The LEO has to be self-aware in escalated contexts; they have to know what their normal operating baseline is, they have to check their vigilance against their paranoia, and they have to check their anger.
Two concepts can help one to achieve this self-awareness; never assume, and don’t take anything personally. These are two of The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.
Fear is based on assumptions. We are afraid of what we don’t know for sure. We don’t deal well with uncertainty. The problem with assumption is once we’ve come to a nefarious conclusion, we’ve stopped gathering data about the truth of the situation. Fear is a great driver in this. Engaging the situation and the subject means calling for clarity, gathering evidence, scanning for clues on both verbal and nonverbal levels.
Anger is based on offense. When we take things personally a number of thought process begin to trip the anger wires - how-dare-you, who-do-you-think-you-are, you’ve-got-no-respect, you-don’t-like-me. Suddenly we’re wearing our badge on our shoulder. And this festers until we’ve found some justifiable way to engage that serotonin dump, losing proportion on tonality, nonverbal posturing, even use of force.
Monitoring fear and anger is a process of the third brain system in the frontal lobes. It's a critical process such as simply listening to the thought processes in your head, recognizing their impetus for escalation and intervening with a script that speaks to this awareness and proposes a way to handle what’s going on. It may be a simple as breathing deep and count to ten or more sophisticated like asking, “Why am I so easily provoked by this guy?” Either way it’s a dialogue, a conversation in the consciousness.
It's with the frontal lobes that we carry on this conversation to figure out our baseline. It deals with three indicators; our disposition, our energy and our vigilance. The LEO has to be self-aware in escalated contexts; they have to know what their normal operating baseline is, that have to check their vigilance against their paranoia, and they have to check their anger.
Disposition - this is your emotional barometer. Happy, pissed, discouraged, relieved, regardless the level it's going to affect your interaction throughout your shift. And it's going to change during your shift. It is the lens through which your perception is tweaked.
Energy - this is your efficacy quotient, the level of efficiency at which you're doing your job. If you're pumped, had enough sleep and feeling good, you're temporal context moves at the same speed as you move. If you're tired and worn out, you're going to be moving behind it, and if you're hyped, perhaps over caffeinated or RedBulled, you're moving faster than your context, disabling your ability to accurately assess what's going on around you.
Vigilance - hyper, hypo or the Goldilocks stage of vigilance will impact your personal baseline of fear and anger. Balance is key here between paranoia and ambivalence.
Developing a dialogue around these indicators (changing your psychological noise) is as simple as running a question routine through your brain throughout your shift:
- How's my disposition?
- What's my energy level?
- What's going on around me?
So, the ideal LEO baseline is recognizing default responses (perceptual influences), and measuring psychological and emotional levels and then adjusting to the situation. But, here's the problem, fear and anger responses are too easy to come by in younger minds where frontal lobe development, the critical decision making part of the brain that that overrides impulses from the cortex and the limbic system, has yet to reach full maturity. Research indicates that this development does not reach full capacity in male minds until around the age of twenty-nine years. This is where guardian training comes in.
