SAMENVATTING (1):
Situational
Awareness and the Mind: Re-rethinking Cooper’s Colors
Mistranslated and
Misunderstood
Unfortunately, whereas Cooper’s original Color Code is an
effective tool to help ramp up to a mental state suited for combat, the
“situational awareness” version so commonly used today is essentially useless
and misleading. It fundamentally misunderstands how the brain scans for and
responds to threats, and thus can harm shooters by leading them astray during
training and development of their situational awareness skills.
Duality of Grey
Matter
The automatic mind runs the vast majority of what you do. It
multitasks and makes decisions very quickly without you ever consciously
thinking about them. The deliberate mind, on the other hand, only deals with
one thing at a time, and does so much more slowly than the automatic mind. This
distinction is critical to understanding decision making, because each system
does so via different processes.
Your Script:
Recognition Primed Decision Making
When the automatic mind matches the information it’s
receiving from the senses to one of the patterns stored in its library, it
applies an appropriate heuristic.
The deliberate mind doesn’t even enter the decision-making
process unless the automatic mind first notes a problem.
We’re almost always in “Condition White,” because the
deliberate mind is busy focusing on the task at hand and not scanning for
threats.
We don’t respond properly to threats when:
a) we don’t perceive the relevant information because our
sensors are directed elsewhere;
b) our brains don’t interpret that information correctly to
alert us to the threat; or
c) our brains don’t immediately know the appropriate action
script or heuristic with which to respond to an identified threat.
Thus, training should focus both on building habits that
increase the likelihood of the sensors capturing relevant information, and then
on building known patterns and action scripts in the automatic mind to
correctly identify and respond to potential threats.
Violent encounters often occur much too quickly for the
deliberate mind ever to react and make conscious decisions, so we must set
ourselves up for success by training our automatic minds to spot threats and
apply the appropriate heuristic for that situation.
Codify Your Code
If you don’t have the time and resources for high quality
resource training, there are other options. The goal is just to build the
patterns and responses into the automatic mind, which can be done visually.
The brain has no mental simulation to judge against during
its intuitive decision making process.
As You See So Shall
You Compete
These same principles can be applied to competitive
shooting, as well as defensive situations.
Many top level competitors, in any form of competition from
shooting to martial arts to ball sports, will tell you that the instant you
stop to think is the instant you’ve lost.
The Color Code
Correct
An interesting note: this mental preparation of the
automatic mind before the fight kicks off is pretty much exactly what Cooper
intended with his original version of the Color Code. He focused on the
psychological difficulty of the decision to kill, but the principles of
decision making apply exactly as I’ve described. Col. Cooper spent decades
combatting the ineffective reinterpretation of his Code so commonly heard
today, because “constant vigilance” just doesn’t work. If you’re going to teach
Cooper’s Colors, don’t teach it as advocating a mythical and unattainable
concept of situational awareness. Teach it as the man intended: mental
preparation for the decision to press the trigger. A tool to set your automatic
mind up for success.
----------------------------------
Reacties
Een reactie posten