Our clients sometimes ask our Dynamis Team to deliver training on general personal safety for Lone Workers or in our specialised Violence Prevention clinics for Survivors of Abuse. Here are 12 of our key personal safety tips, drawn from our Self-Protection Trainer Certification manual.
12 Essential Personal Safety Tips
1. Body Language Matters
Certain behaviours are correlated with the selection of victims. Your body language, posture, gait, environmental interaction, level of attention, and pace are among the main factors which contribute to a perpetrator’s selection matrix. If you are also in the wrong place at the wrong time — somewhere isolated, where observation by others is poor — then the appraisal is likely to be of a “good target.”
2. Trust Your Intuition
The bad feelings you get in interactions with certain people or in potentially threatening environments are often reliable clues to an impending violent incident. Your brain will often work out when a trap is being sprung, or a predator is targeting you, long before your cognitive mind has worked out the problem. Act on feelings of discomfort.
3. Stay Visible
Many of the worst violent crimes are committed in places that are away from other human beings. Time alone with an attacker, away from other people, is associated with higher levels of violence and lower survival rates for the victim. Make all possible attempts to prevent being moved from one location to another.
4. Alter the Perpetrator’s Equation
The more professional crimes are committed within what the perpetrator has calculated to be a favourable risk/reward/workload appraisal. Effective strategies for preventing these crimes include altering the perpetrator’s calculation. If you heighten risk, reduce reward, and increase workload, you may tilt the balance in your favour.
5. Use Body Language Strategically
Body language is an important part of any interaction. It is naturally used to communicate submissiveness — but it may also be manipulated to create opportunities for a pro-active counter-assault when the opportunity presents itself. The bad guy who selects you doesn’t believe you will fight back. If you do, you alter the target appraisal matrix.
The bad guy who selects you doesn’t believe you will fight back. If you do, you alter the target appraisal matrix.
Understanding the Psychology of Violence
6. Know the Bad Guy’s Psychology
The aggressive person who is going to hurt you in a social violence scenario does so because it helps him establish a sense of equilibrium. He believes he needs to hurt you to support his status within a group, to make sure his life is predictable, or to gain a sense of control. Your efforts to defuse the situation should focus on five domains: offering respect, certainty, authority, rapport, and reciprocity.
7. You Have the Right to Defend Yourself
Every person has the right to use reasonable force to protect themselves, if they honestly and reasonably believe it is necessary and they have no means of withdrawing from the conflict. Reasonable force also requires that the force used is proportionate in the circumstances, causing no more harm than the risk of harm presented to you.
⚖️ Remember: Reasonable force is what is honestly believed necessary and proportionate. The law is on your side when you defend yourself.
8. Your Body Is Preparing to Help You
The threat of imminent personal harm will cause the body-mind system to kick into high gear: a sudden release of survival hormones which prepare the body to run or to fight. The most immediate effect is an increase in heart rate, a heightened state of consciousness, and Olympic-athlete levels of strength and endurance.
“More than anything else in life, it is the potential for intentional, overt, human confrontation that has the greatest ability to modify and influence the behaviour of human beings.” — Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
Stay Mentally Prepared
9. Keep It Simple
Over-arousal can cause negative effects. If a person’s heart rate escalates without control or awareness in a novel situation, this often results in reduced performance in cognitive tasks and complex motions. Keep it simple when planning a physical movement or developing a plan. Remember: your body is trying to help you.
10. Silence Negative Self-Talk
Emotional overload is often accompanied by negative self-talk and limiting beliefs — “I can’t do this,” “Women can’t defend themselves,” “He’s bigger than me,” “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Negative self-talk will beat you into the ground long before the bad guy will. Try to address these self-limiting beliefs now, before you need to.
“The whole thing is never to get negative about yourself. I go out to every match convinced that I’m going to win. That’s all there is to it.”
11. Throw Yourself a Survival Anchor
Many people who overcome their attackers do so because in the midst of their confrontation they find a survival anchor and throw it into their near future. Often it is the thought of seeing their family when they get home. Think about your survival anchor and have it ready.
🎯 Your survival anchor: What would you fight to get home to? Picture it clearly now — your family, your children, your future. Keep that image ready.
12. Fight Back Hard and Fast
Research has shown that in many circumstances, fighting back hard and fast, with ferocity and indignation, massively increases your chance of not being victimised. Even in a situation where your actions are not fully successful, the decision you take to make a stand against the aggressor in defence of yourself will psychologically assist you in the aftermath of an event. In many cases it will facilitate your escape, especially coupled with the surprise element.
Gerard O’Dea is a conflict management, personal safety and physical interventions training consultant. He is the training director for Dynamis, a specialist in personal safety and violence reduction initiatives and the European Adviser for ‘Verbal Defense and Influence’, a global programme which addresses the spectrum of human conflict. www.dynamis.training/
Gerard’s book on Lone Worker Personal Safety is available on Amazon Kindle and Paperback.
