Free Yourself from Fears (21 page)

Few cities can boast such a beautiful setting.

But Rio has another side to it, as I have already mentioned. Many parts are dangerous. The majority of the people who live in the city are very poor. Many live on the streets and many more live in favelas, enclaves that are communities in themselves. These have their own laws, enforced by the most powerful people who live there—usually drug dealers and people involved in organized crime. You never enter a favela unless someone who lives there accompanies you.

Driving in Rio is both alarming and confusing, so you can easily drive into a favela without realizing it. There are several all over the city, some very close to the most fashionable tourist areas. Tourists have more money than the locals, so the very rich and the very poor rub shoulders on the streets and beaches. A wristwatch, which would be a trivial purchase of utilitarian value to a tourist, would represent a month’s food to a poor Carioca.

I was walking back to my hotel in Copacabana one evening with Andrea; there were several people on the street at the time, both in front and behind us. Suddenly Andrea stopped and whispered, “Just a moment.” I was not frightened; I did not know why she had paused. She had seen two men behind us and when we stopped, they 164

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continued to walk past laughing. We pretended to talk and we saw them stop a little further on. We turned back and went into a small flower stall at the side of the street. They followed us in. By that time, I was frightened. The stallholder of the shop was too, it looked like he recognized our followers and did not like what he saw. We pushed past them quickly out of the shop, made a sharp turn, and crossed the street, losing ourselves in the crowd. We walked fast in the opposite direction. I was not frightened until I was in the flower shop, but if I had been alert, I would have seen the two behaving suspiciously and felt frightened earlier.

Danger signals can be ambiguous; much depends on the context (the third law of safety). Rio is a more dangerous city than most and these two men were clearly giving signals that I did not notice, but Andrea did. I learned my lesson—be alert to my surroundings. I did not appreciate the dangers of Rio at the time and thought that I was safe on a crowded street. People who live in Rio will tell you that having people around you will not guarantee your safety.

Denying fear

Often we may feel afraid, yet discount our fear or logically try to argue that there is nothing to fear. When a stranger starts up a conversation and we suddenly feel afraid for no obvious reason, what do we do?

Denial of fear can make us victims in many situations. Sometimes fear surfaces as an intuition: there is no real evidence, but we know something is wrong, although it is hard to put our finger on it exactly.

Our intuition is picking up signals from beyond consciousness.

Always pay attention to your intuition. The root of the word is the Latin verb
tuere
, which means to guard or protect. We may discount those fears for many reasons: we want life to go smoothly, or we care about what others think about us and try to avoid the ridicule and embarrassment of crying wolf. We want to think the best of others to avoid hurting their feelings or being made to look stupid. We are brought up to trust people and life is easier if they are trustworthy.

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(Notice the interesting double meaning to the English phrase “perfect strangers.” It can mean both someone we do not know and a stranger who has nothing wrong with him or her.)

Sometimes we dismiss our intuition when we should be paying attention to it. We read in the papers that there are muggers, robbers, and assorted psychopaths out on the streets, but surely none of those are people we know. People we know get the benefit of the doubt. But when a Jekyll and Hyde acquaintance suddenly goes berserk and is arrested, local people will often say, “I knew there was something funny about him…” Some may say this to appear knowledgeable after the event, but many people do have an intuition long before any trouble occurs. We are very sensitive to the way other people behave, what they say, and the kind of “vibrations” they give out. Our normal senses of seeing, hearing, and feeling are far more acute than we usually give them credit for; we do not need any sixth sense.

The eighth law of safety:

Pay attention to your intuitions.

Predicting violence

We may get warnings of violence, which can be predicted by the same skill we use to understand people—the universal human talent of empathy. We are capable of feeling every emotion under the sun, and have felt them all at one time or another. We run through the entire gamut of emotions in childhood and we remember them all. This allows us to recognize similar emotions in other people. Children feel keenly and their emotions fluctuate; they can feel murderous rage and unconditional love in the same afternoon. As we mature, we learn to control our emotions and transform negative emotions, without having to act on them.

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Violence does not spring out of nothing; it is always preceded by a thought. Thoughts are not confined to the brain: they become visible though words and body language, even if the person is trying to mask them. When the thoughts are charged with emotion, they show in the body. We can usually see if someone is angry even if they are trying to hide it: it leaks out in their posture, tonality, and expressions. The more you know the person, the easier it is to see.

There are universal signals of body language that precede violence.

These signals stay constant from culture to culture. Desmond Morris, an ethnologist who has studied crosscultural non-verbal expression, lists 66 body language signals that are constant in every culture. Many of these are unconscious. Many we can pick up without knowing exactly how we do so, but we respond to them.

For example, a stranger comes up to you in the street and asks what time it is. He is well dressed and smiles as he asks. This seems a harmless situation. Yet you may feel threatened. Why? He is only asking what time it is, why think ill of a perfect stranger?

What do you do? Maybe nothing. Maybe you retreat a pace and quickly glance at your watch.

What sort of signals could you have picked up without realizing that gave you the intuition of danger? Here are some possibilities: J He had just passed a big public clock, so why did he ask you the time?

J The man smiled but there was no warmth in the smile, his eyes stayed cold.

J His shoulders were tense and he was standing a little too close to you for comfort. He looked behind him just before he asked you (checking that the coast was clear for a getaway?).

J He smelt anxious. Smell is one sense that we do not use consciously. We are taught from childhood not to notice smell, or if we do to say nothing. It is considered very impolite in many cultures to comment on how a person smells. There is a multi-million-dollar deodorant industry designed to block out any smell that is remotely natural. Yet people do give out smells. We talk of 167

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the “scent of fear,” we say that something “smells dangerous,” or that the situation “smells wrong.” These are more than mere metaphors. When someone is anxious, or frightened, or stressed, the biochemical changes in their body will change their smell. We may pick this up unconsciously and we have learned to disregard it, so the information comes in another way—by intuition.

With this information, it would be sensible to look the man directly in the eye, point to the public clock, and then walk very quickly and resolutely in the other direction.

Danger signals

There are some other signals of personal danger to pay attention to if you see them. The key to these is
incongruence
. A person is incongruent when the signals they give out are not consistent. Two types of incongruence may spell danger:

J The first is
contextual
incongruence, when a person’s words or actions do not fit the context. This can be harmless, for example a business meeting where the presenter is wearing a T-shirt and trainers; or a restaurant where the waiters ignore you (unless you are in France, when it is perfectly normal). Other signals are not so harmless, like a stranger who insists on seeing you to your home, when you clearly decline the offer, or a work acquaintance who starts sending you unusually friendly letters and standing in the street outside your house at night.

J The second is
personal
incongruence. This is when a person’s actions and words do not give a consistent message in the context. Of course, no one is completely congruent all the time: civilization demands that we sometimes hide our feelings. We may say that we will do something, but fail to do it, for example.

However, certain types of personal incongruence can often spell danger, like friendly words accompanied by a predatory smile, or 168

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any smile that does not touch the eyes, or friendly words with clenched fists.

The ninth law of safety:

To stay safe, pay attention to contextual and personal incongruence.

Some personal incongruence signals are always worth paying attention to, especially if they are also contextually incongruent.

The first is “forced teaming.” This is when someone starts to use

“we” instead of “you” or “I.” They say things like “Let’s get this done”

or “We can’t let that happen, can we?” They force an alliance with you without a good reason. Forced teaming acts as a kind of reassurance—”Hey, we are in this together...”—but why would you need reassurance, unless there was a threat? Forced teaming is designed to make you drop your guard.

The second signal comes from unnecessary details and explanations. When people tell the truth, they do not doubt themselves.

When they lie, it may sound credible to you, but not to them—they know it is a lie, so they bolster up the explanation to the point where, to quote Shakespeare, “Methinks he doth protest too much.” When someone gives too much explanation, they may be more interested in convincing you of their story than in making a genuine proposal. A promise that you did not ask for is another signal of a similar nature.

Why would they want to promise you, unless there was some doubt?

A statement would be enough.

The third signal is trying to put you under a sense of obligation by offering unwanted help. If you need help it is always better to choose someone yourself and ask directly. Some people are naturally helpful, but then they will not press their help on you if you say no. Enforced help is designed to make you feel in someone’s debt, so that you are more likely to go along with other proposals they may have.

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The attribution error

These sorts of approaches rely for their effectiveness on what psy-chologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” This means ascribing to identity what is really behavior. If someone acts in a charming way, we tend to think of them as a charming person. They are not: they just acted in a charming way.

NLP makes this distinction through the structure of neurological levels, as elaborated principally by Robert Dilts. There are five levels:

J The first level is the
environment
—the place, the time, and the people involved. The environment sets the context. Environment looks the same to everybody who is there.

J The second level is
behavior
—our actions. Behavior is visible from the outside.

J The third level is
capability
—our skills, both physical and mental.

Skills make us behave in ways that are consistent, automatic, and habitual. Capability is not visible from the outside; we cannot see the capability itself, only the results in a person’s behavior.

J The fourth level is
beliefs and values
. Beliefs are the principles that guide our actions, not what we say we believe, but what we act on.

Values are why we do what we do. They are what are important to us—the things we pursue—health, wealth, happiness, and love.

Beliefs and values are not visible, except in behavior. Our beliefs and values tell us what to do, our skills allow us to do it, and our behavior is the observable result.

J The fifth level is
identity
—our sense of ourselves, our core beliefs and values that define us and our mission in life.

Neurological levels are not a hierarchy. They all connect to each other and all influence each other. Identity is not the “highest.” In fact, there is good evidence that identity changes under extreme environments and circumstances (for example prison). Identity is not a stable, identifiable set of traits but a bundle of habits (capability) and 170

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beliefs that are dependent on context. The reason that identity stays stable is because we are so good at controlling our environment.

Now from the inside point of view—from our perspective, we express our identity, beliefs, and values through our behavior. From the outside, people see behavior, not identity. When we look out for danger, we need to look at behavior and context, not identity. We know nothing of a person’s identity apart from what they tell us by their actions.

Their actions give clues to a person’s intentions. If we confuse behavior with identity, we tend to attribute qualities to people that they may not have. What matters is intention, and this is invisible from the outside.

Rapport is not enough

Many people are very good at building rapport—a sense of relationship and trust. Rapport can be built at all the neurological levels.

Rapport at the level of environment is how we dress and appear.

We tend to be well disposed toward people who look like us. If someone approaches us in the street dressed in rags, we might be immediately suspicious that they want money. A well-dressed stranger looks respectable. It can be important to get rapport on the environmental level (for example, wearing a suit to a business meeting and not jeans), but it is not a reliable indicator of good intention, because it can be so easily manipulated. Confidence tricksters always make sure that they look good, fit in, and meet expectations.