Situational Awareness

The first step in gaining control over your environment is to start being vigilant. Vigilant is defined as “being alertly watchful, especially to avoid danger.”

Anyone who’s been involved with law enforcement knows to be constantly aware of her/his surroundings. This vigilance is called situational awareness. The purpose of being vigilant is to train your eyes, mind and body to remain in a state of awareness that allows you to react to situations more quickly that you could from an unaware state.

Truthfully, you should strive to be vigilant at all times. When you get home for the night and are locked away safely from the world, you can let your guard completely down, but until then, it’s best to remain vigilant.

Now before you start arguing with me about having to be vigilant at all times, let me help you understand what this means. I like to call it Live in the Pink!^TM

When I worked as a government agent, my job required a high level of competent driving ability. So I went through aggressive driving training, where they taught us how to drive safely at over 100 mph in traffic. The only way you can do this is if you’re aware of everything in front of you, around you, and behind you.

The trainers taught us using a color continuum to understand this concept. The continuum went from white to red. The white zone is a state of complete unawareness. Using the driving metaphor, this would be the person talking on a cell phone, eating a burger, painting nails, and driving a standard transmission simultaneously.

Okay, that’s extreme, it’s also the person fiddling with the radio or replaying the fight they just had with one of their friends over and over again in their head. The white zone encompasses any person who is distracted at all from the task at hand. This is the person who doesn’t see the school bus stopped three cars ahead or the emergency vehicle two cars behind in their rearview mirror.

The color red is used to signify the opposite end of the spectrum which is total heightened situational awareness. The red zone is where people enter as they have to respond to a crisis.

The pink zone is used to signify the place in between (they used orange or yellow; I like pink, that’s what happens when you work and train in an all male environment…no pink. Face it, guys, any four year-old can tell you when you mix white and red you get – PINK!).

For our purpose, pink signifies a manageable awareness of your surroundings. This continuum signifies the importance of maintaining vigilance. If you’re driving around in the white zone and a cat runs in front of your car, the time it takes you to get to red, where you can react, is too long to avoid killing the cat or swerving into another car you didn’t know was there.

However, if you drive around in the pink zone, you have time to react to surprises with precision because you’re already aware of everything around you. You know where you can swerve to avoid killing the cat and hitting another car.

So if white is bad and pink is good, isn’t red better? No. The reason you don’t want to stay in the red zone all the time is the same reason training people using the fear mentality isn’t effective.

First off, you can’t maintain that level of heightened awareness at all times. You’ll go crazy.

Secondly, it’s not practical. There’s no point to living life if you’re going to walk around convinced that you’ll have to respond to a crisis at any moment.

Think of it like dieting. Let’s say you love ice cream. How long will you stick with a diet that requires you to stop eating ice cream forever – and ever – until you die? But you know you can’t lose the weight you want if you eat ice cream every minute of every day.

In the long run, the more logical approach is to adopt a sensible diet and eat ice cream as an occasional treat, right? There’s a way to love living your life and incorporate situational awareness at the same time.

Live in the Pink!^TM

About the Author: From the corporate world to the spy world and from rape victim to motherhood, Tonya Dawn Recla embodies the definition of personal power. She holds a B.A. in intercultural communication and M.A. in education/critical theory from Arizona State University. Her current projects include finishing her second book, The Dragon Queen, and providing intuitive consulting to her decision-making, change-agent clients (TonyaDawn.com). She and her husband currently travel the world with their 3 year-old daughter.