Practical Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is something that people talk a lot about when it comes to your self-defense. We mostly talk about situational awareness when we're thinking about avoiding a situation, right? We see a bad guy in an environment, we see something that doesn't look quite right and we want to be able to avoid getting entangled with that person. The other way that situational awareness can tie into your self-defense is to think about knowing where the exits are in a restaurant or something like that. Knowing where your surroundings are.

Maybe situational awareness gets a much bigger picture kind of view when you're traveling abroad with your family or maybe overseas or even part of your state that you're not familiar with. Knowing where travel areas are, knowing where mass transit is, knowing where the rally points or the meeting points you're going to go to if you were to get separated and your cell phone battery were to die. Those kinds of things all fall under the heading of situational awareness. Situational awareness is very important, but there's a practical aspect of situational awareness that often is overlooked when it comes to what I call, the fantasy of situational awareness or the delusion that a lot of people live under. Now, the traditional way that a lot of people particularly in the firearms community have looked at situational awareness for the individual in the moment is through a series of color codes that represent how ready or alert you are, how aware you are of your surroundings.

And you might think of white as a condition where you're completely oblivious to your surroundings, where you're literally standing in a public space staring at your cell phone completely unaware of what's going on around you. And you might think of red or in some color code systems, black as actually being in a fight, being in a situation where to the exclusion of everything else, you are hyper-focused on the person that you're trying to stop from hurting you or someone else. And of course we have yellow and orange in the middle. And most people will tell you, who study the color codes, that they try to keep themselves in a condition yellow, all the time. And what they mean by that is that they envision that they have this 360 degree awareness of generally who's in their environment, what's going on around them and if someone's looking at them as a potential victim, where the exits are, where their family members are and sort of what's going on in a 360 degrees sphere all the time.

Well, I find that to be completely impractical in terms of looking at the way we can be situationally aware, how alert we are and how much focus we really have. So let's take a look at a more practical example of situational awareness. If we think about how we live our everyday lives outside of a training environment, outside of a choreographed range situation maybe where we're focusing on a piece of paper, a piece of steel, or even a scenario environment where we aren't thinking about, what we have to pick up at the grocery store, what our kids are doing, a cell phone call we're waiting for, maybe looking at our social media or something like that while we're in a public space. Now, we don't have to be in a situation where we are hyper focused on that cell phone in our hand to the exclusion of everything else at every moment of the day. But certainly, I think you can probably recognize that there are points during the day where you are looking at a map, looking at a book, maybe sitting in a restaurant looking at a menu.

And while my head may be on a swivel just prior to looking down, after I look around my environment I see that there's a couple of cameramen, I've got a director over here near the monitors, I know that there's a door right there that's cracked, if something were to happen, that's where I'm gonna go, it's the only exit from this room. The minute that I look back at this whiteboard or the minute that I were to look down at my cell phone or look away from that restaurant down to the menu, I don't know what's changing, I don't know if the person off to my right pulled a knife out of a bag. I don't know if someone pulled a gun out, I don't know if someone stood up and positioned themselves awkwardly close to me because I am focused on that menu. And that's how practical situational awareness actually works in the real world. You can't have a 360 degree view when you're looking at that menu in your hands.

So what we really want to do is split our attention. We want to be very aware of the fact that, sure when we first walk into a new space we should look around. Where are the exits? Is there anything awkward going on in here? Is everyone behaving normally?

Is there anyone suspicious to me? Is there anyone in my environment that I'm not quite sure about? And what's going to happen is, as we focus at that one person who is potentially dangerous to us, we're going to have a narrower and narrower situational awareness. If we're engaged in a conversation with someone gonna be focused on their eyes, we're maybe gonna be watching their mouth move, maybe they're gesturing with their hands, maybe they're showing us something. Right now I hope that I have the majority of your attention focused on whatever screen you're watching this video on.

And that's the narrow area that you are really paying attention to. Whatever's happening back here, well there's your condition white. And this is how we can actually apply the color codes. You may be in a condition red directly focused on this screen, very aware of what I'm saying, very aware of what I'm drawing, but you're kind of oblivious to what's going on behind you. Now, chances are, if you're definitely a self-defense person you're watching this video, you may already have turned around to see in case I sent somebody to your house or to your car, or workplace or wherever you're sitting right now in the coffee shop, to sneak up behind you and play a gotcha game, right?

So you take a look, "Nope, nothing going on." Now focus back on me, take a look at the screen and once again, you have narrowed your situational awareness. And this is when the ambush can happen. And the biggest problem with the myth of situational awareness is that it ignores the possibility of the ambush. If people convince themselves, if you've convinced yourself that you're in condition yellow or orange or some higher alert status, always ready, always knowing what's going on around you, then the way you train and the way you think about your learned responses may be dramatically different from what you should be doing, which is accepting that you can be caught off guard no matter how alert you are, how ready you want to be. There's a huge difference between specific anticipation, specific attention that you're paying to this person who's a potential threat and general readiness.

Being in condition yellow really should mean that you're generally ready, right? We go about our day with our defensive tools, with our training, with our plan, with our idea of what we might see as something that's potentially threatening, with our ideas that we're gonna look for exits, that we're going to be aware of where telephones are, maybe where the ambulance station is, the closest hospital when we're visiting a new area, all of those things make us generally ready, so that when the ambush happens we can quickly decide what we need to do. Maybe our trained responses are going to be at that level where we can unconsciously execute them. We have the power of recognition and our learned responses just come out when someone hits us from behind, we know what to do. But the idea that we're going to see them coming, or hear them walking or catch their reflection in a mirror in front of us really is foolish and it can set you up for failure.

When you think about situational awareness, I want you to think about it in a very practical way that can be applied in the real world while you're having conversations, while you're focusing on things of interest, while you're looking at your phone, reading a map, or just sitting down to have dinner and focusing on that menu trying to decide which of the delicious entrees you want to put into your mouth. Remember situational awareness doesn't make it so that you can't be ambushed, it simply means that you're lowering the odds of the bad guy sneaking up on you. When you train, remember you are going to avoid the situations when situational awareness helps you. When you think about your learned responses they really should be trained for response to the ambush.