WYSIAYS

And just like that, it’s Autumn, or Fall, or the season of pumpkin spiced latte. I love autumn, there is still warmth in the sun, but mornings have a certain crisp in the air that hints of magic. The trees put on a glorious display of colour, and it’s safe for Irish skin to be out in the sun.

The summer has ended and so my crowd safety work is shifting from events to planning (permission), and Pilates teaching is getting busier. It’s a strange combination some may say, but I see the link. The more we can anchor in our bodies, and trust our intuition, skills, experience; the more we come to trust ourselves, and the better we are when managing crowds or in the control room. We don’t lose our heads under pressure ;)

Life has been….interesting lately, perhaps it feels the same for you. Although it feels like the world is falling apart, well, it is but it’s not. It’s changing. I reduced my intake of social/media as I saw how it was polluting my brain. I thought of the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) when discussing the brain’s primitive/automatic/survival system (bias, judgment, amygdala etc) and I thought how apt that is for these internet devices in our hand almost every hour of every day, constantly conditioning us. The world isn’t going one way or the other, we are being led to believe it is. “People” don’t think one thing over another, we are being served a story directly into our palms.

I call it WYSIAYS (What You See Is All You’re Shown). You want to hire an Uber but “it’s busy right now so fees have increased”. Is that reality or is that what Uber wants you to see? When you open TikTok and see all the angry Republicans burning their Taylor Swift tickets, is that reality or is that what TikTok’s Heating Team want you to see? You open Facebook and see images of Shrimp Jesus being lauded by thousands of….bots? I digress.

Every time you open your phone, you are being shown something someone else wants you to see. The world is falling apart? That might be what the media wants you to see. It’s like the (Irish comedian) Tommy Tiernan skit on turning on the television and seeing explosions, war and other horrible things happening. But then you go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, look out the window, and everything is grand.

Everything we see is being curated. Are we vigilant for the conditioning?

What I am up to

I will be discussing the above and how it connects with Zone Ex at this year’s IBIT crowd safety & security conference in Cologne, in my talk “Success in Zone Ex”. Evolving crowd behaviour has changed the way we look at crowd safety and I will talk about how the principles of Zone Ex (as written in the Purple Guide chapter a working group and I authored this year) can support crowd safety professionals in a world that some may say feels like its on fire.

Safety Sistas

The latest episode of Safety Sistas is out now with Olivia Bellas, facilitator, friend and incredible human being. We discuss the importance of facilitation to break through difficult conversations, build and nurture relationships and make big change. We recognise how critical it is in creating safety in our environment and ourselves so we can have honest conversations and actually create shifts. I hope you enjoy and would love to hear what you thought of it.

I am looking forward to the interviews currently being arranged and will be planning interviews for the rest of the year. If you are interested in being interviewed, or know someone whose stories the world should hear, please get in touch.

Other things

Last week I participated in a one day workshop on bones and the psoas with the one and only Liz Koch, author of The Psoas Book. It was incredible to explore the theme of safety in relation to grounding into our bones, which is the element of our body that responds to gravity and location, and the Psoas which is part of the autonomic nervous system, contracting in fear response (and remaining contracted if our system does not return to homeostasis after stress). If we don’t know where we are, can we feel safe?

Wishing you a healthy Autumn season 🍂

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