A man walks down a Chicago sidewalk. He’s staring at his phone.
About fifteen yards ahead of him, someone steps onto the sidewalk and starts walking slowly in his direction. Behind him, a second person slips out from between two parked cars at the curb. The two attackers converge at the same moment — one from the front, one from behind. The man is robbed and assaulted.
He never saw either of them coming. He was looking at his phone.
This was Chicago, about seven years ago. It could have been any city, any year, any sidewalk. This exact pattern plays out daily across America. Sometimes the cost is a phone and some cash. Sometimes it’s a life. The variable that determines which one isn’t always the attacker’s skill or the victim’s strength. It’s whether the victim noticed the setup early enough to do anything about it.
That’s awareness. And it’s the dimension of mindset where most people lose the fight before it starts.
What Awareness Actually Is
In the pillar article on the six components of a concealed carry mindset, I described awareness as the practice of paying attention to your environment — noticing people, patterns, exits, and the small wrong notes that precede most violent encounters.
But awareness is more than paying attention. Paying attention is what you do at a job interview. Awareness is a continuous mental orientation — a posture you carry whether you’re walking your dog, buying gas, or sitting in a coffee shop. It’s the default operating mode of someone who takes their personal safety seriously.
Here’s the cleanest way I can draw the line between awareness and the avoidance mindset I wrote about last week:
- Awareness is the input. It’s what you notice.
- Avoidance is the output. It’s what you do with what you noticed.
You can have awareness without avoidance — that’s the person who sees the parking lot situation developing, parses it correctly, and then does nothing. They become a witness to their own incident.
You can’t really have avoidance without awareness. There’s nothing to avoid if you haven’t seen it.
Awareness comes first. Everything downstream — avoidance, decision-making, drawing, fighting — runs on the data awareness collects.
The Chicago Setup, Decoded
Let’s go back to the sidewalk.
The man wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t lost. He wasn’t in a dark alley at 2 a.m. He was walking down an ordinary city street doing what millions of people do every day — looking at his phone.
That single behavior cost him most of his situational awareness. He had no visual field beyond the four-inch screen in his hand. His peripheral vision was degraded. His head was tilted down, so his ears were picking up a different pattern of sound than they would have been with his head up. And to any predator watching, he was broadcasting unmistakably: this one is checked out.
Two attackers caught that signal and built a plan around it.
The first one entered the sidewalk ahead of him at about fifteen yards and started closing the distance. That’s the front pincer. If the victim had been heads-up, he would have seen this person from a block away and we know that because of the surveillance video of the attack that is on the ASP YouTube channel. He would have had time to think about whether they were a threat. Time to change his angle. Time to cross the street. Time to step into the nearest open business. Time to do any of a dozen things.
He had none of that time. He didn’t see them at fifteen yards. He didn’t see them at five.
The second attacker came from behind, around parked cars at the curb. This is the more sophisticated piece. The parked cars provided some minor concealment. The attacker stayed off the sidewalk until the moment of the strike. Even a heads-up pedestrian might have missed the curb-side approach — but a heads-up pedestrian would have at least registered the front threat, which would have prompted a head turn, a glance over the shoulder, a stop. Any of those small adjustments could have surfaced the second attacker.
This is why awareness has to be 360 degrees, not 180. The front attacker was the bait. The back attacker was the closer.
The whole thing was over in seconds. He lost his phone, his cash, and a piece of his life he won’t get back. The cost could just as easily have been higher.
What Most People Get Wrong
The Phone (Or Pick Your Distraction)
The man in Chicago wasn’t on his phone because he’s stupid or careless. He was on his phone because almost everyone is on their phone almost all the time. It’s the default behavior of modern American life. Standing in line, walking to the car, waiting at a crosswalk, sitting at a coffee shop — phone, phone, phone, phone.
If you want a single, high-leverage change you can make to your awareness today, it’s this: when you’re in transitional spaces — parking lots, sidewalks, stairwells, doorways, ATMs, gas pumps — the phone goes away. Pocket. Purse. Down. The phone is not an emergency. The text isn’t going anywhere. The notification can wait ninety seconds.
If you can’t bring yourself to put the phone down in those moments, you’re not running an awareness mindset. You’re running a hope-I-get-lucky mindset.
Treating Awareness Like a Switch
The other common failure is treating awareness like a switch you can flip on when needed. You can’t.
If you spend 99% of your day fully checked out — phone, daydream, music in both ears, head down — your ability to suddenly come up to a fight-ready level of attention when something happens is essentially zero. You don’t get to skip the middle. Awareness has to be a baseline, not a response. The default mode, not the emergency mode.
Front-Only Vision
The Chicago victim might have noticed the front attacker if his head had been up. But even heads-up pedestrians often run a 180-degree awareness picture — what’s in front of me — and never check behind.
Behind you matters. Especially in any environment where you can be flanked. Sidewalks, parking lots, restaurant patios, elevators, stairwells. The most underused awareness habit in American life is the casual head turn. A glance over your shoulder. A scan of the angle behind you. Cost: half a second. Value: not getting closed on from your blind side.
What Awareness Looks Like in Daily Life
A few of the behaviors I’d point to:
- Phone goes away in transitional spaces. Parking lots, sidewalks, ATMs, stairwells, doorways. The phone is not load-bearing in those moments. Pocket it.
- Head up, eyes wide. You can’t see what you’re not looking at. Keep your head up and your visual field wide.
- Scan 360, not 180. Get in the habit of casual head turns. Glance over your shoulder when you change direction. Check what’s behind you before you stop.
- Know your exits. When you walk into a restaurant, coffee shop, store, or office, take three seconds to register the exits. Where they are, how to reach them, whether they’re locked. This sounds excessive until the day it isn’t.
- Catalog people, not just things. Most people remember where they parked the car better than they remember what the guy two cars over looked like. Invert that. The hostile is a person, not a parking spot.
- Notice the wrong notes. The man in the lobby who hasn’t moved in ten minutes. The car parked too far from the building. The conversation that sounds too forced. The person who looked at you a beat too long. These are signals. They don’t always mean something, but the ones that do, mean a lot.
How to Build the Awareness Mindset
Awareness isn’t a personality trait. It’s a habit, and habits are built deliberately.
A few specific tools that work:
- Learn Cooper’s color codes. Jeff Cooper’s framework for situational awareness is still the cleanest model out there:
- White: fully unaware. Daydreaming. On your phone. Oblivious.
- Yellow: relaxed but alert. Aware of your surroundings without being keyed up. This should be your default in any public space.
- Orange: something specific has your attention. A person, a behavior, a sound. You’re focused on it and starting to think about what you’d do.
- Red: the threat is real and you’re acting on it. Drawing, fighting, fleeing, calling.
The goal isn’t to live in Red. The goal is to live in Yellow, so that you can shift to Orange and Red quickly when needed.
- Use the “pick a person” drill. Every time you walk into a public space — restaurant, coffee shop, gas station — pick out one person and describe them to yourself. Clothing. Hair. Build. What they’re doing. Whether their hands are visible. After a week you’ll find yourself doing it without trying. Six months in, you’ll notice the wrong notes without effort.
- Practice the exit scan. Same idea, different target. Walk into a room and identify two exits within five seconds. Make it a game. After a while it’s automatic.
- Audit your phone behavior for one week. Keep a tally of how many times you check your phone in transitional spaces — parking lots, walking, stairwells. The number will be larger than you expect. Then cut it in half. Then cut it in half again.
- Read the application piece. Matthew wrote about how to apply awareness in daily routines and specific environments in Everyday Tactical Situational Awareness. This article is the mindset. That article is the application.
The Takeaway
The man on the Chicago sidewalk didn’t lose because he was small. He didn’t lose because he was outnumbered. He didn’t lose because he wasn’t armed.
He lost because he didn’t see it coming.
Two attackers built a plan around the fact that he wasn’t going to. They were right. The plan worked.
Awareness is the dimension of mindset that determines whether you ever get to use any of the other ones. Defensive only doesn’t matter if you don’t see the threat. Avoidance doesn’t matter if you don’t see the threat. Determination, discipline, diligence — none of it matters if the threat closes the distance before you’ve registered it exists.
Put the phone down. Pick your head up. Scan the angles. Build the habit before you ever need it.
This is the third piece in a six-part series walking through each component of a strong concealed carry mindset, drawn from the original pillar article on developing a defensive mindset. Previously: The Defensive-Only Mindset and The Avoidance Mindset. Next up: Determination — the commitment to do what’s necessary when the moment comes.
