Keeping Safe OnSite – Part One

“Did you hear that my favorite client’s meeting is in Atlanta this year?  I love going through Centennial Park on the way to the Georgia World Congress Center.”

As meeting planners, we are afforded the opportunity to travel the country, and sometimes the world, for our on-sites.  With this great opportunity also comes the inherent risk of being in a city that is unfamiliar to us, being around attendees and convention staff that we don’t necessarily know and working long hours and walking to and from our hotel and convention center late at night or very early in the morning.  In this two part blog series I am going to address a few simple ways to help prevent you from becoming a victim of a violent attack.  As a self-defense and karate instructor, personal safety has become more than a just something I think about, but has become a way of life, both when I travel for work but also when I am at home.  Some of the most effective ways to increase your chances of staying safe are oftentimes the simplest.  In this first blog I will give a couple tips on how to have a better sense of awareness

In the second blog I will discuss knowing and understanding intuition and how it works to keep you safe, and maybe more importantly, understanding why people don’t listen to it.  Recognizing manipulation tactics attacker’s use to get you to do something you necessarily wouldn’t want to do  And lastly knowing pre-violence indicators so that you can recognize things in people and situations that tend to predict violence, such as knowing what an escalated person looks like, how they think and how to de-escalate them.  These are all things, which if practiced with some regularity, will become second nature with little or no effort.

First things first however, in this blog we are going to briefly discuss how to have a better sense or awareness and understand some of the reasons why people don’t listen to their intuition

There are several theories as to why violent attacks take place:

• One school of thought is that violence is based on power and control, which makes violence very animalistic in nature.  With this thought in mind, in nature does the lion go after what appears to be the strongest of the herd or what they think will be the weakest?  I think we all agree that the predator goes after the weakest, the one that they believe will put up less of a fight.  The same can be said for attackers, they go after those who they believe are the “weakest” and easiest to defeat or get what they want.  These are the people who are distracted either by a cell phone, black berry, file folders or someone who is simply not paying attention to their surroundings.
• Two very simple ways to increase your awareness are by expanding your “personal zone bubble” and to play the “red shirt game” whenever you are out or on-site.  Most of us have what is called a personal zone bubble which is the imaginary area that surrounds us, that when some one enters it we instantly start being very aware of them and strive to know everything about them that we can (i.e. facial features, demeanor, things that they are carrying, the speed at which they are moving towards you etc). Most people have a personal zone bubble of 2 to 3 feet, which becomes problematic because at that distance most people can reach out and grab you, thus rendering useless your informational seeking about that individual and their intent and would not allow you time to avoid that individual if the situation called for it.  When I am teaching self-defense seminars, I encourage people to extend that bubble to 8 to 9 feet to allow time to make an assessment of someone walking towards you and allow you time to avoid that individual if you so choose.
• Another way to become more aware is to play the red shirt game.  This is where you pick something that is easily distinguishable (i.e. someone wearing a red shirt, or a baseball cap or a green coat etc.) and look for people wearing that.  What happens is that while you are looking for the “red shirt” you will notice everyone else and able to spot something that looks grossly out of place or people and things that you might want to avoid or alerting conference security to a suspicious individual.  By using these two simple techniques you can become more aware of your surrounding.

Tim La Fleur

These are just a few things that if practiced with regularity will shortly become second nature and will make you more aware and help keep you safe.  I look forward to hearing back from you about this and if you have any questions about anything that we have discussed or if you have any other questions.