Module 2 · HOW YOU COME OFF · Lesson 2 of 2
The gap
The distance between who you are and what you look like at twenty feet, at night, to somebody trained to expect a weapon.
Lesson 4 of 12
Start here
You are sitting in a parked car outside your own building, on the phone, waiting for somebody to come down. Engine off. Music low.
A patrol car slows, then stops behind you. Nobody gets out yet.
You have about eight seconds before the door opens. List everything about this picture that a person who does not know you might read wrong.
What he is walking up on
You know the whole story. You live here, you are waiting for your girl, you have been on the phone with your mother for ten minutes.
He knows none of it. What he has is a parked car with somebody in it, at night, in a spot where he has been called before, and a job where he has watched training footage of officers killed on stops exactly like this one.
That is not an excuse for anything. It is a description.
Everybody who arrives at you arrives already carrying something. A teacher who just got yelled at by a parent. A manager whose last three hires quit. An officer who watched a video in training. They are not neutral and neither are you.
Somebody who understands that can predict the room. Somebody who does not spends his life surprised.
Closing the gap on purpose
Most of what closes the gap is small and none of it costs you anything.
Make the ordinary thing look ordinary. Interior light on at night. Window down before he gets there. Hands high on the wheel where they are visible from twenty feet, not resting in your lap where they are not.
Narrate before you move. My licence is in my back pocket. Can I reach for it. Six words. It does two things at once. It removes the surprise, and it makes you a person who is thinking, which is the opposite of what he is scanning for.
Let the passengers know the plan before it happens. Module 5.2 is all of this, but the short version is that the most common way a stop goes wrong for somebody is that it was not his stop.
And answer at a normal volume. Under pressure people go loud or go silent. Both read badly. Normal is a decision you make in advance, because you will not be making decisions in the moment.
Tone
Volume, pace, pitch, and how long your first sentence is.
Those four are doing more work than the actual words. You can say yes sir in a way that makes everything worse, and you can say what did I do in a way that is completely fine. Same words, different outcome, and the difference is entirely in the four things above.
The first sentence matters most. Short and level. It sets the whole thing. A first sentence that is long, fast or loud has already told him something about how this is going to go.
And this is a skill you can hear. Record yourself. Say the same sentence six times, changing only volume and speed. Play it back. Most people have never once heard what they sound like when they are frightened and it is a genuine shock.
What you are not being asked to do
Read this part carefully, because courses like this get twisted here.
Nobody is asking you to be a different person. Not to smile, not to perform being harmless, not to pretend you are fine when you are not.
You are being asked to make the true thing legible. You are not dangerous. That is the truth. The work is making the truth readable in seven seconds to somebody who is not looking for it.
And you are allowed to be angry the entire time you are doing it. Nothing in this lesson requires you to feel anything in particular. You can be furious, hands on the wheel, voice level, doing this perfectly. Those are not in conflict. The feeling is yours and it stays yours.
You are not making yourself smaller. You are making the truth easier to see.
The workEight questions
Two of these nobody reads. They are marked.
Go back to the parked car. Write everything in that picture that could be read wrong. Aim for five.
Which one is hardest for you?
- AKeeping my hands visible without thinking about it
- BKeeping my volume level when I am angry
- CSaying something before I move
- DNot answering back when somebody is disrespecting me
What is the thing somebody could say to you in that moment that would make you lose it?
Write your six words. The exact sentence you will use before you reach for anything.
You are the passenger and your friend is driving. What are you going to say to him before the car moves, next time? Write it the way you would actually say it.
An officer is being disrespectful. Not unlawful. Just disrespectful. What is your plan?
- ASay nothing, get the badge number, deal with it later
- BAsk him to speak to me with respect, once, calmly
- CMatch it. He started it
- DI do not have a plan and that is why I am asking
Play back the video you made last week. What did you hear in your voice that you did not know was there?
Write the four parts of tone from section three from memory. Then circle the one you are worst at.
DeeperThree reflections
Nobody reads these.
- 1
Write about somebody who reads you accurately. What do they see that other people miss, and what did it take for them to see it.
- 2
Write about the last time your tone cost you something. Not with police. Anywhere.
- 3
There is a version of you that walks into any room and reads it correctly in five seconds and is completely himself while doing it. Write about him. What is different about how he moves.
Before you go
Everything in this module has been about the outside. What shows, what gets read, what you can adjust.
None of it works if your body has already made the decision before you did. That is the next module and it is the one with the most evidence behind it, because researchers have tested it with thousands of young men and the finding was not what anybody expected.
It was not that the ones who did better were calmer. It was that they were slower.
Practice the six words out loud, in a car, ten times, until you do not have to think about them. Then have somebody sit in the passenger seat and do it once more with them watching, because doing it in front of another person is different and that is the whole point.