Angels with Attitude
The Socially Intelligent Woman's Guide to Personal Safety
by Danny Kessler
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Angels with Attitude
The Socially Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Personal Safety
By Danny Kessler
Edited By Vince Nance
Copyright 2011 Danny Kessler
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Disclaimer
The following information and safety tips are intended to be used as a general guide for enhancing personal safety through awareness and prevention. No assurances whatsoever are given or implied by the author or the publisher that, by following these guidelines, an individual will protect themselves or their property from harm, damage, or destruction. All suggestions that I make regarding self defense and/or personal safety should be practiced in person with a qualified trainer, and great caution should be taken by the reader when practicing or executing these preventive safety tips. The author and publisher hereby disclaim any and all responsibility or liability for injury that may occur as a result of the use or misuse of this material. You understand that the information contained herein is an opinion, for entertainment purposes only. You are responsible for your own behavior and no portion of this book guarantees your safety.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Rochelle Pullman for being the best and most supportive Aunt, for showing me better ways to organize and deal with my learning disabilities. I want to thank Jeff Funicello for being like an older brother to me and a great coach who taught me persistence and perseverance and the belief that I can achieve anything. I want to thank Bari Yonkers for being like a twin sister and persuading me to continue to take the road less traveled. I want to thank Dedra Johanson for being the best mentor I have ever had and for giving me great strategy and wisdom in the business world. I want to Thank Dr. Francine Hardaway for being my startup Mom and for her great Fasttrack entrepreneurship classes. I want to thank Emma Resnick for having such a great eye for detail. Lastly, I want to thank my editor Vince Nance for fixing my grammar and spelling and making my words sound great!
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Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Listening with your eyes
Chapter 3: Razor Sharp Intuition
Chapter 4: Visual Boundary Setting
Chapter 5: Verbal Boundary Setting
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A few years ago, I was teaching a class on personal safety at Arizona State University and was concluding it by reminding my students about how important intuition and awareness are. After class, a student named Rebecca approached me and said that she had a story to tell me about something that had happened to her recently.
I listened as she told me that a few nights before, she was walking home with her boyfriend when they reached an intersection. As they were waiting for the light to change, she noticed two guys in the distance that were giving her a bad feeling. She couldn’t understand why she felt this way, but remembered what I taught her about the power of taking her intuition seriously, and immediately became proactive about the situation.
She said to her boyfriend, "You see those two guys down the street coming towards us? They’re giving me a bad feeling - let’s cross the street to the other side."
Her boyfriend responded, "You’re being silly, let’s just keep going."
She insisted, "No, please just listen to me. I am getting a bad feeling about those two guys, so let’s cross the street here and avoid crossing paths with them."
They crossed the street as she suggested, and arrived home to their apartment without incident. By making a minor adjustment to their route home, she took charge of her safety and avoided crossing paths with two men who were giving her a negative feeling. Five minutes later, screams were heard coming from just outside of their building, and they immediately ran to the window and called the police. It turns out, those same two guys Rebecca avoided while walking home ended up robbing two girls at gunpoint! Rebecca and her boyfriend avoided a very dangerous situation because of what she learned in my class, and this became a defining moment early in my career as an educator about personal safety. Her story is one of many like it that continue to motivate me in sharing the message that helped to empower and inform her.
Angels with Attitude is about knowing how to deal with the realities that all women face sooner or later.
Editor’s Note:
“Most women who care about personal safety are the ones who have already been attacked.”
- Danny Kessler
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"So why is a girl born with such a highly tuned machine for reading faces, hearing emotional tones in voices, and responding to unspoken cues in others? Think about it. A machine like that is built for connection. That’s the main job of the girl brain, and that’s what it drives a female to do from birth. This is the result of millennia of genetic and evolutionary hardwiring that once had—and probably still has—real consequences for survival. If you can read faces and voices, you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, more aggressive male is going to do. And since you’re smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman—or cavemen."
- Dr. Louann Brizendine: The Female Brain
Personal safety for women is a lot different than personal safety for men, for a number of reasons. While males are on average larger and more physically intimidating than females, women have not just significantly different, but significantly better intuition and communication skills than men. These skills are invaluable mechanisms of prevention and protection, and when leveraged to your advantage can greatly increase your safety. At its core, this book is about becoming aware of the natural advantages you were born with, trusting them, and incorporating them into your personal safety.
Many experts in the field of crime, personal safety, and women's self defense discuss violent crime and the many ways in which it negatively affects society as if it is a temporary affliction. The undertone to this message is that rapists should and eventually will stop raping people, and that police, cameras, and information will one day eradicate this problem from society entirely. Surely these mechanisms are all part of the long term solution to the plague that is violence against women, but to rely on them more than your own judgment and discretion is foolishly idealistic.
The raw and often disconcerting truth about human nature trumps delusions, no matter how comforting they may be, and I advocate for women to carry an umbrella instead of praying for good weather. I will treat you like the master of your destiny, because that is what you are. If you ever need help, I hope it's there for you, I really do. But I wouldn't bet my life on it, and I won't ask you to bet yours. I will instead teach you how to use your own natural ability to avoid negative situations in the first place, how to de-escalate them when you can't by using your own natural advantages, and will eventually suggest systems for self defense training should physical confrontation ever be truly unavoidable.
This book deals largely with communication skills that break down into four main areas: Awareness, Body Language, Intuition, and Boundary Setting. All of these topics are interrelated, and provide invaluable insight when combined together. As your awareness becomes heightened, your opportunities to read body language increase. Interpreting more body language will gradually enhance your intuition. As awareness of your own intuitive processes becomes more natural, your ability to predict what people will do in various social settings becomes more accurate. This strengthens your confidence and ability to set appropriate and powerful boundaries. Visual and verbal boundaries are vital in commanding respect and avoiding danger.
Chapter One: Catlike Awareness is about being socially aware and alert. I will teach you about how to develop awareness within yourself, techniques for observing your surroundings, and will discuss your potential attacker's most likely strategies.
Chapter Two: Listening With Your Eyes is all about body language. I will talk about how to improve your ability to read and decode body language, which is vital in gathering “moment-to-moment” information about the world around you.
Chapter Three: Razor Sharp Intuition deals with your intuitive abilities and how to predict behavior. I will talk about how you can become more sensitive to your intuition, and how to better predict the behavior of the people you meet.
Chapter Four: Visual Boundary Setting talks about using your body language and how to set visual boundaries with people you don’t want to meet. I will explain how to change your body language to dissuade people from approaching you and causing problems.
Chapter Five: Verbal Boundary Setting demonstrates the power of verbal self defense and provides psychological tactics that you can use to outwit someone you’d rather not converse with.
Chapter Six: Drugs and Alcohol talks about how drugs and alcohol dull intuition, and how they impact your ability to access your natural self defense mechanisms.
Chapter Seven: Facebook Stalker provides insight about the realities of stalking in the 21st century, and how to react to stalker behavior.
Chapter Eight: Physical Feminism explains the benefits of martial arts training, and ways to physically protect yourself in dangerous situations such as improvised weapons, guns, and TASERs.
Women are naturally better than men at many of the different skills that I write about in this book. Verbal communication, reading body language, predicting behavior, and intuition are several areas in which women consistently outperform men. However, the raw ability and social intelligence that women possess must be accurately informed through education and practice. Mastery of these skills will help you to avoid the most potentially dangerous situations and I hope to help you in achieving this goal.
The Angels with Attitude program was designed by Bari Yonkers, Samantha DiPerna, myself and several other experts in self defense and law enforcement. Over the past several years, thousands of women have increased their personal safety by attending Angels with Attitude awareness lectures and presentations, self defense camps, and personal safety courses.
My goal in this book is to give you practical, direct, easy to remember solutions that effectively address your concerns regarding personal safety. This is so that the next time you see your daughter, mother, sister, or someone you love, you can easily communicate these techniques to them. I've devoted my professional life to studying human behavior and patterns of violence, as well as the most effective and proven tactics for staying safe in such a rapidly evolving world. I am honored to have interacted with so many talented and educated women and men who have done the same and who have dramatically enhanced my own understanding and ability to help others. This book will explain some things that society simply will not teach you, and it is my sincere hope that after reading it you will be more empowered with the knowledge and skills to defend yourself and avoid dangerous or uncomfortable situations.
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Chapter 1: "Cat Like" Awareness
“Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do—bats and dolphins, for instance—seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it.”
- Diane Ackerman: Natural History of the Senses
True personal safety begins long before any physical contact. Most people believe that they become victims because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The truth is that all of us have a great deal of control over whether or not we are chosen as victims, and this control begins with our eyes and our ears. Your awareness, your presence of mind, is your first line of defense and the most powerful method of assessing and responding to problems. The element of surprise is what the criminal is looking for, and you take that away from him when you are alert and aware.
So what is “Catlike Awareness”? Have you ever tried to sneak up on a cat from behind? Good luck – they know what you're doing before you've taken your first step.
Women have much better peripheral vision than men do. This allows a woman to see the entire picture of what's going on around her. Women can see more than 90 degrees to the left and right, while looking straight ahead. Compare this to a man who sees more in tunnel vision and cannot see their periphery so clearly. This inability to see their periphery without looking directly at it is why men are so often caught staring at women, while women see just as much (if not more) but appear to stare less. A woman does not have to look directly at someone to “check them out”. For instance, you can be looking at someone’s face and entire body at the same time, so that you appear to be looking in one direction when you are in fact focusing in another. Likewise, a woman does not have to look directly at a man to assess his intentions, and this is not a trivial matter when it comes to your safety. Men are literally blind to a range of vision that you are quite used to seeing in, and most men won’t take this into account when estimating what you can see. Use this natural advantage to collect more information about your surroundings when the moment calls for heightened situational awareness.
What is Situational Awareness?
“Situational awareness” does not mean “wide eyed perpetual panic”. It is more about using common sense and intuition to know when to pay closer attention to your environment. Remaining constantly aware of everything is exhausting and unrealistic. However, you must assess the information that you do gather about your surroundings and be willing to address red flags immediately. Knowing when to pay attention and focus on your surroundings more fully will help you to balance what you want to be doing with what you sometimes need to be doing to remain safe.
If you work late at night in a dangerous part of town, or if you are traveling in a foreign country, your situational awareness should naturally be heightened. However, it’s just as important to keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary in your daily life as well.
What Weakens My Situational Awareness?
Multitasking: Everywhere I go, I see people multitasking more than ever before. Technology allows us to listen to our favorite music while we use GPS, IM online, and talk with a friend. Having instant conversations and entertainment at any point in time certainly has its professional and personal benefits! This technology makes time go by faster when waiting for something, and makes even the most boring professor or a trip to the DMV seem pretty enjoyable. It’s entirely too easy to talk with our best friends constantly and catch up with the latest gossip 24/7, but this perpetual stimulation and distraction has a cost, and that cost is very often your awareness and your safety.
Strong situational awareness means knowing when to take off your headphones and listen when the trail you’re on goes through the tunnel, or when to put the book away and take a second to look at the shadow or bush that you think you saw moving. It means making the decision to hang up the phone so you can hear if those are your footsteps echoing or someone else's, sensing when to quit texting and watch while that new bartender makes your drink at the nightclub, or when to stop surfing the Internet on the subway when you feel someone’s eyes on you. Situational awareness is about keeping your things close on a busy street instead of digging around trying to find your MP3 player, and it’s about paying attention when you sense that you're vulnerable.
Thinking about the past: What do you think about when you walk from the car to your house? When you're stressed out from a tough day at work or are thinking about some personal drama that happened recently, you're not focused on what you're doing and are more vulnerable to attack. In this situation, your mind is distracted and to the trained eye, this will be visible in your body language. Criminals will read your stressed out body language and will be more likely to select you as a target to be taken advantage of. Save your thoughts about the past for situations that don’t require heightened awareness. Walking through a parking garage is NOT the time to be wondering if your sexual partner is cheating, what you had for dinner last night, or why that woman down the hall from you never says “hello” to you. There is a time and a place to reflect on your life, but you must first be alert and aware of your current situation.
Thinking about the future: How often do you think about what you have to do later on, or what you are going to do over the weekend? Maybe you’re thinking about your five year plan, or where to do your Master's degree, but if so then you are not focused on the present. The observant criminal will notice this distracted body language and will be more likely to take advantage of you. You must clear your mind of what you’re doing for dinner or for the weekend if you are in a situation that has the potential to be dangerous. You don’t get attacked in the past or in the future - you get attacked in the present, and when a criminal picks you as a target, that’s where you need to be.
Now
There’s a time that I like,
It’s one that I keep.
Now is that time,
And it never leaves.
Now keeps on going,
Now never ends.
Every time I look up,
It’s Now again.
- Rob Smith, 1990: Operation Desert Storm.
When am I more likely to be attacked?
Statistically speaking, women are attacked much more when they are alone. However, when we’re alone is also the time when we tend to use technology the most to distract ourselves and keep from getting bored. Criminals learn to favor efficiency, and they’re going to look for the path of least resistance. If you had to pick between two people to attack, would you rather choose the one who is deeply engrossed in their new smart phone, or the one who is walking with their head up and alert? Criminals can easily tell when you are distracted and they will see you as an easy target. If you’re having trouble deciding whether a situation is safe for listening to music or surfing the Internet, think of it this way: Earbuds = Deaf Smartphone = Blind These toys and tools are fun and convenient, but decreased awareness is their dark side. You must decide when it is appropriate to be deaf or blind to your surroundings in the name of communication or entertainment.
Technology is an easy topic to point out because it’s one of the most readily available examples of distractions, but it is far from the only one. Often, we don’t need technology to distract our brain because it is quite capable of distracting itself. Not all criminals stalk their prey, but even in a “random attack” the criminal is relying heavily on the element of surprise. Being aware of your surroundings will reduce an attacker’s ability to surprise you, and will thereby decrease your susceptibility to seemingly random attacks. The criminal will notice that you are aware and alert and he will be more likely to pick someone who is neither of those to attack. Criminals have options - don’t be an easy one.
Situational Awareness Exercise: Anchoring Yourself in the Moment.
(Make sure you are in a public place where there are many people walking around that you can observe.)
Vision: For the first exercise, touch your thumb to your middle finger with slight pressure. As you do this, I want you to concentrate on your eyes and notice all of the colors that you see around you. Using your peripheral vision, I want you to notice all of the movements you can detect with your eyes. Don’t move your eyes to look directly at an object, and instead try to notice everything you see in the far corners of your eyes, from 90 degrees to the left to 90 degrees to the right. Pay attention to all the visual activity that you can see going on, and just take it all in. Observe as much as you can using only your eyes, and continue to touch your thumb and middle finger together as you do this. Do not become overly focused on any one object, but notice all of the movement happening around you. Do this for 3 - 4 minutes before proceeding to step 2.
Hearing: For this exercise, touch your thumb to your index finger. Next, close your eyes and pay attention to all of the sounds that you can detect. Listen especially for the sounds of the background noise you normally do not pay attention to, such as car engines, footsteps, and talking. Can you hear the breathing of the people near you? Listen for the sounds of conversation nearby, and then reach out with your ears and find conversations that are farther away. I want you to take in as much information with your ears as you can. Do this for 3 - 4 minutes at a time.
Both: For the final exercise, you will alternate touching your thumb to your middle finger and index finger, switching back and forth every few seconds. As your fingers alternate position against your thumb, alternate what you are paying attention to. When your thumb and middle finger are together, focus on what your eyes can see, and when your index finger and thumb are pressed lightly together, concentrate on what your ears can hear. Seek details with both your eyes and ears. Switch back and forth from your eyes to ears every few seconds, as if you are alternating your reality between your visual channel and your auditory channel. Each time you switch, the channels should become more crisp and clear. Do this exercise for 3 - 4 minutes at a time.
Practice these techniques every day for a week. Once you’re more familiar with it, you can use this technique when walking alone at night to create a hyper-aware mental state. This technique can also be used to bring yourself into the moment before competing or performing, to relieve stress, to heighten appreciation of an experience and create clearer memories, and to relax or clear your mind.
With all of the information that our senses are capable of bringing us about the world, it is worthy of our full attention. However, interpreting the vast quantities of information that our eyes and ears are bringing us can flood our minds if we don’t know what to look for. Increased awareness will make your senses more perceptive and better able to detect potential threats, but you must also learn to decode the increased sensory information that heightened awareness brings. This brings us to the chapter on “listening with your eyes”, which introduces the language of human movement and posture.
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Chapter 2: Listening with your eyes
“A nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to defuse conflict. All of this is hardwired into the brains of women. These are the talents women are born with that many men, frankly, are not.”
- Louann Brizendine: The Female Brain
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans show higher levels of brain activity in women than in men while evaluating facial expressions and body language. Studies have also shown that women are better at deciphering body language and are more sensitive to a broader range of emotional tones than men. Women are naturally gifted at quickly and more accurately assessing the thoughts, intentions, and beliefs of others based on surprisingly limited information. Consciously observing your own body language, as well as your physical interactions and exchanges with others, is vital in gaining a better understanding and mastery of body language as it relates to personal safety. You already speak this “language” (you've been practicing since birth), but this chapter deals with some vocabulary that you may not be familiar with.
What is body language?
The science of reading body language is called Kinesics. Body language, or nonverbal communication, includes the gestures, tonality, mannerisms, and energy that a person displays. My personal definition of body language is simply, “every part of interpersonal communication outside of the actual words that are being said”. There are always multiple dialogues taking place in a conversation – the one you hear and the one you see. If someone verbally says, “I am happy”, then the actual words they are using indicate happiness. However, if they say this with their face looking sad, as they kick the dirt, with their head down, while wringing their hands together, and they look as if they are about to cry, they're either lying or are being sarcastic. Anyone watching that verbal statement being made would doubt the truthfulness of it, because although their words are saying “happy”, their body language is screaming “sad”.
What our body language is saying is the most accurate and reliable reflection of how we are truly feeling. A more in depth understanding of body language will help you to predict the true emotional state and intentions of the person you are dealing with.
Why are women better at decoding body language?
“Typically, a woman can use an average of six main facial expressions in a ten-second listening period to reflect and then feed back the speaker's emotions. Her face will mirror the emotions being expressed by the speaker.“
- Barbara Pease: The Definitive Book of Body Language
The answer to this question involves both nature and nurture, and ranges from hormone levels and brain chemistry to cultural upbringing and life experience. Additionally, it is impossible to disconnect the natural advantages that women have from the social climate that shaped our evolution as humans. Mothers usually spend at least two years taking care of a newborn infant, and communication with the baby during this period is almost exclusively non-verbal. This is part of the reason why women have (what seems to men) an almost psychic ability to read and interpret facial expressions and more subtle signals.
These fine tuned skills have gradually been hardwired into human brains by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, because men and women who were better at it were more reproductively successful, and those who lacked the ability to accurately interpret their social environment were more likely to die off or be killed. This ability is thought to have been of greater consequence to women due to the unique maternal, communicative, and social demands placed on them. For the past few hundred thousand years, our male ancestors tended to think more in terms of minimizing or eliminating potential threats or rivals from outside of their tribe, while the survival and success of our female ancestors required a higher emphasis on creating and managing social alliances and an increased focus on anticipating and avoiding danger. It is not difficult to understand why a female advantage in interpreting body language, facial expressions, and vocal patterns would be of evolutionary significance when it comes to the mastery of family dynamics, social politics, and communication in a prehistoric setting.
Interestingly, women typically have greater sensitivity to infants crying than men do, both in their ability to detect these distress signals and in interpreting the cause. This parallels a natural predisposition in women to be more nurturing than men on average, and has been linked strongly to hormone levels, primarily testosterone and estrogen. In the weeks before and after birth, the male partners of pregnant women and new mothers have been shown to experience a significant rise in estrogen and a drop in testosterone levels. This coincides with an increased sensitivity to babies crying, a more nurturing disposition, and a decreased sex drive in the man during the mother's period of greatest vulnerability. If nothing else, these findings and others like them corroborate the idea that there is much more going on in human interactions than we understand, on both sides of the reproductive aisle.
Women also have a larger communication center in the brain, as well as superior connectivity and synergy between their left and right hemispheres. This allows women a natural advantage in processing and translating emotions, which they can do faster and more accurately than men. Body language is an unconsciously generated outward display of a person's emotional condition, and women speak and interpret this language much more clearly than men. Reading emotions means perceiving reality, and whoever has a more accurate portrait of the emotional condition of those surrounding them at a particular moment will have a vital advantage, especially in a conflict or negative social situation.
Is body language the same all over the world?
The most fundamental communication gestures are relatively consistent between virtually all known human cultures. A ready example of this phenomenon is that in practically every culture (including several other species of primate), people frown when sad and smile when happy or excited. Beyond facial expressions, there are many bodily gestures that are universal to humans, such as shrugging the shoulders with the palms upwards to indicate a lack of information, throwing the head back while laughing, hugging, and cowering in fear.
Many of our human tendencies in exhibiting body language manifest themselves within other species of animals as well. Bowing isn't culturally universal, but is a particularly interesting example because it is a gentrification of something that's true of many animals. For example, wolves are pack animals that have a rigidly enforced hierarchical power structure, and are very sensitive to the height (or more accurately - head level) of those around them. Many species of birds will puff themselves up by expanding their body cavity or fluffing up their feathers, both for mating exhibitions and for warding off predators. Watch two men about to fight in a bar – they are definitely not getting smaller as the argument intensifies! They try to appear taller, bigger, stronger, and usually stick their head up farther, puff their chest out more, and would shove pillows in their shirt while standing on a stool if they could. This tendency in males of virtually every species towards displaying physical power, talent, or a specific trait in order to sexually reproduce or defend themselves is basically universal.
Likewise, predatory body language is extremely consistent within the animal kingdom. When hunting, carnivores will become smaller, quieter, shrink into the grass, camouflage themselves, put out bait, set traps, and move suddenly when the moment to attack arises. While there are many cultural differences within our species, the body language that has been reproductively or socially significant to our ancestors over millions of years is undeniably similar or identical wherever you go. Things like high fiving, kissing on both cheeks, shaking hands, or saluting are forms of body language, but only within a specific social or cultural context. Most significantly, they have to be taught in order to have meaning. While appreciating someone's cultural origins has value, the body language that I refer to regarding personal safety deals more with the subconscious manifestations of intent that can be seen by paying attention to the actions, posture, or behaviors of the men around you. A woman from Japan, India, or France can intuitively tell whether or not a man from America or Australia intends to do them physical harm. These cultures are radically different, but the body language that they will have learned to “translate” as threatening will be something that transcends cultural boundaries.
What do you trust more, the verbal message or the nonverbal message?
I advocate for trusting nonverbal signals over verbal communication. This is not to say that words have no value when it comes to personal safety or discerning intent – they can be extremely helpful. In fact, comparing what someone's words say with what their body says is one of the best ways to tell if they're being honest with you, and both are necessary in order for this kind of assessment to work. However, when someone's words and actions are conflicting, their actions are consistently going to be the more reliable indicator of their true feelings or intentions.
Body language deserves more credibility for several reasons. As opposed to the words that we use, it is less rehearsed and therefor less edited. For instance, when a man thinks about approaching a woman who he finds attractive, he's usually not rehearsing body language, he's rehearsing his speech. Furthermore, body language is not something that can be controlled by managing just your tongue, voice, and lips. Body language is constant, and it's head to toe. It includes everything from facial expressions, to the angle someone's head is held at, to the way they hold their arms, to the position of their hips, and down to their restless feet. Albert Mehrabian's research on body language shows that messages received through nonverbal channels carry five times as much communicative impact as those received through speech. The people who are best at interpreting body language are constantly matching and contrasting words, tonality, and gestures to find incongruency. While words tell one story, the nonverbal messages often tell another, and knowing which to trust will never be more vital than in the realm of personal safety.