Spider Senses Tingling

This past weekend I was away staying in a nice hotel. First thing in the morning I go down to the Starbucks located right in the lobby. The place is busy, there are bellmen, doormen, valets, desk clerks and guests arriving and departing. I roll into the coffee house and all of the sudden I get a huge shot of adrenaline that comes from out of nowhere.

I immediately scan the room. It's filled with families with luggage, couples talking, students hammering away on laptops and businessmen waiting for their morning meetings. But over by the cream and sugar bar, with his back to me is a guy putting sugar after sugar into his coffee. His movement is fast and a little erratic. He had a female companion who came up to him, whispered in his ear and left. He wasn't big, in fact, he was just the opposite. The guy was only about 5' 5" tall and probably weighed about 140 pounds soaking wet. I was at the counter for no longer that a few seconds and he turned looked me dead in the face. I'm about 10 feet away from him and when he looked at me the second time I said "good morning" and purposely looked away. At this point I'm thinking, no need to antagonize this skel, I'm going to keep an eye on him, keep my distance, get my coffee,and get out of here. I'm not going to ruin my romantic weekend with paperwork and statements unless forced.

Now how did this guy pop onto my radar? He didn't make a noise or an erratic movement. He didn't look at me, heck he had his back to me. He didn't give any outright indication that he was a threat. To the same point, how did this guy know to turn around and look at me? Out of all the people in that coffee shop, while he was in the middle of loading up his $5.00 coffee with sugar after sugar. What caused him to turn around mid sugar and look directly at me?

Years ago I had a discussion with my mentor Carl Cestari about the "Instinct". The instinct is the ability to determine the threat level of a particular subject just by looking at them and to some degree, the ESP type ability to sense there was a potential threat even before you saw one. It's like the movie Highlander, when you get in the same vicinity as the threat, you're drawn to it and you get ready for battle.

Carl felt people either "had the instinct or didn't." I disagreed. I felt that the instinct was an inherent survival mechanism developed either through your environment or through training. While some people have a greater aptitude for it, the instinct in wired into our DNA.

It's clear that in modern society this instinct is repressed. The only people who remain in touch with this mechanism are people who live in a hostile environments, have a vocation that deals with violence or train to specifically for violent situations. I have also known physically active people to have this instinct to some degree as well. But people who have become sedentary and live sheltered and somewhat isolated lives within their communities are without the instinct. Those people make up the vast majority of the world. Those people make up the vast majority of victims as well.

Modern science still can not determine the number of observations that the brain makes in a given second. Neurons in the brain fire hundreds of times per second. Researchers from MIT and beyond are still trying to understand exactly how many observations the human brain can make in a given time period. Let's just say your brain is working 24-7 (most of you anyway). It's continuously taking in information from your senses, inputting that info into your memory and making judgments based on your conscious and subconscious. While your conscious mind works with reason, your subconscious runs on instinct.

Your subconscious is reading body language, speaking patterns, filtering smells and facial expressions. These signals are taken in and the responses are physiological, not reasonable. While a conscious observation will manifest itself in a thought a subconscious observation will manifest itself with an emotion, a feeling or a convulsive reaction. When you touch a hot stove, you don't need your brain to tell you to "move your hand".

Have you ever seen two dogs meet? There's a lot of sniffing and posturing (often accompanied by some peeing). This is a great example of what your subconscious is doing (give or take the urination) when you're sizing up other human beings and even your environment. You're constantly assessing and evaluating threat levels. On a subconscious level, you're more aware of your surroundings than your conscious mind will let you know. In fact, in modern society your conscious mind often convinces your instincts that there is no threat. Many times victims of violent crimes have recalled that they thought they saw their attacker earlier in the day, but dismissed their ill feelings as over reaction because they had "no reason" to fear that person. the man in the coffee shop never gave me a "reason", yet I still knew he was a threat.

Call it intuition, ESP or whatever, you're already operating on levels beyond your comprehension. But you don't need to comprehend them, all you need to do is how to develop your sensitivity to them. As mentioned before, the best way to really get in touch with the instinct is through physical activity combined with violence specific training. This method will get you up to speed in the fastest time possible outside of dropping you in Libya or South Central, Los Angeles. On the contrary, the more sedentary and isolated from the reality of violence, the more those instincts deteriorate.

Deterioration of your instincts depends on what level your exposure to violence or time in training. Some who has seen combat or been involved in real world violence will have that instinct for years to come compared to someone with only martial arts training. This all depends on the individual, but like all skills, the longer and more intense your exposure, the longer the effects will stay with you.

Mother nature has engineered you to survive. Survival is the primary goal of every species on the planet. After training literally thousands of people over the course of twenty plus years I can say without hesitation that these instincts can be developed and heightened through the right type of training. Instead of walking past a group of men hanging out on the street corner, a pharmaceutical VP senses something's wrong from almost 50 feet away. A federal agent draws his weapon and takes a defensive position well before he gives his first command to a subject. Why? Because both of them felt something was wrong and instinctively did something proactive about it.

That's what saves lives. Listen to that "little voice" and don't talk yourself out of it. Reason kills all instinct. So what if you're wrong? You took 5 more minutes to get to work or you need to holster your weapon. Who cares?

As for the coffee shop encounter, it went without incident but I should have you know a few things. To manage the situation I kept my distance, got my coffee and went back to the room. Keep in mind I looked for that guy all day and it added aa little edge to my weekend getaway.

How do I know they're junkies? because they acted like junkies. They were intense, wearing clothes that looked like they were fished out of a dumpster, had a pale, beaten complexion and literally put about 20 packets of sugar in an 10 ounce coffee.

They were as nervous as hooker in church and might have well had been wearing t-shirts that said "I still shit for meth." To wrap it up, when I came back to the hotel almost four hours later, they were still clocking time in the coffee shop. At that point I made security aware. Let's face it, I'm not going to dime every junkie that gets my juices flowing, but two skels, sitting in a Starbucks for four hours on one cup of coffee? That raises a few questions. Sure, if they were dressed in khakis and had laptops I would probably pay them no mind. But then again, when's the last time you were robbed at knife point by a day trader?

Train Honestly,
Damian Ross, CEO The Self Defense Company

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