Recently I completed the Behavioural Profiling and Situational Awareness online course produced by Emergence LLC and presented by Yousef Badou.
Mr. Badou is a US Marine veteran (with 3 tours in Iraq) who contributed to the development of the behavioural profiling programme used by the USMC.
As an introduction, I thought it was a concise overview of the principles of behavioural profiling and situational awareness.
A lot is covered in the ~1 hour online course (especially for the cost, at $9 USD). For someone new to it, it really opens up a window into the world that your senses disregard if you’re not in tune to your environment. For the practitioner, it is a good review from the ground up of basics, reframed from another perspective. He states that if he can, through imparting his knowledge, give you even an extra second (or more) of advantage to act, he will have given you an edge in surviving an event. This is all predicated upon becoming in-tune with the environment around you and feeling the baseline.
Mr. Badou’s examples and delivery are engaging and spot-on. Such as the recognition of “pre-incident indicators” are all learnable and actionable. Though a large portion of the material he covered was a review to me, I did like the way he explained some things I hadn’t heard before – the concept of “File Folders”, for instance and how they affect one’s decision making processes.
The entire overview hit the salient points while providing easily understandable context for each. Broad topics covered are:
- Introduction to Behavioural Profiling (with physiology and psychology backgrounders)
- File Folders and Denial (as well as anomalies and perception)
- Fear and Brain Errors (including the Limbic system), and;
- Final Thoughts
Mr. Badou references a few different additional sources for further reading in the form of Patrick Van Horne’s Left of Bang, Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear and Dave Grossman’s On Combat – all excellent primary sources for this type of material.
I recommend giving Emergence LLC a look and trying out their introductory offering. I am also looking forward to further modules they will be putting out – such as Observable Behaviours and Behavioural Indicators.
Till next time, stay warm, stay safe and stay crafty.
