ATMs, of course, anywhere where the environment physically restricts your movement and thus your capacity to escape from an ambush, then that's that's a place where you should be thinking, okay, in this location at this particular moment, I absolutely need full attention on what's going on around me. Our attention at the best of times ebbs and flows that you're gonna be sometimes when you are dialed in, like you are, I don't know, Jason Bourne. You're scanning, you're seeing everything. And there are some times when that's not the case at all. And we want to limit those moments to the as few as possible and maximize the others without ever falling into the trap of being so on guard all the time that you're absolutely exhausted and no fun to be around. And I say this as someone who has been exactly like that. No fun to be around because I'm too busy scanning and looking and watching to be attentive to the people that I'm supposed to be having fun hanging out with. So there's there's a balance here, and I think knowing. Specifically when to apply additional focus and when to dial it down some, never off, but dialed down is hugely important because it allows these little breaks along the way. Of course, one of the things you can do, and I try to encourage, is get more people within your group being aware and scanning so that we're spreading the responsibility around. You can't see everything, but if all the people in your group are at least semi-aware of what's going on around them, there's a percentage, statistically, a chance that someone in your group's going to see something untoward, even if you've missed it. One of the things I did growing up with my whole family was whenever we would enter a restaurant or go into a building or go some places, and I didn't do this everywhere we went because that would get pretty old. But at odd times I would just say to all of the kids, close your eyes. Tell me what you see. How many males are in this room? How many males are in close proximity to you? Give me some distinguishing features. Where do you think the exits are even if you can't see where the exits are? Who around us is someone that might be a hindrance if there was a fire and we had to get out? I would basically I'd basically quiz them wherever we went. Now, eventually we arrived at a place where they were seeing a good deal. I never harked on necessarily about all the potential threats and then tried to put the fear of God in them. I just I wanted to test their uh their visual awareness and their capacity to sort of be in tune with what's going on. And then when they got it right, lots of praise. When they got it wrong, we all had a good chuckle. I do remember going through the parking lot with my two daughters at one point. And as we got to our vehicle and we got in, locked the door, started the car, I said, okay, tell me about the guy sitting, and it was literally one of these 1970s uh rusting rapist vans that was four cars down from us. I'm like, tell me about the guy sitting in that van. And both the girls looked at each other and they looked at me with their eyes big and wide and said, What guy in a van? And I'm like, for Pete's sake, right? And I try not to show my frustration. But I'm like, why and how could you not notice that? And I'm like, first of all, they're with dad, which means that they were already thinking, don't worry about it, dad got it. But but also they don't have my life experience. They don't, you, the people around you don't even have your life experience. If you're one of these people that sort of follows you the crimes that happen in your area, or even just the crimes that happen nationally, you are more sensitive to the potential vulnerabilities than maybe everybody else is. But having more people looking at any given moment means more people looking, greater chance that we are in tune with what's going on, or one of us is. And remember, we're social animals, right? We we were never meant to be tuned in, on guard, terrified of what's going on around us for an extended period of time. And and we're social animals, we congregate together, there's safety in those numbers, and that's for a reason. So utilize and leverage those additional eyes. And if you're dealing with people who are a little bit younger, um, or you're just people you you're trying to get on your plan, do it in a way that doesn't just hark on about all the negative things that could happen if they don't see the danger. Make it a bit of a game. Make it as enjoyable as possible, because at the end of the day, and I know this, you know, this often gets people's backs up, it is a game. It's you versus them, right? And who are them? The small percentage of the general population with ill intent. The bullies, the people that want to subjugate, control um, and exploit all the other people from within their their environment or their society. They're actually a small percentage. We know there's not danger around every corner, otherwise we'd all be a victim of a crime every single day. So it's not trying to put the fear of God in everybody. Well, it's coming, whether I like it or not. It's about saying it's possible. And within that possibility, there is an opportunity for us to be more in tune and more aware in a way that has us playing against the bad guys. Can I see them early enough to avoid escape or deny them access to us or me and mine? Or is it going to be, I don't see it till the last possible second. I've got very little options other than straight out fighting the hard skills, where it's a 50-50 crapshoot. The only fight you can ever guarantee winning is the one you avoid, the one you're not there for. And if you can get the people within your group scanning, at least similarly to the way you do, that's more eyes looking, assessing, and less likely that you are ever ultimately targeted for a crime. If you're serious about becoming a better shooter, here's a question. How many repetitions are you getting in each week? Study after study has shown that dry fire practice and simulator-based training can significantly improve shooting performance, decision making, and skill retention. 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The goal's arriving at the range with thousands of quality repetitions already in the bank. More reps, less cost, better decisions, ultimately better performance. To learn more, visit laser ammo.com. One last thing on uh visually or should I say, really, more situationally aware. The last 30 feet of any approach to your vehicle in a public place is when you absolutely should be at 100% full focus on the environment. Why? Because your destination is likely predictable. We are always more vulnerable when we stop, whether that's on foot or in a vehicle, than at any other time, at any other point when we're out and about. So you're approaching your vehicle, there is no other distractions, right? Even if you're only half listening to the people who are with you, the last 30 feet, you are predictable in where you are going, and at some point, you're gonna have to stop to open the bloody door. Same thing with going into a building. Use that opportunity to take your awareness up to 10, one being super low, 10 being max, and max it out. The amount of people I see going to vehicles, and in the last 10, 15, 20 feet, they're already either on their phones, digging for the keys, not scanning, they get all the way up to the vehicle, open the car door, they get in, lacks a daisy core, and then eventually shut the door. Sometimes the door's half open while they let some of that heat out, and I and they haven't looked once to see who might be around them. Those are the people who are going to end up at some point it will catch up with them because they are the easiest targets in the world. Brings us really nicely into normalcy bias, and that our brain is a pattern-loving, prediction-driven mechanism. It is, above all else, trying to be efficient and in many ways also trying to keep us safe, but in a very sort of um prehistoric way, right? We're still looking for the big cats, we're still looking for things on the periphery. If we're looking for anything at all, most of that is going on subconsciously, of course. But our brain wants to assume by default, not through any necessarily any effort, our brain wants to default to everything is going to be okay because everything has been okay at every point I've been in this environment before. It wants everything to be normal today because it was normal yesterday. And that unfortunately is not how our environment works. In fact, this is probably and arguably one of the biggest factors in why people end up the victims of crime and why you hear the witness reports after the fact saying, I didn't see it coming, it came out of nowhere, who could have predicted. And the reality is most attacks are not in a vacuum. They are predictable, and you just have to be aware that your brain is trying to default on any given day, at any given time, to things are normal. And it will go out of its way to try to find rational reasons for irrational behavior. What it's basically doing is incoming information is constantly being compared to existing expectations. The brain would rather be wrong briefly than rewrite reality instantly. It will tell you things are fine even when they're not. Remarkably, our brain, at least at an instinctive level, sees a massive amount of what's going on around us. And if you have an instinctive response, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, your stomach starts feeling a little weird, you you're getting that something's not right. You have to know that your brain is going to try and find a rational explanation, and yes, a harmless explanation for what it has seen. We really don't see reality as it is. Our brain builds reality as we expect it to be. It's constantly predicting what it thinks the outcome will be. And if you've never been the victim of a crime before, that means that it's going to default to a harmless outcome in your past because that's what it is familiar with, and that's the least stressful. It doesn't want you to be stressed and afraid, and so it goes, well, I'll just skip around this nefarious reason. I'll go straight over here to a harmless explanation. And we're one of the only animals in the animal kingdom that will have a gut instinctive reaction to a potential threat and talk ourselves out of it based on social norms or social expectations. I won't get in this elevator with this creepy dude because I don't want to offend him. I'm not going to cross the street with these guy, these young guys coming down towards me because that might upset them. There are all these rational, socially driven motivations that stop us from doing the one thing we know we bloody well should. We will talk ourselves out of having the right response in a situation where that could potentially even save our life for fear of looking and ostracizing ourselves, in quotations, from social norms. Effectively, it's kind of like top-down processing, right? We don't like to think that we are driven on our animalistic instincts. We like to think as cognitive animals that we are driven by higher thinking. And of course, yes, we are. But at points where we are encountering someone that means us harm, it it is unfortunately a situation where our top-down thinking can talk us out of doing the right thing and getting ourselves out of a dangerous spot because we don't want to offend or upset or come across as rude. And I hate to say it, but it happens a lot more often than people would probably like to admit. One thing I'd like to sort of leave you with here is people don't miss threats because they aren't looking. They miss threats because they're looking for the wrong thing. And even if they then see something that has them uh unsettled, they will find a rational explanation to water down what is happening in a way to reduce the stress they're feeling in that moment. It's a crazy situation where your brain's doing its best to maintain a basic level of comfort. It doesn't like being stressed out and afraid. Even if that means putting you in even more danger in order to avoid that initial stress and adrenaline-filled response. Three things we should always be cognizant of, and three things we can utilize to offset and and combat normalcy bias is uh baselining the environment, taking into account context, and then looking for deviations. So baseline context and clusters. Baseline, what is expected of the behavior in this environment with these people at this time of day? What's the norm? And then look for deviations above or below the expected. Is this person doing more than you would expect someone to do? You ever walk through an airport and everyone, you know, on the one of these um walkways is all kind of walking about the same pace. But there's always going to be a few people that have to go faster because they're running to catch a flight. That movement will invariably catch your eye, whereas you will quickly fall into a sort of a pattern of understanding or or acceptance of the pace of movement for everybody else. Now it can be frustrating if you happen to be the person running, of course, because you need got places to go and everybody's walking at around the same speed, forced by the numbers of people within that environment. Baseline, above context, is someone running faster than the group. That stands out, it draws our eye. Conversely, somebody walking very slowly, again, annoying, yes, but that's below, they're doing less. Someone standing on the periphery, observing all those people is below baseline. One of the things I want to mention here is in most environments, most of the time, 80-90% of the population is not observant at all. They're just not. They really aren't. So one of the things you can look for that's concrete is look for people who are paying attention. That stands out. That is above baseline, it's above the expected in most environments. Most people are not attentive. So anyone that is should be of interest to us. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I had an experience. My wife and I were checking out at Walmart. I'm I we're in the line to check out. My wife is taking care of the payments, and that is so that I can continue scanning our environment. And I noticed a guy four or five registers down doing approximately the same thing. And when we made eye contact with one another, just that brief kind of, oh, okay, I see you. And he's looking at me going, I see you, we both did a little head nod. We both recognized. We were looking at scanning, but we were looking at scanning for the same reasons. His response and my response were the same. I didn't care that he'd seen me looking at the environment. He didn't care that I'd seen him looking at the environment. In fact, in that moment, there was this acceptance that, oh, okay, somebody else here is switched on and looking. If something happens now, potentially I got backup. Right? And it's amazing how quickly that transpired. In just a few moments, there was an understanding that he didn't respond the way a potential criminal looking for a victim would respond. What do I mean by that? He didn't act in a way that was shifty, suddenly avoiding eye contact. He didn't glare at me and get angry, defensive, and stare me down like a bully would, or someone that was wanted to put me in a state of anxiety to stop looking at him and stop observing what he was up to. None of that happened. It was very much, I don't give a shit that you're looking at me. We just went, okay, cool. Dude's paying attention. Head nod, visual acknowledgement, we went back to scanning. And in that moment, potentially there was backup. So when you go into an environment and you're looking for behaviors above or below baseline, you're looking for context, uh, you're looking for clusters of signals, you're looking for behaviors that are anomalous, they stand out either above what you would expect or below, and observing that and looking for those interesting signs, and we could get into body language and signals and stuff that often correlate to threatening and or predatory behavior, however, because we don't want to be here for three hours. I'm just going to limit it to what I've sort of prepped for today. When we are looking through that lens, we diminish the chances and the likelihood that we default to a normalcy bias, an expectation that everything is going to be fine because it's been fine every other time. We minimize that. We'll never do away with it. It's a cognitive bias for a reason. It just sits in there permanently. We're constantly kind of having to push it down and minimize it. But by doing that, you put yourself in a minority of people that are they're not even close to doing that. You set yourself apart, you make yourself a much harder target in the cognitive effort, in the cognitive application of effort to that goal, pushing normalcy bias down, assessing visually, looking for baseline context and clusters, baseline behaviors, are they above or below the expected? Is there a context where that behavior might fit? But in this one it doesn't. Clusters, anything more than three signals that sort of correlate or are emotionally entangled with one another. That is a group of signals that most likely means that if they're all related, greater likelihood that we as the observer are accurate in our interpretation of the intent that that is probably being motivate motivated by. Under normalcy bias as well, it's good to know what the average eye contact duration is between strangers. Because it when I do these events live, the guesses on how long we should look at a stranger and hold eye contact is all over the place. But there was one study done that revealed that the average eye contact between strangers when it happens, which of course these days is unusual because everyone's on their phones, is about 1.1, 1.2 seconds. So when we're saying to ourselves, okay, what's baseline? Baseline for the most part is when we have eye contact with a stranger, the emotional response is indifferent. We do not want, in most circumstances, to engage with a stranger. Most of us avoid it unless you're an extrovert and you just can't wait to talk to people, particularly introverts. No, thank you. If we have an eye contact that is less than one point, but no other anomalous nonverbal signals occur, that's probably about what we should expect. It's just a quick look. The eye contact is made, and then we just want to avoid that because we don't want to encourage an interaction. Above 1.1 gets interesting because usually in that extension of time, we would look for and expect an acknowledgement that the eye contact has occurred. There is a nonverbal signal that says, yes, I've seen you. I know you've seen me, I don't mean you harm, I'm hoping you don't mean me harm. And in those fractions of a second, we display something. And it may be something as simple as an eyebrow raise, uh, mouth compression and a social smile. So not a genuine smile, but something where the lips compressed. It's very much, and I know that a lot of people listen to the podcast, they aren't necessarily watching, but it's a compression that looks kind of like a smile, but it's it's a half-assed smile. It's just a smile to acknowledge the eye contact has occurred. It's not a smile to encourage interaction. It's just enough to let that person know you've seen them, you know they're there, and that's as much effort as you're going to put forth. The other thing you might see is a head nod. That's what happened with me and the guy in Walmart when we both recognized that the other person was also scanning. It was a head nod. And interestingly enough, and this is why nonverbals fascinate me, when we nod down, chin lowers, just that little dip of we're we're actually doing a couple of things. We're doing the acknowledgement, yes, we've seen the other person for sure. But the other thing is we're covering up the throat of vulnerable area of the body. We are defending that. And it's a respectful, I see you, I know you. You could be a potential threat. And it carries the weight of that mutually aligned, mutual motivation of I don't want trouble. I've protected my vulnerable area of my neck because I accept you that you could be a threat. And because of that, I'm going to respect you. And it's crazy to me that so much is said in so little. Conversely, let's flip that for a minute. You have eye contact with a stranger. And that eye contact is 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 seconds. That's a long time with someone you don't know. And during that time period, the chin goes up, exposing the throat. That says a lot. It says a lot about that individual's attitude towards you. Now there are some arguments made for what I'm about to tell you that says that's just somebody doing the what's up. And that's quite possible. Like what's up? But the reality is we tend to reserve chin-up signals for people we know, like, and trust. What we're saying nonverbally is I trust you not to punch me in the throat. I trust you not to attack my vulnerable area of my body. Chin up. It's also another very subtle way of showing a little bit of excitement, positivity. Oh hey, how are you? It's up, it's positive. It's I recognize you and I trust you. When it happens between strangers and there is no like or trust component, it often has more of a correlation to an individual who feels arrogant and dominant because they feel as if they can display this part of their anatomy without fear of retribution, without fear of attack. That's less to do with you and more to do with them and their own psychology. So when you are out and about and you are scanning and you're going baseline, context, and clusters, and you're looking for behaviors that stand out, if I was going to say, look for these three specific things, three specific behaviors that will allow you to take a quick measure of somebody and their intentions, I would say look for people who are attentive, look for people who are attentive to you, and look for behaviors that follow or occur within the duration of eye contact you hold with that individual. When it comes to beating normalcy bias and being more in tune than you've ever been before, a lot of it comes down to the more specific you can be with the instructions you give your own brain, the greater the likelihood is that you are attentive to the right thing at the exact right moment versus just looking at literally everything that's happening within your environment and just hoping that something anomalous, something outside of the norm, is pronounced enough that you recognize its potential correlation to pre-attack behaviors. If you're looking at everything, you're ultimately probably going to see nothing because it's bloody exhausting. But the more you're able to focus on specifics in any given environment, the greater the likelihood is that your subconscious will recognize that behavior, even if you don't notice it consciously, and give you the instinctive warning that something is amiss. And then it also means you're less likely to ignore it. If you know that a particular behavior exists and correlates to dominance, arrogance, criminality, then it's much less likely you talk yourself out of the correct response, which is to get the hell out of dodge, and extricate yourself as rapidly as possible so you can avoid the confrontation. Okay. I've just realized how long I've been yi yapping. So I'm gonna summarize here because I used to teach this for hours at a time, and I'm used to doing that, which means I can sometimes get carried away, and I don't want to overwhelm with something that's two days long, because you know, I might lose you. So I'll summarize with this situational awareness and recognizing the reality change as early as possible isn't paranoia, right? It isn't fear, it isn't about being fearful. In fact, if you know what you should be looking for, how to overcome and improve your sensory processing abilities, you recognize where you might fall short and you take steps to improve in that particular area. Sacadic suppression would be a great example. If you improve where you might fall short through no fault of your own, just the way our brains and eyes scan, then you have put yourself in a position to see more than ever before. And it means that if you can scan effectively, you can look at your environment effectively, you can scan the people in the environment effectively, you've decreased the likelihood you'll ever end up on the menu, which means you should be less fearful. I think we tend to fear what we don't understand. We certainly fear something that we think we can't see coming. And the reality is the minute we step away from that and instead approach it as a it's a bit of a game. It's us against the criminals. And if we can see them before they even perhaps notice us, or at least in time to evacuate that situation, then why am I afraid? I know what I'm looking for, when I'm looking for it, and how to avoid it. Perfect, you got a bloody plan right there. So it isn't about fear. It's really about pattern recognition, both from an intrinsic and extrinsic uh viewpoint or perspective. It's observation, it's deductive reasoning, that behavior doesn't fit this environment at this particular moment with these people, and then doing something with the information. It is one thing to see a potential problem, it's quite another to know how you're going to respond, which is where perhaps if I have a guest in the future that doesn't show up, maybe I'll get more into that. But for now I want you to know it's not about paranoia, it's about pattern recognition and understanding that you can see problems coming in most cases from a mile away if you know how to scan efficiently and what to look for. It's noticing that reality change ahead of everybody else. The brain is a prediction machine. Awareness begins when we deliberately challenge those predictions, right? Our expectations distort perception. The more we expect everything to be normal, the more our brain finds and looks for evidence to support that prediction. And the more it excludes anything extraneous or anything that it feels doesn't support that prediction. Your brain likes to be right. It doesn't like being wrong. Think of the last time you were in a public event and somebody said, Are there any questions? Now we all know there's always those people that love the sound of their own voice, they're always going to ask the questions. But most people don't ask questions because they don't want to sound stupid, right? They don't want to put the focus on them. The same thing here, right? Your brain wants to be comfortable. And because it wants to be comfortable, it will seek rationalized reasoning and rationalization behind behaviors that quite obviously point towards danger. But because we don't want to be stressed or afraid in that moment, your brain figures out a way to give you a plot, a storyline behind this that's non-threatening. And at the end of the day, what we're going to be prepared for is the fact that bad the bad guys control the when, they control the where and they control the how. The only thing we can truly control is how quickly we recognize what that Muppet is up to. And the person who recognizes this problem is in our faces, first is the one most likely able to implement a plan, has the time and the space to implement a plan to make sure they're victorious. And victorious could mean a myriad of things from escaping to successfully surviving and beating an attack. All right, last thing for today. What are you gonna do when that threat presents? If you can't escape, if the environment, the circumstances, the people that are with you won't allow you to just simply evac and the only option is to fight, and you are a concealed carry holder or you have other defensive force multiplying tools on you, what are you going to do? Do you know that you have first shot accuracy from concealed in less than one and a half seconds? Do you know that with your life on the line? Handshaking, stomach churning? With all of the stress, will I live? Will I die? Will a jury of my peers agree with my decision in this moment? Or am I going to spend the rest of my life in jail? Because no one agrees with me. There's a lot of stress that goes along with having to actually defend yourself. Again, an argument here for okay, be more visually aware and avoid it, but sometimes you just can't. Shit happens and it just arrives and you are left in a position where, okay, my only option here is the hard skills and it's the fight. Do you have the confidence to gamble your life and the life of people with you to say I could respond accurately and quickly if I have to? And if the answer had some measure of hesitation in it, any amount of hesitation, then the answer is no. And you should be training more. And dry fire practice at home every day, even if it's only 10 minutes, is the best way to ensure you get as close to a hell yeah, I'm ready state of mind, knowing that your life may well be on the line, the kind of certainty you can literally bet your life on, the only way to get there is practice. And in that case, laser ammo's gear, everything from their smokeless range to their reactive targets, iMits, laser pets, CQB in a box. These are all tools that you can practice with on a daily basis to get your skills to where they need to be to be able to confidently deliver that hell yeah, I'm ready answer the next time somebody asks. Be interested in finding out more about Laser Ammo's gear, go to laser ammo.com and really look. Okay, my budget is this. What can I afford to buy today that will help me get better for that potential threat tomorrow? All right, thank you for joining me if you made it this far in this episode. Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't have a guest for you. I'm hoping you pulled some some nuggets or maybe just a reminder of things and some a reminder of steps that you can take to improve your awareness and your capacity and ability to recognize danger and threats sooner than everybody else. If you've enjoyed the episode, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. It helps with the algorithm and getting the content out to more people. Until next time, thanks for tuning in, and I will see you in the next episode. Cheers.