329: Coopers Color Code: 5 Levels of Situational Awareness

0:00Hey everyone, I'm Brian Duff and welcome to another episode of the Mind for Survival. Today is day 10 of 30 days of national preparedness month. And think about the person that walks out of the store to their car, phone in the hand, thumb moving up and down, scrolling, right? They get to the car and then if you come up and ask them, hey, what, you know, did you just see this thing or what, what'd you pass along the way? Who'd you pass anything about the trip from the door out to their car? They're not going to be able to tell you anything. Why? Because they're not aware and that's the subject today. Awareness isn't an honor off. It has levels. We discussed it a little bit in yesterday's episode. And you move through those levels of awareness, those levels of alertness all day long, whether you decide to or not, there are times when you may say, you know what? I need to be more aware right now, more focused, more alert. And that's a intentional shift in awareness.

1:00But when you're on the couch, you're at one level in a parking lot at night, you're probably on another level. Now yesterday, we covered what situational awareness is and the baseline it works from. Today, we're putting names on those levels. We're talking about those levels up from the baseline. Jeff Cooper, a retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel built an entire color code for exactly this. White yellow orange red and a fifth one black that got added later and that Cooper himself never signed off on. But I think it makes a lot of sense to add it to it. So we'll walk through what each color looks like on an ordinary day. Why your situational baseline decides where you start? Why nobody can live in orange and how to move up when something registers and back down when it clears. Then I'll give you five short drills. You can do an parking lot, a restaurant, sitting in your own front, living room right

2:03your front door. I'm stoked. This is going to be a fun episode. So let's go ahead and get into it. So to start with, let's talk about awareness, having levels, right? Because you are somewhere right now on a range and where you sit on that range changes many times a day, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the latest, scrolling through the latest on your phone or watching it on a screen. You know, if you have a TV set up or something going on there, you pay attention to the screen when you're watching it and little else. I mean, that would make sense. I'm watching my screen right now. Scrolling through my phone, figuring out the world. Not thinking about much else, but pulling out of the driveway, your attention, your aperture for attention, that widens to the road, the mirrors, right? The kid on the bike, two houses down, that's out on the sidewalk, run up down the street. You drive to the store and you walk into a convenience store at night, parking lots kind

3:08of dark, your aperture widens again. You're looking for things. Then getting the car, go home, back home on the couch, whoo, focused back down the TV. Doing all of that for most people happens just naturally. Now, you may say, hey, I'm walking into this blacked out convenience store or the parking lots blacked out, it looks shady and go, hey, I'm going to put my, you know, get my feelers up, get my antennas up to see if something's going on a little bit. Now, unless you're intentionally alert, like I just described in concentrating, your attention moves on its own up and down based on what you notice and how you feel about it. The problem is that most people never check where they are. They find out after the fact, right? When they miss something, because they were walking around in the white, right?

4:10And they miss something they would have caught with a little more attention or spent an hour on edge over something that turned out to be nothing. In other words, something happened, triggered something. They got worked up. They're a keyed up for an hour, two hours, three hours. I mean, come on. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I've been down that road when kind of down at the other day is a better effect. And you get keyed up for a bit and you have to work to bring yourself down. A color code when it comes to your awareness fixes that when it comes to your alertness, it fixes that it assigns a name to each level. Once the levels have names, the different alertness levels, right? You can check which one you were in at the time and decide if it fits the situation and move up or down is needed. Why is that? In case you ever catch yourself being like, we just described keyed up and you're like, Hey, I don't need to be here.

5:11Or maybe you're down too low and you need to ratchet it up some. So where Cooper's colors came from now? The color code comes from Jeff Cooper, who is a retired US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel. He's the founder of Gunsite and Gunsite Academy out in Arizona. I think it's Paul in Arizona. Went to several classes there. It was a great place, excellent courses. And Cooper built his color code system. I might, hey, because I went out there, I got, I actually got to meet and hang out with Jeff Cooper for a little bit, which he did after the basic pistol castes. But that aside, Cooper built his color code system to describe a person's state of mind in relation to how ready he or she is to handle a situation. And since then, since Cooper came up with that, police departments are using it, self defense instructors use it. And every day people have adopted this thing. It's all over the place.

6:11The colors mentioned at the beginning, white yellow, orange and red. And later the Marine Corps added black to the color code, which Cooper did not. He was not supportive. I went through a lot of these letters that he used to send out. And he definitely wasn't in favor of having black added to his color code. And I think it makes sense adding it in the manner that it is. The colors themselves are the least important part. What matters is the underlying idea beneath the colors, which is this. Your day is made up of varying levels of alertness. And those levels relate to one another. And you move between them sometimes on instinct and sometimes on purpose, intentional purpose. And Cooper's colors gives you a mental way to notice which level you're at, which one

7:11you are in and to move where you should move based upon the situation, what situation you're in and what it calls for what alert level you should be at in case you're not there. So rather than getting too fixated on them, treat the colors as labels for what is already happening in your head, not as rules to follow this thing. You already do it. Sometimes we just need to be better. We need to become better at actually doing it. And it's good to know where you're at because you can say, Hey, I'm in this situation. Here's where I'm at. Oh, I should expect to be like this right now because this is what I'm in. This is what's going on. So what are the five conditions? First condition white. White is not paying attention. You are either sleeping or absorbed in your thoughts, your phone, your conversation, your music, the kids playing the birds chirping and the world outside is not registering.

8:14You're checked out. You are oblivious to what's going on. And therefore not ready to act because you haven't noticed anything happening. Right. We all have to check out at times. And the person walking across the parking lot with his head down texting that person's in the white. So is the driver who misses the brake lights ahead because he's reaching for something in the passenger seat, messing around something on the dash, messing around the phone. Everyone spends time in the white. Like I said, we have to. We have to mentally unplug it times and chill out, recharge our brain, get our batteries going again. Right. The goal is to spend it where white is safe. Like your couch inside your house. Right. Pretty safe there. Not where it isn't like driving down the road and checking out and being in the white. Next, it's moved to condition yellow and condition yellow is relaxed in alert.

9:16You're not tense and you're not looking for trouble. You're paying enough attention to your surroundings that a change in your situational baseline, a change in your personal environment would register with you. You know who is around you. You know where the exits are and you know what normal looks like in this place at this time. And therefore yellow is where you want to spend most of your day when you're out of the house in familiar areas. It takes no real effort once it becomes a habit and over time of practicing it, what do you do? You move to unconscious competence with things where you don't have to think about doing things like this. And I'd argue that many of you may already be there. Think about being the person at the restaurant reading a menu. Focused on the menu, but noticing that someone out of the ordinary just walked in the front like you just say there's something about this guy. That's being in the yellow. I bet most of you probably do it.

10:17Condition orange. Orange is when something has your attention. A change of state is registered causing a good amount of your focus to shift towards that change of state. You haven't decided anything yet. You're looking, you're gathering information and you're preparing to move up or down the alertness and awareness scale is necessary. That car in your rear view mirror that's made the last three turns with you. That puts you in the orange like, oh, let me see if this car is really doing this. You take some other routes, make some other turns. Right. You stare step make a left or right, a left or right, a left or right kind of thing. That puts you in the orange. So does the smell of something burning in a house where nothing she'd be cooking? There's, there's a head. There's nothing on the stove. What's burning? Your focus on the guy who walked into the restaurant while you were reading the menu. Tells you that he seems a little bit agitated. He seems a little bit off. Right. He detected something was off.

11:18He just out and what's going on this guy you zoom in. You take a, you draw a minute a little bit more into your vision into your, your focus and they've seen this guy looks like he's a little bit agitated. In orange, you start working the problem. What is this? What could it turn into? What will I do if it does? Then condition red. Red is being ready to act. And red is also often acting. Right. The change of state you were watching in orange has become a problem. And now you're responding to it. That guy is running my direction. This thing is happening. Right. The agitated guy that's sitting up at the front of the restaurant, he starts screaming and yelling and carrying on. The decision is made. Red is the moment you pull the card to the shoulder. Step between the strange and your kid. Reach for the fire extinguisher or when you're in that restaurant, grab your family and head towards the rear exit, just in case. Maybe you get up and you don't run, but you get them up and like,

12:20hey, let's move towards the back and you just calmly get them towards the back. Just in case that devolves. You hear somebody in the grocery store getting into it. Leave your buggy, leave your cart, whatever you call it, wherever you're at and walk out the door. Red is not panning. It's focused action on a specific problem. You already saw coming. Why? Because you were aware because you were an orange first. As we practice this, as you practice this, that's where you'll be because this is, you'll become better at this condition. Black, black is the condition. Others, the US Marine Corps added after Cooper. It describes what happens when your central nervous system takes over during an intense moment. Right? Your central nervous system frees, fly to fight response that overrides your rational mind. It shuts down your, your thinking brain. When you're in the black, right? You're not. Red was focused. Black is, who knows how deep you are into the central nervous system?

13:24You may freeze in place. You may act without thinking or take an action that does not help you survive or reduce the harm. It actually puts you in harm's way even more maybe. Why? Because it's an emotional survival instinct that hijacks your decision making process in whole or part. Black can happen anytime the situation activates your survival instinct driven, emotional brain, the amygdala and all that center that is designed to keep us safe and to try to to keep us alive. Now, your baseline sets your starting color. Your baseline, what we talked about yesterday is what normal looks like where you are right now. The noise level in the restaurant, the pace people walk in the parking lot, which cars are usually on your street at nine at night. You use all that information to build your situational baseline without trying.

14:26You use that every time you spend a few minutes somewhere. What? Right? Like why? Because you are picking up on what's happening in that environment. You take in and ingest what's happening and that establishes a familiar baseline. And it's that baseline that you establish, which is the reference point that the colors move from in yellow. You have a baseline and you are comparing what you see against it. You're in that yellow. You're walking around not focusing on any one thing too much and join your day. But you're aware of what's going on and why are you aware of what's going on because you have a baseline of what's normal. And as soon as something breaks, what's normal pattern? Well, that's when we slide it up to orange. Right? In yellow, you have that baseline and you're comparing it against what you see. And any change of state is anything that does not match that baseline. And that change is like I just said is when you move to orange.

15:28And something to know when it comes to a change of state, a change of state, in other words, a shift off the baseline does not automatically mean a threat. A man walks up to your front door, looks around and leaves. That does not match the baseline. So it gets your attention, obviously. Right? That's off the baseline. Like who's this clown coming up to my front door? Most of the time though, it turns out to be nothing, right? It turns out to be someone looking for someone else and they got the wrong address. They walked up, oh, no, this is 3245 instead of 3247 or whatever it is. You know it. Like, hey, this guy walks up and he left and I think it's probably fine to be safe. And I'm everything's good. And you settle back down into the yellow. Maybe because you just had that happen, you're going to say, you know, and I'm not going to, like, go take a nap right now. I'm going to stay up to see if anything's going on. The system work, you noticed, you checked and moved on. Now let's talk about ratcheting awareness up and down because no one lives in the orange.

16:32You're ready. You can't. That's not the way it's going to work. The body will not allow it. Sustained, high alert wears you down. It makes you difficult to deal with because over time, it caused you to get agitated. You don't sleep. Well, it just, it's not good. And after a while, it makes you worse at noticing things. Your brain's tired. It's worn out. You can get foggy because everything, when you get going down that road, everything can start looking like a problem. So it's hard. What's not the problem? What is the problem? Now you're missing problems because you're seeing problems everywhere. People who try to stay on high alert all day, be hyper vigilant all the time, days on end, weeks on end, months on end, that'll wear you out. That'll numb your brain and it'll make you really hard to do what you're intending to do and be squared away with your prepping. The skill of all this is ratcheting your awareness up and down as the situation calls for it. Up on a change of state, back down when it resolves up again on the next one.

17:37You spend most of your day in yellow with short trips to orange and you should probably rarely be going to the red. Now, ratcheting up is the easy half. Your mind detecting a change of state does most of that work for you. And you being a prepper, you're watching for stuff like that. Your subconscious is queued in to watch for that because it's what's wired into you. The problem comes in is ratcheting it back down. That's where people can get stuck. The man who walked up to the door is left, but you're still keyed up and watching the window three hours later. I would be like, who is this dude? I live out in the country. People just don't walk up to your house out here. And when I'm in L.A. When I was at my father's house, like people walking up to your door, there's enough crime out there where you're going to be, what's that dude doing on my porch? So at times like that, you can decide that the change of state has resolved. Like, hey, I'm not that threat is not there anymore. That thing I was concerned about that pushed me into orange, maybe red.

18:39That's that's resolved. So now I can allow myself to relax. I can let my attention out. I can widen my focus, my aperture. And you can do that and make that as a decision. You could make that thought of, I need to calm down. Now I need to relax and need to open my aperture. You could do that on purpose. Now, there will be days when you do not have effective awareness, days when you need to unwind and days when something happens at no level of alertness would have caught, except that going in. Right. There are going to be days when things are going to get you alert and pinged up. And you're going to be stuck there. That's all part of this. It's all part of being human. The goal is to spend your time, your time in the white or your time in the black. We're at safe. We're you're not going to get jammed up or you're not going to cause problems for yourself that causes migrator problems and all that. You know, the the spiel on preaching there when you're being in the white and the black because you want to be in the yellow as much as possible and move through

19:40the others throughout your day. Now what pulls you into the white? Because if we know when we're in the white, we're not aware and we're setting ourselves up for failure. Hey, what can pull us in there? What do we? What should we envision ahead of time in case we start to do it to pull ourselves out? You know the first one is the phone, right? You see it all the time. Head down, eyes on the screen, hearing through earbuds, like noise, cancelling earbuds. So you don't hear anything else, but what's being piped into your ears? Right. Every sense you use to build a baseline is pointed somewhere else. The parking lot, the sidewalk, the train platform, whatever you're walking on, whatever you're doing, walking in now, Walmart are all the places where this matters most transitional spaces, moving from one place into another, going through that edge of the parking lot because there's always some some laymo driving along the, you know, along in front of the storefronts that doesn't, isn't paying attention and in risk running people over. So you got to be careful in those spots, right? And it's in those spots that you see people buried in their phone, the driver buried

20:41in the phone. Next, another thing that can get you, can suck you into the white, can push you into the white is fatigue because tired people, what do you do? I'm tired, you know, I'm worn out. Stop scanning as much and after a long shift, a bad night, a long drive, your attention narrows, right? To the next step and nothing else, right? You're tired, like, hey, I'm done. This is when you wrap up a long overnight drive with a walk across a dark, strange parking lot without really registering what's going on. You're tired, right? There's also routine can cause you to go to the white, the same drive, the same store, the same walk to the mailbox. Familiarity can feel like awareness, but you can become so aware of it. You do it on autopilot and therefore that familiarity, which is where you're hoping to have that baseline, lows you into like, hey, everything's fine here. So you stop building a fresh baseline because, hey, that old one, you know, hey, I'm drifting off. I got back here. I'm tired.

21:41I'm worn out all the other things we've been talking about. Well, it's so safe near my home. I'm so used to this. I can go engage in those other things consciously or unconsciously conversation. Obviously talking with someone in person on the phone takes most of your attention, walking and talking is pretty much in the white. Some people can pull off yellow, but for a lot of people, they're in the white, even if it doesn't feel like they're there. And then finally, emotion, anger, worry, excitement, they all pull your attention inward or onto a specific thing that may not be where the threat is. You are so focused. You could even say, maybe that pulls you into the black, right? The argument you had before you left house comes with you into the parking lot. And has you distracted because you're stewing on it. Oh, you're missing something in the parking lot. So none of those are wrong. They're all part again, a being human. You have to talk. You're going to have routines, right? You're going to get tired and hey, phones are part of our life right now. And we get fired up.

22:43So the point is to know which one you're in so you can choose when to sit in them. Like, okay, I'm going to have this conversation. I want to talk to my friend and I don't want to have to think about what's happening or whatever that is. Right? So you can pick when to do that and when not to do that. Now some daily drills because the colors, they become really useful when you practice moving between them on purpose. Because the more you practice, the more eventually you don't have to do it on purpose, it happens, right? And each drill that I discuss here can take under a minute and fits into something you do already. So it's not going to take you a lot of time. You don't have to spend any money on it. Great way to get better prepared. Right? First, let's name your color on entry into a new space. You go through that transitional space. You go from one space into another space, another type of space. When you walk through the door into a new environment, ask yourself, what color am I in? Right? Like go in, just use that as a key and like maybe you were right then before then you were looking down at your phone. Maybe you weren't paying attention.

23:44Maybe, you know, when I go into the local Walmart here, there's a hair cutting place right there that I look into because there's a door and you're like, hey, sometimes people just open the door and you walk in the door and smack it with your cart. So what color are you and when you go in restaurant, gas station, office, your front, your own front door, think it in your head as you go as you move through these spaces. And then that one question is the whole drill, right? Oh, I'm in the red. I'm hopefully you're not in the red, but hey, I just moved into the mall and it's Christmas time and there it's bonkers and there are people everywhere into this store that I just went into. So I'm in the orange right now because there's so much I'm just trying to out the bump in the but whatever that is, try to figure that one out. There's also the parking lot walk, right? Consciously, be sure to put your phone in your pocket. Don't have in your hands. Have your hands free so you can do anything if you need to have your earbuds out of your ears from the store, from the door of the store to the car. Count the people as you walk between you and your car.

24:46Note what they're doing. Who's moving? Who's standing still? It doesn't give you a bad vibe. That's being in the yellow and it just takes the 30 seconds. You're walking into your car and you're practicing, you're practicing observing people look at the eyes, the hands, what's their demeanor? How are they holding themselves? Are they tense? Are they relaxed? Are they engaged? Don engaged. Like you can tell a lot by people and over time as you recognize this and you make a conscious effort to identify stuff like that, you'll pick it up second nature and it'll just happen automatically, right? Another one you can do is pick a seat in the restaurant or you're in a waiting room, choose a seat, obviously, where you can see the entrance. You can see the entrance is coming in and out just so you can note, right? If anything's happening, if anybody walks in that shifts your baseline, when you do take that seat, what do you want to do? You want to see where the exits are? What's my nearest egress out of here? Right? Where's the kitchen? What's going on real quick? Get a good lay-down. Where are the bathrooms? Just in case you have to get up and use the can while you're sitting there eating, right?

25:46Hopefully you do it, you know, maybe after you eat, but whatever. That's what they have there for. Then relax and enjoy your meal. Yellow does not mean watching the door all the time. Oh, I'm waiting for this thing to happen when it's a flash mob coming in. It means you already know where it is. I know what the door is. If anything comes out in that shifts the baseline, I'll pay a little bit more attention to that, right? Then also practicing ratcheting down on purpose. The next time something puts you into the orange or the red and resolves, notice the moment it resolves. See where you're at. Go, oh, I'm still in the orange. I'm still in the red. Like you can tell, like I'm really focused on this. I'm not relaxed. I'm focusing on this thing a bit, but I'm not too intense on it. Well, you're probably in the orange. Well, and I'm really like, I'm like, this thing. Ah, you might be in the red, right? Tell yourself this thing's done. Then let your attention widen back out. See how it feels to go through that process. See what you start noticing, right?

26:46See, okay, this is what I felt like in orange. Oh, here's what I'm in now in yellow. It becomes it's breeding familiarity for you with this. So it makes this all that much easier over time, right? Then you can also do an end of the day check before bed. Think back over one place you went today or whatever that had an increased attention moment, right? Something that drew your attention, something that said, Oh, I need to focus on this. What happened? Did a car turn in front of you? Did a car slam on its brakes? Maybe someone raised their voice. So there was a loud noise you weren't expecting. That one always gets me. What color were you in when that happened, right? What? What a Cooper's color is what awareness level were you at when that happened? Hey, the noise happened. I went right to red. Right? Oh, the noise happened. I don't really get started by noise. I was in orange. Oh, hey, what was that? Was it the right one for the situation? Go through it, analyze what happened, how you felt, how you reacted, responded when thing shifted.

27:50And if it didn't go well, like, ah, you know, I stayed in the red really long. I shouldn't have been there. I was in the white when I should have been whatever. Don't worry about that stuff. Even if you think it didn't go well, why? Because you're identifying your learning. You're building the habit of checking in. You're building your situational awareness. You're practicing it and working to get up to unconscious confidence and get really unconsciously confident at this is all progress, right? The bottom line on this is Cooper's colors gives you a name for each level of awareness. It gives you a color of visual representation for each level of awareness. And white when you are not paying attention, yellow, when you are relaxed in alert, orange when something has your attention and red when you are acting when you're super hyper focused, dealing with the problem. And finally, there's black when your nervous system is taken over and hijacked your thought process in whole or part. In other words, it completely takes you off. And you're just completely reacting to something.

28:51Emotionally, you're not thinking it's just happening or it gets you partly in there. So maybe you make some bad decisions. You do things a little bit more hasty. That kind of thing, right? Your reference point for all this is your baseline. In yellow, you have one, right? There's a baseline in white. You're not really feeling a baseline because you're checked out in yellow. You're feeling the baseline of what's going on. You're like, okay, here's the state of flow in this place. And a change of state is what goes, Hey, something changed in here. I need to see what it is. I need to pay attention to it. Right? It ratched you up to orange or red, probably just to orange, hopefully. And when the change resolves, you move back down. Most of your day belongs in yellow with little short stints and orange and rarer trips and red as we said earlier, start with one drill and work your way up. That's how it works. And so, Hey, everybody with that. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you would, if you enjoyed it, please do me a favor and share it with those who could stand to get some good information about situational awareness,

29:54about Cooper's colors and how we should ratchet up and ratchet down our awareness during the day, sharing with them makes me super happy. It helps get the word out there. It spreads the podcast helps everything grow. And that makes my day. So thank you in advance for all that. So with that, everybody, as always, stay safe, secure and prepared. And never forget my friends. You are just one prep away from being better prepared. Bye.

30:58I'm a to stay on the County road tractor up ahead. And his eyes are on the needle 45 like that. It's said that it's a comes up with the air down right there in the sun. That's it. How'd you see it? I looked up that says, well, that's what. Look up, Danny. Look up. There's a whole lot more than the day. Look up, Danny. Look up. Cause the world don't stop to ask. And it record us. Got somebody every mirror tells you when. Look up, Danny. Look up. And then look up again. Friday at the DMV and Danny passes on the first try. Drive to Marcie's house along with the radio. Look up. Halfway there, the light goes green. The truck beside him waits.

32:00Danny looks left, holds the brake. A car blows through doing 60 years. Ten years on the same old lock belt, still ring the same. Danny's got the coffee now, a boy who's got his name. But kids got his hands at nine and three. And his eyes blew to the hood. And once come out of Danny, like his father knew they would. Look up, Danny. Look up. There's a whole lot more than the day. Look up, Danny. Look up. Cause the world don't stop to ask. And every corner's got somebody every mirror tells you when. Look up, Danny. Look up, Danny. Look up. Oh, Danny, look up again. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And I got again. Look up. Oh, look up.

33:00Oh, God. Look up. Look up.