It’s About Community: The Genesis of Beer In Boulder

January 20, 2016 in Veterans, Business, and Security

At the beginning of December I posted an article to Medium titled, “It’s The Age of The Active Shooter and We Can’t Talk About It,” where I presented my ideas about long-term solutions that can get America further and further left of bang. The premise of the article is that strong, close-knit communities offer significant advantages to ensuring our own safety against the risk of mass killings and terrorist attacks at a local level. That article was a shift in many of the concepts that I typically write and teach about, as we primarily focus on the improving an individual’s ability to recognize threats here at The CP Journal. In Left of Bang and in the Tactical Analysis program, there is an implied assumption that, by developing a single person’s ability to identify those with violent intent, the collective community will benefit as a result of a the time spent by that person attaining a level of informed awareness.

However, in my “Age of the Active Shooter” article, the goal was to shift our awareness to a point even earlier on the bang timeline. Whereas behavioral analysis is designed to recognize people who have already made the decision to become violent, strong communities can also prevent some of the conditions that might lead a person to making that decision in the first place, ultimately reducing the number of people that protectors have to identify hiding within the crowd. But there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. It isn’t enough to simply write about community as the solution; those words only have meaning when we are actively contributing to making it a reality. It is in that pursuit that I’m excited to announce a new project that my fiancé Lisa and I have launched called Beer in Boulder.

The Role of Community

If you were to look at the last decade of my life, it would be pretty clear that “community” wasn’t something I was committed to developing or contributing to. Community has been something that has remained fairly Continue reading »

Help Video #5: How do I ask questions while taking your class online?

January 18, 2016 in Training

Return to Frequently Asked Question

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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) – Here Are The Most Basic Answers To This Frequently Asked Question

  • Can I ask the instructor a question while going through the online class? Yes.
  • How do I ask those questions? There is a link in every module that lets students ask a question via email.
  • Who will answer the question?
    • If the question is related to the content being taught in the program, the instructor will be the one who personally answers the question.
    • If the question is technical in nature or related to the learning management system platform, a member from our support team will be the one to provide a response.
  • How long will it take to get a response? That answer depends on the depth of the question. Every question will be responded to or acknowledged within 24 hours (on business days). If the question requires a longer/more developed answer than what can be generated in that time, the students will be notified that the instructor needs more time to provide a thorough/complete answer and will be in touch as soon as possible.
  • What happens if the answer provided doesn’t actually answer my question? We keep going until the topic becomes clear and the answer provided has actually solved the problem the student is facing.

Video Transcript
Continue reading »

Holding Yourself Publicly Accountable For Learning

January 8, 2016 in Learning About Learning

Each year The CP Journal has been in business, we have always established goals for ourselves personally, professionally and for the business. As an education-focused company, the end of the year usually presents a much lighter workload than the year’s earlier months, as most organizations that we’re training don’t try to squeeze seminars into what is already a chaotic December calendar. Over the last four years, I’ve come to truly appreciate that piece of our yearly rhythm, as it provides a natural break in the daily grind to take a step back, assess the previous year and think about the transition into the next.

While I’ve never made those goals public, I’ve come to realize that, if we are going to hold our students accountable to putting in the work to truly learn and integrate behavioral analysis into their lives, they should see that we also practice what we preach. In an age of self-guided education and unstructured lifelong learning, we go through the same process of determining areas and skills we need to master to be true professionals in our field. We design adaptable and personal training programs that we believe will get us to the level of proficiency we are seeking. We go through the same ups and downs that come with learning and do it all while trying to remain motivated and holding ourselves accountable to the standard we set for ourselves.

When it comes to choosing the areas I am pursuing in the coming year for personal development, I always try to consider the two axes (for clarity, this use of axes is the plural of axis, not multiple versions of the tool to chop wood) that go into lifelong learning. There is one skill that I am always looking to go very deep on, and there are a number of skills that I want to develop in order to have a broad scope of knowledge across a range of topics. If you are a fan of Brett McKay’s writing on The Art of Manliness or enjoy frequent Mr. T references, here is a great article that Brett wrote a few years back on being a “t-shaped man,” which encompasses both deep and broad skills. Thinking about development in this way has helped me to ensure that I make progress without becoming a dilettante.

The skill that I continue to focus a great deal of my deep development on is Continue reading »

Communication Exercise: How To Use Real Life Events – Part 2

January 5, 2016 in Applying The Observations

In Part 1 of this article last week, we talked about the behaviors that a mother observed in a real life scenario that helped her get left of bang when faced by a woman attempting to kidnap her baby at a mall in Long Island, NY.  Each of the intuitive observations that the mother made in the situation allowed her to prevent herself from becoming the victim of the crime. Using our terminology, we can further explain why the would-be attacker was an anomaly to the baseline for a woman’s bathroom. But to complete the communication exercise, we also need to further explain why the kidnapper’s behavior actually made her stand out from the baseline.

To do that, we need to take a look at her intent. The kidnapper’s violent intent for being in the bathroom is different than a typical/baseline bathroom goer. To put the observed behaviors in context, let’s start by placing the would-be kidnapper’s actions into the framework of the seven-step attack cycle.  If you are unfamiliar with this cycle, it is a structure Continue reading »

Communication Exercise: How To Use Real Life Events – Part 1

December 26, 2015 in Applying The Observations

“There was just something off about the person. I couldn’t explain it but I just felt like I needed to get out of there.”

The comment above is one that I hear often while teaching or talking to people who have read, Left of Bang. As humans, we are hard-wired to predict danger. This natural ability is one of they many reasons why we need to trust our instincts that stem from the limbic system, which is the survival center of our brain. For example, in early December, there was a story reported by an ABC News affiliate in Long Island, NY, about a mother who had an instinct that another woman was trying to kidnap her baby. Because the mother was able to trust her intuition that there was something “off” about the other woman, she was able to safely get away and prevent herself and her baby from becoming the victims of a crime.

However, recognizing that there is something wrong is often only the first part of the process that people with situational awareness need to go through in order to ensure their own safety. For police officers and security professionals who are going to have to write out a report, there is still the requirement of being able to effectively communicate exactly what you observed. For civilians who need to file a police report or are looking to better understand where that original gut feeling came from, the ability to articulate what you saw and explain why it was important is a critical skill. While it is extremely gratifying that the students who come through the Tactical Analysis program note that they now have the ability to clearly and articulately explain what about a particular situation led them to make a decision, the communication of those intuitive recognitions we rely on takes practice to master.

One method that we use to hone this skill and that we recommend to our course graduates seeking to make behavior analysis a habit is to take real life events and translate the eye witness accounts into the Continue reading »

Why The Submissive Cluster Does Not Come From The Freeze Response

December 15, 2015 in Assessing Individuals

As students go through our Tactical Analysis program, there is a question that often comes up during the portion of the course when we teach how to read and assess the behavior of individual people. The question is usually framed in this manner:

“If the dominant cluster is manifestation of the fight response to a perceived threat or stressor, and if the uncomfortable cluster is the body’s manifestation of the flight response, and if the comfortable cluster represents the absence of the fight or flight response because no threat is perceived, then wouldn’t it make sense that the submissive cluster is the body’s manifestation of the freeze response?”

While this train of though suggesting that the submissive cluster might originate out of the freeze response is certainly logical, the answer to the question is no. The submissive cluster is NOT how the body displays that it is experiencing the freeze response to perceived stressors or threats.

The definition that we use to define what the submissive cluster represents is as follows Continue reading »

It’s the Age of the Active Shooter and We Can’t Talk About It

December 9, 2015 in Veterans, Business, and Security

America is in the middle of what historians will one day call the “Age of the Active Shooter.” Despite empty words from public figures about how shootings have not become the new normal, the increasing frequency of attacks with mass casualties proves otherwise. A couple days after the San Bernandino shooting, NPR ran a story about how companies in the security industry that are providing “active shooter response training” are part of a growth industry. As disturbing as that is, it is unlikely that these attacks will slow down in the near future because Americans cannot even have an honest, intellectual and meaningful conversation about how to stop them from occurring. In response to the attacks that have occurred in the last decade, it has become clear that there are four topics that have the power to effectively derail any conversation about how America can ultimately get left of bang and prevent the next attack or shooting.

We Can’t Talk About Guns

The topic of guns is the first surefire way to immediately end any rational conversation about how to prevent violence. Whether you believe that we should erase firearms from the planet or think that the only way to keep people from being violent is to arm every person in America does not matter. The moment that you bring up either gun control or the 2nd Amendment is the moment when you lose 50% of the people you are talking to. Because the most vocal people in each group are the ones who have already made up their mind on the topic and will never even consider information contradictory to their views, the words used and emotions that present themselves when discussing the topic of guns eliminates any rationality whatsoever. Regardless of which view that you have, we cannot make progress towards stopping an attack when a conversation about the weapons being used to kill hundreds of Americans each year can’t even begin.

The real reason why my opinion and your opinion on guns are irrelevant to furthering the conversation about violence prevention is because the actions our country has taken in the last decade show that gun control is unacceptable to Americans. If there was going to be any event that made people find some common ground and move away from one of the two extremes on the issue of guns, it would have been the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 when 20 children were killed. While there were Executive Orders made about gun control after this Newtown shooting, no gun control legislation was passed by the people elected to represent all Americans. If the lives of 20 children are considered “the cost of living in a free society,” whether you like or agree with that statement or not, it seems that Americans has already made their decision. Bringing up your opinion on the role guns play in violence is only going to end the conversation because it is a debate that will not make progress towards finding a way out of this dark period.

We Can’t Talk About Religion

The second foolproof way to eliminate any pursuit of common ground or consensus when talking about preventing violence is to bring up the topic of religion. Continue reading »

Which Training Program Is Right For Me?

September 7, 2015 in Background Information

One of the questions we often get asked at The CP Journal from people thinking about purchasing the Tactical Analysis online program is whether there is a difference between all of the courses that are available. The short answer to this question is that, for each level of the program, the different, market-specific courses are both similar and different. Allow me to explain.

When the Tactical Analysis program was first adapted to an online format, we only had one version available for all of our clients. Based on the feedback from those early students we realized that, because they were coming from a variety of different professions (private security, law enforcement, the military, universities), there were a few areas we needed to tailor to the individual student.

A common question we would get would be something like this.

“In ‘Module X’ of the Level One class, the example you provided showed how a police officer could apply the clusters to their job. The explanation made a lot of sense, but can you help me understand how that same concept applies to my job in private security?”

We continued to receive similar questions, and when we opened our Online Academy in February of 2015 and re-released our Level 1/Basic Program, we decided to offer four versions of the class for the four different types of professionals that we typically serve. We now have one program designed for members of the military, one for police officers, one for security providers and one for people concerned about school safety. Today, we have found that people who are interested in the program want to see if there are advantages and tradeoffs to taking the course tailored to one market versus another.

In our Tactical Analysis Level 1/Basic Course, there are Continue reading »

How We Work: The Tactical Analysis Online Program

August 28, 2015 in Books and Resources

As part of our “How We Work” series, we answer questions that we have received from readers to pull back the curtain and show you the technology, principles and processes that power our business. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading, make sure you sign up for our Weekly Profile to see those articles that we want to pass along.

In the first “How We Work” article in this series, I wrote about the technology that we use to power The CP Journal, but what I left out of that post was the technology that allows us to actually deliver our products. Our website is the place where many of our clients spend all of their time interacting with us. Whether it’s reading something on our blog, downloading a resource from the library or going through the Tactical Analysis Program in the Academy, there are few things that impact the learning process for our clients as much as our website does.

These are the tools we use to build and deliver our online program on The CP Journal website: Continue reading »

3 Ways That Tactical Analysis Supports the Future of Security

August 25, 2015 in Learning About Learning

In his article, “The Fox and the Hedgehog: Contracting Approaches to Anticipating the Environment,” Dr. Randy Borum talks the type of professionals who will be well prepared to deal with the violent, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions that characterize our current and future security environment.

Navigating the contemporary environment requires a different mindset than was needed during the Cold War. Leaders most likely to succeed are those who embrace uncertainty, are highly adaptive, constantly learning, and know how to maneuver incrementally and with agility. [i]

Dr. Borum’s article, which you can find here, talks about how our next generation of leaders and strategists in security related fields need to be adaptive and need to be able to function effectively in the dynamic and ever-changing situations that will likely characterize the future global security environment. Dr. Borum refers to the type of leader capable of not only embracing uncertainty, but also being able to maneuver incrementally and with agility within it, as foxes. He contrasts the characteristics of the fox with those of the hedgehog, a leader who only has one response to potential threats and is unable to adjust their approach as the situation faces. I happen to agree with Dr. Borum’s perspective. With my experiences as a Marine and how I assess the current challenge faced by America’s police officers and security providers, I believe that the professionals who are able to excel in ambiguity are the ones who will quickly prove their value to their organization.

Embracing uncertainty, however, doesn’t mean that we will avoid attempts to see through the “fog of war.” It means that by acknowledging the presence of uncertainty, adaptive leaders are the ones who Continue reading »

The Tactical Analysis Advanced Course is Available

August 23, 2015 in Training, Updates

Depending on where you are in the world and what types of risks you are concerned about encountering on a daily basis, the challenge of recognizing threats can appear to be daunting.

  • Members of the military may be overseas and deployed into any country on short notice.
  • Police officers can find themselves in an unfamiliar area of town.
  • Executive protection professionals could be conducting an advance and doing surveillance detection in a country that they’ve never been to before.
  • Corporate security professionals may be preparing employees to travel abroad into areas they are unfamiliar with.

How does a professional prepare for these types of situations? Because being an anomaly is a relative term – for someone to stand out and attract your attention, they have to stand out from something – the most capable protectors are the ones who have built an extensive database of experiences allowing them to quickly realize what is normal for the area they’re in and the people within it. Historically, developing this understanding hasn’t been done in a deliberate or repeatable way. It has been left to chance and is often done without any conscious attention.

The problem with that unstructured approach to building a database of knowledge is that it limits who becomes capable of recognizing threats. It becomes hard to pass those experiences and that intuitive understanding of “normal” on to others. The result of an unrepeatable process is often one of two things. One common result is that people are unsure of exactly what they have been told because it wasn’t done in a clear way, which causes them to doubt themselves the first time they are actually consciously assessing someone or an area. The other scenario is that in the absence of valid pre-event indicators, they rely on inaccurate biases and subjective definitions of what the baseline for an area is. Naturally, neither one of these outcomes is desirable.

Until today, the solution to this problem was only taught to elite military and law enforcement units through intensive training seminars. With the addition of the Tactical Analysis Advanced Course to The CP Journal’s online Academy, the process to deliberately establish a baseline by reading human behavior is now available to all of the professionals who serve our country in the military, police our streets and protect us from attacks. For the people who are expected to be capable of proactively preventing violence, the challenge of being able to clearly define the norm in an area, so that anomalies present themselves, is no longer a hurdle that can’t be overcome.

With over six hours of video lessons and real world examples, the Advanced Course expands on the behaviors taught in the Basic Program to provide our students with the ability to read three of the four pillars of observable behavior and the process to establish a baseline through sequential searches. Following the lessons designed to teach the process and the behaviors, the course shows students how to conduct a red team analysis on your baseline so that you can look at the area from your adversary’s perspective and find the vulnerabilities that they could exploit in their crimes and attacks. The class teaches you how to figure out what is going on in the areas being observed and how to anticipate what will make someone stand out from the crowd, so that you can be prepared to be proactive against anyone who requires investigation or action.

According to many of our clients, the biggest takeaway from the Advanced Course wasn’t just the ability to make the observations and assessments needed to get left of bang, but also the newfound capability to clearly articulate and explain what led them to recognize someone who warrants attention. The way that you can learn to do this is by learning:

  • How to assess the collective mood of an area.
  • How to read the environment.
  • How to conduct a hasty and deliberate search.
  • How to think like the adversary to find holes in the baseline that could be exploited.

In the Advanced Course you will learn how to do these things while using real life events and situations to elevate your situational awareness to a level of informed awareness. Knowing how to look for threats and knowing what cues will make the adversary stand out from the crowd is what separates the professionals who are information hunting from the amateurs who are information hoping. The baselining process taught in the Tactical Analysis Advanced Course helps professionals reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in military, police and security operations so that getting left of bang isn’t just a tagline, but the new reality.

When you’re ready to be empowered to take control of your personal safety and shorten the time required to be proficient in analyzing your environment, make the baselining process yours by taking The CP Journal’s Tactical Analysis Advanced Course.

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How We Work: Collecting Information and Staying Current

August 21, 2015 in Books and Resources

As part of our “How We Work” series, we answer questions that we have received from readers to pull back the curtain and show you the technology, principals and processes that power our business. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading, make sure you sign up for our Weekly Profile to see those articles that we want to pass along.

A common question we get from Weekly Profile subscribers relates to the variety of sources of information that we pull from each week in our recommended articles. The question is usually expressed along the lines of, “Do you guys actually go to all of those websites every week to see if there is anything new? Isn’t that really time consuming?” The short answer to this question is no, we don’t go to these sites every week. Instead, we use a number of tools to organize our reading and all of the research that we are doing. We know our readers are busy. We can help you find a way to centralize information in one spot. Here is how we at The CP Journal do it and how you can access it.

We rely on two tools, Feedly and Hootsuite, to centralize information and research. These platforms let us create streams for the eight different areas that help us find sources of information that are relevant to us. These eight areas include: Continue reading »

Are We Looking For One Cluster or Two?

August 18, 2015 in Assessing Individuals

A question that we frequently get asked during our classes here at The CP Journal is whether a person can be displaying two clusters at the same time. In other words, can a person be both “dominant and comfortable” at the same time or “uncomfortable and submissive” simultaneously?

The short answer to this question is no, a person can’t be displaying two clusters at the same time. The dominant, submissive, uncomfortable and comfortable clusters used to assess a person’s current state are mutually exclusive because they each represent a different survival response that the brain can choose from in threatening situations.. Since your brain makes the decision to either fight or run when a perceived stressor or threat presents itself, you can’t be displaying the dominant cluster, the manifestation of the fight response, and the uncomfortable cluster, the manifestation of the flight response, at the same moment in time. It is by the same logic that a person can’t be displaying the dominant cluster and the comfortable cluster concurrently. As the comfortable cluster is the type of body language displayed when no flight or fight response has been triggered, a person can’t be displaying body language that is associated with the stress response and body language associated with the absence of a stress response at any given point either.

It is important to remember that the body’s responses to potential threats are not permanent decisions. As a situation Continue reading »

How We Work – Technology and Platforms

August 14, 2015 in Veterans, Business, and Security

I got to sit down with a friend this week before I presented at the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) conference. I listened to him talk about how he was getting ready to strike out on his own and start his own company. As he talked, his excitement was hugely apparent, but he had a few questions about how we at The CP Journal work, set up the underlying processes that we rely on and what technology we use. Since I was getting ready to speak in just a little while, I only gave him some big picture thoughts, but told him I’d follow up with more detailed information. The email that I was planning on sending to him grew to be quite long, so I figured I’d break it up into a series of posts to share it here so that any other entrepreneurs getting ready to make the leap can find it useful as well.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting new pieces to this series to show how we collect information to stay current, the technology that runs our website, and some of the processes we use to run our company. If you’re looking for the usual weekend reading article we post each Friday, sign up for the Weekly Profile to see the articles we are reading and want to pass on.

The technology and platforms that we use to stay connected are chosen because we work remotely and spend a lot of time travelling, which requires that everything powering our business is synced across our MacBooks, iPhones and iPads. While the software we have chosen to use make life easier for us, they also help us to deliver better service to our clients.

Platforms and Software

Evernote
Everything we do is stored in and collaborated on through Evernote. With different Continue reading »