i was in college and one night i come home two three in the morning and i parked a couple blocks from my house because we didn't have parking by my house got out of my car and i noticed that there was a pickup truck with men in it and there was a couple of guys in the back of the pickup truck and i was walking across the street towards a little one of the little side streets and the guys they made a u-turn and something in me said they're coming for you and i literally i ran full force up my alley i went in my apartment i didn't turn on any lights and i went to the back window and i watched them drive up and down in the little area where i lived and looked for me my intuition saved my life that night i truly believe in it you did save yourself and you applied a resource that worked and it's a gift [Music] how could fear be a gift well it is these feelings are gifts they're not things we should ignore the gift of fear is a bachelor's degree a master's degree and a phd all rolled into one [Music] [Music] one of the gifts that we hope to give people is to feel permission to listen to their intuition and act on it every time because intuition is always right in at least two important ways number one it always has your best interest at heart and number two it is always based on something all of us have learned through a lifetime of saying gee i wish i hadn't done that or i knew i shouldn't have done that or i wish i'd listened to myself we've learned that the intuition is very often accurate and useful and helpful i like to think of it as making the journey from a to z without stopping at all the letters on the way it's just knowing without knowing why i think i thought certain people are born with great instincts about people and certain people aren't and i didn't understand that actually it's a primal skill we can all tap into some of us have just buried it really deep everybody has intuition it's not gendered everybody has a feeling we're not encouraged to listen to it because it doesn't seem to be in the logical realm it comes into every aspect of your life who you trust um who you speak to who you don't paying attention to your gut what it tells you and the significance of what it's telling you is this is critical critical life skills that could save lives literally save lives there's been a lot of research done lately that proves that when it comes to safety uh intuition is more accurate than logic it really is powerful i mean i wouldn't recommend investing in the stock market based on your intuition but in terms of safety it's a good way to to go this resource of intuition is so remarkable that it even works when we're asleep a lot of people doubt that but i can give you an example of a woman who is at home in bed and her husband who travels a lot is away and he can drive into the driveway open the garage door close the garage door open the kitchen door walk up the stairs as loud as he wants go into the bathroom take a shower and she doesn't wake up but if they're four-year-old down the hall just turns the doorknob on his bedroom she's up in a second in other words even while we're asleep we're assessing all of these sounds and it's one of the reasons why you don't sleep as well in a new place because in a new place you're registering all of these sounds and saying ah that's the ice maker dropping some ice at night that's the heater coming on when you're in your own house you ignore all those things but in a new place you have to catalog those things and in the beginning they wake you up there are many messengers that our intuition uses to get our attention true fear is the messenger that the body mind system sends us when uh it really needs our attention right now now there are other ways that we communicate with ourselves nagging feelings persistent thoughts gut feelings hunches dark humor wonder curiosity suspicion doubt apprehension and hesitation how your intuition communicates with you it's different for everybody and it comes with different voices at different times and it's usually a whisper it's not a yell it's just a whisper [Music] there's always a reason that you get that feeling oh should i go back home did i leave something burning on the stove my message is what's the cost of turning around and going back and checking it's free i'm not asking you to fly to hawaii to check on the pot on the stove now you might go back home and you might find that you didn't leave something burning on the stove in fact you turned it off but usually you'll find something else there was some other reason that this mind-body organism brought you back home [Music] when we think about intuition one of the great mysteries is why this expression feminine intuition has gained such traction as if women have more of it than men in fact women don't have more of it they just have to rely on it more often in day-to-day life now men while criticizing feminine intuition they have their own version of it but it has a much better name gut feeling and that's the one that they think is the one to listen to how does intuition communicate with you what do you get that tells you uh there's something to to pay attention to here i get a a physical feeling in my gut i feel uncomfortable mm-hmm you know i i'm usually open and i can feel myself close up that's great it's hard to recognize an emergency situation sometimes because there's no slow motion there's no music telling us this is about to get serious you know it's not a movie it's just one moment and the next moment and the next moment in the next moment [Music] sometimes a joke will come up a dark joke and we don't really stop and think well that's a particularly dark idea why did that joke come usually it's not the funniest joke and there's a story that has a profoundly good example of this that happened at the california forestry association a few employees were going through the mail because the receptionist who normally did the mail was not there that day and they came upon one package addressed to the former president of the association and they wondered what to do with it and they were holding it up and they were looking at it wow it's heavy i don't recognize the return address i wouldn't open it looks weird as they were thinking about it and they weren't particularly interested in opening it the new president of the association came in and he said what's going on not sure if we should forward it or return to the post office well let's just open it well i'm going back to my office i don't want to be here when the bomb goes off i don't want to be here when the bomb goes off that was one of the unabombers bombs and like other bombs that he sent people had intuited something was wrong and yet still opened the package and so dark humor those jokes that come to us that seem funny because they're either very unlikely or very extreme they are one of the ways that intuition gets our attention [Music] wonder is an intuitive messenger that says there's something more to learn like i wonder why that happened and then you're thinking about that another one is curiosity and that's an interesting one because curiosity is basically your mind telling you hey there's something more here there's something more to know now suspicion which is another messenger of intuition is curiosity with the added instruction to watch suspect the root of suspicion means to watch suspicion has a very bad rap in this culture we all think well i don't want to feel suspicious of other people but suspicion is not something you do to someone else it's something that you apply to yourself it's a signal you get from inside and it doesn't hurt anybody and it is just curiosity with the added directive that you continue to watch a lot of people believe that human behavior is not predictable and i hope to persuade any of you that human behavior is highly predictable and that we all do it every day we learn from our parents and our siblings and neighbors and friends and we catalogued all these behaviors and we begin to say well when somebody does this it's likely that this is going to happen later on every one of us here in los angeles who drove here today predicted the behavior of literally thousands of other people in traffic accurately and on the basis of tiny things 100 feet away the little nod where their hands are which way they were looking we accurately predicted the direction and the speed and the intention of the drivers who are otherwise moving around in these thousand pound and two thousand pound missiles just to step off the curb in front of a car we've made a prediction that it's going to stop at the traffic light and we're doing that from far away on the basis of where their head is and which way it's facing on the basis of which way the car is behaving an example of this is you're driving on the freeway and the car in front of you makes a little beginning move into your lane he quickly corrects you'll never trust that driver again right you want to get away from that driver as fast as you can and so this is one example of predicting human behavior that we all did today accurately i know because we all got here safely [Music] all too often we balance intuition with denial and so a woman alone in a building 10 o'clock at night on the 15th floor is working late in the office and now she's leaving the office to go home she walks down the hall pushes the elevator button and the elevator opens up and there's a man inside who causes her fear does not matter why and what does she do she says oh i don't want to be like that i don't want to live like that or i don't want to make him think that i'm not getting in the elevator because he's hispanic or he's black or whatever the issue is all of those ways in which we cross-examine our own feelings and so she gets into a steel soundproofed chamber with someone she's afraid of and there's not another animal in nature that would even consider doing that not even the bravest predator would say there's danger over there let me go that way denial does have a purpose in our lives you have to have denial to build a bridge or to get on a spacecraft at the top of an exploding rocket and fly off into space it takes a form of denial of risk and all people who've accomplished great things had to be able to set aside the concerns and the worries that they had and in effect to deny the risk but if you compare the two resources intuition is far more valuable for us than denial is and at the center of every kind of victimization i've ever seen is somebody who saw some signal got some information and denied it so many of my past experiences it was just so obvious that i missed signs oh i just have a pre-experience before i read your book where there were all of these pre-incident indicators i i felt and i heard things that were just not right that i just ignored i just shoved them down and you know as a result my boyfriend almost died tell us more about what happened it was a holiday weekend in key west and i was walking with my 6'4 linebacker boyfriend who was going to protect me you know wherever we went and we were just walking down the street through other people and i heard a metallic tinkling sound behind me and i thought well that's an odd sound and then i heard men's lowered voices coming up behind us and i thought what's odd why aren't they just walking around us but they stayed behind us and i realized i was scared and i couldn't register why i was scared so i made myself very small and i got in close hoping they would just go around us and i prayed please just leave us alone please i was so scared and one of the guys just picked me up by the shoulders and just sort of threw me aside the tinkling sound the metallic sound i'd heard was somebody pulling a wine jug out of a trash can and they hit him on the back of the head and he just dropped like a sack of potatoes so that was before i read the book but i heard them i felt scared and i did not want to turn around and after reading the book what was different i realized turn around i've made a rule with myself that if i feel afraid um i and i hear myself saying oh i'm sure it's nothing that's a red flag to me to get out of there don't ask about it don't think about it just get to safety so i have left grocery store lines i've walked out of elevators i've gone into a parking lot and turned around and come back into the store because if i hear myself negating whatever i'm feeling it's a red flag i get out [Music] there are all kinds of cultural reasons that we suppress our own intuition and don't want to listen sometimes it's just that we don't like what we're hearing a friend of mine cynthia told me that she had fired her building contractor because her dog ginger didn't like and didn't trust the building contractor she said ginger just growled and was very uncomfortable with him the irony is that ginger is reacting to cynthia's intuitive signals right dogs don't have any special intuition what dogs have is they don't deny what's precisely in front of them the dog just sees things as they are and acts on that and i want to tell you you can cut out the middleman or the middle dog and you can go straight to your own feelings about a contractor a boyfriend a husband anybody you work with and you don't need the dog's permission to make choices in your life that's really a key to safety in western society and really a key to being aware of predatory strategies that are applied around you by someone it is being in the present moment being awake being willing to accept what's actually happening what's going on if we let ourselves let go of what we want to believe what we wish were true and just let in what is we will be 100 safer a hundred percent happier a hundred percent wiser i interviewed a woman not far from here she was on in one of those apartment houses on the second story where the uh you know the hallways are on the outside of the building over a courtyard she was putting her key in in her lock and suddenly somebody was standing very close to her and she turned and she saw that the man in the middle of summer was wearing a ski mask pulled over his head and her first thought was oh he's going right that's the denial thought because that's the way i wish it could be the way i want it to be that's the denial step now the good news in that story is that her first thought was after her first action because her first action was she jumped back and pushed him over the balcony railing and the man toppled right over the second story and down into the courtyard below that intuitive signal is basically our nuclear defense system when we listen to something that we just feel we're certain about it will stop bugging us it'll stop nagging us and the way in which we exchange information intuitively silently and powerfully is the thing that lets us harvest this gift of fear and the gift from all the other signals that we get fear is a signal in the presence of danger it's meant to be a brief signal then there's unwarranted fear worry anxiety dread all of those how do we tell the difference one of the ways is that true fear is always in response to something that you sense you perceive it in your environment you see it you hear it you smell it you feel it it's always something in your environment but unwarranted fear is always something in your imagination or your memory and so uh if you've ever had that feeling you know this plane's going to crash cancel this flight don't get on this plane if that's in response to a news story you saw three weeks ago about a plane crash somewhere on earth that's memory or imagination but if it's in response to seeing the pilot stumble out of the out of the bar at the airport then that would be in response to something really in your situation so this test can really be applied all the time you feel fear about something and you can quickly determine whether it's warranted fear true fear or unwarranted fear go ahead i just want to thank you so much for making that distinction i have like severe anxiety and short succinct things like that are really helpful to me like oh am i freaking out because of something i'm imagining or something actually going on because 99 of the time something i'm imagining so what you just said impacted me i just wanted you to know i'm glad thank you for telling me one of the benefits of talking about fear is that if we look right at the truth of something we will be far more able to see it later on because when you know what something looks like you stop imagining what it looks like and you stop seeing it everywhere we spend a lot of time being afraid of people who aren't behaving in a way that ought to cause fear a good example is i get into the elevator after you and i push the button for another floor there's no reason to be concerned about me and yet all the time and there are people who we sense are afraid of us just because it's a man in their environment and maybe you know it baron here's a tall african-american kid do you ever encounter people who are afraid of you for no reason yeah like this old lady whenever i walk my dog outside and she sees me she always puts her back onto the other side and then she cuffs it and holds hilarious right so here's this woman who you've walked by 20 times you've never tried to take your purse and yet she's got it in mind african-american young person i'm going to be afraid it makes no difference whether somebody is big badly dressed african-american hispanic whatever it may be that's not the issue the issue is behavior the choices they make if you move toward her if you stare at her stop doing that if you're doing it by the way but if you do things like that of course there's a reason but just being a guy walking down the street there's no reason and it's wasted because if you're thinking about the tall african-american kid over there you're failing to see the you know wiry small white guy next to you who's actually staring at you or who's actually the same guy who followed you in the parking lot two hours ago and so the idea here is to look at behavior and choices that people make and not look at anything demographic [Music] animals in nature do not argue with their intuition there is no animal that wouldn't want the fear signal when there's a reason to get it because if there's something to be afraid of i'd rather hear about it i'd rather get the signal than not hear about it if you can imagine two wolves coming together in the forest on some mountain path and they see each other and then their ears go back flat and their teeth are showing and the fur on their back stands up and one attacks the other well you can be certain that the victim wolf does not say oh i had no idea that was coming they've exchanged a whole series of signals why why do they send signals in nature to each other because wolves fighting with each other don't actually want the risk of tissue damage they'd be much happier to avoid the fight with human beings there are gestures and they differ culture to culture but there are a group of absolutely universal gestures in every culture on earth without regard to language without regard to history this means calm down shutting out the chin means i'm angry those are the same in all cultures on earth so they are parts of our universal code the universal code of violence and the universal code of human behavior [Music] invariably after i say to an audience that all of us have in us the capacity for violence somebody will raise their hand and say no i could never be violent and if i'm quiet let's say it's a woman she says well unless somebody tried to hurt my child and then she could bite rip scratch burn kill doesn't make any difference suddenly the resource that we think is only in men is in everybody and since we all have it we can all recognize the warning signs of it and how do we do it we do it intuitively we do it immediately upon meeting somebody we feel comfortable or we don't feel comfortable who benefits from women and girls being ignorant about violence only predators would benefit from that one of the main reasons that we go through that dance of discounting our intuition when we get a signal is the belief that murderers will look a particular way or a rapist will look a particular way this person doesn't look like that or this person doesn't act like what our image is or our vision in our imagination of a dangerous person but predators look just like other people act just like other people do things just like other people even the worst murderers we can imagine have more in common with us than they have in contrast with us you know scientists do not look at a bird that eats its own eggs for example and say gee that's an aberrant bird and i've never seen anything like that instead they say if this bird does it then other birds in this species will also likely do it and there must be a reason in nature that it goes on even the most aberrant and unusual criminals choose their acts from a menu of possible options they can be quite extreme we've all seen stories in the news where people did something we would describe as inhuman predators look like all of us you can't you can't pick them out from a crowd we have to keep developing our intuition knowing that there's some of the bad guys bad guys that look like all of us that look like me you or our neighbors and they're not foaming from the mouth they don't have a third eye in the middle of their head they're one of us they're not a monster the use of the word monster is a way of distancing ourselves from that kind of behavior as if they are somehow people who snuck into humanity and they don't belong here they are specifically human precisely human and the the ability and the willingness to know how big that menu of options is that people choose is what helps us to see it when it's actually happening and to prove that to yourself to prove that we can still understand this territory that you can still spot predatory actions even when they're about extremely unusual or aberrant crimes is i would ask you to think in your imagination of the worst thing that you think a human being has ever done to another human being will really pause and conjure in your mind the worst thing that a person could do to another person [Music] whatever you imagined by virtue of the fact that you can imagine it you can be certain it has been done it has happened and the value of that disturbing exercise is to know that you can recognize these behaviors only if you're willing to believe that they actually happen and if you're willing to know that you get all this information about crime and you get all this information about violence in here in you because while we may not act on these things that disturbing thing that you thought of a moment ago is in you that was in you that didn't come from outside you may not act in the same violent ways but the same ingredients are there [Music] every one of us walked into this room and decided it was safe automatically without any conscious thought we realize the floor is there the walls aren't falling in there's nobody in here with a gun all these things that happen automatically for every room we ever walk into every corridor we ever walk down every underground parking lot we ever pull into we're making that assessment automatically sometimes all you get is a few lines of dialogue you don't get the whole play right every prediction would be perfect if we just waited till the 11th hour for example if we wait for the assassin to jump on the stage and pull a gun out and aim it at the governor i can very easily predict he's going to shoot the governor the harder thing is to predict it earlier and when you talk about prediction you want predictive elements that are not too dated like the birth of an assassin is a pre-incident indicator but that's too old to be useful jumping on the stage with a gun is too recent to be useful and you want to find that sweet spot in the middle and for all of you it's when we meet people when people come into our lives when people come into our environment now a good example of this is given to us by a man named robert thompson who's an airline pilot and he encountered danger in his life right here on the ground when going into a convenience store one day i walked into the convenience store to buy a cold drink and i was suddenly afraid i mean it was just a gut feeling i turned right around and walked out and to his credit he got in his car and he drove home and that is the end of his story except that at six o'clock that night on the news he saw that a police officer was shot in that store minutes after he left he asked himself later what caused him to feel fear what was he registering i think back the guy behind the counter he he gave me a quick look and i don't know i'm used to the guy sizing you up when you walk into the convenience store but he was intensely looking at this other customer this guy was wearing a big heavy jacket and i you know now i realized that it was hot and he said to me i didn't know any of this at the time and i said well if it's in your head now it was in your head then everything he told me was information he gathered as he went into the store and he listened very unusual because most people would say i don't know what that's about or it feels all right now or i just want to grab something fast and go because we get on our missions in life and we want to complete our missions and we don't like to change our plans in his case what was the cost of getting in his car and going to another convenience store that's what it cost him nothing and what was the benefit his life his life that he wasn't there in during a shooting right [Music]