Mastering Verbal Commands for Self-Defense | Concealed Coalition Webinar

Hello Conceal Coalition family Austin Davis, your national Director of training, and I'm so glad to be with you here this month. I've got a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Now I know I say that every time I do a topic because anything that makes you and your family and your lifestyle safer is something I really do appreciate. But this topic is something near and dear to my heart because it's about verbal commands. What's interesting about this topic is I've been a police officer for many decades. I'm a field training officer and I train officers. And what I've noticed is sometimes I have officers who step out on scene, especially my little new baby cops who come on out, my probationary police officers, and they can say two or three words and blow the whole scene up. And some experienced officers come in the scene, they say two or three things in calm things.

As you know, as a owner and director of Virtual Tactical Academy for the last 12 years, I've been working around the country with people just like you in a hyperrealistic virtual reality environment with my judgment trainer. And what I notice is one of the hardest skills we have is verbal commands pulling a gun and shooting. That's pretty straightforward. But knowing when we can use verbal commands, when that leads us to have to escalate into higher uses of force and the basics of it pretty much seemed to be a bit of a problem. I had so many problems with my officers recently that I decided to write a little two page form to hand out to everybody on shift next month about verbal commands, the importance of them. Well, about two and a half weeks later, I now have vote for a hundred thousand words in about 38 chapters, and it's my newest book and I hope you'll like it.

So verbal commands, why are verbal commands so important and why am I taking time out your valuable day to talk about it? Because I think it is the one personal safety issue we don't spend enough time to talk about. And the great thing about verbal commands, it's not about the words you use, it's about you being able to use those words to gain control, which hopefully will give you more chances to increase more safety to manage the situation. Also, I find out that verbal commands well done can help you before the incident, during the incident and after the incident, especially if it's being reported or it happens to go to court. Now the big thing about verbal commands, if you only take one takeaway from it is this, there's only two ways human beings communicate. Force a reason. That's it. Force a reason. So if you can talk to 'em and get 'em to comply, we win.

If you have to go to force, that's okay, but at least you showed that you went through the process to try to take this thing and resolve it without having to go to force. And if you can win with just using words, that's the cleanest victory at all possible. Now, verbal commands or self defense tool that most people would like to have but they don't possess. And the problem is it's very hard. One is hopefully with this little chat today, and if you get my book, you'll have a whole, and I know a hundred thousand words sounds like a lot, and it is when you're typing 'em out, but it's in little short segmented chapters with very specific things in there. I have verbal commands for domestic violence. I have verbal commands for cultural sensitivity. I have all these topics in there that are very short, very action items.

Once you learn that and put it declarative message though, I need you to come to one of the Concealed Coalition, virtual Tactical Academy so we can put you in the simulator and let you practice it so you can work out what works for you and what doesn't work for you. And if I really had to name one gap in training, it would probably be verbal commands. Now, the problem with verbal commands though is if you don't have certain tips, I'm going to teach you like preverbal loops, understanding astel make when you need to be using alpha beta commands, this becomes a very high cognitive load. So I need you to learn this in such a way that even if you're all freaked out, it can still be accessed through procedural memory. Now, when we talk about verbal commands, I like to break things down simplest component because the more complicated anything is, the less likely it is to work in a complex situation.

So we want to take this thing as simple as possible. For me, on its most basic level of verbal commands, trying to do one of three things and it's doing it in three ways. It's two threes, that's actually two chunks of knowledge, okay? We're trying to get 'em to stop doing something they want to do, get them to do something they don't want to do or understand our non-negotiable no. So when verbal commands in sort of a 30,000 foot view, we're trying to get 'em to stop doing something they want to do, get them to do something they don't want to do or understand we're dealing with a non-negotiable no. Now, when it comes time for verbal commands, really try to do three things with them. And if you can get this in your head, you can be outcome based and probably have a much better chance of success.

The first thing we're trying to do is get 'em to freeze. So if someone just steps out behind a car, behind a bush or whatever and you don't know what's going on, you throw your hands up and yell, freeze, don't move. And what I'm trying to get with that command is for them not to make any furtive gestures into their pockets, into their waistband, into their wingspan where they may access a weapon. So at that point in time, I just need 'em to stop all movement to give my chance to give my brain a chance to kind of catch up to see what's going on. So the first of the three big global commands are trying to do with the verbal command is get 'em to just freeze, not move. The second one is pin them. So I'm not so concerned at that point in time when they're moving their hands, I'm probably going to be concerned they're going for a waistband, but I really don't want to get in closer to your daughter to the door of the daycare, to the front of the church any closer to me.

That's free them. The second one is pin them. So I want to pin them in place. And the third one is move them. If you watch your episode on home security, one of the interesting things is I see this all the time in the simulator, we have a lot of home invasion simulators where you get the drop on a person coming in your house, they go ahead and comply and then they sit there waiting for you to do something and then my student with the simulated gun in a simulated situation locks up and they always look at me and go, what'd I do now? I go, I don't know. You got the gun, you figure it out. So one of the things in that situation, if you don't think they're a threat, they haven't produced a weapon and they are compliant at that point in time, you may get 'em to face away from you.

Go ahead and start moving left, left, left, put your right hand on the doorknob, open the door, exit the home, come back, I'll have to shoot you. So getting someone to move is sometimes very helpful. If you see a weapon in their wingspan, I need you to move left. I need to move, right? Don't go near the ax handle, don't go near the firearm, don't go near my children. You need to move them farther away to gain more control. So we have pin them, we have, excuse me, we have free them, pin them, and we have movement. Now, alpha and beta commands, if you're not real careful and if you're not real careful about who you get information from, they're going to tell you when it comes time to give verbal commands to always give out alpha commands. Alpha commands are when you need to act and get compliance right now, beta commands are more about cooperation and knowing the difference between the two and which situations one will work better for you will really enhance your effective ability to communicate.

Because if you need an alpha command, a really alpha command, don't move, drop the weapon, take two steps back, don't step near that child. Very clear, direct problem, solution oriented communication, that's great. But if we're in another situation, those same barking commands with someone who, for examples, maybe an emotionally disturbed person who's in crisis, that may escalate the situation and drive them to go ahead and enter into the force instead of the reason part of the category. So what is a bad use of a beta command? When you should have an alpha command when you have your gun drawn on them and you say something like, don't do something stupid, don't make me do this, don't do something silly. Those are not direct clear cut commands, but a beta command might come in helpful when you say things like, if you'll just take a step back, we can work on a solution to this.

Hey man, I know you're in stress today. We can take this on down. You can lower the tone of voice, you can talk slower and end up with a much better chance of gaining the compliance you're looking for. Now you understand that basically we're trying to get 'em to stop doing something they want to do, do something they don't want to do or non-negotiable, no, you understand that we're trying to either freeze them, pin them, or we're trying to get them to move in a direction that works best for us. You now have a rough guess of what an alpha and a beta command is and sort of have a rough place to put this in your head on when you need to be a little more cooperative and when you need to be a little more commanding. What about the basic threes of verbal commands?

Well, if you're tied up in a situation, sometimes that high cognitive load can become very difficult for people to sort out some sort of complex situation. One of the things I like calling it is I call it the Texas method, but actually it comes from verbal judo and it comes back even farther than that I believe. And the reason I call it the Texas method is because it was taught to me as a baby cop decades ago and it's a field training officer, I teach it to my officers and that's called the ask tell make formula. So let's just say for example, you're at a gas station, keep bopping along, doing your own business and somebody rolls up on you and they start asking you a socially acceptable question. Many street attacks start off with a socially acceptable question. They're trying to see if you're quick, easy, low risk, low possibility resistance.

They're trying to see if they can get you in sort of a confused cognitive load and they can see if they can play on your natural good person instincts for not wanting to give them a dollar, tell them what time it is, or my cell phone's dead, can I borrow your cell phone? So at that point in time you, I want to ask them, Hey, I'm sorry I can't help you today. No thank you. I dunno what's going on here, but I don't have your dollar so you can ask 'em or Hey, would you just please stop right there? Take a few steps back and we can talk. At that point in time, you're ask him, you want to match your tone with their tone. You don't want to come off too tough, but you don't want to come off too weak either. And what you're doing with this asking is you're trying to solve the problem at this level in one section, but you're also trying to look for a micro compliance because anytime we're dealing with these people, we're trying to see if they're compliant with what's going on.

If I approach you and I do need a couple of dollars for gas and my kids are in the back of the car and I'm in a bad situation, I don't know the time or I don't know this area, and I come up to you and I go, Hey, I don't know what you way to the mall and you jump on me, my first response is a good guy person. It's going to be throwing my hands and go, Hey, sorry, I didn't mean to bother you. I'll go find somebody else. But if you tell me that and I'm like, dude, just chill, just need a couple of bucks for gas and they start closing on in, that means they're disregarding your non-negotiable. No, and this is pretty much a danger sign you'd be careful about if you ask 'em and they don't comply with it, then you tell 'em this is going to be one step up in the verbal tone and the tension in your voice to command, Hey, I said you need to back off.

Hey, I don't have your dollar. I can't help you today. No, you can't borrow my phone at the key coming. At that point in time, you're probably going to have to use force and make them, because remember, it's only two ways we communicate force a reason. So if you get to that point, we're going to have to do something now between ask, tell, and make. There's the magic question between ask, tell, and make between, tell and make. There's a magic question, Hey, is there anything I can say or do to get you to comply with what I'm telling you to do? Or we don't have to take the next step and go to Tesla. And if they say, let's say you bumped into a guy in a bar and you spilled a beer and he's all up in your face like, Hey man, I'm sorry, I dunno what's going on.

Buy another beer. He's getting back up in your face and taking this personal. At that point in time you say, Hey, you need to step back. I need to walk away and we just need to go about our business. And if you're still up in your face, you understand that, man, I've tried everything that gets compliance at this point in time, reasoning's not work, life's going to get forced. At that point in time, you may want to go ahead and ask the magic questions, is there anything I can say or do to solve this problem that you and I getting into some sort of conflict? And if he says, you better apologize right now, how about this? Hey, I'm sorry man, can't buy another beer. It's all good. You need to get out of that chair. It was mine. Or I'm going to kick your ass.

Hey, I get out of the chair, I'll go find another chair. If the cost to compliance is low enough, there's no need to use force. So just ask yourself, what's the cost to compliance to say, I'm sorry, I give up the chair, buy 'em another beer. Whatever it takes to resolve the situation out that, but if you do have to go to force and the ask tell, make formula, what you need to be doing is making sure that you decide what the red lines are in your life that when these people keep closing in on you, you're always thinking about your plan B. Because the problem with a lot of these verbal commands are you ask them, you told them, and then all of a sudden you have to get that make part. You may not have made that mental switch that says, okay, if I do have to go to force, what kind of force am I going to use?

Have I got my pepper spray in my hand? Is this something wrong? I need to draw my gun, point my gun or maybe even use my gun? So you want to start thinking about the downrange implications of this thing while you're doing the astel make though there's something called the quadrants of attention and your attention is probably going to be external narrow. More than likely you'd be looking right at their face because that's how we read emotions, human beings to human beings. The only problem with that is, is when you're doing that, you're looking through a very narrow field of focus and the problem looking at this narrow field of focus is you probably can't see their hands, their waistline, their wings fan, and you probably aren't looking around scanning to see if this is some sort of ruse for having your focus attention, your locus of control, your area of responsibility in front of you and not aware of what's coming past you.

And remember wolves traveling packs and maybe his buddy slipping up behind you to knock you upside the head or to stick a gun in your back. Or you may find yourself in this process of backing off to gain some space. You might've stepped out in traffic and have crossing traffic or gosh knows what's going on. So make sure when you're doing the astel make that you have complete situational awareness because remember, wolves travel and packs and threats are not always in front of us like they are at the range. The real problem though is when we're trying to do astel make, keep situational awareness, understand we're trying to pin 'em, freeze 'em or move 'em. This can be really taxing for you to come up with whatever dialogue they're feeding back to you. So you may want to try some pre-recorded verbal loose. For me, if I'm in a public place, I'm making transit and I'm in a transitional space, which means I'm going from one safe space to another safe space, let's save my car to the convenience store, somebody rolls up on me.

My inertial response to a prerecorded loop is I stick my hand up and I say, no thank you. I can't help you today. I like the no thank you because it sort of is a verbal non challenge statement. No thank you. I can't help you today and that's my pre-done verbal loop. He coming, I repeat that back. Hey, I'm sorry I told you no thank you. I can't help you today and I'll get a little tension in my voice by trying to raise my voice. Very aware of a lot of situations where you have something going on that's environmentally difficult. I'm a relatively low volume speaker, so when I'm out in public, if there's a lot of car noises, if I'm at a gas station, they got that sort of background music playing or someone's got a car going with their stereo going, we have to adjust our levels there.

But if you adjust your level to make sure the communication is clear, make sure that we don't take it up a notch to where we end up with an escalation problem because it seems like we overreact and over respond to the level of either real or perceived threat that we think this person is presenting with us. So prerecorded verbal loops. The other thing about prerecorded verbal loop is if you ever do use any kind of verbal command to back someone off who's in a transitional space that you don't feel comfortable with, do a hot wash after every traffic stop or every call for service I have with any of my officers, we do a hot wash even when I'm on calls by myself, I like doing a hot wash. I like going, how did I handle that call? How did I handle that approach? God, I've done this a little differently.

And then we're always trying to improve on this thing because there are no perfect situations and there are no perfect reaction situation, but there are better standards of care and better standards of practice we can always pursue. So it's not about perfection, it's about progress. And each time you do get in a situation like this breakdown to practice also when you sort of rehash your pre-done verbal loops, this is also a great time if you're on a dinner conversation, a table to talk to somebody because the kind of person who's a concealed coalition member or belongs to concealed coalition university or takes time out their day to hear this kind of talk is my one percenters. Y'all got it figured out about personal safety and you're not outsourcing your safety, but all of us have those people who are not as dialed into safety who are not going to spend time watching this.

And you want to lead by example, and this is a good time to teach by talking to 'em about that situation saying, hey, if you're in a situation, how would you react? You may want to also talk to them about transitional spaces and safer ways to conduct themselves in it. For example, if the situation at you in a gas station, you might want to say, have you ever had that situation at you in a gas station? How'd you handle it? And the safest place to get gas is going to be at a Costco or a Sam's type environment where all there is to do is get gas When you're at a really sketchy gas station and people hanging out, this exposes us to a hard time reading the situation because we have a hard time reading the baseline and the anomalies because all kinds of people moving around for all kinds of reasons.

If you're at a Sam's or a Costco type situation, all you can do is buy gas and there's no convenience store attached to it. People either you're getting gas or not. And that's a much easier baseline to read, a much easier time to pick out anomaly in a way to become much safer. Now sometimes we need to use our verbal commands to deescalate a calming situation. Here's where deescalation and verbal commands come together. If you read my book, it's deescalation and scope of verbal command. Personally though, I'm going to be rewriting the deescalation book and taking out the verbal commands and spending a hundred thousand words just explaining that technique alone. The thing you need to understand is whenever you're using verbal commands with somebody, there's a few guides that'll really help you figure out if this is emotionally disturbed person situation or if this is something else to something else usually can be, it's going to be a personal crime, it's something about you they don't like or the group you represent they don't like.

It's going to be a process crime. For example, a sexual assault, you have the body parts that they need to get whatever they're trying to do with power or dominance and control, or this could be a profit motive, which means this is all about deciding they need whatever valuables they have to convert to some sort of funds. So if you can read that, you'll kind of know what you're dealing with. The thing you want to think about though is if it's on a personal process or profit prime, if this is somebody who is in crisis, you're dealing with and we need to figure that out. If you think you need to give verbal commands to emotionally disturbed person, first off, ask yourself a very simple binary question, do I need to be involved in this or not? If I'm walking to and from of the gas station, somebody is having a crisis, I'm backing out of this deal, I'm grabbing my people or I'm going, but if this is a neighbor, this is somebody in my office, this is somebody in my house of worship there between me and the exit, or if I leave this person in the context of other people who may not be as dialed in as you are to be prepared to handle a situation.

In that case, we have to define if you're going to be able to talk to them to try to get them to come on down. Understand there's going to be really three types of people we need to calm down. One is going to be intoxicated. If they're intoxicated, that could be drugs, alcohol. This poses significant problems because they may not have the cognitive ability to understand what's going on if you're trying to deescalate a situation and is a short-term crisis. The classic example of that is road rage. You have somebody who may have the capacity to think, but at this point in time their emotions are so high. And as emotions go up, rational thought goes down. We may have to get 'em down a bit to deal with this and we may have somebody who's got long-term emotional for cognitive issues, which cause them to have some problems.

So they don't have the capacity to understand. So whenever we're trying to talk them down in a calming technique, we also have to check ourselves to make sure they have the capacity, they have the agreement and they're participating with us. And we can always go back to, if you read my book on deescalation, a technique I learned from Force Science Institute on the Force Science Institute deescalation structure, it's the TEB profile thoughts, emotions, behavior. And this is a really important thing to be able to figure out when you're trying to deescalate somebody to see if they're going to be working with you or if you need to get ready to go right to force. Because the reason part is not working. Thoughts are they clear contaminated emotions, high or low and is behavior compliant or noncompliant? So the most dangerous person'll come in contact with someone who's real clear thinking, real low emotion and noncompliant.

They're not backing up, they're not giving you two steps, they're not keeping their hands out of their pockets, they're not reaching into their backpack, and that person's extremely dangerous. You may have somebody who has contaminated thinking high emotion, but very compliant. Hey buddy, I can see you're having a tough time. Trust me, you're scaring the kids here in the parking lot. Can we take a few steps away from them because you don't like the kind of person wants to scare children? Lemme talk to you about here and see if we can find a solution. So when you're doing calming techniques, you really want to think about if they have the capacity, the agreement, and the participation to deal with you in this situation. Now the last thing I want to talk about, and these are my sort of cherry pick from the however many chapters I'm going to end up with in this book is profanity and verbal commands.

Now, there's two camps when it comes to profanity and verbal commands. One camp is this. There's street people talking to 'em like the street. So here's the problem I've got with that. Number one, those three people who talk like that, they may have all their chaos cup filled up with life. They may have a rough childhood, they may just come out of prison, they may have had some real problems, they may be coming on or going off on a drug cycle, and they're just that close. They're just a grenade and you pull the pin on 'em. So I think when you say, Hey, mother, stop right there, I think that that term disrespect and it could escalate. The other problem with verbal commands is we may give up our ability to say that we are the innocent victim here. The reason is, is those words may seem provocative and if they're being recorded on a police officer body camera on some sort of surveillance video on a cell phone security footage, this may lose your ability to keep your victim status, whether that's in a criminal, civil case or a social pariah case if this ends up running up, putting a piece of metal into meat by your handgun.

So I really want you to think about that. If you do feel like you need to do profanity, a couple things. One, try to remove them from verbal loops. If you do feel like you have to use profanity to explain yourself in the situation, there's difference between going, Hey mother, drop the screwdriver and drop the effing screwdriver. Those still use profanity, but in very different ways instead of, hey, mother, on the ground versus on the I'm having a hard time. Even my loops are so programmed not to have them on that effing ground. Those are both examples of profanity, but they are directed in such a way that the profane part is about the action or the direction. It's not directed towards the person. I know that's a real fine line, but if you spend some time thinking about it and if you thought about it from the standpoint of trying to defend your actions later on, I think it'll start making a lot more sense.

The other problem I've got with profanity is I'm trying to use very clear language. I'm going to probably be escalated. They're going to be escalated. And the higher our emotions go, the lower our cognitive rational ability to think is. So in this situation, we really want to try to keep 'em very simple. So face away, don't reach in your pockets. That's very different than, Hey, mofo, turn the F around. Don't reach in your F in pockets. Those ad words and complexity. And I'm trying to get very clear, simple alpha directions to get what I'm doing. And profanity doesn't ever mix well with beta commands. So if you feel like you need to use profanity and it pops out in that, that is what it is. But if we can train ourselves so that doesn't happen, we're going to end up being in a whole much better place to prevent this, to deal with this and defend this after it's all gone.

I really wish I could spend about three hours with this discussion, but hopefully you'll be able to drive around and listen to the new book from Road Rabbit, who's hopefully going to do all the nice layout and we'll do a nice audio book for you. But I really think that you can go to the range and practice every month. And I think that as I get older and I spend more time in the development of people to make them as safe as possible in increasingly dangerous world, I really think it's the left of bang skills that are probably more important. Yes, I want you to be able to pull your gun. Yes, I want you to be able to hit what you're shooting at, but also I want you to have the skills to see when something's coming up, recognize what's going on, and have the command presence to be able to use your voice to take them from here down to here, to use your voice to figure out where that red line is, to where they're not.

You've asked, you told you, you're at the point where you make them even after the magic question that lets you know that, hey, I've done anything I can. Because when we are gun centric people, we think all problems can be solved with a gun. And if you've ever heard me say more than two words at a time about this topic, the way I feel about a gun, it is a very specialized tool for very narrow set of topics to save human life, not harm, innocent life and the tool of resort. And yes, there are situations you have to pull and you have to shoot, but generally speaking, when we look at things in hindsight, those chaotic situations, you have to pull point and shoot. Usually it had a lot of warning signs that situational awareness would've helped. And usually they're going to ask you some sort of question to see if you are a victim that they need to be dealing with.

Why don't two sharks eat each other? It's too darn much trouble. That's where verbal commands come in. The problem with verbal commands though is you really can't em at the range while you're shooting. You can't stand in front of a mirror. You need to put this in context. We need to give you the base information and let you work with it and play with it until it becomes your own that it works for you because my commands may not work for you and your commands may not work for me. And your commands when you're with your family may be different commands than you would have, and your tolerance for risk with those commands is different than when you're alone versus when you are with your family or when you're alone with this bad person, without any witnesses, where you have a crowd around you where this may be some sort of personal thing that you can talk them down on.

So being able to read the whole thing in context and separates what's facts and what's your story can be very, very helpful. All this leads me to say, I hope you come spend time with me in the simulator. And the simulator in Virtual Tactical Academy is not about whether or not you shot the bad guy or not, it's about how you work to the problem. And we like letting you work through the same scenario three or four times, let you play at different responses until you figure out what exactly works with you. So in closing, if you haven't thought about verbal commands as a primary way of increasing your self protection, I hope this changes it. Hope you'll get in line for the book when it comes on out. I hope I'll see you at a virtual tax academy class soon. We're starting up next year in 2025 and starting around the country for our concealed coalition university members. We look forward to adding you in that very specialized group, and I think you're going to find a lot of like-minded people in that room you're going to find a lot of comfort and fun with because these classes are just a hoot. If you've never been to one, trust me, it's probably the most fun training you can have. So in closing, remember is like to finish any time we have a talk, be a guardian always and a warrior when indeed.

Credit: Mastering Verbal Commands for Self-Defense | Concealed Coalition Webinar