🎯 Reducing risk through calm attention and early choice
Situational awareness is often spoken about as if it’s instinctive — something you either have or you don’t. That’s a comforting thought for those who believe they already possess it, and a convenient excuse for those who haven’t given it much thought at all.
✅ In truth, it is neither. Situational awareness is shaped by where you’ve grown up, what you’ve been exposed to, and whether you’ve ever needed to pay close attention to what’s happening around you. It is a skill. And like any skill, it can be learned, sharpened, and maintained.
🇬🇧 In the UK, many high-net-worth and prominent families have spent decades living in relatively predictable, well-protected environments. There is nothing wrong with that. But it means their awareness has gone largely untested — and right now, the conditions around them are shifting.
🚨⌚️🎯 Street crime, watch thefts, targeted robberies, and opportunistic offending are no longer confined to certain postcodes or late hours. In 2024 alone, approximately £60 million worth of luxury watches were stolen in the UK, with an average of 21 high-end timepieces reported missing every single day. Theft from the person reached a peak of over 151,000 offences in the 2024/25 reporting year. The National Crime Agency has confirmed that organised crime groups now routinely canvass wealthy areas, targeting people who appear distracted, predictable, or unaware.
👀 These offenders follow routine, visibility, and distraction — not postcodes. Situational awareness is what allows people to stay a step ahead without living in fear or appearing guarded.
🧭 What situational awareness actually is
The term has been around for decades, rooted in military and aviation settings where the cost of getting it wrong was measured in lives. The most widely cited definition comes from Dr Mica Endsley, who in 1995 described it as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.”
✅ Stripped of the academic language, that means three linked stages:
👁️ Perception – noticing what’s around you. Who is nearby? What are they doing? What’s changed since you last looked?
🧠 Comprehension – understanding what it means when taken together. Is that person’s behaviour consistent with the setting? Does that vehicle belong there?
🔮 Projection – anticipating what may happen next. If this situation continues to develop, where does it lead? What are my options?
📊 Research in aviation safety has found that 76% of awareness-related errors occur at the very first level — perception. People simply fail to notice what is right in front of them. A further 20% fail at comprehension. Only a tiny fraction of errors happen at the projection stage. Put bluntly: the biggest risk isn’t failing to predict the future. It’s failing to see the present.
🎙️ Dan Schilling, a former US Special Operations officer who spent over thirty years in some of the most dangerous environments on earth, joined me recently on The Defuse Podcast to discuss his book The Power of Awareness (Ep. 031). In it, he splits the phrase into its two parts. The “situation” is external — your environment, the people around you, the conditions you’re operating in. That exists whether you notice it or not. The “awareness” is entirely internal — your choice to pay attention. The situation is outside your control. Whether you are aware of it is 100% within it.
✅ In everyday terms, situational awareness means staying connected to your surroundings and noticing change early enough that you still have options. It has nothing to do with suspicion or tension. Done properly, it is calm, quiet, and unremarkable.
🌍 Why the environment shapes awareness
There is an uncomfortable truth here that rarely gets acknowledged: people who grow up in environments where risk is closer to the surface tend to develop stronger awareness earlier.
🕶️ Much of my own situational awareness wasn’t theoretical. It was developed operating covertly in Northern Ireland and later refined while working in hostile environments with the Metropolitan Police and alongside British intelligence. The lesson was consistent wherever I was operating: the earlier you notice change, the less stress, confrontation or force is ever required. That lesson applies just as much to a London street, hotel lobby or restaurant as it does to any overtly hostile setting.
🚗 Compare that with someone who has spent most of their life in gated communities, chauffeured vehicles, and private members’ clubs. They haven’t needed the skill. That doesn’t make them incapable — it simply means their awareness hasn’t been tested. And untested awareness tends to fail when it’s needed most.
✅ The good news is that awareness can be developed at any stage. It is a learnable, refinable skill. But it does require honesty about where you are starting from.
🧠⚡️ Where intuition fits — and why most people ignore it
Intuition is frequently misunderstood. People treat it as something mystical, unreliable, or vaguely feminine. Neuroscience says otherwise. Intuition is the brain’s ability to process information and reach a conclusion faster than conscious thought can keep up.
🧬 Research has shown that several parts of the brain work together during intuitive responses. The amygdala — a small, almond-shaped structure deep within the brain — acts as an early warning system. It rapidly flags situations that match patterns associated with past danger or discomfort. Other brain regions integrate emotional signals with prior experience and draw on thousands of hours of accumulated, often unconscious, learning. Together, they allow you to reach a judgment before your conscious mind has had time to work out why.
✅ What this means in practice is that when someone says “Something didn’t feel right,” their brain has recognised a pattern and sent a signal — often before they can consciously explain what it was. That feeling is not guesswork. It is a rapid, unconscious pattern recognition built on a lifetime of stored experience.
⚖️ It is worth drawing a clear line between intuition and instinct, because the two are often confused. In my security work, the distinction matters enormously. Instinct is reactive. Something has already happened — someone throws a punch, and you flinch, duck, or swing back. That’s instinct. Intuition is what happens before. It’s the feeling that the punch is coming, seconds or minutes before anyone moves. If you’re already relying on instinct, you’ve missed the window where you had choices. The goal is never to need it.
🎓 I was trained by Dr Robert Fein, co-author of the US Secret Service study on targeted violence, and one of the things that training reinforced was the importance of pre-incident indicators — the observable behaviours that almost always precede acts of interpersonal violence. Forced familiarity, excessive charm, unsolicited offers of help, refusal to accept “no” — these signals are present before most incidents, and people frequently notice them but choose to dismiss them. Gavin de Becker made the same case in The Gift of Fear, describing intuition as “knowing without knowing why.” His point, which my own casework confirms time and again, is that every person has an internal warning system standing ready to protect them — but most people override it because acting on it feels socially awkward or inconvenient.
🧾 In the cases I’ve reviewed over more than thirty-five years in policing and security, the pattern repeats itself time and again. In almost every instance where someone has been targeted, the victim recognised after the fact that something had felt wrong beforehand. They noticed it. They just didn’t act on it.
✅ The lesson is straightforward: trust the nudge. If you feel something is off, honour it. If you’re wrong, the cost is a mild inconvenience. If you’re right, the benefit could be everything.
🏁 Even seasoned professionals get this wrong. Schilling tells the story of losing a $100,000 race truck to Mexican car thieves during the Baja 1000 off-road race — stolen in roughly ninety seconds while he and his teammate were six hundred metres away on a hillside. He watched it happen. The man had worked in twenty-six countries, operated under an alias, and never lost so much as a bullet or a t-shirt in a foreign environment. Yet he missed the warning signs that day because he let other priorities override what his gut was telling him. That experience, he says, is what made him write the book.
📉📈 There is a reason even experienced people fall into this trap, and it is something I see regularly with the families I advise. We live in what is statistically the safest period in human history. You are less likely to be involved in a war, be attacked, or have your possessions stolen now than at any previous time. That’s good news. But it comes with a cost: safety breeds complacency. When you ignore a warning signal and nothing bad happens — which, ninety-eight times out of a hundred, it won’t — you reinforce the wrong behaviour. You train yourself to dismiss the very signals designed to protect you. Over time, that becomes a habit. And habits are hard to break in the split second you actually need them.
⚠️ Myths that need challenging
Working with high-net-worth families over many years, I hear the same assumptions come up again and again. Each one carries risk.
❌ “This doesn’t happen around here.”
It does. The National Crime Agency has confirmed that organised crime groups specifically canvass affluent areas. Watch theft gangs, for instance, have been documented arriving from overseas to target wealthy individuals in Knightsbridge, Mayfair, and Soho — people who were observed in restaurants and then followed. Police believe some gang members could identify luxury brands and estimate their value to the nearest euro. Offenders travel. They follow routine and visible value, not postcodes.
❌ “I don’t look like a target.”
Targets are not chosen on confidence alone. Predictability, distraction, and visible wealth matter far more. Security research consistently shows that offenders assess how people move, how distracted they are, and whether they appear aware of their surroundings. People who look lost, repeatedly check directions, hesitate at junctions, or seem absorbed in their phone stand out far more than those who move calmly and with purpose.
❌ “If something was wrong, I’d know.”
Often you do know — briefly — and then talk yourself out of it. This is one of the most common patterns in case reviews. The brain sends a signal, and the conscious mind overrides it because acting on it would feel inconvenient or embarrassing. As de Becker observed, no animal in the wild would suddenly feel fear and then spend its energy convincing itself that it was probably nothing.
❌ “Security is for other people.”
Security starts with attention and behaviour, long before it involves guards, vehicles, or technology. A close protection team cannot compensate for a principal who is routinely inattentive, publicly predictable, and dismissive of risk. Personal security begins with personal responsibility.
📱⚠️ The smartphone problem
No honest discussion of situational awareness today can avoid the single biggest destroyer of attention: the smartphone.
The evidence is clear: mobile phone use while walking significantly reduces situational awareness and increases the risk of both accidents and crime victimisation. People on their phones cross streets without looking, fail to register changes in their environment, and become far easier to approach and target. Nearly one-third of pedestrians in high-risk areas have been observed crossing streets while distracted by their phones.
For prominent individuals, the problem is compounded. Visibility and predictability are already elevated. Adding distraction to that equation creates a near-perfect target profile: someone who is identifiable, follows a routine, carries a routine, carries visible valuables, and isn’t paying attention.
The phone has become such a default behaviour that most people don’t even recognise they’re doing it. Walking from a restaurant to a car, crossing a hotel lobby, waiting for a taxi — these are the moments of transition where risk is highest, and they are precisely the moments when phones tend to come out.
Stand outside any London underground station after dark and watch. People emerge from the platform and immediately reach for their phones, unable to bear the thought that someone might have contacted them during the eight minutes underground. In winter, the effect is worse: the screen lights up their face, advertises to anyone watching that they have a phone worth taking, and blinds their night vision just as they step into an uncontrolled street environment. Then they put their earbuds in, shutting down another sense entirely. They cannot hear footsteps behind them. They cannot hear someone closing the distance. They have voluntarily switched off two of the primary tools their brain uses to keep them safe.
The answer is not to stop using your phone. It is to stop using it when it puts you at greatest risk. Check your messages inside the tube station, inside the airport, inside the restaurant — and then put it away before you step outside. That small habit alone changes the equation.
🚶♂️🚪🚗 Situational awareness in everyday life
Most problems don’t begin with drama. They begin with conditions that people stop noticing. Everyday awareness means paying attention to things that most people walk past without a second glance. Alcohol-fuelled environments where people are spilling onto the street with nothing particular to do. Queues and bottlenecks where frustration builds, exits are limited, and valuables are on display. Parked vehicles that don’t fit — engines running without reason, repeated presence in the same spot. Transitions — leaving a venue, approaching your car, entering a building, stepping off public transport. And behaviour that doesn’t match the setting — someone closing distance without reason, or out of sync with everyone else around them.
None of these necessarily means danger. They mean pay attention and keep your options open.
🎯👀 How targeting works
Another uncomfortable reality: people who cause harm rarely act at random. Almost every criminal act, from a bag snatch to a planned assault, involves some degree of pre-operational observation. This is something I have studied extensively through my own training and through the cases Defuse Global manages. Offenders look at how people move, how distracted they are, and whether they appear aware of their location. Security professionals have long understood this, and the research backs it up.
Offenders are often surprisingly sloppy during their planning and observation phase. They tend to get away with it because most people simply aren’t looking. An individual who practices even basic situational awareness can often spot these preparatory behaviours as they unfold and take steps to avoid a dangerous situation or prevent one from developing.
The watch theft cases are instructive. Analysis of theft-from-the-person offences shows that victims were often observed in restaurants — where longer sleeves were removed, and watches became visible — before being followed outside. This suggests a level of planning that goes beyond simple opportunism: a network of individuals capable of identifying luxury items and coordinating the theft in a different location.
This isn’t about projecting toughness. It’s about projecting presence. Calm, oriented movement — knowing where you are and where you’re going — makes you harder to assess and less appealing to approach.
🎚️🧠 A model for adjustable awareness
In the 1970s, Colonel Jeff Cooper, a United States Marine and firearms expert, developed a colour-coded system for thinking about awareness levels. Originally designed for military and law enforcement use, it has since been widely adopted by security professionals and the general public alike.
The model isn’t complicated.
⚪ White — Unaware
Absorbed in thought, locked into a screen, oblivious to what’s around you. This is the state most people occupy in public more often than they’d like to admit.
🟡 Yellow — Calm awareness
Relaxed but attentive — not expecting trouble, but aware of your surroundings and difficult to surprise. This is where you should aim to be whenever you leave a secure space.
🟠 Orange — Focused attention
Something specific has drawn your attention — an unusual person, an unexpected movement, a change in pattern — and you are focused on assessing it.
🔴 Red — Action
You have identified a credible threat and are acting — leaving, creating distance, seeking help.
The principle matters more than the labels: attention should rise and fall without drama. The aim is to spend most of your time at Yellow — a state you can maintain all day without any cost to your wellbeing or enjoyment of life. The critical thing is never to be caught at White when a situation demands more.
As one instructor put it, you can shift smoothly from Yellow to Orange and back again without anyone noticing. But if a genuine threat catches you at White, you have to jump several levels at once — and that is where panic lives.
✅ What to do when awareness tells you something
Awareness without a next step is just anxiety. The value of noticing something is what you do with the information.
In my work advising prominent individuals and their families, I always come back to the same simple sequence. Once your awareness and intuition have flagged something, ask yourself one question: Do I have a problem? Say it to yourself clearly. The answer is either yes or no. If your answer is “I’m not sure” or “maybe,” then the answer is yes — because you always err on the side of safety.
If the answer is no, carry on. If the answer is yes, make a plan. It does not need to be complicated. Your plan might be as simple as: leave through a different exit. Cross the road. Walk into a hotel lobby where people are. Call someone and tell them where you are. Ask the manager to walk you to your car. Often, the best plan is the simplest one — create distance. The further you are from a problem, the safer you become. That is the only equation that matters.
Once you have a plan, act on it — and act decisively. Do not spend fifteen minutes unpicking whether it is the best plan. It is the best plan you have right now, and that is enough. Decisive action disrupts any threat. If someone is assessing you as a potential target, the moment you change direction with purpose, alter your route, or move towards other people, their calculation changes. You are no longer predictable. You are no longer passive. This is something I have seen repeatedly in the cases I’ve managed — the moment a potential victim does something unexpected, the offender’s plan falls apart.
A common concern is freezing — the fear that in the moment, you simply won’t be able to move. The answer to that is embedded in the plan itself. If your plan has steps, all you need to do is focus on step one. Not the whole plan. Just the first thing. Turn left. Stand up. Start walking. That single action breaks the freeze, and once you are moving, step two follows naturally. People perform well when they know what to do next. A plan gives you that.
🧘♂️ Awareness without anxiety
This is the part that matters most, and the part most people get wrong.
Good situational awareness should never look like paranoia. It should never present you as anxious, unsure, or on edge. The people who cause harm are scanning quietly for opportunity. They notice distraction, isolation, uncertainty, and visible anxiety. Someone who appears flustered, overly reactive, or constantly looking over their shoulder actually draws more attention than someone moving calmly and with purpose.
Calm awareness projects confidence without challenge. It signals presence, not preoccupation. In my experience working with principals and their close protection teams, the individuals who are hardest to target are not the ones surrounded by guards. They are the ones who move with quiet purpose, trust their own signals, and make small adjustments early — long before anyone else has noticed a problem. True situational awareness is the opposite of living in fear. Fear gains credibility when it isn’t applied wastefully.
The aim is not to broadcast vigilance, but to blend in while staying connected.
📍 Knowing where you are matters
Location awareness is a simple but often overlooked part of personal safety.
If something does go wrong, your ability to describe your location clearly becomes critical. Emergency services rely on accurate information. If you don’t know the street name, nearby landmarks, or even the general area, the response can be delayed at exactly the wrong moment. Relying entirely on a phone to navigate without orienting yourself can leave you struggling to communicate under stress.
A quiet habit helps: know the street or area you are in, notice nearby landmarks, and be aware of the last junction you passed. It takes seconds and pays dividends when clarity matters. And if you must use your phone for directions, do it before you step outside — not while walking. Nothing advertises that you are lost quite like standing on a pavement, turning your phone in circles, trying to work out which way the blue dot is facing.
🍷⚠️ A brief caution on alcohol and substances
This point is offered simply as a reminder, not a lecture: alcohol and drug use reduce situational awareness. Anything that dulls perception, slows judgment, or increases misplaced confidence makes it harder to notice change early.
For prominent individuals, that matters more than for most. Their visibility and predictability are already higher. When you add impaired judgement to that mix, the margins narrow considerably.
🎯 The real aim
Situational awareness is not about confrontation. It is about preserving choice.
It gives you permission to leave early, change direction, create space, or alter plans without explanation. If you’re wrong, the cost is small — a minor inconvenience, a different route taken. If you’re right, the benefit is significant — an incident avoided, a confrontation that never happened, a family kept safe.
For high-net-worth and prominent families, that quiet ability to stay ahead of risk — to notice before you need to react — is often the difference between inconvenience and incident.
Good awareness blends in. Anxiety stands out. The aim is not tension, but presence — calm, purposeful, and always with options.
Listen to the full conversation with Dan Schilling, Lt. Col, USAF (ret.) on The Defuse Podcast: Ep. 031 — Improving Personal Safety with the Power of Awareness
👤 About the Author
Philip Grindell is the founder and CEO of Defuse Global, a threat investigation and crisis management consultancy serving prominent individuals and organisations. With over 35 years in law enforcement and security, including roles as Counter Terrorism Security Coordinator for the Royal Family and Government Ministers, he brings deep expertise to complex security challenges. Trained in behavioural threat assessment by Dr Robert Fein, co-author of the US Secret Service study on targeted violence, he is among fewer than 300 globally recognised Chartered Security Professionals. He is the author of ‘Personal Threat Management: The practitioner’s guide to keeping clients safer‘ (2025) and host of a weekly podcast on threat management. www.defuseglobal.com
