Can I See Your Hands?

A Guide To Situational Awareness, Personal Risk Management, Resilience and Security by Dr Gav Schneider.

The title of this book: Can I See Your Hands refers to a key outcome – being able to tell whether or not people want to cause us harm. To explain it very simply, if you can see someone’s hands and they are not concealing them, holding a weapon or positioning to strike you, one’s levels of trust and confidence can increase. This simple example can serve as a reminder to us all in many of the complex moments we have to deal with, and difficult decisions we have to make, in everyday life.

One of the key messages is that we need to accept that we must all take responsibility, to some degree, for our own safety and security. Despite their best intentions, authorities are fighting an intense and seemingly losing battle against extremism, cyber-crime and other evolving threats, simply because of the limited resources available to them in countering them. The goal is for you as an individual to become part of the solution. This may mean you taking a more active role in contributing to your country, your region or your neighborhood’s specific security and safety setup. The aim is to not only make you, but also the community you live in, a more unattractive target for those who wish to harm others.

Not accepting a lack of safety only makes us vulnerable

Accepting that something bad may happen to us is no easy matter, especially when that something bad may include losing our lives or the lives of loved ones, etc. And yet these are the very things we need to invest time and effort into, as unpleasant as it may be. As human beings, whilst we are wired to focus on things that may cause us harm, we often seem to ignore unpalatable issues, we believe that crime or terrorist attacks won’t happen to us, and if it has happened before, that it can’t possibly happen again. This aspect of denial only created vulnerability. The goal should be one of empowerment. In my experience, I have found that people fear most that which they do not understand. With that in mind, understanding how crimes and terrorist attacks are committed, and how we could proactively act to minimise these threats happening to us is crucial. The first step in this process is to accept that it could happen to you. Depending on where you live and what you have been exposed to in your life this could be very easy or very difficult to do… It is crucial that we deal, once and for all, with the denial most of us harbor that somehow, we are exempt from these criminal activities and bad things happening to us.

Can I See your Hands provides the knowledge and understanding needed for both security professionals and the everyday person to be empowered and take action to make their own lives and their loved ones safer.

For more articles like this, subscribe to the Security Newsletter

Story credit: ASIAL (authored by Dr Gav Schneider)

Source: https://www.asial.com.au/blog/can-i-see-your-hands

About the author: Dr Schneider is an acknowledged leader in the field of human based risk management and the psychology of risk. He is a serial entrepreneur and has been running his own businesses since 2001. He is a leading academic in his field and is a much sought after International speaker. Dr Schneider was a speaker at the 2017 ASIAL Conference.