328: What Is Situational Awareness and Why It Matters

0:00Everyone, Brian Duff here and welcome to another episode of the Mind for Survival. This is day nine of 30 days of National Preparedness Month. And think about it. Think about being at a restaurant with your family, table by the window and two guys walking. They look around and they leave without sitting down. I know that's odd. 30 seconds later, they walk in again. Nothing is happening. You move your chair so you can see the door a little bit better. Right? You never find out why they came back. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't the feeling that you got. It's like, Hey, what's going on here? That has a name. And it is the second fundamental preparedness called situational awareness. Now the first eight days of National Preparedness Month, we're about mindset. How you think, what you value, why you prep and what gets in the way. Now today we move into the next layer of the survival pyramid. And we start where you have to start with what situational awareness is.

1:00Now most people think they know, most people are picturing a bodyguard, scanning a crowd, like, Oh, I'm looking around here. I'm really aware. And that's a piece of it, but it's a small piece because situational awareness is the teacher who notices that the quiet kid sitting over in the corner. And that kid's quiet because he's actually choking. It's the diner waitress who knows something is wrong with a regular before he gets out of his truck. It's you coming home late, seeing the kitchen light on when you never left it on before and going through the list before you open the door. Hey, what could be going on here? Today we cover what situational awareness is, what it isn't, why it matters. And the one concept that everything else is built on your situational baseline, which is the normal of your world and what it feels like when that normal shifts. Now let's go ahead and get into it. And let's start with what situational awareness is because situational awareness.

2:03There is many people refer to it as a capital S capital A is your ability to detect what is happening in your personal environment. And your personal environment is everywhere in the world that has an interest to you that you have some sort of attachment to. Maybe it's in the area immediately around you right now. Maybe you have a friend or relative that's on a trip somewhere and they're in Spain and you're like, Hey, I'm going to keep an eye on what's happening in Spain. That is your personal environment. So situational awareness is your ability to detect what is happening in that personal environment. Understand what it means in the here and now. And then go, Hey, where is this heading? You're going to predict where all this is moving to and then feed that understanding that you acquire into your decisions, your plans and your actions. And if you read my book, Mind for Survival, you know, I refer to the definition that is created by Dr. Micah Enzli, who is the former chief scientist of the U.S.

3:07Air Force. She was a dog there. And she gave situational awareness. It's what is a working definition. Situation awareness is the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the future. Now I'm going to break that down for you into some plain English here. So perception. Micah Enzli says the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time in space. What does that mean? Perception is what you take in the car drifting in its lane, the change in a friend's voice when they're on the phone, the kitchen light that is on when you always shut it off, right? You're understanding what's happening in this time, in this space around me. Then we move to the comprehension of their meanings. You're understanding you're, you're taking that perception and you're saying, what does

4:11it mean for me right now? The stranger standing in the neighbor's driveway is someone lurking in the driveway until you remember that the neighbor told you his brother was going to be in town for a few days and it looks a little bit like him there. It's the same man, just different, different meanings, right? Initially, it's like, oh, who's this creep lurking in the driveway? And it's like, oh, yeah, his brother is in town. That was comprehension. And then we project the status of everything it's going on into the future, into the near future. What is projection? What happens next? Okay. This car is drifting over the line. It's in your lane in two seconds. What are you going to do? You're projecting where it's going to be. If the crowd keeps moving in that direction, right? As it's trying to get away from the thing that's happening, the fire, the violence, whatever, well, it bottled next at that exit. I'm projecting what's going to happen. So I understand what's happening now. I get I can I understand all my elements.

5:13I understand how they relate to one another and then I project, hey, what is this going to look like in the future? Each step depends on the one before it. If you miss the perception, if you don't perceive it, then there's nothing to comprehend. If you perceive it, but you comprehend it wrong, well, then the decisions and actions you take after will likely possibly be wrong. Your senses gather the raw information. Your mind then takes that information and runs it through the filter of your experience, your knowledge, your biases, the way you look at the world, all of that. And what comes out is your understanding of the situation. And that understanding right, wrong or somewhere in between is what every decision you make gets built on. So that was what situational awareness is. Let's talk about what situational awareness is not situational awareness is not paranoia. Paranoia is fear without a basis to it.

6:16Paranoia sees a threat in everything and never never checks whether it's real. Awareness though is attention with the basis. Like, Hey, I'm paying attention to this because I have a reason to pay attention to this right now. I'm not just blowing a bunch of stuff up in my head. It notices what's going on. It checks and it lets go of what some of what turns out to be harmless, right? Not everything in your days or threat. Situational awareness is not some tactical skill, just reserve for soldiers, police and security professionals. The teacher who I mentioned earlier that the kid is choking, that teacher is using situational awareness. So is the driver who slows down because the pick up two cards ahead down the road is weaving a bit back and forth in the lane. So the driver slows down. Hey, let me see what's going on with this, this truck that's weaving. Think on it. You can probably come up with some personally witnessed examples that you've seen over time.

7:19And situational awareness is not and does not mean a constant state of alertness. Nobody can hold a high state of attention all day every day and trying to do so. Somebody tries to do that. It'll burn a person out over time. Awareness are awareness of what's going on and our levels of awareness in the world around us. That scales up and down, relaxed and tuned in while you're out eating dinner. Like, hey, I'm going to relax and we have a good time. But I'm going to be noticing if anything out of the ordinary off the baseline happens around me. You're awareness sharpens when you're out and you hear a raised voice from the next table. And then everything comes back down again, once it settles down and you realize that that sharpness, it wasn't an argument or something. It was somebody screaming at the because they were excited to see somebody. You ratchet your awareness up and down as the situation calls for. And most days, it should probably sit on the low end of awareness.

8:20Like you should be, you know, we do Cooper's colors, right? The white yellow orange red black. You most days, you should be probably in the yellow. And when you have the opportunity when you're home, there should be times when you're in the white. If you're out and about doing something and it looks like, you know, you're in a crowd or something, maybe ratchet up to the orange. Situational awareness, it's not a personality trait that some people have and others lack. It's a skill. Skills, the great thing about them, they can be taught, they can be practiced and they can be improved on. And if you ever have had the feeling something was off and that feeling turned out to be right, guess what? You already have it working. The new work though is training yourself to use it and pay attention to it more and more and more. So you turn it into a really powerful thing. Situational awareness can be really powerful. If you pay attention to it and you work on dialing it in. Now let's talk about why situational awareness matters because situational awareness matters because it gives you the best opportunity possible

9:23to avoid problems, minimize their effects when you can't avoid them and live a great life as a result. It's what sets you up for all that. Every problem you avoid starts with noticing it early or if you're just going to think about luck, right? But if you have an active role in it, it means that you noticed it early. The driver who sees the brake lights three cars ahead has time to slow down. The driver who sees them one car ahead has time to brace and the driver who never looks up. Well, they get the outcome you can expect, right? Time is the difference and an awareness is what buys us time. When you can't avoid a problem, awareness shrinks the problem. Smelling the gas before you flip the lights, which on, oh, hey, there's something going on here. Let me not flip the lights, which on noticing the ice on the porch before you step out. None of those are dramatic big, you know, Rambo style situational awareness stuff going on. Most of what awareness prevents is the ordinary stuff that sends people to the urgent care that causes you problems.

10:28That impacts your budget that causes time off work, all that kind of stuff. Then there is the side most conversations about awareness leave out situational opportunity. The same attention that catches a problem catches the good stuff too. The open parking space nobody else saw the conversation at the gas pump that turns into a job lead or the retired electrician down the road who is happy to teach anyone who asks some great electrical skills. People who work on their situational awareness find themselves more in tune with the world and oftentimes one step ahead or maybe more. Awareness is not only a defense. It's how you get the most out of whatever situation you are in. Now let shift and talk about what I mentioned at the beginning, your situational baseline because every place you spend time has a normal home, a buzz, a feeling of vibe, etc. The sounds, the people, the pace, the smells, the light, the way things sit, your kitchen at 6 a.m.

11:34The office on a Tuesday, the gas station on the corner, the trail you walk on Sundays. When you go to church, right, everything, that normal that you feel is your situational baseline. Your baseline for your street differs from your neighbors baseline for your street because you live different lives. You experience it at different hours with different things on your mind. Awareness works by detecting a change of state against that baseline. The dog that never barks in the suddenly barking, the office that is too quiet for a Tuesday, the pickup that has been parked at that trailhead you like to go to and walk at and I get that pickups and park there for three weekends in a row and nobody in it. You register the change because you feel the normal like you know what normal is and you sense when something's off. Some changes get missed. A change you never perceive. There's something changes in your environment and you never realize it.

12:35It's still a change. But since you didn't sense it though, your perceived baseline, what you the baseline that you perceive hasn't changed. Right. Reality's changed. You just aren't seeing reality. This happens to everyone and it's why awareness. It's why situational awareness is treated as a skill to practice rather than a switch to flip. It takes on the switch flippings part when you get to that conscious confidence and unconscious competence level of practice with it. Another thing to consider is that a change of state is not automatically a threat. Just because your environment changes doesn't automatically mean there's a threat there, whether you catch it or not. Most changes in your baseline are nothing and they're not threats. The dog barked at the squirrel. Right. The office is quiet because half the floor is out at a conference or the pickup at the trailhead belongs to a guy who's camping up on the ridge. Right.

13:36The change is the signal, right. When you notice a change, when you pick up on that change in your situational baseline, that's the signal to look at it closer. And what you find when you look is what tells you what your next step would be or should be or set you up with the information to make that decision. The more in tune you are with your situational baseline, the faster a change stands out. The faster something is happening jumps out at you and the less time you spend guessing as a result. Now, how do you detect a change of state? Because change reaches you in two ways from external stimuli and from internal stimuli. Now external stimuli, right. Something stimulates me like, hey, there's something happening. I become aware of it. External stimuli come through your five senses. You see the smoke over the ridge. You hear the glass breakdown stairs. You smell the propane. You taste that the milk is bad.

14:37You feel the floor give under the rug. Most of the changes you catch in a typical day come in that manner. And most of them are obvious if you're paying attention. Now internal stimuli are the ones your body reports before your conscious mind has finished the math. They hair on your back of your neck pops up, right? That pit that nine feeling in your stomach, the urge to move away from someone who has done nothing, but you're like, man, I need to get away from this person. Your subconscious takes in far more than you consciously track, compares it against your baseline and your experience and sends up a flag when either pieces don't fit or they fit a past event that we'd rather avoid happening. Like, hey, this thing happened in the past and all the same indicators are there. Let me avoid that. That feeling, the sense of something's wrong can often arrive before it registers with your rational mind,

15:39before your mind registers what's going on. You're like, hey, I need to move something doesn't feel right. And then it's like, oh, that's where this is. That flag you get that feeling is information about your personal environment. Treat it like anything else your senses and you you check it. You look for what set it off. Sometimes you find it the stranger asking for directions who keeps glancing at your open garage. Sometimes you find nothing and the feeling was your own stress, a bad night's sleep, a past memory of the situation that happened that got that touched on and kind of got you going thinking about it. Either way, you checked it out. You said, hey, that there's something going here. I'm going to look into it. Now there's two failures that can come out of that. Right. One is dismissing the feeling, right? The sensations that you get where your subconscious letting you know, like, hey, they are on your neck stand up. That bit, the nine feeling that put your stomach, you can't explain it and you're like, ah, I'm just going to ignore it. And the other is treating every, did I say, tweeting?

16:41The other is treating every twinge that you get as proof of something happening. Oh, I got a nine feeling of my stomach. The hair on my neck is standing up. The things I keep saying. Sometimes they're real. Sometimes they're in response to something other times. They're in response to something that's not really happening right then or is not really what your subconscious thinks it is. The skill is going between the two, taking that signal, your subconscious sends to you and looking at it seriously enough to look into it. So that way you find out, hey, is this sensation I'm getting? Is this thing my subconscious is learning me to? Is it something that I really need to pay attention to or is it just key in on something that, you know, I checked it out. It's good. I don't need to worry about it. So now let's talk about moving from awareness to action because awareness by itself changes nothing. It is the front half of the four step process that I know many of you, most of you,

17:42all of you have heard called the Udalupe Reserve Orient Decide and Act. Awareness, situational awareness is the front half of that. It's observe an orient and observe is taken in what's happening. Orientine is making sense of what you take in, what you observe against your environmental baseline, against your experience, against your biases, against what you know, against your values, against how you look at the world. So one is pulling the information in. The other one is is vetting it and filtering it based upon our experiences and what we believe those two steps are situational awareness decide and act are what awareness is. The quality of the back half of the Udalupe, right, the downstream effect after situational awareness after observing orient, what do you get to decide and act? And it's those decisions in the actions that depend on what happens to observe an orient, garbage in garbage out a decision built on a missed observation or a wrong

18:45interpretation of an observation, observe an orient is a decision built on bad information and as a result, will most likely lead to a less than effective or a less desirable outcome, then could be possible if it was built on good information. I mean, it's pretty obvious that the person who reads the room right usually comes out on top of things, right? So when it comes down to it, the work of situational awareness is the work of feeding your decisions better information, everything downstream from bringing in and interpreting the information from which way you walk out of the building to whether you call the doctor today or next week, that starts with what you notice in the observation phase, how you interpret it and then what you do with it down the road. Now, where situational sits in regards to preparedness because situational awareness is the second fundamental preparedness right after mindset and it sits at the base of the

19:46survival pyramid for a reason. Mindset is how you approach the world. Situational awareness is how you make sense of what's in it, what you see. So mindset is your motivation. Mindset are your values. Mindset is how do I get up and face my day situational awareness is how you make sense of that day. Now, before you can protect yourself, treat an injury, find shelter, secure water, feed your family, whatever the proper thing is that you're working on, you have to know what is going on around you. Every layer above situational awareness, every tear, every level up to survival pyramid depends on situational awareness. Security without awareness is locking the door while leaving the window wide open. Medical without awareness is the bleed you didn't see. The thing you didn't catch, no matter what it is, your awareness is where your response

20:48starts. It requires no gear, no budget, and it's available to everyone in any situation. And it's just free to work on. It just takes time and some thought. The bottom line on all this situational awareness is one of the most critical aspects of preparedness. It's knowing what's happening in the world around you and the things that matter in the world, what impacts them, how you interpret all that and the decisions you make and the actions you take that will help lead to you overcoming problems, the type of problems that we prepare for with preparedness and will come and help you lead a much better, happier life because you can get ahead of problems. You can seize opportunities, you can capitalize on the good that's happening. And that's what situational awareness is all about. So with that, my friends, hey, if you enjoyed this, if you thought this was helpful, please share this, help me get this out there in this 30 days of national preparedness

21:51month. This sprint I'm doing from the A to Z from day zero all the way up to day 30. Help get this out there, share this in your Facebook group, share this on Instagram, send it out to your friends who could benefit from that. And with that, everybody, hey, as always, stay safe, secure and prepared and never forget my friends. You are just one prep away from being better prepared. Bye. He takes the last curse slow the ways done 10,000 nights. And there's a light on in the kitchen and there's never any light. There's a light in the kitchen and there never is this way.

22:5220 years of coming home to a dark house and again. There's a light in the kitchen. He's running down the list. Every reason it could be from nothing up to this. Could be Ellen couldn't sleep when she got up to make some tea. Could be she left at burn. Could be nothing more to see. Be the dark guy sick and she's down scrubbing at the floor. Could be somebody's in there who has never been before. There's a light in the kitchen and there never is this way. 20 years of coming home to a dark house and again. There's a light in the kitchen and he's running down the list. Every reason it could be from nothing up to this. He cuts the engine at the mailbox, less the truck roll to a stock counts.

23:53There's only hers, no tracks across the line. No window broke, no door jar, no shadow on the blind. Just the light, the smell of butter and a shape he can't define. He doesn't hurry up the walk and he doesn't call her name. He stands a minute in the dark. Till the shape moves past the flame and it's small and it's humming and it's holding up a pain. It's Katie home from Lubbock, two weeks ahead of break. Standing at the stove and his old shirt making eggs at two for heaven's sake. She says, hey daddy want some, like it's noon on any day.

24:56And he sets his lunch, pale down and says, yeah, I believe I may. There's a light in the kitchen and there never is this way. 20 years of coming home to a dark house and again. There's a light in the kitchen and the list runs out on it. Every reason it could be and the best ones what he gets. There's a light in the kitchen. There's a light in the kitchen. There's a light in the kitchen.