Alana Winter teaches observation, the first spy school principle for staying focused under pressure. It means using all your senses to notice what's unusual, then processing it separately. She walks through a self-defense story and a business case, then gives two exercises: scan new rooms for exits, and spot three new things each time you enter a familiar space.
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So observation otherwise known in the military as situational awareness. In a nutshell, it means being fully present in the moment. It means using all of your senses to take in all of the available information and paying special attention to anything that's out of the ordinary. Because anything that's out of the ordinary is your harbinger. It's your early warning sign of potential threats or opportunities.
Could you survive a battle in a war zone? You could if you were as well trained as the Navy seals, Special Ops and Recon Marines are. But you're not likely going to be in a military battle. You're entrepreneurs, yet you can learn to see your business and personal battles in a new way. They that's what Alana Winter teaches in her Stiletto Spy School and MI6 Academy. How you can blow through obstacles, make calmer and clearer decisions and achieve even greater success. Alana's title is the Six Principles of Spy School. Please welcome Alana Win.
Susan found herself in the unfortunate position of walking down a dark New York City street alone late at night, wearing only her cute dress, black alligator heels and vintage 1950s purse. She heard footsteps behind her. They sounded heavy, purposeful, she thought they didn't sound like someone casually walking home. She edged to the back of the sidewalk, put her back against a parked car and leaned down, pretending to fiddle with her shoe, hoping she was wrong and he would just walk by. Unfortunately, he approached and as he did, he started to say give me your he probably didn't intend to finish that sentence with stiletto heel across my face as hard as you can, but that is exactly what he got. The stiletto was followed by a sharp elbow jab to the jaw, allowing Susan to escape unscathed and sending him running off in pain. I know this story because Susan had attended my Stiletto Spy School program. And while it was the hard skills that she learned that that thwarted her would be attacker. Long before that, it was the six key principles that are the heart of Stiletto Spy School and our corporate MI6 academy program that came into play. Six principles that let the spy's special ops Navy SEAL commanders gain control over chaos in the most unpredictable circumstances. In my normal hour keynote, I get to teach you all six. And when you come to our live programs you get to learn the skills of the Special Ops hand to hand combat, knife fighting firearms and these principles become ingrained in your mind and body. But today we have only 10 minutes and so I want to give you the first of these skills observation and I want to share with you how crucial that Is help you avoid a common mistake and show you two ways that you can practice it starting today to increase your powers of observation, to recognize and avoid threats and take advantage of opportunities.
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So, observation, otherwise known in the military as situational awareness. In a nutshell, it means being fully present in the moment. It means using all of your senses to take in all of the available information and paying special attention to anything that's out of the ordinary. Because anything that's out of the ordinary is your harbinger. It's your early warning sign of potential threats or opportunities. For me. Oh, I'm sorry. The common mistake I want to share with you first, the common mistake that we make is that we try to take in information and process it at the same time. Research shows us that we can't do two things at once unless one is a fully automatic process. And neither taking in information nor processing it is predictive text on your phone. You all know it's hysterically wrong most of the time. And yet that's exactly what we do when we hear the first few words of someone's sentence and we listen to respond instead of listening to understand what they're actually saying to us. We don't take advantage of all of the available information. We jump to poor conclusions. We miss important clues. It's counterintuitive. But the clue here, the trick is to slow down, to stop and take in all of the information and then figure it out. Even in the most chaotic circumstances, you will always have that moment to figure it out. If you don't, you will miss important information. Missed information equals misinformed, equals bad decisions. If any of our instructors do this, they are dead for me. I'll tell you a story how I put this into play. For me, it was my business partner's tone of voice on the phone. It just sounded half an octave higher than normal. Because I'd been trained to pay attention to anything that was out of the ordinary, I hung up the phone. I downloaded all of the company records and started pouring over them like Susan. I hoped it would be nothing, but I found the trail of embezzlement. Mindful observation is what helps you notice those Metaphorical footsteps in the alley saved Susan's life and saved me from catastrophic business ruin. Now, I said to you that. Oops, how do I do that? There we go. I said to you that this is important not just for avoiding threats, but also for recognizing opportunities. Why do we come to a conference like this, all of these amazing speakers? You could read their books and watch their videos in the comfort of your living room. That's not why you're here. You came for the opportunities to connect and collaborate with all of these other amazing geniuses in the room and the magic that comes from that. And yet, sometimes when we're in a social situation, we can feel stress. And research shows us that stress narrows our peripheral vision. It shuts it down totally. Our attention and our focus narrows, which means we literally can't see everything that's going on around us. So therefore, we can miss some of these opportunities. Luckily, there's a cadre of people who have cracked the code on this umint. In the intelligence community, there's a specialty, umint, Human intelligence. And agents in UMINT are always out looking for opportunities for people they can connect with. Total strangers, foreign nationals that they can connect with and turn as informants, as spies. We can learn a lot from them. Joe Navarro, former FBI lead, counterintelligence agents, prolific author and one of our instructors, teaches us that when we enter a new novel social environment, our brain is primed to scan for three things. First, we scan for threats to our safety. Our primal brain is always sorting for dangers. Then we scan for the social hierarchy. What's the power dynamic in the room? Who are the dominant individuals? Who's powerful? Who are the peons? Wait, am I one of the peons? Then we scan for communication. This is, you know, the familiar feeling when you enter a room and you scan for the familiar face and that inclination to run to that familiar face for first. So to counteract this, agents are trained that when they enter a room, to stand just off of the doorway and first scan the room for all of the exits and the floor plan. Then they're trained to scan for something else. They're trained to scan for the fire extinguisher, not because they're afraid of fire, but because you have to really look to find this. And slowing down to find this neutral red object satisfies your brain's need to check for threats and dangers. It occupies your brain so that it interrupts it from forming snap judgments about the environment and the people that you see. You have to slow down to find. And as you do you increase your level of situational awareness? As your situational awareness goes up, giving yourself something to do, your stress dissipates. It allows us to open our vision and perspective so we can see the opportunities for that chance conversation that could lead to something big. So that's in novel environments. What about your daily environment where it's very easy to become complacent? In your daily environment, the simple trick is, every time you go to a different room in your house, different room in your office, stop and look for three new things. That plant. Does that need water? Jill's coffee mug always says something interesting. That guy in accounting, is he wearing a toupee? This simple act of noticing three new things will bring you into mindful observation. Instead of the mindless state that we normally cruise in, now, it's a practice. It's one that I work on continually. Just the other day, I was on the subway spacing out and one of my instructors happened to be in the same subway car and took great glee at being able to sneak up on me and yell in my face. Winter, pay attention. We think this is hard work, but in reality, it's just a mindset shift. It's just a decision. This isn't about being in some hyper vigilant nervous state. It's really just simple mindfulness. And once we decide that, it becomes like upgraded software running in the back of our minds. So observation, being fully present in the moment, using all of your senses, observe first and then process. Notice what's out of the ordinary. In new environments, scan for something specific. The doors, the fire extinguishers. In your daily environments, notice three new things. Now, people, don't take our program and I'm not sharing this with you today. So you can become a spy or join a special ops team, but in our daily environment, you as entrepreneurs, as thought leaders, as disruptors, are facing the same unpredictable and chaotic circumstances. Unchartered territory. And using this skill of observation can help you recognize opportunities and create amazing innovations. Thank you.
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