Mental Awareness and Avoidance of
Attack
By Tom Crawford
Copyright 2012 By The Author
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The most satisfactory method of surviving a violent encounter is to avoid it in the first place. Utilizing the
strategy of avoidance does not mean that one will sacrifice their daily activities or personal freedom in order
to reduce the possibility of attack. Rather, what we are talking about here is the simple, prudent,
observation of our surroundings, and avoidance of potentially dangerous situations as we go about our
daily business.
Most people do not successfully practice avoidance on a daily basis, because to do so requires constant
awareness of one's surroundings, and an almost constant assessment of potential threats in the immediate
environment. Armed with information, we can then make a reasonable decision on the risk of a given
activity versus its benefits, and then a choice on whether to go forward or avoid a certain situation.
Unfortunately, situational awareness and avoidance requires thinking, which is something very few of us
seem willing to do unless we absolutely have to. This is not totally surprising in a culture where almost one-
fourth of all households watch television game shows every night.
This is precisely why most humans are such ridiculously easy targets for the criminals who would attack
them. Most people simply do not monitor their surroundings, and are therefore caught completely unaware
when violence erupts. Think about this for a moment. How many times have you walked up to a friend or
acquaintance in a public place, and startled them with your presence? How many times has someone
startled you like this? What where you thinking about at the time? Certainly not what was going on around
you. What if that person was not a friend, but a criminal bent on victimizing you? What do you think the
outcome would have been? There is simply no substitute for mental awareness as a personal protection
method. Animals in the wild practice this constantly, which is why most of them are much harder to stalk
and kill than humans. I guess we're all just lucky that humans only have one predator after us in this day
and age, and that's the violent criminal.
There is no denying that constant awareness of one's surroundings is hard work. It is certainly easier to
live life in blissful ignorance, and hope that you will not be victimized than to take steps to insure that this is
less likely to happen. Notice I said, "less likely to happen" as opposed to "won't happen". This is because
nothing will keep you perfectly safe. There will always be lapses of attention, special circumstances, and
unforeseen occurrences that could combine to get you killed. This sort of thing happens in the animal
world too, and it's how nature thins the herd, so to speak. But, you should be aware that even armed with a
$1,500 pistol and the finest technical handgun training money can buy, you're still a sitting duck for
criminals unless you practice awareness as a strategy, and avoidance as a defensive tactic.
"But", you say, "I can't/won't live my life in a state of paranoid worry about bad things that could happen to
me, nor will I walk around in fear, ready to be attacked at any moment. That would make life miserable for
me." You're right, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're simply encouraging a heightened
state of awareness and "mental edge", at a level that is appropriate for the situation. The late combat
trainer Jeff Cooper developed a color code system that describes these levels of awareness that has been
widely used over the years. This system, with minor modifications, is outlined here:
Condition White - a state of blissful ignorance of one's surroundings, similar to that which one
experiences while preoccupied or daydreaming. The individual is completely vulnerable to attack, and is
making no ongoing judgments about the relative safety or his or her situation. Most people live the majority
of their lives in Condition White.
Condition Yellow - a state of calm awareness of everything that is going on in the individual's immediate
area, to the limit of one’s sensory abilities. Through continuous observation, information is constantly being
fed to the brain on the changing situation, and hopefully, you are making decisions on the situation's safety
for you and reacting appropriately. Individuals who have decided not to be easy targets resolve to live in
Condition Yellow when outside the confines of their secured homes.
Condition Orange - your Condition Yellow observations have triggered in you the sense that something is
not quite right. In short, you have "smelled a rat." All of your senses are now working overtime at a
heightened level. Now is the time to use the avoidance tactic, if you can, and make a strategic exit. Or, you
may decide that the threat is not real after investigation, and return to Condition Yellow. Condition Orange
typically lasts only a few seconds, which is how long you have to make a decision and act on it.
Condition Red - things have taken a rather nasty turn, and you must react! You are actually in danger or
under attack, and must respond with flight, noise, Mace, hands, feet, or pistol. The "go" signal has been
given, and delay may be deadly. Condition Red situations are almost always the result of being caught in
Condition White, ignoring cues in Condition Yellow, or instincts in Condition Orange.
As you can probably see, different situations demand different levels of acuity. You can probably tolerate
the inevitable lapses into Condition White while relaxing at home better than you can while walking the
street. Resolve now to spend most of your waking hours in Condition Yellow, and practice situational
awareness every time you venture out from your secured home. Initially, you will still find yourself slipping
into Condition White, but with practice this will happen far less frequently. Far from being a tiring chore,
being aware of your surroundings on a constant basis can actually be exhilarating, and is a key part of any
effective self-defense plan.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that at the outset of your journey to become a better-protected
person, you adopt as your role model the professional bodyguard rather than the police officer many would
attempt to emulate. In my home state, professional bodyguards are registered by the state as “Personal
Protection Specialists”. I have such a state registration, and further, am authorized to train candidates for
registered status as bodyguards. Having also been a law enforcement officer, I can tell you that the two
roles and training priorities for each are fundamentally different.
The role of the police officer is essentially reactive. The officer gets paid to run toward disturbances and
sources of potential trouble to “check them out” or provide assistance. Many with what I call the “Police
Personality” are drawn to trouble, as I recently heard one very good law enforcement instructor put it, “like
moths to a flame”. This is why most cops make lousy bodyguards even though most people don’t know that
and think of the two functions as interchangeable.
By contrast, the professional protection agent is trained from his first day in school to be cautious, some
would even say to be a “professional paranoid”. Properly trained agents know how to “harden” the client’s
home or temporary residence so that it is more secure and resistant to attack. The best are provided with
extensive training in how to analyze a client’s schedule and activities of daily life to see how these areas can
be made safer, and are quite experienced in so-called “advance work”, which is detailed planning of routes
of travel and establishing the safety of venues the client will visit with contingency plans for emergencies
along the way.
From the first day of their training, true professionals in protection work are taught to use their powers of
observation to spot potential threats while they are still far enough away to be acted on, and are trained in
a technique called “ACE” which stands for “Alert, Cover, and Evacuate”. This means that when a threat is
spotted, it is called out for others to see, an immediate protective action is taken to safeguard the client,
(often with the agent’s own body) and the agent rapidly extracts the client from the scene rather than going
forward to engage the threat. When a disturbance breaks out near one of these professionals, his first
thought is to protect the client and get them away from danger, but such outbreaks rarely occur if he has
planned well in advance.
Professional protection agents are often armed and certainly always would be if they had a choice in the
matter. The best are normally quite skilled with their weapons. In my home state of Virginia, firearms
qualification for bodyguards is much tougher than it is for cops. However, when asked to work without a
firearm, these professionals do not obsess about it, since they know that there are many other means of
protecting themselves and their clients, and that just because they have no firearm does not mean they are
defenseless. They also understand that the use or display of their personal weapons may spell the end of
their professional career, because in the circles they move in, it is assumed that they should have been
better than to let things get to the point where a weapon was drawn, much less fired.
Let me suggest to you that in crafting your defensive mindset, in the training you engage in, and in the
advice you accept on self-protection, you adopt these professional protectors as your role model, and think
of yourself from here on out as a bodyguard, protecting the most important “clients” you can imagine,
yourself and your family. If you think in this fashion and ask yourself what a professional protection agent
would do in any given circumstance, you won’t be far wrong in deciding what you should be doing. Like
them, you should stay alert and stay aware in order to stay safe!
Finally, I will mention that from time to time, one of our students will call to let us know that they have
actually used something we taught them in one of our programs, and they felt that it helped them to avoid
or escape a potentially dangerous situation. We’ve even had several who have been involved in defensive
shootings and have come out on top and have called to tell us about it. If this ever happens to you and you
call to let me know, my first statement to you will be an expression of gratitude that you are okay. But what I
say to you next may surprise you. I’m going to ask you some very pointed questions about how you came to
be in a situation where you had to fire a gun, or even point one, at another human being. Unless you have
a highly unusual case, rather than me making you a hero for doing so, we are going to have a serious talk
about the various failure points along the way that brought you to that place. Like the professional
bodyguard, you probably should have been better than to let matters go that far. Always remember our
priorities in the Safe Start Program, which are Awareness, Avoidance, Evasion, and only then if truly
necessary, Resistance.