Article - Training your Situational Awareness or dying: which do you prefer?

[TWP]

Where is your attention right now?

Are you narrowly focused on your computer screen, reading this text?

Do you feel safe with that much of your attention limited to one area?

I extracted this from the article:

White = relaxed and unaware.
Yellow = relaxed but aware of what is around you.
Orange = something of interest has entered your awareness.
 Red = what you are aware of is a threat.
Black = acting with intent to stop a threat.

https://www.mdcreekmore.com/training-your-situational-awareness/

I expect that some of you will reject this mindset as being too far outside your "comfort zone".  You still have that choice option.

I find myself uncomfortable if / when I catch myself falling back into the "white" zone.  Yes, I do it, as I'm sure most of you do also.

Rather than beat myself up about it, I recognize what happened and do a quick scan of my area, using all my senses.

It has become second nature now and that "update scan" takes only a couple of seconds.

If that scan comes back "negative" - all is ok in my area.

A "positive" means that I have seen, felt, smelled, heard or in some other way detected that something is not right about my area.

If I get a "positive" impression, I will get up and walk around, looking with all my senses.  If I'm with other people whom I trust, I'll ask if they feel anything.  If I don't trust the people near me, then they get closer attention because they may be the cause which triggered (love the new meaning for that word) my alertness.

Usually, the cause is immediately obvious.  A noise that is out of place, a smell (electrical burning?), a sound from outside the apartment, etc.

Now, I can guess that some of you will regard the state of mind as "borderline paranoia"... Like that is a bad thing... 

Please re-read the title of the article.  You decide which is better for your well being and safety and that of your family/group.

Now, run through your senses as you sit reading this, doing a "situational scan" of everything in the range of each of your senses.  That was being situationally aware.  Practice this, frequently.

[Jerry D Young]

I have lived with this concept for a very long time. My father taught it to me when I was still pre-teen. Or his version of it. I am not sure, but I do not think he had read any of Col. Cooper's stuff at the time, so it was something he either got in the military during WW II, or developed himself.

It was not a color code, but more of an American Indian concept (he was close to 50% Amerind), using mental state terms like 'present in the now', or 'with senses beyond the camp', and things like that.

Same thing, though, as I have pretty much been doing what he taught me and what Col. Cooper wrote and I read when I was 15 or 16 I think, and what the modern interpretations of his system, such as the one in the article. The building window mirror technique as been part of my awareness from the time I first spent more than a few minutes in a town or city, after we moved to Senath when I was 14. I also picked up on using vehicles with a high polish when they became the rage in the 70s. And other peoples mirrored sunglasses when they were first getting trendy.

When I was doing security work in a suburb of St. Louis, Wells, which was not a good area, I carried a woman's compact in my hand when I was making rounds at the closed down foundry I was watching, and took it with me when I went shopping in the area. Just because there were enough people around to interfere with my abilities to sense someone coming up on me. Very effective. Did finally learn I could ditch the face powder and use the empty compact so I did not get the stuff all over me. Sometimes I am a bit slow.

Lots of other things I have been taught, or learned on my own by observation. I highly recommend the book Dress For Success by John T. Molloy to learn about how people perceive one another. It has a great deal of well researched information that can be used both for camouflage techniques as well as observation techniques, in addition to interpreting many of the things a person will see, but not necessarily connect with anything in particular. In a like manner, Judith Martin's Miss Manners books (I will have to look to see which particular titles, as she wrote several) that, to a much lesser degree, and for indoors situations mostly, have similar well researched techniques and explanations about how and why people see and react to one another.

Being aware of a person's surroundings is more than just seeing things (and hearing, smelling, touching, and in some cases tasting since smell is big influence on taste) and being aware of their presences. It is often just as important, and if not more important, to know not only the why something is there, as it is to understand the motivation, as well as the likely consequences.

Just my opinion.