The last thing you wanna do

is make a decision in crisis.

But if you're paying attention to the environment you're in

in a very methodical way,

you are undoubtedly ready to react

in the way that you should

and that you've trained your brain to.

That is the distinguishing difference

between just observation

and true situational awareness.

[dramatic music]

I'm Clint Emerson, retired Navy SEAL,

21 years combat experience all over the globe,

and now a crisis management professional.

My years of service consisted of both SEAL teams

at the theater level and the national level.

I had the opportunity of working in Iraq, Afghanistan,

and other parts of the globe.

I like to sometimes compare things

to the Jedburghs of World War II,

where guys would go in,

small coalition forces, if you will,

it was an American, a Brit, and usually a Frenchman,

and they'd go in behind enemy lines

and do sabotage and other things

to try and defeat the Nazis.

So a modern-day version of that

is probably a good explanation

without actually telling you what's going on.

Our brains rely on being challenged.

The benefits of just being situational aware

besides observing

and making decisions based on what you're presented with

is one way to exercise your mind

and learn how to be more attentive,

how to pay attention to the small things.

You'll find that your memory

starts to get a little bit better

'cause you're doing it more often.

Not just with the things you're paying attention to

but remembering your grocery list

all of a sudden becomes a little easier,

and you start noticing the little things

about people and their mannerisms.

Our pattern of life is really small.

It's home, it's work, then to our favorite restaurant.

If you take the time to evalsuate the routes in between

and those establishments,

you've just reduced the number of things

you have to pay attention to

when something bad occurs.

Let's look at situational awareness

presented in the movie Bourne Identity.

[wheels squealing]

I'm not making this up.

These are real.

No operative would store all his passports together

in one big pile. [laughs]

That's a little out there.

I can tell you the license plate numbers

of all six cars outside.

I can tell you that our waitress is lefthanded

and the guy sitting up at the counter

weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.

Yeah, I mean, I would factor this more

in the side of hyper-vigilance.

Also, probably in some aspects, a little extraordinary.

Most people aren't capable of that.

Just from my observations,

there was four cars in the parking lot,

there wasn't a truck,

and the guy at the bar was not in that great of shape,

[laughs] but.

I think this clip is a great representation

for situational awareness and kind of defining it.

It shows the capability of maybe a couple of people

[laughs] that I know.

But could an average person train

to memorize and take in that much information

and actually analyze it and interpret it?

To a limited degree.

The more you do it, the more you'll get at it,

just like with anything.

[paper scrunching]

Alright, imagine this is your house.

We're gonna go ahead and take a look at it

from a safety and security point of view.

Ideally, in every home or every place you go

or you spend time,

you designate a safe area

for the family to consolidate in time of an emergency.

And in this home, for example, the stairs are a great place.

It's centrally located,

the walls do not share any outside walls,

you could even put water, food,

and other forms of communication in that spot.

You have windows, alright.

As we know, in natural disaster, windows are bad.

But identifying your windows,

now you're seeing a common thread of exit strategies.

You've got the main door here

and then you've got really nothing down below

that stands out.

If you need to exit, you're gonna go out these windows.

And once we get done doing this,

we're gonna see pretty much where the home's dead ends are.

So, if there's an emergency,

going to the backside back here,

this is probably no-go 'cause there's no other way out.

Into this master bedroom suite,

it looks like there's nothing there.

So you kinda get the point.

Once you really start concentrating on your points of entry

and then all of your windows,

now you know parts of your home

that are kind of off limits when crisis occurs.

The OODA loop, or O-O-D-A,

is a tool you can use

to help sift through the environments you're in.

Observation, orientate yourself, decide, and then act.

One thing that happens in a crisis is

your fine motor skills go out the widow,

you have no time, and you have high stress.

That is why it's so important

to make your decisions in a more clinical setting

where you have plenty of time

and you're running those scenarioses.

And the more you do that,

the more you train your brain

to come up with really good decisions

because you're doing it while you're calm.

Now, if something happens,

all you're gonna do is act it out.

So, let's say this is where I go to work every day.

This is part of a multi-level building

and we are not on the first floor.

We've got several elevator banks

right here, here, here.

These elevator banks basically become useless

in a time of disaster.

They usually shut down immediately

and you're forced to use stairs.

In an emergency we know

that we're gonna probably concentrate our efforts of exit

to these stairs.

Specially if it's a fire.

Most people don't know it but most of your stairwells

have their own HVAC and positive pressure systems.

So once you're in there,

it actually protects you

from the bad air that may be going on here.

A secondary option.

We've got so many windows,

and in times of disaster you wanna stay away from glass,

but if there was a fire

you could probably get away

with throwing a chair through the window

and escaping that way

if you're a reasonable distance up.

So I'd say, safely, if you're in reasonable shape,

you could jump from three stories and be okay.

Heck, you might break a leg

but that's better than whatever the consequences are

up here in this space.

It's also important to keep in mind that,

as it relates to fires,

a lot of truck's ladders only extend 120 feet max.

Just good information to know in extreme situations.

I break down awareness, and what I call total awareness,

into four big pieces.

And that's personal awareness, cultural awareness,

third-party awareness, and then situational awareness.

The first one is personal awareness.

When we talk about threat reduction,

you have to know what you look like to others.

So, the next piece is cultural awareness

and that's really knowing the dos and don'ts

of the geographical area that you're gonna be visiting.

So, third-party awareness is, really,

just knowing that we have people all around us

that can look at us, judge us,

and potentially gonna find your vulnerabilities

and exploit them in some varying form.

The last one is the big one, situational awareness.

Cataloging the environment, sifting through it,

and then confirming what's good and what's bad.

So, now, we're in a restaurant.

Alright, so.

We know that there are one, two, three,

four exit and entry points here.

I'm probably gonna come inside,

probably step to the left or step to the right,

let's stay out of the way of that doorway.

The doorways are known as fatal funnels.

When I look at a crowd of people, I wonder to myself,

alright, if everybody was to get up right now

and run out of here because of a natural disaster,

or whatever,

where would they all go?

The doorway that I'm standing near?

Then, as I get seated,

they walk us over

and this is where we're gonna end up sitting.

Immediately I'm gonna go ahead and go to the restroom,

mainly so that now I can identify,

is this a good route out?

Is there any doors down here?

And then, of course, there's always the exit in the kitchen

that you never see but is always there.

As I come back out, sit down.

I can cover at least here field of view

and then here, with the doors.

Active shooters, unfortunately, are a reality.

One of the things I promote the most

as far as what you can run through,

to keep it really simple is,

run, hide, fight.

The run.

If you increase distance from the shooter

then you increase survivability.

When you run, ideally you wanna run from cover to cover.

Never follow the herd.

Take a moment and see if you can truly identify the shooter.

So trust your eyes, question your ears

when it comes to gun shots.

Now, looking at exit strategies,

the majority of the people

may run to the door that they came in,

that's gonna be natural instinct.

Some are probably gonna head over to this fire exit door

and some are probably gonna go towards that patio door

if it's a big slider.

And very few people are probably gonna go to the kitchen.

I'll be able to see what's coming at me

and then be able to react accordingly

using the kitchen door.

Hide.

What would I hide behind that stops bullets?

Oh, structural pillars.

The big planter that's out in front of my office.

Vehicles.

You'll hear about people hiding in a closet

or hiding in a bathroom.

If you're gonna hide in a dead end,

then make sure it's a room that has furniture

that you can stack in front of that door.

And the proper way to barricade when you're hiding

is to stack in front of the door

all the way to the opposing wall.

Now you're using the wall as the brace against the door

and no one's gonna open it.

Right off the bat

I know that this bar is probably built pretty well,

so if you need to take cover,

you can cover back behind here.

And then if you roll into fight mode,

the utensils on your table,

salt and pepper burns the eyes,

you've got lose chairs everywhere

that you can potentially throw at the guy.

Anything you need to do to create pain

or create a distraction so that you can escape.

So then, when we talk about the fight or the defend,

you've gotta be far more aggressive

than the person coming at you if you wanna win.

So, here we have a collection of objects

that can be readily found around the globe.

All of these can be used as self-defense tools

and let's start with the roll of quarters.

A roll of quarters, just by gripping it alone

increases the density of your fist,

making it a little bit harder.

If you add it to a sock just by dropping it in there,

you just created an improvised sap.

A first typically flies at roughly 25 miles an hour.

By adding your quarters to a sap,

now you're increasing upwards

to about 40 or 50 miles an hour.

Eight-ounce fishing weights,

we'll put it in a handkerchief.

Let gravity keep it in place

and, once again, it's an improvised sap.

This one, because it's got more weight

than a roll of quarters,

you're increasing its velocity

upwards to 55 or 60 miles an hour,

and that's just the average person.

Books.

A couple of 'em will by themselves stop most handgun rounds

by adding ceramic tiles.

What ceramic does and what's unique to it

is that it displaces the energy of the round

as soon as it hits.

If you wanted to make some improvised body armor,

you could take two books

and you could either throw in your tiles on the inside,

like so,

or you could throw 'em in between the two books,

like so.

[tape whooshing]

Alright, the two books and added ceramic tiles

will stop most rounds,

regardless of whether it's handgun or riffle.

Impact, [fist thumps] it'll displace it,

and very rarely will it penetrate through the second book

if you've got that many tiles in place.

Okay, so that's improvised body armor.

So, steel-barrel pens are awesome.

A steel-barrel pen acts as a great puncture tool.

Alright, salt and pepper.

Alright, first and foremost,

this certainly is everywhere around the world.

Salt and pepper both burn the eyes.

Don't think for a second that you can't take a moment,

pull some out, put it in your hands,

and use it to your advantage.

A newspaper nail bat.

So, if you've got a newspaper that's,

I'd say, 10 pages or more,

you spread it out just as I did.

As you can see it's a square.

And then the idea is to roll it as tight as possible.

Then you fold it back on itself.

Your best friend, duct tape.

So the fold, it becomes hard as a rock up here at the end.

[bat thumping]

Once again, all of this is used

to either defend yourself or create pain

so that you can then escape and get away.

I believe awareness is 100% teachable.

If you're walking or driving that same route every day,

if you're sitting in the same office or cubicle every day,

then identifying these things really isn't a big deal.

Applying the situational awareness

starts to fine tune more of the human interaction,

it helps work the brain

and give it something new to do and learn,

increase your cognitive levels

and your ability to retain information

and then to be able to pull that information

when you need it.

You're gamifying it,

and while you're doing it,

you're actually increasing your safety and security.

[soft music]