"awareness" vs. "AWARENESS!"

[Dropkick]

Cool, it sounds like I was making the same conclusion too.

[NickA]

What I got out of the Wednesday lectures I've watched (on tape; I'm old, but I'm not that old) is that the function of awareness is to allow you to select and deploy a plan. Cooper was very focused on shifting surprise to the adversary; being ahead in reaction, so that you can take decisive and aggressive action to create a favorable outcome. That starts with being aware, so awareness (and hence the color code) are fundamental; but as Todd points out, awareness without a prepared line of action is meaningless.

Well said; if you don't have a plan to make awareness an advantage what's the point?

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[Odin Bravo One]

So you are against pocket carry altogether, even for a BUG?


I was always under the impression that good planning and situational awareness were the first and most effective keys to self defense. It seems to me that if you are getting "donkey stomped" on the pavement while in a futile attempt to get to your holstered weapon, you've already committed a series of cumulative fails that pretty much overshadow either your choice of pants or holsters.

I am all for awareness. And I am all for carrying a gun. Even two guns. Unfortunately, it is 2011 and there are a whole lot of well trained and well disciplined people who will not give you target indicators. And there are even some pretty street savvy low life dirt bags. They will not advertise their intentions. Shit happens, and more and more often, we are finding that shit happens with little to no warning, regardless of the time of day, area of town, where I selected my seat in the diner, and whether or not I have $100 bills hanging out of my pockets. At a stop light. At the local IHOP in the middle of lunch. Regardless of your level of awareness, bad things can still happen at times when your strong side pocket is not immediately accessible. I suppose in the pocket is better than in the safe. But if I am taking the time and putting forth the effort to carry a gun for defensive purposes, I am going to take the time and put forth the effort to ensure it is accessible should I need it. In my front trouser pocket while I am seated is not immediately accessible.

[JAD]

Cooper's Principles of Personal Defense were, in order: Alertness, Decisiveness, Aggressiveness, Speed, Coolness, Ruthlessness, and Surprise. Each builds into the next, and circles back pretty neatly (we surprise the attacker, taking an approach to which he was not alert). It's a pretty skimpy pamphlet, and Amazon wants TEN BUCKS to put it on your kindle, but it's still the best single piece of writing about our topic that I'm aware of.

[pax]

Anyone who says he's never fallen into Condition White while out in public is either lying or so unaware that he doesn't even realize his own imperfections. Furthermore, with growing trends like "flash mobs" it's hard to imagine how anyone can honestly think he'll be aware enough to realize trouble that materializes in large numbers over the course of just a few seconds.

There are plenty of instructors who talk about Awareness as a combined holy grail and classroom lesson wrapped in an impenetrable force field that will protect you at all times under all circumstances if you "do it." These tend to be the same people who have less developed hard skills and justify it by saying "I don't need to know combatives, my Awareness would never let someone get that close to me," or "I don't need a fast draw, my Awareness will give me plenty of time to act." The word awareness is really just code for luck under those circumstances.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying awareness & avoidance are unimportant. They're critically important and under most circumstances absolutely will be a greater factor than shaving half a second off your draw or knowing the 97 Steps or whatever. Just don't let "my awesome level of awareness" become a paper mache crutch.

Pardon me for repeating the whole post, but it was so good I couldn't resist.

I've recently been re-reading The Invisible Gorilla, an excellent book about the way the mind works written by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The authors are the researchers behind the infamous white shirt - black shirt basketball video (see it at www.theinvisiblegorilla.com -- which I recommend you go do before reading the rest of this post if you've never seen it before. Follow the link to 'videos' and then to 'the gorilla experiment' Also watch the second video down on that page).

In that study, researchers told people to count the number of times the players wearing white shirts passed a basketball to each other. Halfway through the video, a person wearing a gorilla costume walked into the middle of the screen, beat its chest, and walked off screen. Roughly half the participants never saw the gorilla, even though they were staring right at the screen and focusing all their attention on the screen. Awareness wasn't enough. Attention wasn't enough.

I think this has huge implications: people often don't see things they don't expect to see. It's why (for example) people who ride motorcycles have to be paranoid about people driving cars -- because people in cars aren't usually expecting to see motorcycles when they look for oncoming traffic, so they pull directly into the path of the motorcycle and later claim, "I never even saw that guy!" It's also why criminals can do what they do: they exploit the common and predictable gaps in people's attention.

The lesson here isn't, "Pay more attention." Of course we all should be paying attention! But our brains aren't wired to pay attention 100% of the time. We aren't even wired to pay 100% attention to any one thing at any one time. There doesn't appear to be any consistency between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn't. The authors write:

Despite the intuitive appeal of the gorilla video as a Rosetta stone for personality types, there is almost no evidence that individual differences in attention or other abilities affect inattentional blindness. In theory, people could differ in the total attentional resources they have available, and those with more resources (perhaps those with higher IQs) might have enough "left over" after allocating some to the primary task to be better at detecting unexpected objects. ...

Training people to improve their attention abilities may do nothing to help them detect unexpected objects. If an object is truly unexpected, people are unlikely to notice it no matter how good (or bad) they are at focusing attention.

As far as we can tell, there are no such people as "noticers" and "missers"--at least, no people who consistently notice or consistently miss unexpected events in a variety of contexts and situations.

Since we know that about ourselves, and since brain research keeps showing us how true it is, it's obvious that "Pay attention" isn't the be-all and end-all of preparedness.

I think any sensible self defense plan needs to accept that sometimes we will get taken by surprise and be trying frantically to catch up. And that sometimes that will happen after we do something really stupid. If your defense plan starts and ends with the assumption that you will always see trouble coming, it'll fail you.

Kathy

[mnealtx]

Hi, pax - good to see you on the site!

[NickA]

Hi, pax - good to see you on the site!

Ditto, really enjoyed Lessons from Armed America.

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[superscribe]

has there been any discussion on whether AWARENESS (capital) has any affect on quality of living? I have two friends who are in law enforcement.

one has active sonar on all the time. he picks up on the smallest things. he also cannot be in crowded places, and it's difficult hanging out with him because he's so high strung. it's affecting his social life, and any prospects of finding a life companion.

the other kind of just has a passive sonar. he is very relaxed, and maintains that being relaxed allows him to see the whole picture and act more quickly and effectively. it also allows him to pound drinks and get rowdy at the bars. he has a happy wife, and i enjoy hanging out with him a lot more.

what's the trade off? do you guys feel there has to be a trade-off at all between awareness and quality of life?

[Occam's Razor]

You can't live in a state of heightened awareness without paying a price at some point. The officer mentioned who is hypersensitive will (is) pay a price down the road. Part of the issue here is that "most" normal folk, even those who train in combatives, haven't trained enough to be truly reactive. Proactive is great, but as has been mentioned, Mr. Murphy will eventually get involved. As much as we'd like to believe that awareness is the end all be all, training to the point of forgetting, just reacting, is part of survival (Lt.Col. Grossman quoting Bruce Lee in his book On Combat). Then again, I could be completely wrong.

[pax]

Thanks for the welcome, guys. Didn't see a place to intro, so just jumped right in - hope that wasn't a faux pas here.

superscribe, what an intriguing question. Sad story too.

I suspect the answer will be different for almost everyone, and maybe dependent on personality type or some other variable. For me personally, when I started paying more attention to the world I think my quality of life went up. I saw the potential bad guys and sticky situations developing -- but I also saw a lot of charming human behavior I'd missed before, like the middle-aged wife pinching her husband's butt when she thought no one was looking, or the look on a dad's face when his almost-teen daughter walked away from him at the fair to go join her boyfriend. Noticing little stuff like that tended to make me happier, more fulfilled in some ways, and it was stuff I'd never noticed until I started really trying to pay more attention to the world so I would notice potential danger. So I guess maybe it depends less on "Awareness" per se, and more on your overall mindset going into it. Of course, all of that might just be evidence that I myself have a trivial & superficial mind, or that I wasn't smart enough to just look for the bad stuff to avoid, so I started noticing everything including the good stuff too. In any case, when I personally started paying attention, I ended up having more fun than I'd had before.

Kathy