Latest / Wheels Up - Safety and Security for Business, Executive and VIP Travellers Podcast / Ep 17 – The Physiology of Protection: Performing Under Pressure with Dr Adam Szlezak & Ben Hartley
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome to the Wheels Up Podcast. Join Troy and Ben from Panoptic Solutions as they explore topics such as travel safety, security, close protection, combatives, law enforcement, military insights, business, and well-being. This is the Wheels Up Podcast. speaker-1: Welcome back to another episode of Wheels Up with Ben Hosking. Unfortunately I've got no Troy Clayton nearby at the moment, but I am joined today by Ben Hartley, who is the training manager at Panoptic Solutions. He's he's come on board in this last year and been heavily involved in the delivery of our services across Asia Pacific as well as Australia with some of our domestic training content. Ben's got a a pretty expansive history across the Australian Defence Force. He he enlisted as a digger initially back in the day when he was not a hundred years old. Left and you trade qualified, Ben, is that right? Sorry? Trade qualified as well, is that right? yeah. Yep. So what did you what did you qualify in big fella? I initially joined the army when I was eighteen, so yeah, back in the day. Joined as a grunt with a bunch of mates, not knowing much else what I wanted to do with life and then yeah, re enlisted a bit later on in life. W so in between your your experiences there working Brisbane Sydney, whereabouts w we non army. Yeah, non army. Yeah, so I had my own business based here on the Gold Coast. Yeah. I was in the construction game as a chippy and then later became a builder. And in between I was playing a bit of football on that overseas. Yeah, it's a it's a part of your history that I always tend to forget but I always find very interesting is not only did you play footy, but you chose to play a completely different league to most Aussies. Where did you go, mate? What where did you go and what'd you do? yeah, I played American football. Yeah. Managed to represent Queensland, then Australia. Then I was fortunate enough to get picked up, played a bit of pro ball over in Europe. Yeah, cool. In the German football league. What was the name of your team? the Dresden Monarchs. The Dresden Monarchs. Yeah, so I was on the east side of Germany, which is a pretty cool part of Germany. did that for a couple of years. Yeah, so I did that in between running a business back here in Australia and then was it twenty seventeen I re enlisted, went back to the army, obviously a little bit Older this time, a little bit more life experience, so I decided to go through the officer stream to the dark side, yep, and went down to RMC and did 18 months down there and come out in the Corps of Military Police. Now, before anyone curses your name because you're wearing the red hat out there handing out tickets on base, I I know that you chose that for a very specific reason. What was the decision to go into that space for you? my main interest with the MPs was they hold a close protection capability. Capability. So I did a couple of years as a junior subby, like an LT, and then I was fortunate enough to get thrown on the CP course. Yep. Completed the CP course and then pretty much didn't look back from there. So most of my career was in a specialist role in running CP teams as a team leader, and then later later on I became the capability manager across Army. So what I think this is probably worth noting, and it it it links back to what we do at Panoptic. When you say capability manager, can you just explain that a little bit more in the lengths? You know, obviously I come from a law enforcement background, you're from military. What what does that capability manager sort of connect in with you, that sort of global space, sort of national space for Australia? Yeah, so it's sort of twofold. Internally, my main sort of role was like modernisation, training, a lot of like internal development of the actual capability itself as well as running teams. I help instruct on some courses in that space as well. And then outwardly focus I was involved with ANZC. In the DIGPRO space. So I was a representative for that for about three years. Yep. Representing Army. And just quickly on the ANZ CDC DIGPRO, plenty of acronyms all locked into one there. So Australian New Zealand Counterterrorism Committee is ANZCDC. Yep. And DIGPRO is the parochial language that we shorthand dignitary protection down to for those listening at home. Yep, exactly. So it was our Army's contribution to the dignitary protection space, which is really good getting to work with government agencies at state and federal level, like AFP. getting exposed to things like ASEAN summits and you know planning for COP thirty one and that sort of thing. So high level sort of government stuff. Yep. I was also the NATO representative for close protection. So involved with forums, helped write the NATO close protection handbook. Wow. Involved with that, worked with a bunch of coalition teams. And for for that handbook, are you is that talking about dignitary protection in permissive, non permissive, semi, black? Both yeah so yeah, it's it's the so any any nation or country that's a part of NATO had access to that handbook and it was a collaborative effort to put it together and it's just basically standards on how to to run missions and tasks and jobs in the C P space. Yeah, right. Yep. And yeah, so and then work with a bunch of coalition partners forces in the C P space as well. So managed to live with the travel and work with other teams, which is good. Good exposure. Good experience. Well mate, we're we're incredibly glad to have you. I know, you know, since you've come on board, the syllabus for training has been enhanced with your two finger typing and the endless hours that you've spent at the keyboard. for those that That have never seen Ben work at a laptop, it's like watching someone with crayons trying to draw on the screen. But I I'll tell you the the amount of work that he put into the syllabus that has been written for the closure protection operatives course that Panoptic Solutions are currently training people in is absolutely world class. It's an eight-day residential program that Ben's written from start to finish. draws on all sorts of different standards, expectations, both military law enforcement, into the private industry and across the skill sets that are utilized for permissive and semi-permissive and a little bit of non permissive sort of knowledge as well. So yeah, incredibly happy to have you, Ben. And you know you mentioned standards just before. You've only just got back from a conference with Troy as well. correct. Yeah. We went to the B E P B E P P conference, so the Board of Executive Protection Professionals Conference. Yep. Straight on a drunket Ben. That sounds very officer of you. yeah, it was a good good opportunity. got to do a lot of networking with other people in the executive protection field. Yep. Yeah, great exposure, good opportunity. We're also heavily invested in writing the training standards with the B P P. Yep. which I've been doing in the background. which is So you're a part of one of their committees on the training standards, are you? Yep. And that's currently in the process of being collaboratively written and put together at the moment. Yep. Which will be released. I think we only just received something from James Cameron the correct from the BPP for their release of the ANSI standards for close protection. Yep. So big things happening. I think they're really sort of blazing a path as far as trying to bring people together and establish a standard across the board 'cause similar to what's happening from my experience from the conference anyway, similar to what's happening in the US as far as standards go is what we're experiencing here in Australia in the industry. So it's they're collaboratively trying to network with people and enforce those standards to basically raise the standard, which is what we need here. Yep. Something a bit more explicit rather than you've done this course and now you qualify with a cert three and close protection. Yeah, definitely. No, I look I applaud it. I think it's awesome. I know you're going to be doing some late nights with that technical committee that you're riding on. So yeah, good luck. And then we're also Luckily enough to have been able to get some more time from Doctor Adam. Doctor Adam, I'll I'll I'll chuck in your intro from the previous podcast that we've done for the listeners at home. But thank you very much for coming back today, mate. I appreciate you know, your time is very, very hard to get. So yeah, we're we're speaker-0: Happy to be you. speaker-1: looking forward to this. This is this is gonna be a conversation that we're gonna go through a little bit of stuff in regards to the training space, specifically the elements of the course that you've written there, Ben. And we're gonna throw to Dr. Adam with a a few little psychophysiological questions and and get a little bit of value for the users at home that might be interested in how these things apply in the field both from a practical skill set sense but then also from a how your body can handle it, how you can handle it better yourself. Sounds good. Yeah, looking forward to it. Dr. Adam what have you been doing lately? speaker-0: that's a good question. I'm always juggling projects. so you know, personal and professional. Yep. Trying to keep my training up, weights and a bit of martial arts and trying to train with guys who are speaker-1: How is the jits going, mate? speaker-0: It's good. It's good. What I yeah, con consistency's the key, I think as yeah, we were trained martial arts here and we're like the gym. They're trying to keep it up. speaker-1: Some like the gym more than others, I mean obviously I've been enjoying the buffet a bit more than the gym, but it's balance. speaker-0: Well you could you got it? speaker-1: That's kind of you mate. have you been tossing Troy around much lately? Have you thrown him by the head lately? Yeah. speaker-0: bit a little bit troy's T Troy's pretty handy actually sometimes speaker-1: Don't say that out loud. Don't say that out loud. We've got a big ego. speaker-0: Yeah, so if you if you get underneath Troy he's a bit hard. So I think we've got a look if you get underneath Troy he's a bit hard, so I'm probably gonna try to stay on top a bit more. Yeah, but no he's he's he's good fun to train with actually. If I can get him into onto the mats and speaker-1: Yeah, trying to get trying to get him away from the laptop can be hard sometimes. Yeah. So speaker-0: And as we all are. speaker-1: yeah, spot on. All right, so we'll well mate, other than that, I also accompanied you to something just recently as well. Where you delivered something that relates back to this psychophysiological stuff that we're talking about. speaker-0: Yeah, that's right. So that was that was interesting when we did some leadership training with senior leaders at Hilton and that was you know that was a great experience. I think the the I think the team were you know there's sort of what we expect from high level leaders, right? They're looking for exactly they're looking for speaker-1: Absolutely yeah. Self development in that space. speaker-0: practical tools, they're looking for things that they can action in real time. hotels are obviously a high pressure environment. You know, you have I mean you we all travel around the world, we speaker-1: Well it's service industry, isn't it? It's person to person, which is where the pressure comes from. speaker-0: And exactly and the thing is a lot of the time it's you know, as you guys know, it's like performing under pressure is not necessarily having things go to plan. They rarely go to plan. You can do all the planning in the world, which is great, but you've got to have those tools for when things don't go to plastic. Might have a a fire in the building, elevators speaker-1: Yes, but speaker-0: aren't working. speaker-1: Coffee machine at the b breakfast buffet isn't working. It's got a cranky ex cop that's just sitting there rampaging around the buffet. speaker-0: Exactly right. So you've got to then have the tools to deal with keeping that operation running when you know you go to work and things don't go to plan as you expected. And also obviously the tools to deal with challenging interactions with customers, patrons, members of the community. So yeah, so it was good to share some of those sort of performance and and conflict management skills. speaker-1: We managed to record most of that. I'm hoping once we've had it all edited we can put it out on the YouTube channel as well with a little bit of bits and pieces from the advice that you were able to provide. Obviously we've got to be conscious of what is IP and what can and can't be released, but yeah, really keen to get that up for people to be able to sort of see you in action as well with the training that you've done for a a very high level. So speaker-0: That'll be good. speaker-1: One of the things that I I wanna throw into this one right at the very e start is that towards the end of this podcast, what we're planning on covering off on is some of that high level strategic psychophysiological skill sets and tools that you utilize with us at Panoptic Solutions, with us and the the the systems that we utilize for our close protection. But before we get there, before we get to the the the high level, you know, doctor level stuff, Ben, do you wanna just run us through A couple of the sort of training pieces from the course. Yep. Correct. And we had eight out of nine graduates of that course. So not everyone ended up finishing it off. different reasons for different folks. But you you push that through. That was a a residential programme for the close protection course. Do you want to sort of run start to finish and then go through some of the things that you know, the the PID, maybe the range day, the the defensive tactics? Yeah, awesome. yeah, so we we actually just ran the first Panaptic Panaptic solutions close protection course. It was a nine day course that we ran here on the Gold Coast. I know it's been a sorry nine, I think I might have said eight, yeah, nine yeah just discounting a day for you. it's been a project I think that Troy's wanted to do for a long time and then like I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to come on as a training manager and then we kicked it off this year. So yeah, nine day course it's not your traditional type of course. We're not aiming at pumping out certificates and high fives and bum slaps. It's more about there are bum slaps though for the those that want the bum slaps, yeah. Yeah, definitely. We need a cater for everyone. When I'm on staff there's bum slaps, yeah. What happens on course stays on course. So but the idea is We're more focused on those gaps that exist in the industry and how we as a company can start to look at filling those gaps. I think that's a good point, with the gaps 'cause we talk about a lot of the time in the training that we do offer the point one percent margin of error, right? And I think that's probably where when when we mention soft skills and gaps and issues, we're often just talking about those really minor little pickups that people just shove off or put off or th they just don't see the value of Yeah. Exactly. so the the the the course as a whole, I mean we started We start with day one with a physical fitness assessment. You know, and it's a pass fail. It's a barrier assessment, so if you don't if you don't pass it you can't qualify on the course. Yep. you you can get a cert three in close protection, you know, in two or three days from an RTO pretty easily. However, what we're trying to do is is go against the tide a little bit and and look at filling some of those gaps and actually training future operatives and giving them the skill sets on how to do this job so that they can have a career in this industry but also build a professional reputation for themselves but also allow those that want to come and be a part of the panoptic brand. Yep. which is very much about standards and culture. Yeah. So that's where that sort of came from. So it's not an easy course. a lot I like you said Months and months of banging at the keyboard like a bit of a monkey. I sort of took it as a my own personal mandate to try and write a international standard course. Yep. 'cause I put my own name on it and it we've sort of adapted and evolved it since the first one. But yeah, so it was scripted very methodically and purposefully. There's nothing in it that is just there randomly. Yeah. So it comes from experience, you know, years of training, doing the job. Things I've read, articles, the mountain of textbooks I've got in the office there, it's all sort of come in as a There is a legitimate mountain of textbooks as well. And there's a lot of fucking highlighters and sticky marks as well. Yeah, I don't think you've left anything off that course that you possibly could have No. We we jammed as much as we could into nine days. Yeah. And and it yeah, that's how we're approaching it. Having heard the feedback at the end when I I came back from a job and was able to be there for the last day, the e everything I got from whether it was the the initial fitness through to the medical, through to the the defensive tactics, the whatever it was, it was all just more. The students just asking, it would be great if we could have more. Yeah. But then, you know, how long's a piece of string, how much time you p have people take off work and Yeah, exactly. It's it's gonna cost more, it's gonna I mean more time Physically on the course. It it's it's a balancing act. So what so we've gone with nine days. Whether we change that in the future, we'll test and adjust maybe after the second one. But I somewhere around that point I think is a good yep, a good mark that we hit. They're long days. I guess the easiest way to describe the course is it's a bit of a hybrid course. So we've taken the principles and the training from close protection and then we putting in a bit of an executive protection context. From that commercial space. Yeah, from that commercial space. So it's it prepares you know future operatives to do both. speaker-0: Yep. speaker-1: So it's like this, you know, worst case scenario, this is what it looks like. You know, best case scenario, this is what it looks like. But it's more about giving them the tools to be able to make those decisions and understand the why they're behind why we are teaching what we're doing. Because a lot of courses just regurgitate the same shit and it's just like do this because I was taught this. And this is the way that you do it. Yep. Whereas we've taken the approach of more of a mentoring type approach and it's like the reason we're doing this is because of this and these are the things you need to think about so that you can make an effective decision on the ground when you're protecting a principal. 'Cause it's let's face it, we're not going to be there when these trainees are out doing a job. Maybe we will, but nine times out of ten we're not going to be there. So it's it's well the idea is for them to set themselves up with a skill set and push into their own career, right? I mean, sure we We hand out contracts with work and there's positions available with Panoptics at different times. But the reality is most of these people, once they've completed a course like this, they're industry ready, good to go. That's the whole idea of, you know, committing to the residential part of this program. Yep. So we run it a bit like a military sole course. It is residential. It's team based. 'Cause we have a very a bit of a pressure cooker. We have a very short period of time to put a bunch of civilians into a high stressful, high pressure situation to expose them to that level of training but also enable them to by the end of it the final assessment is they get to run a simulated itinerary with a VIP or principal in a short matter of time. So there's a a lot we pack in but it the end result is is that it that clear intention of of and giving them those tools to be able to do that job. To run a whole job. Yeah. Mate sorry, I I I'll just throw to you real quickly. I you know there's two things here that I just want to ask first before we sort of l dig into some of the specific training that you do on the course. The first one Ben mentioned that I'd love to get your take on is the how someone who might struggle with a pass fail pressure test would would react. And also that residential pressure where, you know, like because these those two things there immediately are psychological, right? But they're gonna have a physiological response on you and how you perform. If you're talking to people that are dealing speaker-0: sort of social pressures and that personal self pressure. Are you sort of thinking as things they want me to do? Well it's a good it's a good question and I was actually just gonna chime in and and add a point there because I think what's great about this course is it's very much focused on capability development. You know, I think I mean I've always been in business for myself, so yeah. I get paid based on results. So if you have great qualifications, whatever they may be, great experiences, you've got a nice C B, etcetera, et cetera, but you can't deliver results in industry, you don't get paid. Correct. speaker-1: Well you're not getting another phone call either. speaker-0: You're not getting another another job. That's exactly right. So because this is a very capability focused program, I think ultimately ultimately that then kind of ties into some of the key points you've just addressed there. Addressing issues that are real-world barriers in someone's operating system that then can be turned around to give them some advantage so they can become capable when they need to be capable, or they're a liability. speaker-1: Which which which which brings me straight to that the past fail fitness test, right? You're either an asset or a liability based on the result of that. It is very binary, it's a zero or a one, you yes or a no. Someone comes in, they're struggling with nerves. What's something you're doing in a situation like I mean you're a competitive athlete, no less. What are you doing as someone who now understands this at the the doctor level to deal with those nerves? speaker-0: Yeah, so the f so the first thing is you've got to understand and again, right back to what Ben was mentioning, you've got to understand the why this is happening, right? You can't you can't do you can't I always explain it like if you're going to build a swimming pool, you that's that's the goal, that's the objective, right? That's what you want. So you pick your tools accordingly. You don't just randomly pick up which particular hemmer because speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: I a masonry hammer or I need a core hammer and hopefully I'll get something eventually. So you've got to know, you know, you've got to be pretty goal directed. Yep. So you have to understand where you're gonna go and then you have to understand what it is you're trying to achieve and also what barriers you're coming up against. And that gets into the nervous system. So you've got to so the big thing that we talk about that I always talk about and I've obviously talked about with you guys. speaker-1: it's been a huge help, absolutely. speaker-0: Is is helping people understand what's really going on on the inside. There's a few there's a few factors here, but basically we're either in a state of perceived safety or perceived threat. So and I use the term perceived because it's not about whether you're actually safe or not. It's about whether your internal bodily systems perceive that you're safe. Yeah, okay. So when you're in that perceived safety state, you know, you're kind of like sitting around the campfire with the clan back in our sort of ancestors' days and you're feeling safe. when you're out in that hunter-gatherer mode you know, you're in kind of fight or flight, you know, that's the that's the perceived threat state. Yep. So an interesting thing about this too is we've got these these elements here where you've got people working in groups, you put eyes on them. You've got people working in a team, they're not familiar with these certain speaker-1: You've got the risk of social embarrassment. speaker-0: They've got risk of losing face. Yeah well that's that's a biological that's a biological part of our you know who we are. fundamentally. I mean if you if our ancestors got kicked out of the clan into and they were out in the Savannah plains by themselves, there's chances. So that's kind of speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: basic basic survival biology or basic sort of evolutionary biology. So you've got to be aware of these processes. But the way we do it, and obviously we won't go into that too much now, but the way we do it is we start understanding and noticing what changes start happening within ourselves. Yep. Because in real time, when we start getting into this fight or flight state, we become a little bit like up in our heads and we're starting to look for threats to and problems to solve. So we're no longer connected with our bodies, we're no longer grounded. Yep. And then as a result we start getting into this reactive fight or flight state. Yeah. Where we don't have that ability to think, perform connect, interact effectively with the environment, with other people. speaker-1: There's that's probably actually a really good moment that you you can maybe dig into a little. I wasn't there, but I heard about Guppy. which which I think probably leads to this perfectly. You're talking about like a reactive fight or flight and the the lack of sort of executive function to be able to step back and see the problem. Do you want to give us the Guppy story without breaching names? Yeah, yeah. So we won't we won't mention names and if he listens then he'll probably have a bit of a chuckle anyway. But part of the fitness at fitness assessment at the end is a fifty A swim with a a tread water attached to the end of it, but they've got to do it in clothing. For the territorians in the audience who might be listening, there's no salt water anywhere nearby. It's totally safe, chlorinated only. And one of the particular participants on the course thought he'd wear a pair of really thick cotton trapsuit pants. And and to be honest, like even though it's day one, a lot of the a lot of his teammates picked it up and said, Hey mate, that's probably not the best option, but he decided to roll with it anyway and back himself and Jumped in the pool and by the end of the fifty meters you could see the panic had hit his face and he was literally like cutting donuts in the water, just trying to keep his head above water 'cause he was sinking. So you know, you learn from experience I guess. speaker-0: That I'm just gonna jump in there. That's a really good example too, because you can imagine in that moment how much was he really sinking and burning energy because that was a consequence of his pants or that was just the fact that Pennic set set in. He becomes triggered, his nervous system's dysregulated, pumping all that speaker-1: It's exactly what it was. speaker-0: all that emotional and physical energy. speaker-1: Exactly what it was. Yep. And if we're talking about speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, if and we're w if we put that in the context of like that standards and culture on the point one percent We can sit here and laugh about it now in a training environment. Th the reason training's so important is because you need to overcome these hurdles so you're ready for the real you know, game day. You're on a job and say you dump all of your nervous energy in the morning because you fuck something up, because you don't actually take the time to think about it, down regulate, get yourself in the right headspace before you head out the door and you're flapped and you're flustered and you forget your I don't know, your comms earpiece or whatever it is, then you're complete you're you're a liability. You're completely combat ineffective for the unit as you're going out to support the team in the field. Whether that's a A permissive dig pro environment where you're looking after a you know governor general, say, or you're overseas looking after a corporate in Iraq doing a PSD move. Like if you can't regulate your own nervous system, which is why I think the work you do with us, Adam, is instrumental to our growth and success in the Asia-Pacific region, is because we've got operators that are trained to not only just deal with, right, these are the black and white circumstances of a protection environment, but these are also the tools psycho psychophysiologically that you also need to be the best all of the time. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. And let's face it, you're constantly in perceived threat environments, right? Even if it's dealing with Absolutely. speaker-1: Well, even if I'm just going home to the teenagers. speaker-0: yeah, absolutely. But I mean you think about like dealing and we talked about this, you know, paparazzi or media getting in your face. Even even then the repu reputational risk of how your focus shifts to paparazzi and you don't focus on the principal. Of course. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: So there's so many you like that and that's all part of obviously that situational awareness. So we haven't noticed you mentioned that word here, but I mean that's all the context, isn't it? Like being able to be aware and engage with your environment, yourself and the people around you. And when you're in that when dysregulated state and you don't have the tools to to manage it, which and and let's face it too, that constantly happens. Like we'll get spiked into that regularly. So we've got to have the tools in real speaker-1: It's a people industry. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's it's all about people. speaker-0: Yeah, right. Yeah, you're definitely not getting away from speaker-1: No, you're Some of those people, even in regards to what you're talking about there, you in you and Ben are scheduled in the you know later part of this year to go down and do some security manager training with a a a major institution down in Sydney. You guys have been booked in to go down there and talk to them about these exact things. And these are this is a group of senior security leaders that are working in a major institution that's you know globally recognized. And your responsibility is to go down there and and and talk to them about this situational awareness stuff, right? Which sounds crazy when you think about about it that you know someone would need to talk to you about situationally because everyone's quite quickly able to say, that's rubbish, you I'm always situationally aware. Well are you? What about when you're walking along with your phone out and you're you text messaging your mates or whatever it is, are still situationally aware even if you're an a an elite tactical operator? No, I don't think so. So speaker-0: And that's a good point, right? Because I think it's fun for us to have these conversations so we can share the in like I always love sharing insights that other people don't have access to. Yep. Because when we deal with high performers, like you just me who you mentioned, they're looking for this because they know they speaker-1: They're gonna need it, yeah. speaker-0: aware of that they're open to that so so for the average person they might think well surely no one needs those skills they already have them yeah no high performers know we need to stay on top of this that we need to actively seek out these training strategies yeah and be practicing them regularly with people who can help us take ourselves to the next level and address the risks that we face. speaker-1: I I I I did some training a while ago with a a sales guy and one of the things that he said that's just stuck with me ever since is training isn't what you've done, it's what you do. And i it was couched at the time in the concept of how you might see elite level athletes or Olympians training. They they might be the best in the world but they still have a coach. They might they might be training for the Olympics or a you know, a a ma a major competition, but they still have someone there guiding them through what skills they need. It's not like you get to a level and that's it, you just know everything. And you don't have to learn anything more contemporary that's recent and relevant. So yeah, I I think it's one of the most powerful things that we can be sort of talking about at the moment is this this regulation. Ben after you they go through the pass fail fitness test, what are some of the other sort of barriers that the students are faced with during that course? Yeah, so I I I won't go into I'll sort of talk about it, but I won't go into too much detail 'cause I don't want to sort of ruin it for anyone that does come and do the course. But we throw them in a bit of a pressure cooker again. and it we we we run a P I D assessment, so a positive ID. D assessment and it's not about how good their skills are. so basically what happens is they're exposed to six different scenarios in a in a reality-based training sort of environment, and they're given a bit of a debrief and explained the whole process. And we're not assessing their skills to use a firearm or you know how to manipulate a manu move a principal because it's just an individual bodyguard drill. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: We are purely doing it in a way to expose them to themselves. So it's like holding up a mirror in front of them so that they can see based on their life experience, you know, their past, their history, what they've learnt, what they've read over life, how they react to situations. So it's a they get exposed to six different scenarios which vary from low to high threat. Yep. And then we just we have a data system on how we record it. and and capture all that and then there's a a debrief at the end of it. Again, we're not assessing what how they perform. What it is they do. It's what they do. Yeah. 'Cause that this is really It's a bit of an ego check to be honest and it's a bit of a leveler for the course to sort of begin. 'Cause from there that's when we start building into the trainees and a very methodical approach to the training and start building up and giving them the tools. So it's a it's a really good tool to start with. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: and expose them to like stress, quick decision making, how they you know, how they make how they make those decisions and what what are the triggers for making some of those decisions, which flows very much into what Adam brings into. And a a big thing that we're we're gonna be able to add to the next course, which we weren't able to do on the first course, is like that's where Dr. Adam comes in. Yep. And posts that PID assessment and and debrief is when Dr. Adam will start doing some of a presentation In my opinion it's it's it's a bit of a missing link and i it's it was something I was aware of and not until I met Adam and we've had multiple coffees in the office in the training office and spoken about things and it's like plenty of caffeine. Yeah, plenty of caffeine. th this is the missing link. And this is what is so unique and niche about the training that we do at Panoptic that a lot of courses don't offer it 'cause they focus on the tactical stuff. Yeah. We are actually really focusing on I won't take too much at Adam's thunder, but like that holistic approach and that's maybe where I'll hand board to Adam. Before you do and Ad Adam, I'll I'll I'll don't hold you up, but can you just describe what the signals of stress are? speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, it's really great. So if I I'll give you a little bit of context really quickly, because I I I tell this sort of analogy to everyone, otherwise we just don't, you know, it's all just words, right? Yeah. I mean, if we think of ourselves as humans are great at survival, we have evolved to survive threat, attack, our ancestors have, and we've got their biology. So if we think that our ancestors were down at the waterhole and a crocodile would come and attack them, right? They didn't they didn't get taken out by the crocodile. Yep. They were able to reactively flee the situation. Split second, less than split second stuff, right? Yep. in that moment physiology kicks into gear. And that is the survival biology that I often just keep refer to as survival biology, but that's how fight or flight. speaker-1: Response or Thursday afternoon in Darwin. One of the two or two. speaker-0: And so basically what that what that really feels like though is quite interesting because you know, our heart rate increases, our our blood pressure increases, yeah, our our muscle tenicity increases, we feel this tension in our body. Our body starts we start sweating for thermoregulation because obviously we're gonna be overheating, so we need to cool down. we start breathing with our accessory respiratory muscles, so our upper upper respiratory muscles instead of our diaphragm starts working, right? So to get that little bit of extra gas exchange occurring. And you know, of course our fo our cognition is linked into that, linked into this mind-body process as well. So our thinking, our focus narrows and become very kind of tunnel vision focused. And of course we're reactive in our behavior. You know, we don't sit around and sort of contemplate because the crocodile would have taken us out. We just get out of there. So that reactive biology is is is survival biology. However key word is reactive in terms of our behaviour. We do things without thinking it through, without being aware of the full situation. So unless we're actually dealing with a crocodile attack, that can make us quite a liability in almost every circumstance we're gonna we're gonna encounter in our worlds, right? speaker-1: So say, you know, you Ben's talked about the positive identification threats and you know, we've got students or people are in the field 'cause I you know, you could quite easily say these signals of stress, they they're relayed through the field. We talked about the paparazzi situation before, but you know, you might have a a fixated fan, someone who's you know absolutely focused on the principal, they're charging towards them. You don't want to have an international incident, you know, ground stabilized someone who's just a super fan, they actually care about the principal, but you also have to recognise the situation. What what are some of the things that you're y you would advise an operator in that situation to try and do to down regulate a bit. speaker-0: Yeah, well the big thing that we teach in physiology of protection is, you know, the first one is R, right? So an and R stands for recognise and regulate. Yep. So in traditional psychological terms we think of the the head as as kind of like the mind or the brain. Yeah. And that kinda comes in historical context, that kinda comes from the way medicine was done initially. Medicine has been divided up into body parts. So you know, you've got the foot's the podiatrist and the heart's cardiologist and the head's the psychiatrist or psychologist or whatever. But you know, from my background and also from my experience as an athlete, I knew that, well, that's not how nature works, right? You're kind of we're kind of one speaker-1: Totally linked in. speaker-0: living, breathing creature, right? So In that sense, the mind and the body are not separate. And what we know about our cognition, our behavior, our performance, and stress survival processes is that there's this constant integration of bottom-up and top-down processes. The mind and the body are connected. A lot of the time we experience perceived threats, you know, just through our gut instinct, right? But it doesn't make any cognitive sense to us. And obviously when we get overwhelmed, feel when we become challenged by a stressful situation. We can't think. We don't have those cognitive strategies. So in coming back to your question, what all what do I do? Well, firstly we let people know this because if they don't they don't know what they don't know. Yep. They need to know this core content. This is how human psychophysiology works. And then we talk about that first step, that R, that recognise and regulate. So that means starting to notice and learn to recognise and connect with the body in real time. So the question I always ask people in the training we do is, How do you feel in this situation? So we'll do exercises, training exercises. And I'll go, How do you feel? And sometimes I'll be like, And I said, No, I don't mean like feelings in your head like happy or sad, like I mean emotions in terms of physiological, physical experiences. Yeah. How do you feel in your shoulders when you feel that? what changes in your in your stomach, what changes in your hands, what changes in your posture. It's really interesting because very rarely, I mean people become triggered all the time in situations, but when you ask them to kind of observe and critique themselves and what they could experience, they've got very little self-awareness. So in a nutshell it's like this embodied self-awareness we've got to start developing so they can notice that their physiological state is becoming dysregulated. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And then they can start and that's actually the first step in regulation. speaker-1: I think a key of that also too is because doing this job you're in such close proximity to a principal, your ability to be able to self regulate doing this job is critical. Absolutely. Because a principal will pick up on that, you know, pick up on those signs or feel that tension. Well they what are they called? Mirroring neurons or something something like that? speaker-0: Yeah, I neuroneurisms. There's a more than that though, it's really interesting. So, yeah, so th so this is like this is something it's not talked about a lot and it's a really important part of what we do. So we when we some of the two key areas we use for physiology protection are self-regulated performance, yep, and also conflict management, de-escalation, challenging behavior management, right? Now, when you're whether you're trying to de-escalate a situation with someone who's becoming, you know, Agitated, heightened in their emotional state or whatever, yeah, or you're working with the principal, your entire body is able to then send communicate signals of either perceived safety or perceived threat to the people around you. So and that's the entire body, not just not just the brain, so mirror neurons in the brain, but the entire system, right? The entire bodily system is then and the way we move. a good example is like if you if you yawn and you're kind of empty. someone yawns you can it can often be contagious right because we connect through these different experiences so we really do kind of co-regulate help co-regulate each other so that's probably more of the term there I think Ben we probably want to emphasize is that co-regulation because it's it's getting away from like I guess parts of the body to the idea that we can help other people and regulate and and vice versa. Now you can imagine if you're working with the principal or someone who's probably safe to begin with. So, you know, speaker-1: Huge part of it. speaker-0: in respect to like how do we help people regulate themselves, well they've got to obviously recognize their own state so they can regulate. That's gonna have performance implications. speaker-1: So they can then provide that for the principal as well. speaker-0: Yeah, well yeah. And then of course that's the other aspect of it. Then they're gonna have to be able to send signals intentionally to support the principle. Yeah. And also may maybe maybe someone they have to de-escalate like paparazzi or whatever it may be. speaker-1: Benny, y we we step away from the PID stuff and you're you're talking about this is where you start to build up the trainees and the students and you you begin to introduce Doctor Adam in the actual syllabus. What what are some of the other things that You're putting these students through to really sort of amp up the pressure and simulate things that they'd be finding in the field. So every morning starts with some lip form of combatants training. Is it like P T. Yeah. It's done as a as a in a small team. We cover all the aspects of close protection, so you'd so is that like kidney point nine and Again. What happens on course station? It's it's all relative to the job. So we're it's more about giving those skill sets so that they can, you know, avoid conflict, you know, disengage it with a threat if they needed to, and ultimately protect the principal and get off the X. That's what we're more focused on with that combative side. A a lot of what I saw from the videos that were done from that course, i it was there wasn't a whole lot of striking. No. There was a lot more control and physical movement of people and individuals and holds and restraints and that sort of stuff. Yeah. Is there a reason And I I know you worked with Clancy on this, big shout out to Clancy Roberts who was heavily involved in the delivery of that stuff. was there a reason you s you stayed away from the striking elements? It's more about like disengaging. Yep. Not getting decisively engaged 'cause ultimately the mission of C P is to protect the principal. So I mean if you're working as a you know in a one man, two man team, you know, one up sort of thing, th there is no reason to to get engaged with a threat because then you can't do your job, you know, and another threat can appear from somewhere else. So playing devil's advocate, wouldn't I be right in saying that if you are lethal enough to or effective enough to d take that threat out, you've protected the principal? How come you wouldn't how come you how come you've chosen to focus on that as opposed to the stay and play approach? again, it's about getting off the X. I is the biggest thing. I for me Like there's a lot of close protection training out there which is what I would call like an old school old ment sort of mentality where it's you know where it's sort of very focused about controlling that immediate situation, but it's it's more about getting removing the principal from that threat. Yep. you know, if if it comes to a point where you have to use you know, lethal force or non lethal force in some sort of way, then that's what it calls for and that's why we train to that highest sort of level. But obviously we want to avoid that at all costs and remove that principle from the threat if if we can. Does that come back to anything, that reasoning, the logic of getting off the X? Like is that is that based in doctrine or is that any well so we teach the the three the like we took RTA so re reaction to attack. Yep. There's three principles. So the first one is to remove or reduce the threat. The second is to remove The principal from the threat, when the third one is to place assets between the threat and the principal. Yep. So we we teach those principles and then they sort of flow into everything else that we that we teach. Yep. So it's more about making an assessment on the ground when it's occurring. what is the best course of action to take. to me about in the office as you've built this out is this this idea of an intelligent an intelligent operator. Yep. Even I can't say it. When you're talking about an intelligent operator, what what you know, like because you just talked speaker-0: What is that? speaker-1: about those three principles, you know, reducing, removing, and replacing, you know, other assets in the way, what what are the tools that the intelligent operator comes out of this course with that enables them to be able to operate at that level? so the whole so this sort of flows on with what Adam's sort of been sharing. So it the concept comes back to what we call as the philosophy of protection. I'm a big reader and advocate of stoicism and and sort of get very much into that and that's sort of where that's sort of where all that sort of flowed from. So the intelligent operator is is a concept created around someone that is has an ability to think, adapt and evolve in situations. The threats that we're seeing nowadays in the security environment in my opinion are not increasing, they're getting faster. The you know, they've got access to cyber, AI, digital stuff, just like, you know, all of the law enforcement agencies, you know, we're seeing the increasing threat of drones and you know, we're seeing that that whole threat picture is evolving and changing. Whereas I think a lot of security training is still very archaic. It's still based, you know, ten, fifteen years ago and we're still just doing the same thing. And it bring comes back to some of my initial statements when I like, Well, we're looking at what those gaps are. Yep. And that's what the whole philosophy of protection is, is is developing and creating an intelligent operator. There's a lot of courses that do the tactical training because it sells courses. Yep. And you get a certificate at the end of it, but it doesn't give the soft skills, the interpersonal skills, the ability to think and evolve and adapt on your feet a an ability to think outside the box. If I'm brutally honest, this This is such a niche role during CP. It's not for everybody. And I think, you know, Hollywood hasn't done it any favours, the industry any favours, you know, movies and stuff like that haven't done it any favours 'cause we like to glamorise it and, you know, look at movies like The Bodyguard and all the other ones out there that make it look all this sexy stuff with a Frank Farmer is actually my DJ name. Hey, that's but you know, the earpiece in the suit and the the concealed pistol and stuff like that and and I mean ninety percent of this job is waiting. you know, sitting around in a car, in a lobby, in a in a back office waiting. It's that one percent when something goes to shit and you have to react and you have to be able respond quickly and with the appropriate amount of force and and within that context and within that situation. And that's that's the dichotomy of this whole job, you know. speaker-0: Can I add I want to add something in there that I think is really relevant because you mentioned intelligent operators are really great visual. Obviously I've seen the visual. I love the visual. speaker-1: But it's speaker-0: But but the con the context here, you know, like I when I mentioned earlier, about capability and you mentioned capability Ben and we've talked about capability and from a you know, from my high performance background personally and professionally too, it's all about capability development, right? Yeah. And and this is really quite interesting too, because even me even in context to in even in relation to sort of the the combatives approach, you know, w we have sort of like fundamental human biological needs. We have to feel connected with others because it helps us feel safe. We have to sort of feel in control of our actions and the environment 'cause it helps us feel safe. We have to feel safe. speaker-1: Psychological comfort or speaker-0: Well, we need that we need that kind of but it's not it's not psychological, it's it's really biological. It's hard wired into us. You know, we need to it's we have we've evolved for safety, so we need things that make us feel safe. We need to feel safe in ourselves. Yeah. So, you know, defensive strategies like this is one of the greatest things about, you know, jujitsu and grappling arts is that you you're learning so many you're learning how to escape out of hell. Mm. So, you know, it's easy to be 'cause a lot of s lot of arts like striking arts, right, have have kind of a an aggression element to them, if you if they're not sort of Administered the right way. You know, you go and punch the pillow to sort of get your angry out, you just get angrier. Yeah. Interestingly. But when you combine that with the right kind of scope of managing that perceived threat, which obviously you do if someone's pinning you down and you learn how to get out of there and get into a safe situation, you're satisfying a fundamental human biological need. So that's like a core skill that we need for nervous system regulation. So we put that into context, you know, that just that's what the intelligent operator needs, right? Needs a system, a collective system framework that will help them be regulated in every encounter that they're going to face so that not so that they can perform optimally, but so that they can get their physiolog physiology back into a state where they have a chance just to do what they could otherwise do before they get dysregulated. And I want to make that really that point clear here because I've said this to Olympic coaches as well that I've worked with over the years, because I've worked with Olympic athletes. You know, hyp high performance isn't performing at your best all the time or taking your performance to that next level. It's learning how to get your shit back on track when you're losing it. Yeah. And you will. So true. You will constantly lose it. You'll constantly get situations that throw you curveballs. So how do you become what is the intelligent operator? It's the one who is functional through high pressure. Yep. speaker-1: Mate mate, I could I couldn't agree with that more. Even if I just take that example and throw it into my own life and I think about the times that I've had to do, you know, building clearances for warrants, you know, high risk arrests, that sort of stuff, there is always that one moment where you should you can train till the fucking cows come home. You go into a dynamic and exigent environment where you've got no control over anything, and you've just got to deposit your skills into a a setting where it's high risk, high speed, and high pressure. There is always that one moment when you finish that warrant or that run through for a house or you know, whatever it is that you're doing. And you look back and you go, fuck. I fuck that so royally. And if in the moment you let that get to you, that's when your skill set goes to shit. Like you you you could be the fucking world's greatest room clearance operator in the world, but if you go through a fucking open door and you split to the you know, the the greatest area of sorry, the the area of least responsibility rather than the the area with the greatest responsibility and you expose yourself or your teammate to a hostile threat, a lethal threat, you're never gonna live that down. And if you go in that environment and you have that moment where you're like just fucked up and you can't re-regulate yourself or down regulate yourself to get ready for the next room entry say you survived you're cooked you're cooked and so's your team so like absolutely what you're talking about there is it's integral to being successful in a high pressure situation. speaker-0: You see it you see it interestingly, I don't think people comment on this or make sense of it. you see it at the Olympic Games. There's lot of injuries before the Olympic Games. I think recently there was one where someone was hit by like a golf wasn't no golf cart, they rolled their ankle getting out of the golf cart. You know, this is if you're an Olympic athlete if you're an Olympic athlete, probably not a high risk getting out of a golf cart normally. speaker-1: How pissed off would you be? speaker-0: But any emotional storm before competitionally a thirty centimeter drop off a golf golf cart is probably not a big Yeah. But it's an amazing thing when their nervous system's like heightened because you've got these emotions. Yeah. So, you know, it's it's quite interesting. speaker-1: protecting yourself from the the unexpected threat. Yeah. Yeah, speaker-0: That was a natural body on experience. speaker-1: absolutely. Yeah, so. So so you push on from there, Hearts, you you go through your combative stuff and we sort of spoke about the reason being and I you know played devil advocate there but speaker-0: Mm. speaker-1: It makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I was always taught C C E, you know, communicate cover extract. So you I just wanted to be a bit of a prick and ask you but Yeah. what's what's the next what's the next part that we sort of go into for the guys? so we we we start with the basics, so we go through, you know, everything for like dress and bearing, comms equipment, you know, we look at individual bodyguard, yeah. Dismounted, mounted drills. So we we start building the individual and then we gradually sort of ramp that up. We go into, you know, things like reconnaissance and advance of venues, routes. We look at threat and risk assessments and they do a bit of briefing and orders. We talk about l like liaison skills, sites surveys. So all those things that that CPOs, EPOs need. We look at things like the interpersonal skills or soft skills, which are massive part of this job, which is missing a lot from training. We look at, you know, how to operate in a three sixty environment, so developing situation awareness. What Dr what are some of the things that you're looking at when you're talking to people about situational awareness in regards to like physiological factors that they're sort of paying attention to? Yeah. In in other people perhaps, rather than just themselves now. speaker-0: Yeah, okay, great, great question. So so if we're dealing with you know, situational factors where we've got well what so any any environment we're gonna be dealing with potentially high risk individuals. speaker-1: here you Can I throw you an example? let's just say you're looking after a principal, you're walking through Circular Key in Sydney. there's a four man detail, you're in a diamond formation. And the principal's on fire. And the principal's on fire. No, no. You're a four-man detail, you're diamond formation. It's it's loose, you're using the elastic principle, so you sort of gather around the principal, but not within a direct, you know, hand to hand reach. and you start to see a group of people coming together formed in an assembly. So they're not quite a a riotus mob, but you see a group of people moving towards your principal, what are some of the things that you're looking at from like an SA perspective that you're factoring into play from that group that's moving towards your principal? speaker-0: Yeah, I mean I guess obviously i the first thing in that situation as you guys know is you're always looking for like your exit routes because there's an impending threat. speaker-1: Yeah yeah yeah without the without the full reaction to attack. speaker-0: But but in terms but in terms of in terms of like that sort of those bodily factors that you're looking for, I mean you really want to get insight into the state of a person because there's two so with with heightened emotional states, heightened nervous systems, obviously people become reactive unpredictable. Yeah. Which is what we've talked about. I mean these are classic this is a classic situation for de escalation. It could be a you a doctor or a nurse or a health professional having to de escalate an agitated patient or you know a security staff or even just a teller in a bank having to deal with someone who's really heightened in their emotional state. So that's so we're you know we were looking for firstly a is a person displaying bodily signs of that heightened physiological state? I mean you can see when you start having when you have some education about this and then a little bit of coaching on it it's pretty easy to pick up basic bodily indicators of ch heightened physiological states. speaker-1: So so what are they? What are those things, yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, so I we don't look for like micro expressions and faces. I mean that's like you know John English kind of stuff. Yeah. But you know, practical practical things that anyone can learn and and it's very pragmatic with the nervous system, is you you know, you look for things like you look for you can look for muscle tension in their face, 'cause that's kind of easy to see. You can look for elevated shoulders. That's one of the key characteristics. We talked about that before. When people we're in that heightened breathing state, our shoulders tend to rise. And you see that, you know, anytime you see like if you see like an angry mob, yeah, or you see a person that's frustrated in you know in any any environment you may face, you can see in their shoulders if they're tense. Also breathing, you can see how much they're breathing through their upper chest, how fast they're breathing. You can look at their forearm tension. So these are kind of like the basic signs that there's that elevated physiological state, that elevated emotional state. Also it's nice to see whether that's not there because like if we use an example of say you know situational violence, some people will threaten violence because they've learnt or they have they believe that you know threatening violence can get them what they want. speaker-1: Might is right. speaker-0: Yeah, like a means to an end kind of thing. Yeah. So in that case, if a person's using situational violence, they're not necessarily escalated in their nervous system. They can be totally calm. But as a result though, you now you've got a different insight into probably what's going on internally, they're probably likely to be more rational. Yeah. You know what I mean? As opposed to someone who's heightened physiologically, they're what we would say would be irrational, but what that basically means to us is reactive, right? Yeah. So they can do things that, you know speaker-1: Well, it's it's almost like i it as a pre attack indicator is an indication of maybe it if there's an emotional connection, there's a lack of training, they're overwhelmed by their situation, so they're going to their own emotions. Yeah, they're they're being overridden, as opposed to say you've got someone who's highly trained, highly competent, like a tier one operator who's going into commit to a you know, some sort of explicit action or direct action against a target, they you would imagine would be quite calm, quite leveled, quite this is just another day in the office. So if their threat their threat potential is much greater because they've still got the executive function. Maybe speaker-0: Yeah, it's it's a speaker-1: not. speaker-0: It's an interesting thing. I mean I I I see and obviously in terms of you know risk management that sort of gets into the expertise that you guys hold too. But in terms of I c I suppose those indicators, those physiological indicators that a person's heightened, yeah, it's just always worth remembering that people do things irrationally when they're at that heightened state. Yeah. And I think what's I guess scary about that is the unpredictability of it. So you don't know what's gonna happen. However, you do also now have an understanding that if you're dealing with heightened individuals you can also be equipped with the tools to manage that because you can de-escalate situations like that. So there is that predictability in the sense that you can get into that space where you can regulate yourself and start working in a co-regulation. speaker-1: That's I mean, what you're talking about there, that you know, the unpredictability and being able to deal with it, that is the whole premise of what the physiology of protection is about, isn't it? Is being able to self identify and also externally identify and then try and resolve the situ that's that's the whole package you deliver, yeah. I mean not whole but it's a huge part of the package. speaker-0: That's that's a huge part of it for self-regulated performance so you actually can get yourself back on track and then obviously interact effectively with your team or or your or your principal particularly. And then that co-regulation aspect so you can, you know, inter manage, I suppose, threats but also have the right tool set. So for example, if you have a really cool c like a a group that seems really regulated or an individual that seems to be really calm, You're d yeah, as you said, you're dealing with a different kind of person. That's not a that's not a case for de escalation. No 'cause if you're using a totally different approach. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. But you can't do it you you can't identify what tool set you're gonna use, like if you're building a pool, unless you know what it is that you're dealing with, right? Like you gotta see the plans before you start speaker-0: building yeah. That's right. So that's why I said originally that the first thing starts with education and obviously in the CP course it's it's it's huge about how I think you said Ben it's sort of perfect sort of way to sum this up. It's like you've got to help people make sense of what they're going through so they actually understand what's happening. Yep. And then they know what to do. So that's how you get real capability, right? speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I heard this statement once, I can't remember where it was from. It was like calm is contagious but so is panic. Yeah. Karma is contagious? Yeah, being calm is contagious and so is panic. Yeah, okay. speaker-0: Yeah, so that's so that you sort of resonate that to other people, don't you? And that fits back into that whole, you know, are we sending perceived safety signals to the principal? It's an interesting one too, just in that space, because I suppose one element we didn't talk about there when you mentioned like a scenario with potentially a group, one of the biggest liabilities is is like well if you don't have the training, you're a massive liability. even if even if that group is speaker-1: If you're light on your C V you mean. speaker-0: Yeah, i i i i you know if you haven't been in this course perhaps. If you if you see a group that is approaching or an individual that's approaching and let's say someone is appearing threatening, even if they look pretty regulated. Yeah, you've got to obviously recognise and regulate yourself. Yeah. Because that's gonna be challenging. Things are ramping speaker-1: Well things are amping up now, aren't they? speaker-0: up, they're escalating, and obviously high level operators, yeah they're not constantly regulated, they're constantly regulating. There's a big difference. That's certainly been my experience. speaker-1: Yeah, right. Yeah. That's well that's well put. Well you're speaker-0: 'Cause the idea is people see it as a s like. speaker-1: constantly stimulated, aren't you? You are. And you can't stop from being stimulated. I I think I and I can speak also from like a like a military background in our training, your ability to self-regulate also gives you longevity in this in this industry. Yeah. Like you you can face constant high threats and high risk and that sort of thing. That's gonna take a toll on your body, on your mind. Yep. But if you can learn to self-regulate, especially like like straight after something has occurred, that gives you a better chance to, you know, have a longer career. Survive and keep going. Yeah, one percent. speaker-0: Yeah, there's a th there's that's a really, really good point. a lot of high performance industries in period. I mean I've spoken with so many clients that I've worked with from CEOs of companies to medical specialists to Olympic athletes who have been clients of mine and lawyers and so forth and they've all got academics, professors, you know, everyone from different walks of life but high pressure careers. And they've all got a different reason why their career's hard. And they just haven't realized being a human's pretty hard. speaker-1: Yeah, it's the same shit. Yeah. And then they burn out. Yeah, absolutely. speaker-0: Different battlefield, but it's the same internal battlefield, right? So you you're you're right there. But I did want to make that point though that with the principle, they're obviously in any of those situations, they're gonna feel pretty overwhelmed, I imagine. You know, most most people who are gonna be in those perceived threat situations, they're not gonna feel great if they're if firstly if they're needing if they're needing protection in the first place or they're they're they're looking for it. So, you know, how much are we paying attention to their cues as well? That's obviously really important. speaker-1: Q's Ben. You talk about going through the different stages of training from like a basic level, building these students up to the point that they're running an F MP when it comes to the last day. Cues I think are probably one of the biggest things that I picked up from my time doing surveillance, the covert work. you know, we would use cues in the language to convey huge amounts of information in the shortest period of time because you know comms is a pretty precious element of transferring information and you've only got a very short window when people are on the move. What are some of the cues that you're using to not not just train but to enable these operators to work at that intelligence space so they can communicate, so they can deal with clients? Are are you using industry based language, are you using terminology? Is it you know three letter acronyms? What are some of the things that you're sort of trying to equip these guys with to operate at the higher level? Yeah, we we did it just came naturally coming from a military background. We use a lot of acronyms. Yep. But I found that was actually a bit detrimental to the way we taught the course. Yeah. I mean most of our instructors come from, you know, S F background, law enforcement, military sort of background and to us that's a second language. Yep. We had to kind of adapt it a little bit so that 'cause we've got a lot of civilians, people come from security backgrounds, some from military. Yeah. Well it's interesting. A a few of the people in the course were military of a kind or law enforcement of a kind, but they've been out long enough to be civilians of correct in i in effect and coming back into the industry. It's principle based training. It's the same principle we just adapted to suit the environment and the people that we're teaching. Yeah. Yeah. So it's very much a mentored sort of approach to the training because it is there's a lot happening in in nine days. There's a lot pac compacted into those nine days. But it's we're it's about and we've got away from the whole assessment piece. It's more about like performance and standard and it's it's we're looking at it as a partnership. So, you know, us as Panoptic are partnering with these people and going along that journey with them and mentoring them through that. So it's not that we're looking to set people up to fail because ultimately we want them to succeed. But it's it's taking them on that journey so that they are at that standard. And then Adam has a really good analogy when it comes to like engineering and like stress testing. yeah. Yep. And we kind of now have brought that into the whole performance piece and how we explain reaching those standards and I might handle that to Adam. Sorry, just while we're on the on the cues before you do jump in at it, are you you are you using language to sort of cue the way people are thinking or are you We we are, yeah definitely. I've tried to shape it in such a way that it's explaining it in in a way that it's not I guess confrontational, but it's more about The industry clients need a standard. Yep. And it's not that we are the gatekeepers or that we we think that we're better or we've got an unchecked ego. It's just like we're looking at this from a holistic approach as in the the industry needs a standard, it requires it. And so that's the the standard that's set for all of us. And then Well and on that point commercially, it's not so much Our responsibility to set that standard, it's our responsibility to uphold the standard because this is what the clients expect. Yeah. And what we're delivering with our training, with our expectations on jobs, is not because we're saying this is what you need to do to survive in the industry. We're saying this is this is the bare minimum of what any principal at a ultra high net worth level expects of a close protection operative. Yeah. It's very easy in this industry to be complacent because you know, I could do nine jobs and nothing could happen but Then on the tenth job something goes wrong, but because those first nine went right it's all good. Yeah. You know, and I and that's that complacency piece where we think because nothing's happened in the past, it's it's it's all good. And in my opinion across you know nationwide, in especially in that security space, we're we're seeing a you know, we've seen the Bondi attack happen recently. Yeah, no one would have predicted that or seen that. If you have your finger on the pulse and you're seeing what's occurring and you're delving a little bit deeper than the surface, you'll start to pick up things and see those cues. of what's occurring and how the how the industry is evolving and changing, I think I us at panoptic we are sort of delving a little bit deeper than the average person and looking at that and that's why we've scripted the training the way that we have because we're starting to see those things. It's very easy to just keep doing the same thing because that's what we've always done and that's that complacency piece. And you you you can get away with it for so so long, but that that risk sits there. You know, those threats sit there. They're just under the surface and then Sometimes they're just opportunistic, you know, wrong place, wrong time and something occurs and y y we saw that with Bondoy, you know, nobody predicted that was gonna happen and then all of a sudden it did. And you look at the the flow on effect from from what that has has occurred across the nation, you know. It's massive, it's huge. you know, and and that's how the industry has to to look at things is we can't we can't be reactive. We've gotta try and stay ahead of what is what is potentially coming. You know, we've got Massive events like you know, was it twenty thirty, twenty thirty two, the the Olympics occurring here? Yep, thirty two, the Olympics occurring here. Yep. You know, you and I both know coming from that ANZ C D C DIGPRO space that you know, at that governmental level, if we have a huge amount of V V IPs coming into the country, there is a massive shortfall in resources. So y you know, something I think that needs to happen in the Private sector as far as security is somehow bridging that gap between private and government, you know? Otherwise we're gonna be exposed. The US do it very well, I think. They do with their their combined models. of private and public protection. Yep. sure it's not perfect and you know no model ever is, but I think there's definitely some gaps there that we need to address in Australia and you know, we we've been speaking to a lot different people, you know, Mark over at ASEC College has been a huge advocate for this as well, which has been fantastic. He's been right behind the train that you've been building and he also shares that opinion as well. but j to go back or I'll chuck it back to the engineering piece. Yeah, sorry you so you get the analogy out of speaker-0: Well it kind of fits no, it was great. I mean what you guys did is you just naturally set a bit more of a stage for my answer there. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Because because ultimately it was it was just showing that, you know, there's a need for capable there's a n need there's a there's a need and there's a growing need in industry for capable operators. Yep. And capability is the key again. so you know, how do you develop that capability? Obviously we've talked about some some interesting concepts of you know helping people with physical and emotional fitness and all these different skill sets. But ultimately one thing that it comes back to is how do we help people learn so they can develop? Yeah, how do they develop through that course? and it's a practical course, it's an intense course. People don't like well, let's just preface this by saying I've already mentioned that Perceived threats make us go into tunnel vision and we focus our attention selectively, don't we? So what do you do? Ever ev yeah, probably everyone listening to this has done some sort of test in their life. Yep. And when you go you're always speaker-1: So you're speaker-0: going like what what do I need to know for the test? Yeah. You know, that's what ever that's that's what it's about. So that's speaker-1: That's a par spell test we spoke about at the very start. Everyone everyone's speaker-0: But I want to know how do I pass? Yeah, How do I pass? That's exactly right. How do you know because I because that's that's the threat. That's you're trying to you're trying to regulate that threat. It's that safety response that you you're looking for. so the issue then is how do we develop people who have this natural biological predisposition to say, tell me what I need to know to pass? Yep. Because that actually shifts the focus from development as a capability development. That shifts the focus from that to pass fail, I just want to pass. Right? So I guess that's the the issue. speaker-1: I is that is that is that identifying that, does that create an issue in regards to potentially their their future potential as well? Like if all you're trying to address is pass fail. You're not really in my mind, you're not really trying to push say you've got to do sixty push ups. If that's the pass fail and you've got to get to sixty push ups and you're only thinking sixty push ups, is that then limiting your potential to do a a hundred or whatever it might be? speaker-0: Well that well that's a deep question. There's two questions there. The first one is does that affect your sort of future potential? I mean, in a nutshell it won't through this course, because you've got savvy course designers. Yeah. we're savvy course designers. Because speaker-1: Because speaker-0: we know what we're what we're up against, right? So we're we're flagged like like anything, we flag the risk to begin with, don't you? Yeah. So we're the risk management here is we if we don't identify that and shift them away from that, speaker-1: have a limited im speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So so the answer is yeah, they'll be limited absolutely. But they'll be limited in the development from that from that course. So speaker-1: But that carries on to like doing tasks and missions too. speaker-0: carries on to everything. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's that perceived threat. It's that tunnel vision focus. So what we need to do and and the analogy that Ben mentioned there is the engineering analogy I use is is basically the idea that in high performance we're look or in engineering terms you're looking for failure points when you're designing a system. So the idea is failure points are good because when you have a failure point you now know where the weakness is which is a which is a point to for growth, for rebuilding, for enhancing, for re engineering. That's a human performance model as well. We want to see where someone can fail, not because failure is a negative thing. So we're de-risking failure, basically. If we wanted to look at it in psychological terms, we're de-risking it. But from performance terms, we're saying there's that failure point. This is a good thing because it lets us know what we need to work on. So obviously, no one wants to pass or you know, no one wants to fail if it's a pass or fail assessment. Yeah. But you're shifting their focus from seeing failure as like an amaz a major threat. That helps. some kind of bit of attention regulation. Yeah. They get their focus away from it and they refocus from outcomes to the process. speaker-1: That's a societal issue, unfortunately. Because no one likes assessments failing, looking bad in front of peers. You know what was interesting on that course, the one you'd just come out of May, was the desire from the students to get immediate gratification feedback on a past fail. It was it was amazing to watch like this was a room full of really good quality human beings. yeah, there was nothing wrong with them. A and they were struggling with the lack of we we gave no feedback. Yeah. We ran it very in that aspect, very militarized. See that's the problem with not having me there. There weren't enough bump pads. There was zero feedback. speaker-0: So I'll just add one thing there, 'cause in in the physiology protection framework we talk about the importance of co regulation, right? Yeah. And and and this is and we t one of the things I mentioned before about a biological need is to feel safe, so you know, survival. We want to feel safe. So if we see the outcome that we value as life or death, right? Do I speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Fail, life death. Yep. I'm looking to my clan for safety. Yeah. Did I survive? Right? So there's that underlying driver there. So there's that biological sort of driver. Yeah. But if you re de-risk that and you refocus it, which is obviously what we've done, and I appreciate Ben, but he's given me too much credit that he was already doing that before before I shared my analogy, it was already in the course. But that whole process of of make shifting to capability away from pass and fail is brilliant because, firstly, capability is something that people aren't in control of. with control of. They can they can choose to focus on their capability development. That gives them a sense of control, gives them a sense of safety. speaker-1: Well it gives you agency over your own future, doesn't it? When you yeah, when you build on your own capabilities. speaker-0: That's right. And that f sa that satisfy satisfies that fundament one of those fundamental survival needs, you know. We need to feel safe through control over our actions, control over our environment. So that obviously means they're gonna be able to take that on board. So even just by the way the the course is structured, it's already developing a capable operator because it's shifting away from you know, the attention on on passing to to development as a as a capable individual. Yep. speaker-1: Definitely. Well once you once you get through the majority of the stuff that's you know, the teaching points, the the lessons, the physiological stuff that you do. You you also have a bit of range time, Ben. Yeah, so we we have a partnership with the boys at Foresight Tactical, so I'll give them a bit of a shout out. They're good lads. so we do part of the one of the qualifications that the trainees get from the courses their firearm safety certificate for cat H so pistol, which is recognized here in Queensland to get their pistol firearms licence. So we do some shooting with them. It's it's done in a way I mean it's it's It's done in a way that is about proficiency and competency when using forearms. Obviously we all understand in the current security environment in Australia in it's very difficult to do armed work here in Australia. Yep. unless you have that cash in transit licence and then it's very restricted. However, we do offer that part of the course. I I believe it's personally important. Because we are because it is a hybrid type course and we are training for high threat, medium threat and low threat, it's p important to include that because you know there are people that follow on from this course and maybe go overseas somewhere and do that sort of stuff. So it's done at a high level and it's by no means is this the be all and end all of pistol shooting or what we do. I mean there's there's other guys out there that you know have got way way more developed syllabus and training on pistol shooting. Yep. This is much more about exposure, adequate safety handling, capability It it's still very good. I mean we had guys we had three or four guys that have done extensive training, they've been overseas and they've done, you know, the HEC postal courses and tactical shooting and that sort of thing. And I spoke to them after the course and they actually got a lot out of it. I think the thing that people forget when it comes to firearms training is you can do CQB, you can do all these, you know, really advanced type shooting, but you've also always got to come back and refresh the basics. You know, like I'm I'm an avid pistol shooter, I shoot here on the Gold Coast. you know, I'll do more advanced training but then I'll come back and do do the basics. You know, always rehashing the basics 'cause they're the core fundamental skills skills of anything that we do. So and skill fades You know, it happens all the time. So even with the best operators. On on that, I can very clearly remember going through my firearm instructors course with NT Pole and then doing the r range stuff with T I G and no matter when it was, it was always the pr in regards to like the the load or unload of your firearm when you're taking your firearm to and from the station. It was always the right time to carry out just a dry firing scenario or dry firing serial. Just for the sake of just understanding trigger manipulation for that one one god forbid chance where you might actually have to shoot someone fire your weapon on duty right yep. In practicing that with my Glock with that sir that dry fire cereal just as a cop just on the road general duties on a consistent basis. There were two separate times in my career where I tasered someone. And on both of those times, I only had a single barb hit because both of those times I I healed the taser because I was anticipating the recoil. Yeah. So I I here I am a firearms instructor going through you know Dry cereals, training, you know, on and off almost every day of my career. getting into a tactical section and having two separate tasering incidents where both barbs weren't successfully deployed. And It is it's incredible to think that after all that experience and training I was still that shit. But here I am, I still got a job at Panoptic. And that's got nothing to do with standards here. Yeah, there's less tasering at Panoptic than there was in the NT police. But no, I I think the the relevance of that is the fact that you actually do have to you do have to train, you do have to continually practice, you have to keep working on skills. Always train the basic standards. Always. You know, and and that's just that's just how it it comes at being proficient. Yep, definitely. So Adam, I want to ask you a couple quick questions here because it it is some of the things that just triggered in my memory about being a a copper on the road. Maybe this might help someone that's out there on the on the thin blue line at the moment, but these are some of the things that I faced dealing with situations on the road. Going to a domestic and seeing you know, one of the parties that you've got to separate with a nervous tick, like a twitch in the eye. What am I looking at there when someone's like they're they're they're staring me down a thousand yards there, but then they start to tick in the eye. What am I dealing with? What's something that I'm sort of anticipating there? speaker-0: really good question too. My father was in the Wales police I for 14 years. He always flagged that domestics were some of the most dangerous, volatile situations you can walk into. And it it it it fits into that what we were talking about earlier with that group. mentality of or that scenario where you've got that really heightened emotional state. So I mentioned things like sh you know shoulders, I mentioned you know you can look at facial expressions, but you know, things like eyes twitching, you know, blinking in one eye, these nervous twitches or nervous ticks if you want to you've got to remember too in that situation, firstly you're dealing with people who are feeling highly unsafe within themselves. And again, taking things back, if we can kind of make sense of that individual in the moment, you've got someone who's feeling h really heightened in their emotional state, which means they're feeling really unsafe within themselves. Someone who's feeling really unsafe is like, well, you can imagine if you're trying to, you know, put a a dog in a cage, take them to the vet, you know, that they're not they're likely to bite your hand. So speaker-1: Absolutely. speaker-0: that's what you're dealing with. You know, you're dealing with someone that's in that very high high perceived threat. speaker-1: So so now I'm now I'm seeing that, you know, you you've brought my awareness to the fact that, you know, the nervous tick is the the the heightened emotional state. Or the next thing I might notice is that they've got a quivering lip and an elevated voice. What am I starting to think about doing now when you know I get the I've got the visual, the the visual cues now I'm getting the audio audio cues and I'm I'm getting I'm getting even more physical representation. What are some of the things that I'm trying to do now as a an operator in the field to bring that situation down. speaker-0: Yeah, so let let's hope firstly that right now you're constantly noticing yourself. You're noticing your own state. Because as you're noticing that external situation, that other party, you need to be simultaneously noticing your own state. Love it. speaker-1: Because that was the the next piece there is the tunnel vision from me, right? Because I start to see those cues. The f I know from being in the job, the first thing that happens is I close in on the threat. That's the whole survival instinct. speaker-0: Yeah, correct. And if you think about that's right, you're you're in threat, perceived threat. And unfortunately, what you're doing is you're inadvertently increasing the perceived threat of that person. So because you're not aware of your own physiological state and you're not aim not regulating your own physiological state, you could be could be inadvertently sending perceived threat signals to that person. So if you I mean if you think about your speaker-1: Yeah, okay. So you're having this silent conversation with someone at the same time as trying to hopefully de deregulate or de-escalate. speaker-0: Well, you need to be constantly aware of yourself. So basically the way this stuff works is you've got have you're dealing with two things at at the same time, always. You're dealing with inter you're interacting with yourself and you're interacting with your other with other people. You know, any environment. Yeah. But in the same context. So if you're as you're focusing on this person, you're trying to make sense of that information. That's situational awareness. If you're in a d-reg dysregulated state, which you probably are, it wouldn't be in that situation. So let's just assume that you're a human like the rest of us. You're in that dysregulated state or you're becoming dysregulated because you're getting triggered by what you're seeing. Yeah. You know what that means. You speaker-1: You know what's coming. speaker-0: learnt about this, you know it's coming high threat, right? Yeah. Your dysregulated state now means you're perceiving that situation through even a higher threat lens. Yeah, okay. Okay. So speaker-1: So your your levels of understanding of what's going on now, just as an operator on the road, you're going instead of it just being like a situation where we could have a conversation, you're thinking maybe there's now a use of force scenario that's gonna happen because of what I'm adding as a layer of perceived threat. speaker-0: No. There's two things I'm saying there. I'm saying that if you're not aware of your own state, you're likely getting into a dysregulated state simply because it's a high risk situation or a potentially high risk situation. Yep. You've probably also had some learning experience on top of that. So you might be like a you know, like a a new cop on the job and just pretty nervous about everything. Yep. However, depending on what experience you've had with violence, speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: you might have had some learning, so you're already nervous and anxious before you even go because you've got a called D V fuck alright. Yeah. You know what I mean? speaker-1: Nature, nurture, environmental history. speaker-0: Yeah, so you're overwhelmed before you even get there, naturally. so your perception of everything is gonna be perceived as threat through your own lens. Yeah. If that kind of makes sense. And yeah, we Yeah, speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. speaker-0: and then on top of that, so you're gonna perceive things in a different way too. the second aspect of it is as you're regulating you're able then to send signals to calm that person down and help with their co-regulation. You're not actually regulating them, but you're you're able to help them regulate. That's what co-regulation is of what you're doing. I mean if you're standing there and looking like you're intimidating, what sort of impact is it going to have on them? But if you're able to adjust your body language and put them into a state where suddenly they feel like, you know what, there's actually someone here to help. speaker-1: So I mean you spoke about this at at the start of what we were talking about here with recognize, right? Recognize and regulate. Before speaker-0: Recognize and regulate. speaker-1: you're before we get to that and we start talking about that, you know, as we sort of dropped that earlier on the podcast I alright, so that's all going on right now, this is all unfolding. And then suddenly I start to recognise clenching fists. So hands f flexing and opening and closing. I see the skin tone start to flush, so face goes red, neck goes red, ears go red. and then the shallow breathing starts, the height you know, the pumped up chest, the rapid breathing. What do I recognize? What am I looking for in myself to start to down regulate so that I can start to get my forty thousand foot vision back? speaker-0: Well you're noticing your shoulders, you're noticing your chest, you're noticing your stomach, you're noticing your vision. And you just start starting with these really basic sort of things. This is I'm I'm just going to preface this by saying I'm giving you a couple of general pieces of information here. However, what's really interesting with this stuff is that we all have different behavioral responses, embodied responses is kind of the geeky term, to shifts in our state. So this is why there's no textbook that we're we're gonna write on this. but no this is just but what we would speaker-1: This is just a theoretical conversation. speaker-0: do is I would be asking the person or in your case I'd be saying to you Ben what do you notice from situations when you've been in that situation before or a situation like that what do you notice when you're in that situation? How does how do your shoulders feel speaker-1: immediately you know, I I know my neck tightens. Okay. My my vision narrows and my voice raises. speaker-0: How does it how does it feel in the neck temperature wise? speaker-1: Like I'm I'm running I mean I I run hot generally but it's like I've got a like shoulders are super tight and I'm like haunch hunched over on speaker-0: Yep. So you okay, so you can feel tension, temperature change, posture. Absolutely, speaker-1: Absolutely. speaker-0: yeah. Okay. So that's like that's we'll call that like a somatic profile, which would be individualized for you. Yeah. And the in that sense what we'd be looking for is we'd be establishing like a somatic profile for you when you get into that perceived threat state. Once we've established that and you know what that's like, and mind you, a lot of people don't, but obviously you're a highly experienced operator, you've done a lot you you know speaker-1: I've been there a lot. speaker-0: And you've done a lot of speaker-1: Happens every Friday night. speaker-0: You've done it you've but you've done a lot of training, you've done it you've gone through so many different things, right? Yeah, yeah. But you don't automatically have this just from experience. speaker-1: No God no. I I remember being a junior copper on the road, being totally freaked out, going to like violent fights in the street, just think speaker-0: There's another fuck am I going into But there's another point there too, that a lot of highly experienced high performers in in any spaces that I've worked with, both in performance and when I used to work in in clinical context too. In when there's a lot of pressure and when there's a lot of like high level exposure, people tend to become quite dissociated from their bodies. Yeah. So you know, I know myself as an athlete. When I was out there running 200 reps and, you know, you run to that point where you're vomiting and you have to somehow get up and every part of your body is like in agony and you have to keep running to finish it. Yeah. You have to dissociate so you don't feel the pain as much. Yeah. speaker-1: That's a that's a that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about it. speaker-0: Yeah, and I mean I've seen that so much, you know, having worked with various I mean, I've worked with lots of different trauma survivors and so forth. And dissociation's quite a quite a challenging thing to come to overcome. Yeah. So when you're in a lot of these high stress, high high sort of pressure situations, it's very easy to become so focused on your head That you never actually have the tools and training to connect with your body, which means you actually don't have the ability to notice your physiological state changing. And that's kind of the key point here. So once you learn what your physiological state change feels like and you've got some actual practical physical feelings that you can notice, that helps you recognize when your state's changing in any sort of high pressure situation. And that's the f that's part of recognize and regulate. Obviously we do some more, you know, some other cool things in there as you guys know too. But that's sort of the basis to it. yeah, so that but that dissociation part's an interesting point. You I often talk about talk about that in some of the you know the seminars that I do because everyone tells me, I I I know I know what I do. I said, Okay, tell me. We did that at the seminar recently. Do you remember do you remember how many people could tell me in the room where I think well zero speaker-1: Yeah, it was really interest it was really interesting to watch. It really it really was. To see you sort of put on the spot and sort of try and drag that information out of them. So Yeah, yeah. but yeah, no, th yeah, okay, cool. Well, I mean there you go. Look, I I think those are some really good points, is that you know, if you if you can't recognise that your own states changed to a dysregulated one, that's probably the biggest indication that you're out of sorts, really. Straight away. Absolutely. speaker-0: Absolutely. And I think, you know, to keep it give you a really quick, like funny example that everyone always likes is that you know we can all have an arg like a low-level argument with our spouse of conflicting over like who what dishwasher should we buy or who's you know what days should how speaker-1: follow the tail. speaker-0: do you fault the towers? It's all this sort of low-level stuff, right? And speaker-1: I lost that argument by the way. speaker-0: we often can't see eye to eye in the moment, but half an hour after the conversation, the nervous system sort of decompressed. speaker-1: about twenty years for me at the moment, Adam. I still can't fold the house. speaker-0: Yeah, well that that might be that might be that might be something beyond my But you know, you get a different speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: perspective, right? Once that state regulates you like something like, I sort of get what that was saying now. Yeah. How do we recognise it? Well gotta do this kind of work. speaker-1: Yeah, well I mean, which brings us back to the whole reason training is what you do and not what you've done, right? Like I mean I I look at this course that you've put together, Ben, and you know, I spent a fairly long time in the N T police and was lucky enough to be put through a bunch of different courses and I'd still I'd gag to come and do this course if I if I had the fresh space to be able to do it and not just doing a job split. Well that that's the thing, like we I come up with a bit of a statement. It's like we we get paid to rehearse and train but the job or the game is for fun. Yeah. You know, like all the hard work you put in behind the scenes is you know, is what actually makes you effective on the job. It's you don't get paid to do the actual job itself, you get paid for everything else. And that's that's what it we're bringing it back to that intelligent operator piece. It's about it's a mindset and a skill set and they're partnered together. You know, and then like what Adam's talking about that self regulation, you know, after that we then start to give them the tools, you know. We you know, you're talking about how do I assess you know what somebody's gonna do? Well we go through, you know, part of the P I D assessment is is a whole assessing intent. Yeah. So we look at, you know, what's in close proximity, you know, to that person. Is there something they can pick up that's a threat? You know, you know, Adam talked about their shoulders, you know, their are their hands clenched. What was we were just recently providing a hostile environment awareness training for us to So you went through something that I really Yeah, so part of the CQB training that I've done previously with Army is w in that whole assessing intent and it's a continuous cycle that you go through is hands, waistband, wingspan, intent. So, you know, what's in their hands, are they holding something? Is there something you know that anything could be in their hands, you know? waistband. Is there something tucked in their in their belt? Is there something, you know, under their shirt? Is there something concealed? Is there something hanging off the Hands, waistband, wingspan. So is there something in close proximity that they can pick up and use as a potential weapon? Yep. And then intent, you know, and that comes back to what Dr. Adams' saying. It's like, you know, looking at looking at their facial expression, looking at their shoulders, looking at their body posture. Are they pacing around? Are they moving? It's a very quick assessment you can do head to toe very quickly and you can move to somebody else and do the same thing. Yeah. It's something that I learned and picked up and I use constantly on jobs and especially, you know, dealing in crowds, clo crowded spaces you can quickly go through and assess people and the more you do it it just comes become a natural natural part of the process. That as a mental model or a you know a tool to be able to use to deal with any conflict situation or any situation realistically probably is a good segue towards the the higher level training that you guys are about to build out and deliver in the upcoming months. So I know we've been going for a little while now, but before we close it out, Dr. Adam, you've you've been instrumental in building out the physiology of protection, which is using the you know the psychophysiological work that you've done as part of your doctorate and Ben you've been heavily involved in building out the philosophy of protection which both sort of sit under that panoptic pathway for the you know the training space that you guys are you're growing and developing across the industry in Australia. Do you want to give us a bit of a rundown on Maybe not the a release of the IP specifically, but the concept of the sort of situational awareness training, the the the level at which you guys are gonna be talking about these two programs with some of our corporate partners at at the end of this year and then into the next year as well. speaker-0: I'll jump in there. speaker-1: I guess it It's it's quite unique because it we're we're looking at it like it's almost like a two prong approach sort of thing. I'm looking at it from a I'm a big believer in reality based training and creating scenarios for people to experience what they might p experience on a job before they get there. Like it you shouldn't if you're doing you know, these sort of roles, the first time you have to de escalate something or the first time you have to encounter a you know, a threat shouldn't be on a job. It should be in training. training and and on that just quickly you're not you're not talking specifically about just scenarios for close protection because some of the stuff there's some of the clients that you we're talking with at the moment have nothing to do with close protection absolutely nothing to do with security. This whole principle based training relates to anything. Yeah yeah you're talking about threat from a psychosocial or environmental one. Yeah we're not talking about IEDs and you know tanks and bombs and stuff like clients speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: even I mean the training that we offer and that we do we have a like as you No, and I won't mention names, we have a very broad base clientele basis that we offer training to. And but it's principle based training. So we can tailor it to whoever that client is and the environment that they operate in. But the principles stay the same, it's just the narrative or the language that we adapt to suit that type of training or environment they're operating in. So we take those principles and it's about e exposing them to those stresses and that environment or those situations that they were going to face before. before they face it. And that's what reality based training is. and it's it's it's developing a the mindset and the skill set and the ability to then process that information, understand how they react in those situations. And then it's it's it's it's a very methodical approach to it. And we it's done in a in a particular way, in a particular method where we expose them to that. We allow them to make mistakes, correct those mistakes, and we slowly ramp it up and build it up to the where there's more pressure, more tempo applied, to the point where, like you mentioned earlier, we run a simulated itinerary for a principal and that's the last assessment of the course. So it's a gradual progression of training to get them to that point. So by the time they get there, they they almost feel comfortable doing that. sort of stuff. It's it's a we're because we've built them up to that level where it's like, this is now my new norm. So when I go out and do a a job for real and I'm exposed to a ultra high net worth client, you know, s a CEO or an executive, it just it becomes the normal. I'm comfortable in that environment in being uncomfortable and I'm I'm okay with that because I've already been exposed to this, I've already been trained to that. And then on top of that is what Dr Adam brings is that ability to How are you Before we go into Dr. Adams, you you know, the ki the key piece here at a a a a high level, so that sort of sweet sweet C sweet level executive sort of training that you guys are are out there doing. How are you putting these people in scenarios that are making them feel uncomfortable to get them to test themselves? Is it c 'cause you talk about reality based training and I I've s I've seen you put it to work. is that Environmental pressure, is that psychological pressure? Yeah, so it there's a there's a theory component to it as well, and then there's a practical component and but we do it in a way where we allow them to make mistakes and then we just debrief post it. Yeah. And again it's removing that stigma of making mistakes. It's like, hey, have a crack at it, see what it feels like. These are your first efforts. These are your first efforts. You know, make the decisions. Let's let's see what decisions you make in this this environment and learn from it. But The beauty of it is because we do it in a small team environment and dynamic and we've got all the instructors there that come from various different backgrounds, we we allow them to mistakes and one person might make a mistake, but it's going to affect the entire team, but they're all gonna learn from that mistake. It's better to make mistakes in training than on a live job. Yeah. Yeah. And that's Poor at commercial level with multi multiple. Exactly, because the fallout of I mean in the military space if we made mistakes, you know cost lives. Yeah, it costs lives. But in the commercial space it it costs your reputation. It costs a job. It might mean not being employed for an extended period of time. The the repercussion is huge. Yeah. So 'cause reputation is is everything. And that's the key takeaway we try and instill in the in the trainees is like make make a mistake here. Like, you know, moving away from that whole Assessment piece and and bring in that performance partnership is like where and and all of the scenarios that I've scripted come from something that I've done or an experience I've y you know, gone through and had to make a decision under pressure. So it's like, hey, have a crack at this, see what it's like, learn from it and and we go from there. Yeah. Yeah. And Adam, when we when we step away from the philosophy of protection which we're you know, we're talking about that physi sort of the the environmental stuff, not the physiological When we get to what you're doing with the physiology protection, what are you aiming to sort of work through with the the students that are coming into this training environment with us? speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. So I guess in in terms of like seeing the philosophy of protection, the physiology of protection as sort of two sides of the same coin and Yeah, yeah, it's a good idea. speaker-1: Cool. speaker-0: so I I basically so basically the language I use is ex speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: experiential learnings is you know, so when Ben talks about reality based training, the process I support people through. is experiential learning. And the idea is and this is part of that de-risking failure, but it's part of the growth process 'cause part of that self regulation. If you're worried about fucking up or you're trying to control outcomes, your nervous system's heightened, you're not going to perform well, you probably will fuck up. So there's that speaker-1: You're away from flow state then, aren't you? speaker-0: Yeah, you're just in that you're just in well yeah, that's right. But that hap that means you're not in and that's obviously that comes from being in that regulated state, right? That's the underlying sort of wheelhouse that we've got to gotta have speaker-1: That's people are coming to s coming to us for and seeking guidance on is getting back into that space where they're regulated, making good decisions, not affected by the stresses. speaker-0: Despite despite the environmental chaos. Because the and I think that's the key, right? You've got you'll have inevitable environment environmental chaos. So with the physiology of protection, I mean there's lots of applications, but two key applications are self regulated performance. And the other one being de escalation, conflict management, you know, challenging behaviour management more generally. So if we think of self regulated performance, everyone hears performance. etc. etc. But self-regulated performance in line with what we've talked about today is the idea that we're not pre doing extensive preparation for for one day. We're developing real-world skills, strategies and insights into ourself that we can train regularly as well. so that we have the capabilities to recognize and regulate ourselves in real time. So that we and it's not so much that then we have again a more amazing capabilities when we need it, it's so that we manage our state so that we don't lose our capabilities. This is the this is the interesting thing thing about self-regulated performance. People can do things quite comfortably when they don't have perceived pressure. Yeah. It's when they're under that perceived pressure for whatever reason It can be environmental, it can be psychological, it can be nutritional, you know, lack of sleep, whatever. There's all these factors that help a person become dysregulated. speaker-1: I can tell you right now the stuff that I've learned from you, I put into practice on a daily basis when I'm at work here because I g generally suffer from levels of insomnia that will be one or two days worth of no sleep and I'll be trying to regulate while I'm in the office and you know it's it's high pressure, it's stressful. You're dealing with you know critical decisions in regards to contracts, personnel, HR, interpersonal relationships, and it's a it's a constant use for me. Absolutely speaker-0: Yeah, okay. speaker-1: you know amazing help for me. speaker-0: That's really awesome that you sh share that. and I like how 'cause it highlights two two aspects of that self-regulated performance. The sort of the flow on steady long term aspect of it, sustainable performance that Ben's mentioned as well. Yeah. And then of course the real world aspect where some maybe like you know, someone gets in your face in the workplace. speaker-1: He's throwing dinky dye at me. I'm not the only one. This thing gets whirled around the office. speaker-0: That's right. And then and obviously then in that moment you've got to recognise, regulate, get get back in charge and back on track with what you were doing versus reactively changing direction or changing approach. Yeah. You know, good like a l so that's basically I guess that self-regulated performance aspect. That fits into everything. But also then that gives you the ability to work with your principal, work with the custom you know, customers, clients, and that feeds into the the application with de-escalation and challenging behaviour management. We won't go into this too much. speaker-1: The other piece I think that that goes into that I think's worth mentioning right now that I have found very, very potent, is the ability to remain able to do lateral thinking. speaker-0: Yeah, yep. speaker-1: When you are regulated, you are or when you are regulating and you are able to stay in a calm state, y the ability to do lateral thinking to problem solve is absolutely unnecessary for any sort of these, you know, high pressure and and like you said, every human is a human and the pressure of whatever job they're doing, whether they're a lawyer or an engineer or whatever, i it applies based on the human condition, not on the profession. If you can't think laterally to solve problems, then you're completely fucked. speaker-0: Yeah, you lose your higher order capabilities, right? And then you bec w as you're dysregulated. And again, that's why that's why capable professionals, true high performance isn't about, you know, taking the engine and supercharging it. Yeah. It's about getting it to operate well all the time. Yeah. And when it does get dysregulated, which it will having the tools to bring it back in check. And again, and again, and again as you need to in real time. So so that point there is Cognition's one aspect of it, but obviously a big part of it's behaviour, you know, because so much of what we're doing is interacting with other people, making decisions, interacting with our team. We're not solo in any role, in any profession really. So lateral thinking and behaviour, we don't you know, we we kind of lose flexible behavior and we lose lateral thinking and ability to think we we lose problem solving skills. Yep and we lose flexible behavior when we're dysregulated. Yep. We're designed to be rigid, right? And look in tunnel vision. speaker-1: How quickly do you reckon so say you go through s some of this training that w you know you've got planned for you know the upcoming sessions that we've got booked in. Sure. How how quickly are you able to get people to understand or maybe bring themselves from a dysregulated state back to a regulated state with what you guys are teaching? speaker-0: Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think the thing is you start making gains from, you know, the first couple of hours that we're working them through it. Yep. then they start realising, my God, This is happening all the time. Right, which obviously it was one of the things that came out of our recent training of s very senior leaders and they were loving it. So, but you build capability over time. So there is that s as Ben mentioned, it's like that skill element building as well. We t we train it, we train we teach the skills, we train it, we train it regularly. And if an Olympic athlete said to me, okay, you know I'm In like five minutes, you know, what can I do? I'm realistically I would speaker-1: Pressure doctor. speaker-0: say, well, you know, you should have talked to me a few months ago. There speaker-1: Did you listen on the podcast? speaker-0: is there is a there is a training element to it, and that's that's very high level pressure. Yeah. high level performance. But yeah, within that first couple of sessions, within that first couple of hours we'll start making tangible gains. But but we've got to obviously build awareness and that's when we start building their self awareness and situational awareness from from day one as well. Things just c compound from then basically. speaker-1: Genuinely From my exposure to the teaching from you, it I feel the same way about the physiology of protection as I do about learning jujitsu. If I had of learnt speaker-0: yeah, right. speaker-1: jujitsu as a brand new police officer, I reckon w I would have used less force less often to a less degree because I would have been more capable of dealing with conflict resolution without use of force options outside of, you know, physical presence and communication. Yep. The the the physiology of protection stuff And the the lessons that come from that for self regulation and being able to clearly deal with situations, I I think have been instrumental to some of the success that I I personally have experienced. and and that's just by being exposed to you. It's not included in training. Yeah. Current training anywhere. No. speaker-0: Not included, and it's really interesting. I remember talking a couple of years ago to a retired doctor of psychology about this. He was just a he's actually a guy that I know through the martial arts sort of community, very high-level senior guy. And he was really fascinated in my work because he's like, I've never heard of any of this sort of stuff. And I explained it to him, and he said, How do you get people to sort of like buy into this stuff? And I said, Well, it's pretty easy when you help someone. Do these little exercises, these recognition exercises, and notice what it actually feels like physically in their bodies when their state's changing. And then you start helping them recog recognize patterns of this that show up across every aspect of their life and career. They realise the situations are different but the internal biological responses are the same. Yeah. And once they can see those biological and behavioural responses, there's like, wow, that's that's firstly that's buy in, that's that self awareness and then that's the idea that yeah, I need to I need to work with this because this is actually gonna help me make some seriously practical changes. Yeah. So it's pretty cool, you know. speaker-1: Ben w obviously Adam's got a huge amount of stuff to do there with the psychophysiological training that he's gonna be presenting in the not too distant future. Have you got anything else that you want to chuck in in relation to the CP course and some of the stuff that you've done, maybe with the driving or like with the security driver enhancement training that we've been running? And that you say taking the Yeah, well, hey, look, I'll give the course a bit of a plug. Obviously, the SDET to the security driver course is coming up. We've got one from the second to the fourth of October here on the Gold Coast. Yep. And then back to back we've got the CPOX of the close protection course, which is running from the 5th to the 14th of October. Yep. Also here on the Gold Coast. The close protection course is is filling up pretty quickly. So we've we've still got a few spots available. I thought twenty twenty seven's almost booked out already. Yeah, we've got two courses booked in for twenty twenty seven already and we've we're taking registrations or you know, so I think we've got I think half the courses already filled for from May next year. So there there is definitely interest there and it's growing and I think not to blow my own trumpet but Once once this sort of gets out there because we are doing something that's very niche and different, you Word will just get out there and again w you know, we we're we're just trying to put that information out there and train people to equip them to a high industry standard. so yeah, I'd give the course a bit of a plug. I'm obviously biased about it, but I I think it I generally think it it it is we're we're looking to and we're starting to try and meet a need that's in the industry. And we're happy to partner with and work with with with people that are like minded and want and want to get after it is w pretty fortunate that you know with Dr. Adams now come on board, which is it for me yeah massive win. For me it was like I was aware of these things but I couldn't put them pen to paper and then sort of Doctor Adams just sort of you know put some steroids into it sort of thing and take it to another level which is it's just only going to enhance what we're offering to our to our trainees which is which is really awesome. Yep. We could yeah we couldn't be more thankful to have you on board Dr. No definitely not. That's an absolute pleasure. speaker-0: So the pleasure's all mine and I think you know, just having worked with so many individuals I feel very privileged in my career who I've worked with and what I love working with with this group is you guys are genuinely open minded, high humility human beings, which is really amazing, you know. and that's what you tend to see in people who have been in protection roles and high performance roles, have been through the trenches literally and yeah, so it's a privilege to work with you guys. speaker-1: Well, I I always struggle with saying thanks, but yeah, it's nice of you to say those kind words. But yeah, look I think we're we're in good company and we're looking we're really looking forward to the future and seeing where this goes and I guess coming up we've got the cloche prote the security driver enhancement training course from the second to the fourth of October. We've got the Clash Protection Operations course from the fifth to the fourteenth. Correct. Yep, fourteenth. Fourteenth of October. Nine days. Yeah, and then you two gents are off away for a fair few years. So we're doing some training down south. Yep. And then we've got some stuff coming online. early next year as well that'll be the be big with a state agency in regards to sort of some of the work that we're doing with this specif specific especially around the situational awareness and occupational violence. So yeah, thank you very much, gent. So I appreciate your time. Ben, awesome to have you on board, mate. And Dr. Adam, once again, thank you for sharing your time with us because it's it's hard to get a hold of you as it is. But yeah, you're you're a fantastic operator, so thank you. Awesome. speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: Awesome. speaker-0: Hey, before you take off, a quick reminder to all you listeners. 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