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Baseline Versus Anomaly: How to Not Get Murdered
The world works because the same thing happens every day. We all behave in predictable ways.
Until we don’t. And the world turns bad.
Remember the story of my friend who killed himself? I missed the anomalies in his baseline behavior. We all missed (or dismissed) the signs until it was too late. I mentioned him briefly before in this book, but there were pieces we missed. Pieces that can help you gain situational awareness in your own life.
This happened back in my high school days. My friend was a line cook at a fast-casual dining joint. Back then, real prep work was involved in food production, not just yanking bags from the freezer. My friend worked alone in the kitchen sometimes and had to prepare the food by chopping up meat and vegetables. One day he slipped with a big knife and cut himself so badly he received workman’s compensation.
Except it wasn’t an accident. He later shared with our close group of friends that he’d done it on purpose. He claimed it was for compensation. But the workman’s comp was only a tiny amount of money, and he came from a well-off family. The money shouldn’t have meant anything to him.
This was the first anomaly. We all thought it was really weird, but what can you say when someone makes a bad decision? It’s their life, right? Plus, he was a big talker. Always painting his every experience as bigger than life. It was easy to write off his admission as pure exaggeration.
Shortly after that incident, he asked around to see if any of us could get him a weapon. We felt uncomfortable about the request coming so soon after he hurt himself. He lied and said he wanted to customize it and see if he could get practice gunsmithing. It was his new hobby, he said. He went around to everyone he knew, friends and family and even some strangers, trying to find a spare firearm.
Second anomaly. But everyone denied the alarm bells or dismissed their concerns. His lies both times made enough sense. “This is what kids are into,” we told ourselves. He was just being a teen, right? We all have weird phases. “He’ll go back to normal soon.”
He started saying he also wanted the gun so he could threaten the new guy dating his ex-girlfriend. We didn’t believe that, we thought it was just chest-thumping. He wasn’t normally a possessive kind of guy. We figured he’d get over her, too. He just needed time. We shouldn’t make too much of his claims.
Anomaly number three. And we still hesitated. Those three disturbances should have been anomalies we took action on. Our failure to act meant there was no opportunity for authorities to intervene
He ended up buying a firearm illegally from a friend of a friend. His peer group was actually glad, because it meant he’d stop asking. Maybe he’d calm down now that he’d got what he wanted. None of us believed he would ever use the weapon for anything. It was just more big talk.
A few weeks later, he shot himself with that weapon.
I’m telling you this sad story because people think Situational Awareness is about what to do in the event of a felonious assault or fatal weather event. How to handle problems when they come out of nowhere. But that’s not all. There are slow bang events as well. Anomalies can manifest months ahead of time, leading up to the bang occurrence. Remember left of bang versus right of bang? Everyone who does not act will say, “I knew something was wrong.”
I want to teach you how to stop hesitating and start acting. When something feels off, you’ll evaluate and act as necessary. So you can save a friend where I did not.
Baseline Versus Anomaly
We always start with definitions so you understand exactly what I mean.
Let’s begin with Baseline. A baseline is what you expect to happen in an environment. Take a coffeeshop as one baseline example. What do you expect to see happening? People sitting around. Machines whirring. Staff talking. All what you expect to happen in that environment. Your observations match what ought to happen there based on your experience.
Baselines are consistent anywhere. Coffeeshops in Paris, France, Tokyo, Japan, and Raleigh, North Carolina all handle business the same way. You can walk in and expect to see orders taken, staff talking, machines working, and so on. Coffeeshop stuff.
Next comes Anomaly. An anomaly is anything that exists in the environment or in the behavior of people and things in the environment that either shouldn’t be there or is missing. If you walk into the coffeeshop and see an employee wearing a clown suit, you know that doesn’t belong if it’s not Halloween. This anomaly may or may not be a threat.
Context matters. Context is additional information that clarifies observed data. In this case, your brain sees the clown suit and starts searching for additional information that would make the clown make sense. What context could fit? Of course—it’s Halloween. That context means you would update your baseline for what is normal at a coffeeshop on Halloween. This is not a threat, it’s just a seasonal costume.
Some changes are perfectly normal and don’t indicate risk or threat. But taking one glance isn’t enough. You must constantly develop new observations because environments constantly change.
Consider three example situations you’ve probably encountered.
Sirens. You expect a little stop and go traffic to and from home. An anomaly is sirens behind you. That’s an anomaly. We have culturally adapted to that anomaly, meaning we pull off to the side so the emergency vehicle can drive through. Again, those sirens are an anomaly. But most of us just dismiss these anomalies.
Scams. A baseline on social media is to get a few notifications, or a few new followers. But when there are anomalies, we often want them to be true. “This attractive person is messaging me with a great personal offer!” We want it to be true. So we pretend it’s a good anomaly. No threat could possibly come from the hot lady asking us to send her money to help her get out of a jam. One of my family members fell for a Jamaican prince scam, not just once but on a regular basis, while he was in assisted living. We asked why he did it and he said, “He needed help; it was the right thing to do.” He got sick while sending them money and briefly went to the hospital, and the Jamaican scammers contacted local police to check on him. They didn’t want to lose a lucrative mark. And he was completely unaware it was all a lie.
Sex. In the 1990s and early 2000s, roofies were common at sketchy bars and sleazy nightclubs. Special straws could identify if chemicals had been mixed into your drink. What’s a girl to do? I tell my daughter to always drive separately from people so they are not dependent. You won’t get driven out to the woods if you’re driving your own car. Always check in with someone periodically, a girlfriend or parent. Doesn’t matter who. Just check in. Tell them where you’re leaving and where you’re going. A white lie is OK—“I’ve got a work call to reply to.” Keep the date where people congregate, especially early on.
The biggest tip I want to give you right now is that the worst threats pretend they’re not an anomaly at all. They try to act like the baseline. But think like the bad guy. They will want to win your trust fast and not break it too soon. And they will make themselves appear more vulnerable than is natural. They over-share. They may also lower your inhibitions by pushing drugs and alcohol on you. Basically, what does the online “Pickup Artistry” crowd teach about how to make conquests? Frequent but not creepy contact.
Consider a baseline for the date and for the itinerary. As one example, use a dog park for your date. Pick a daytime meetup with no rain. If it’s getting late and it’s rainy, those are anomalies to the baseline of the daytime dog park date. If he shows up without a dog, it’s especially bad!
And that’s a key thing to remember: People can say anything. But their actions give them away. Behavior doesn’t match words? Bad situation. Like if you’re going out with someone who says they’re extremely religious, but then they try to have sex on the first date. Always trust their actions over their words. That tip is useful for all situations with and with all people.
Situational Awareness in Practice
I can’t give you exact recommendations on every situation you’ll ever encounter. Because I can’t define every perfect baseline in your world. Then you’ll need strategies to deal with anomalies. The following strategies, mindsets, and practices can help you make sense of your world and stay safe.
Restore Natural Curiosity
To map out your baselines, you need to be curious. Natural curiosity is supreme. Our mind wants to fit things into patterns and dismiss changes. Natural curiosity overrides that tendency so we engage instead of dismissing.
Foster curiosity to support being aware of your surroundings to keep yourself out of trouble. The more naturally curious you stay, the less likely you are to dismiss anomalies. Be “left of bang”—aware enough of your surroundings to keep yourself out of trouble. Don’t dismiss any indication something is off. Pull on that thread to see if anything unravels.
In particular, obey the Rule of Three: If you hit three anomalies you must take an action. Don't wait for three if fewer anomalies justify action, as in the case of one big anomaly. But don't let more than three accumulate before you take action. For most, one will be enough. But even if the first three seem innocent and non-threatening, you still must act. It’s never too early to keep yourself safe. You can always apologize later if you’re wrong, but you can’t bring yourself or your friend back to life.
I’ll tell you another story. I knew a veteran who went on combat patrols in Iraq. Everybody in one particular village flipped them off or threw rocks at their vehicles. That was the baseline. Then one day, one guy in the crowd smiled and waved. That was the first time someone had been nice. They approached him, hoping he was friendly.
Sometimes it’s a “good” thing that is the anomaly.
In this case, the friendly face was there to lure them in. There was an IED planted in the ground before they’d reach the nice guy. The patrol felt something was off so they stayed alert. That helped them spot the danger in time and narrowly avoid death.
Your gut instinct is a gift from your ancestors. We are creatures of habit. Intuition—the limbic system in the midbrain—is even older than our species. Our prefrontal cortex is effective at explaining away or denying what the gut says. Train your gut, then trust it. Curiosity will help you apply these gut feelings to the anomalies you notice.
Threat Decision Equations
Once you’ve got your baseline, fostered curiosity, and noticed an anomaly, follow this equation:
Baseline + Anomaly = Decision
The decision may be to get out as fast as possible if there’s an observable threat equal to that reaction. But many times you’ll want to gather more context. Why is that guy wearing a clown suit? What day is it?
Overreactions follow this equation: Lack of Understanding + Fear = Exaggeration of the threat or dismissal of the threat. So get more information.
That does not mean fear is a mistake. Fear is often rational, and therefore we do not want to compromise our fear response. But exaggeration and/or dismissal of anomalies reduce the efficacy of our decision equation. So in order to not exaggerate or dismiss, overreact or underreact, we have to adjust the understanding side of the equation.
Primal Situational Awareness
The Situational Awareness we are trying to develop when around people is the practice of Real-Time Behavioral Analysis. Because people behave in observable patterns. We are creatures of habit. Our behaviors are non-random. Our behaviors are difficult to unlearn and change. If we experience an internal change, our behavior changes.
The application of real-time behavioral analysis can be expressed as the "Hunter Mindset.” I prefer to call it the Guardian Mindset as my focus is self, not prey. You may not feel like it today, but you have all the tools and equipment you need to be an apex predator. I don't mean this in the sense of you killing or taking advantage of weaker prey, but that we evolved to be acutely aware of our environment and to notice even the smallest changes in those environments. This primal situational awareness provided us the context to anticipate, to predict where both threats and resources will be, thus moving us to the top of the food chain. All you are missing to recapture that ability is the skill.
With primal situational awareness, we:
Think like the apex predator
We proactively search for anomalies and threats
We practice "thinking like the bad guys,” also called "Red Hat" practice
We do not dismiss anomalies so we can act upon them, like a predator, rather than react to them, like prey
We bring environmental (contextual) adaptation to our observations
That last piece is key. Everyone we observe has basic needs that must be met, like food, water, shelter. And more, too. We’ve discussed Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. We use these needs to predict where resources and threats may come from. Because our limbic system is what drives our threat and survival responses, there are some hard-wired behaviors and physiological changes consistent across all people.
When you see a change, go primal. Ask what the need is that has changed. What is the organism trying to accomplish with their change? What need are they fulfilling? This can help you avoid most scams and traps as long as you pay attention to action instead of words.
Speeding up Decision Making
Situation awareness is ultimately a tool used to inform decision-making. We want to bring in observations about our surroundings and the people in them to allow us to make decisions as early as possible. Developing this skill is important not just in response to threats but also in taking advantage of opportunities.
There are five key steps to making faster and smarter decisions. First, proactively search for changes or anomalies in our environments, including in the behavior of the people in those environments. Second, apply our techniques of observation broadly instead of focusing on any specific element of the environment. That requires you to get off your damned phone—this makes you a perpetual target. Third, identify and evaluate anomalies fully to discern any threats. If you find no threat, only then dismiss irrelevant anomalies. Fourth, accumulate only enough cues to act. A 70 percent informed decision taken in time is almost always better than a 100 percent informed decision later, especially in threat evaluation. And finally, based on your observations, make a reasonable and adaptable inference. That means you decide what to do based on your data and then do it.
Act. That’s the whole point of speeding up your decisions, to get to the action part in time. Nothing can save you if you don’t act.
Deepening Context
You are not limited to your own experiences in developing your context. Each experience represents a "File Folder" that informs your baseline for future similar experiences. In addition to your own file folders, you can add the experiences or file folders of others to add depth to the context that informs your baseline. Each of these adds to your ability to triangulate context when confronted with unfamiliar elements of new experiences.
It is like playing connect-the-dots as a child. Each folder you add represents another dot. And the more dots you collect, the clearer the picture becomes.
Take care to only incorporate file folders from trusted sources. Every folder is either good (direct personal experiences that were survived), bad (video games and movies), or incomplete (something trained for but not experienced). Curate your sources.
On Denial and Dismissal
You must train to intentionally look around yourself. And not just look, but really observe. It takes practice to develop the skill to see what is going on in your environment.
Denial or Dismissal is the first phase of decision making. We reject most things as unimportant to what we’re thinking about right now. This is automatic. This is also why "Freeze" is the most basic of the "Fight/Flight/Freeze" response. We struggle to process because we aren’t in observation mode. Denial/Dismissal is the most dangerous phase of decision making as it can paralyze you from taking action, and delay can be deadly.
Denial/Dismissal occurs every time we observe any non-standard element or behavior in our environment. The "I just thought it was . . ." excuse after a threat situation turns into an event is the result of this denial/dismissal. To beat this, you need to practice not denying or dismissing. This goes back to curiosity, but it also requires you to actively engage with that curiosity. Lean into your observations. Look around you. Keep your head on a swivel.
A Situational Awareness Exercise
Go to your familiar restaurant, park, or coffeeshop. Just pick whatever is easiest. Or pick one where you know the expected baseline. Get there and observe the present baseline. Write down your baseline observations and be as detailed as you can get. “There are two baristas behind the register making drinks. Machines are whirring every couple minutes. Between four and eight people are usually standing in line. Half the tables are filled. Everyone looks relaxed and is talking or reading. No one is clustered by the door.”
Then the next day, or whenever you can, go to a new and different place that is just like the one you visited. A different coffeeshop, for example. Note any and every anomaly that’s different from the baseline you observed yesterday. And there may be none on the surface. But there are probably a few. Even if it's the arrangement of tables or where people are standing.
While you’re there, also note anything that changes. A loud crash as someone drops a glass. A huge lunch rush. A thief waving a gun as he holds the place up (hopefully not, but you never know). Write down changes in your environment. Practice noticing them and logging them. Get curious about why they happened. Write down what caused the anomaly, too.
When it comes to threat detection, we have our baseline, anomalies, and context. Context can either change anomalies to fit the baseline—the clown suit on Halloween—or confirm a threat. We also have the concept of relevance. Like the guy standing behind the counter in a clown suit and it’s July seventeenth. If everything goes fine and he acts normal, this anomaly can pose no risk.
The Anomalies I Ignored That You Never Should
After I got out of the military, I moved to Florida with my wife and daughter. And Florida has theme parks on every corner. Those crowds with guests from around the world show you myriad baselines with near-infinite numbers of potential baselines.
So there I was at a theme park for dinner with my wife and a friend, who ran a martial arts studio. During our walk home after dinner, a group of guys heckled us. That was an anomaly. We ignored it. Just kept walking back to the car park. Walking took us farther away from people, nearer the parking lot.
And yet the guys kept following us. That was the second anomaly. Which we also dismissed. “Oh, they’re just going to the parking lot, too.”
No. As it turned out, they were stalking us. The guys confronted us as soon as we got out of earshot and eyesight of the crowd. I tried to de-escalate the issue, but this was a bang event. I stepped in front of my wife to keep them away from her. Then one attacker threw a punch at my friend, who blocked it. I grabbed the other punk, threw him to the ground, and jumped on top of him. Meanwhile, my martial artist friend battled his attacker.
My military background and my martial artist friend’s background were not the right fit for these jerks. We terrified them. They broke off and ran away.
After the event, my wife was shaken up. She’d been training in martial arts at the time so she wasn’t completely at an attacker’s mercy, but she had never been in an altercation before. It takes time to calm down from an experience like that, and eventually she did. But she knew it could have gone badly if we hadn’t been prepared for the fight.
But what could have happened? We ignored verbal aggression and then ignored them following us. A bang situation where an attack actually occurred. We could have confronted them while still in public areas and might have avoided the attack.
I don’t want you to have to be in that situation. Respond to the first anomaly. All you have to do is circle back around to where people are. Even after the second anomaly, we could have easily gone back. We could have said, “I forgot something at the bar.” The longer we let it go, the more obvious it was they were following us.
Returning to where people are reduces the likelihood of an altercation. Because it raises the stakes for the attacker. So if you feel threatened, get somewhere where the baseline is stronger against changing. Where you know you’ll be safe.
This is situational awareness. And now that you know how to keep yourself safe, your brain won’t need to be terrified of the outside world. You’ll be able to figure out when you’re safe, and I mean really safe, not just naive. Practice this skill and your brain will learn when to relax.
