Chapter 1: What are the common misconceptions about personal safety?
Today's world can feel unpredictable and at times dangerous. So how prepared are you to really keep yourself and the people you love safe? The question is not only relevant, but the answer could mean the difference between life and death. That's why today's SYSK Trending topic is how to stay safe in a dangerous world. In a moment, my conversation with Spencer Corson.
He is a personal security expert who has spent years protecting high profile clients and studying how everyday people can stay one step ahead of potential threats. And he shares simple habits and situational awareness techniques that anyone can use without living in fear. We also dive into practical real-world strategies that could make all the difference in a critical moment.
So if you've ever wondered what you should be doing to stay safe, you'll find out right after this. How safe are you when you and the members of your family walk out of your house, or even when you're in your house? Are you safe from harm? We all like to think we're safe, and probably are most of the time. But all of us have been in situations that seemed unsafe, or we felt might be unsafe.
Little warning bells went off in our head, and maybe we listened to those warnings, and maybe we didn't. Maybe we didn't want to offend someone, so we ignored them. Personal safety is important and sometimes a little tricky. You don't want to think of everyone you meet and every situation you're in as a potential threat. That would be exhausting.
Still, it's important to plan and think about what you would do if things went wrong. Here with some insight and some very practical and sensible advice about personal safety is Spencer Corson.
He's a nationally recognized threat management expert, founder of Corson Security Group in Austin, Texas, and author of the book, The Safety Trap, a security expert's secrets for staying safe in a dangerous world. Hi, Spencer. Thanks for joining me today.
Michael, thank you so much for having me. A true pleasure to be here.
So what's your sense of how dangerous the world is?
I think it's I think it's a two fold outlook. One is that if you could be born at any time in the history of mankind right now is the absolute best time to be alive. We have never been safer. Medical advancements have never been greater. Life expectancy has never been higher. Crime rate has never been lower. Food has never been more plentiful.
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Chapter 2: What strategies can help improve situational awareness?
It's just that there wasn't this pervasive promotion of those horrific acts in news stories or the media or what have you. When we see these things on social media, they're happening to other people. So our anxiety about our risk of those things has a tendency to go up.
Despite how anxious people get about their security and their safety, it doesn't seem like, you know, except for maybe getting an alarm system for the house and making sure you lock your front door, it doesn't seem like people do a lot to prepare for that because you can't prepare for every possible situation. threat that could occur. So you tend not to prepare for any threat that could occur.
So what do you suggest people do?
Audit yourself with honesty. Just really, all most of us, most people will never be in a plane crash or a terror concern or an active shooter situation or a kidnap for ransom exploit. But all of us need to participate in our own protection. Everyday safety requires the participation of everyone.
And a healthy sense of skepticism and a moderate dose of vigilance, kind of having more of a framework of playing chess than of playing checkers, is all most people need to Live a happy, healthy, successful, and especially a safe existence.
And so what does that mean to have a healthy skepticism? Because you do what?
So let's say everyone, everywhere I go, every speech I give, one of the big topics of conversation always comes down to home security, residential security. How do I keep my home safe? Do I need a gun? Do I need a dog? Do I need a ring camera? Do I need ADT? What do I do to keep myself safe?
And for the most part, all most people need to do is lock their front door because 85% of home invasions are the result of someone just walking in through the front door. Bad guys are kind of like lions stalking the gazelles. They don't go after the strongest of the herd, they go after the weakest.
I remember hearing some security expert talk about this, and I chuckled when I heard him say this and took his advice to heart, that if you were locked out of your house and you didn't have a key and you had to basically break into your own house, you probably would know how to do it. You probably know where that weak spot is, right?
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Chapter 3: How can you assess your own safety risks effectively?
No problem. Well, all of those ways that you would break into your house are the exact same way that a bad guy would break into your house. So now that you know what those risks are, put the safeguards in place to keep those bad things from happening.
When a criminal targets your home, what's their intention? What are they thinking?
Most people who come during the day are coming for your things. Most people who come at night are coming for you. But where most people may have a security plan to keep bad guys from coming in, most people, like the number one vulnerability of most residential security plans that I audit is that they don't have a plan for what to do once someone gets in.
So should that actually turn into a home invasion where you are inside the house? What is your plan? Are you going to get out? Do you have a safe room or do you have a fallback plan? Are the kids going to come to you? Are you going to go to the kids? What is your family reunification plan if everyone's just going to go out different exits?
So having like the most what is the most realistic risk you are most likely to face and then put the safeguards in place to to reduce the the overall impact of that risk. Bottom line is that we can no longer afford to live in a world where we simply hope that nothing will happen and then solely rely on the first responders to save us once something does.
What is the most likely safety threat anybody faces? Overconfidence. Overconfidence?
Most people are overconfident. Most people think, well, I have mace, so I'm protected, or I carry a gun, so I'm protected. Most of us would love to believe that in a scenario that we would be the hero, that we would rise up, that we would fight back or we would run away. Most people freeze. Most people panic.
Most people don't understand why they're feeling this way because they never expected to feel that way. And when they're in that situation, they make decisions which are more in line with being a victim than of being a survivor.
But if you understand that that is something that might happen to you, you might be the kind of person that has to be more proactive in identifying the exits or the uncommon exits or having a mental projection for what you want your body to perform so that when it is called upon to engage in that act, it is able to do so in a more effective fashion.
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