Start With A Win - Agent Safety

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Adam kicks off National Real Estate Agent Safety month by sharing the four keystone concepts of agent (and personal) safety. He has used these concepts as a member of the military, as a law enforcement officer, and now as the leader of thousands of RE/MAX agents.Awareness – This is the primary key to survival in most situations. By paying attention to any physical signs of criminal activity as well as any gut feelings telling you that something is not right, you can avoid entering into danger.Avoidance – Remove yourself from the situation by physically leaving and calling for help. You should have a plan for how you will avoid potential danger and trust your gut when it tells you to follow the plan. In the case of an open house where a person approaches you and makes you feel unsafe, just walk out of the house. You should have already instructed the homeowners to remove any prescription medications, valuables, and weapons from the house, and your safety is more important than possessions. Remember that the best fight won is the fight never fought.De-escalation – Kindness is the first wave of de-escalation and talking your way out of things can help diffuse a potentially dangerous situation. Another tactic of de-escalation is to redirect the person’s attention or the focus of the conversation. If you feel unsafe, it is best to call the police and report what has happened – it is likely that this person’s behavior is a pattern that the authorities need to be aware of.Response – If after following the steps of awareness, avoidance, and de-escalation you still find yourself in a potentially dangerous situation, your natural defense system will kick in and you are likely to fight, flight, or freeze. Analyze your surroundings and keep trying to either get out of the situation or choose to do nothing and hope the person moves on. However, if you do find yourself in a fight, fight with all your might by using whatever resources are available to you. You are legally allowed to defend yourself if you feel at risk of bodily harm, and your focus should be to protect, defend, and win.In addition to these safety concepts, it is also important to be familiar with first aid. Have a first aid kit nearby and be prepared to administer basic first aid if the situation arises, either learned during a CPR/First Aid training class or by watching a few YouTube videos. You can have a positive impact on others by being aware and willing to act.Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

Adam. Yes. How's it going? That's good. I think we're gonna be talking about some agent safety in this episode. Is this the secret side of the podcast? This is the intro of the podcast. Oh yeah. The little hey do I want to listen to this or not kind of section of the podcast. You might be wondering what is good agent safety? Well you're gonna find out. Let's do it. Atop of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And live from top of the 12th floor of REMAX World Headquarters here in Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Kantos, CEO of REMAX with Start With a Win.

I've got with me here today, producer Mark. What's up, buddy? As always, so good. I'm awesome. Thank you for asking. You are always awesome. Yeah. I love this time of year. It's like the summer's dying down and fall's kicking in. It's cool and stuff like that. Whoa. Yeah. It's only like 96 degrees here today. That's it. Yeah. But then it's cool in the evening or in the morning. It's nice and crisp. Is it nice and crisp or is it just like we're sick of 96 degrees and it's like 76. We're like, whoa, it's so cool out. It's less than 70 or 96. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. But it's nice. It's Colorado. It's a dry heat. That's right. Yeah. So let's talk about this agent safety thing. Well, you know, September. Yeah. September's National Real Estate Agent Safety Month, which does not mean

you should only be safe in September, by the way. Right? You should be safe always. It's just we remind people once a year. That's good. Yeah.

It's like a continuing education. It is. Yeah. Get your safety credits. The cool part about this podcast, we can listen to it year round. That's right. We can just come back to it

every time we need to. So if you could break this down into a few things, what are the top, what would you say, two or three? There are actually four. Four? Wow. Yes. There are four key concepts to this.

And let me kind of take a step back here and tell you kind of where these key concepts come from. I used to be a police officer in the 90s, and I taught officer survival skills at the police academy with decisional shooting and things like that. We taught cops how to stay alive, taught sniper schools, SWAT schools, things like that. And it all boiled down to these four principles that keep human beings alive. And they're very simple. So I'm going to unpack them here. But essentially what those four principles are, awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, and response. So awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, and response. So let's start with awareness here. Awareness is ultimately the key to survival.

When you think about back into nature, we all had this animal instinct or this sixth sense, if you will, that something's wrong. Now we call it gut feeling. If something's not right, you've got a bad gut feeling about something. You hear the term, the hair on the back of your neck standing up? Yeah. So think about this. Mark, when you look at a dog who's laying on the floor and let's say somebody's walking up to the front door, the dog knows before they ring the doorbell typically. And what happens to that dog? The hackles on the back of their neck stand up,

and they kind of go, woof. Kind of a warning bark. Is that what it's called, the hackles? Yes. Look at the gold. Just learning all sorts of stuff. Look at that. Yeah.

So when the fur on the back of their neck stands up, that's them saying something's wrong. Their gut feeling. Yeah, that's their gut feeling on something ain't right here. Or when they see another human being that they don't trust, they get that way. You can see it in their body language. Well, guess what? We get that way as well. And the hair on the back of our neck stands up because something's not right. But we don't know what that is. We can't quite identify it. And the worst part about nature and being a human being is we get to choose whether or not we respond to things. So generally, we choose not to respond to that in life as human beings. When you're doing business and you're a real estate agent, say you approach a house,

and you look at the house and you just think to yourself, something's not right here. I hope I survive this. That thought goes through people's minds. It's the same thing as if you pull up to a car in a parking lot. Any human being in anywhere society pulls up next to a car to park in a parking lot, and there's somebody sitting in that car, and you think to yourself, boy, I hope that person doesn't get out and kill me or take my car. Like if you saw something on Craigslist, you're like, oh. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you've got this awareness that happens. So that's subconscious awareness, OK? You also have conscious awareness where you can actually look for things, look for warning

signs, look for red flags, look for somebody being deceptive or lying to you or trying to get you to go somewhere or do something that you know is not good. Like somebody going, hey, let's go walk down this dark alley. I want to check and see what's in your wallet. They're not going to be that obvious with it, let's go walk down this dark alley. I want to check and see what's in your wallet. They're not going to be that obvious with it, but they're almost that obvious when they say, hey, come here. I got something for you. And you go, wait a second. Something's not right here. So we've got to be aware of these things. We also have to be aware looking for physical signs of criminal activity. Let's say you're a real estate agent. You pull up

to a house to show it to a client, and the screen on the front window has been pried off and the window's open. That's a red flag. Yeah, something's not right here. Yeah, you don't go up to the front door and go, hey, let me unlock the door here and let's go in and see if we can find the burglar because you never know. Or you go up to the front door and it's been kicked in or pried open or something like that. Yeah, call 911. Yeah, get out of there. So get in your car drive down the street. Don't just stand in front of it and call the authorities. Ultimately, we got to be aware. The number one key to avoiding a bad situation is to notice it first. Then you have time to adjust. So awareness is our first key. Awareness. Awareness. Next one is avoidance.

Let me tell you, if we can be aware and avoid everything that is about to go wrong in life, we're winning. Okay? Winning. You don't have to go through de-escalation in response then. So awareness and avoidance. How do you avoid stuff? One, leave. I mean, simply put- Remove yourself. Get the heck out of there. All right? You can avoid these bad situations. And sometimes you're in situations that you go, how do I avoid this? For instance, let's say you're sitting in an open house. And Mr. Creepasaurus Rex walks in. And it's summertime.

It's 96 degrees like it is today. And the guy's wearing a trench coat. And he walks into your open house. Yeah. Is something wrong? The warning signs are going off. The hair on the back of our neck is standing up. Our gut is turning upside down right now. And you're like, what do I do? Leave. Grab your phone and walk out the front door

because there's nothing in that property that is worth your safety and call for help. Call the police and say, hey, I'm a real estate agent. I'm sitting on this open house and a creepy guy just walked in. Would you mind sending somebody by because it's really uncomfortable here? And they're either going to say, okay, somebody's on their way or they might say, oh, we don't have anybody available right now. If there's nobody available, call a friend and walk down the street or get in your car and drive around the corner. You can go back. Physical items can be replaced. Stuff can be replaced. And by the way, before you sat on that open house, you probably told everybody to put away the valuables, right? What are the three things that we need to tell people to get rid of in a house before we hold an open house? Prescription medicine, valuables, and weapons. Top three.

Top three. Meds, valuables, weapons. Get rid of those three things. Everything else typically can be taken care of. And so we talk about prescription meds. Just go through the bathrooms and don't just put it in a drawer. Guess where bad guys look for prescription medicine? A drawer. A drawer. Ding, ding, ding. So we got to get rid of these things out of the house. Put them in your car, folks. Lock them in your glove box while the house is being held open, something like that, if you're the homeowner. Realtors don't take the prescription meds with you. They're not yours. Your name's not on a prescription. It's not legal. Have the homeowner do it. Have the homeowner put

it in the glove box, whatever it might be. Have the homeowner put it in the trunk in the garage or something like that. Have them remove the prescription mitts. Valuables, obviously, speaks for itself. Gold, jewelries, diamonds. Yeah, don't leave your Rolex sitting in the bathroom on the counter when you're having an open house. Anything that can be bumped into and broken, no.

Right, and if you don't have a gun safe, put it somewhere else. Don't leave your guns laying around during an open house, okay? And that also kind of blends gun safe. Yeah. Don't leave your guns laying around during an open house. Okay. And that also kind of blends into weapons. Yeah. So, you know, do you know where the most weapons in any house are? Actually, I don't. You don't?

The kitchen. Oh, yeah. The kitchen. What if I got a nice like Cutco like I want to display? Put it somewhere. Okay. Yeah. It's, you know, take that butcher block with that giant horror movie style cleaver in it.

Friday the 13th. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And put it somewhere. Get those weapons away so that if something does start going sideways, you know where they're not. Yeah. And you know where they are.

You know, if you take that butcher block and you put it somewhere in particular that nobody's going to go look, you have to get to it yourself. At least you know where it's at. And then on the weapons note, and we're going to circle back around to this on response, know where there are weapons that you can use. And I'll dig a little deeper into that here soon. So awareness avoidance. Avoidance also means have a plan. Let's say you're just walking down the street. Let's say you're going to go show a condo to somebody in an urban environment. You're walking down the street and it might be dark because sometimes it gets dark early in the wintertime or whatever. You're going to show it to them. Be aware of what's around you. Like for instance, in an urban

environment, maybe you have somebody who's intoxicated under the influence of something, whatever it might be, who's stumbling towards you, making a lot of noise or being obnoxious, they're harassing people, things like that. You don't want to encounter that person. How do we avoid them? Move to another side of the street? Yes, cross the streets. There you go. Good one. You typically don't see people who are stumbling on the sidewalk go, oh, there's somebody way on the other side. I'm going to go after them. Unless they start engaging, they make eye contact, they start directing a verbal attack towards you or something like that, immediately disengage, cross the street, and know what your options are. Looking around and seeing that,

to avoid them, just go around them. Go around them. Avoid those bad situations. Avoidance is really the best way to win a fight. The best fight won is the fight never fought. Old martial arts proverb there. The best fight won is the fight never fought because you've avoided it. You've avoided not just hurting somebody else, but hurting yourself in the process. So we've got awareness and avoidance. Next one, de-escalation. You do end up in some situation, face-to-face talking to somebody who is creeping you out, who's making advances, who's asking you uncomfortable questions, things like that. What do we do? How do you get out of that? You got to be able to de-escalate this situation and do it quickly. First of all,

kindness is a good preliminary way of deescalation. No, thank you. No, thank you. I have to go. No, thank you. I have an appointment. No, thank you. My friend is coming to meet me right now and I need to go make a phone call first. Deescalation is how good are you at talking your way out of stuff. And it's okay to practice that, do some role-playing with somebody else. Let's say that you're sitting on an open house and somebody walks in and they start getting creepy. How do you de-escalate that? Oh, you know what? I appreciate you asking all these questions. I've actually got a couple of people coming by and I have to meet them out front. So why don't you take a look around and I'll be out front, kind of

redirect their feelings, what they're doing. One of the two things are going to happen. One is they're going to escalate as you're trying to deescalate, or they're going to go with it and they're going to be like, okay, thanks. Or they'll kind of be on to you and go, all right, they get it. Don't just sit there. Doing nothing can be a deescalation, but there are consequences to doing nothing just like there are consequences to doing something. Doing nothing is a choice in-escalation, but there are consequences to doing nothing just like there are consequences to doing something. Doing nothing is a choice in de-escalation. Understand that as one of the options. This person's doing this. I'm going to de-escalate this by just throwing my wallet in the corner and being aware that I'm getting the hell out of here and I'm going to survive this. You got to de-escalate the situation before it escalates into something violent,

something bad. And of course, anytime you de-escalate, you need to deescalate the situation before it escalates into something violent or something bad. And of course, anytime you deescalate, you need to call the police anyway, because they need to know. If it's just creepy and you deescalate, let them know anyway, because a lot of times these things happen in patterns. Somebody who's putting you in these situations that you need to avoid, deescalate, or respond to, you might not be the only one that they've just tried this with. Awareness, avoidance, and deescalation. Now, the last one is response. Response. What does that mean? Response. It means do something. So we've ended up in this bad situation. We went through a few response capabilities here. Getting yourself out of there is a response. But ultimately, the key to response is options. The key to response is options.

Look around. Anytime you're in a situation, let's talk about we're sitting at a, we're going to find a listing. We're going to do a listing presentation. It's dark. You're driving through a neighborhood, and you stop at a stop sign, and you're looking for the address in your phone or on a piece of paper or something in your car. So you stop at the stop sign. It's dark, and you're just sitting there shuffling around in your phone or on a piece of paper or something in your car. So you stop at

the stop sign, it's dark, and you're just sitting there shuffling around in your car. You're a vulnerable target right then. Carjackings happen that way. People might walk up to your car. Maybe they're just begging for something. Maybe they're lost in any directions, whatever. But ultimately, I don't want you just talking to anybody who walks up to your car in the middle of the night, sitting in a stop sign in the dark, because you never really know what their intentions are. You're sitting there and they come up and your window's down and they go, hey, what do you do? Roll up your window and lock your door. Ah, well, that's part of it, yes. But you also got to get the heck out of there. That's true.

Okay? So let's look at what our options are. One is we can talk to them, which I don't recommend. So let's figure out how do we get out of here? We can go straight. We can turn left or we can turn right. We can throw it in reverse, punch the gas and back up, or we can honk the horn. Kind of scare him, freak him out. Try and freak him out. There's several options here. So basically a response is just taking action or deciding to not take action in response to something somebody else has done. While you're sitting there, you can look up and you see this human being standing there next to you and you're going, all right, I have to do something. Look around real quick. I can go straight or I can

turn right. What is traffic going to allow me to do where I'm not going to crash into somebody and get myself hurt in the process? So maybe turning right at that stop sign is the best thing to do. Respond. Take action. And that's really where you have this fear response when something freaks people out or when something's going wrong. Fear response is fight, flight, or freeze. You can fight, which there's no need to fight with that person right there. Not recommended. Not recommended.

Last resort. Last resort, absolutely. Because you're going to get hurt. They're going to get hurt. You got a lot of explaining to do to the authorities at that point. So fight, flight, or freeze. If you got to fight, though, fight with all your might. Fight like your life depends on it.

Because if you get in a fight as an adult, your life does depend on it. And we'll talk about getting in a fight elsewhere here in a second. Let's talk about flight or freeze. Freeze, maybe it's just somebody who's walking in front of your car, that intoxicated person I was talking about before who's stumbling down the street in front of your car. Somebody's just lost. Maybe there's an animal in front of your car or something like that. You have to respond to that, and it's a situation. You don't want to just punch the gas and run it over. Freeze. Just sit there and wait and see what happens. Doing nothing is a decision

to do something. Let's talk about flight now, straight, right, and things like that. So fight, flight, or freeze. One of those three things. That is a response. That is a response. Awareness avoidance, de-escalation response. Now let's talk about, we do end up in that fight. Something bad really does happen and we have to defend ourselves. You are legally allowed to defend yourself if you are an imminent threat or fear of bodily injury. If somebody's attacking you, if they're calling you names and you don't feel threatened, you're just insulted, you really can't take physical force against somebody, okay? You got to follow the law, regardless of where you're at. This is being broadcast around the world.

Laws are different elsewhere, but know when you can defend yourself physically and understand how to do that. I always tell people when they're sitting on an open house, attacks happen in open houses. Attacks happen in showings. Attacks happen when you're walking down the street. Look and see what resources you have available to you. Let's say you're in an open house and the pantry, the food pantry is right behind you. There may be a can of soup in there and somebody's attacking you. Grab that can of soup and smack them with it. Use things. Use things that are harder than the human body to contact the human body with on any attacker. It will change their mind sometimes. Fight like you are fighting for your life. It's a serious thing. But sometimes on a response, you have to fight. Sometimes on a response, you have to do

things that you never thought you would do to another human being. But you have to do them because they're trying to do those things to you. And you have to protect yourself. You have to defend yourself. And you have to win. You have to win the fight and know when you're fighting that you're doing it to win and to save yourself. This is heavy stuff, dude.

Well, agent safety. You got to talk about it. We're not like talking. Yeah, we're not sitting here. Let's talk about agent flag football. Let's talk about agent candy making. You know, this is- Yeah, this is serious stuff, safety.

While we're at it, let's talk about one more thing, and that is first aid. It's good to have first aid knowledge. Most bad situations that involve somebody bleeding to death, many, many, many bad situations that involve somebody bleeding to death can be solved with appropriate bleeding control items like a blood stopper or a tourniquet. First responders use those things. And in some of the more serious mass casualty situations that have been encountered, and this may happen to a real estate agent sometime, be it somebody attacking you in an open house is showing you're just in a car crash or something like that, you need to have first aid materials,

a tourniquet, blood stoppers, and then a litany of other smaller items. But you can buy some of those basic bleeding control items locally wherever you're at, or you can go online and pick them up as well. Just first aid kits and like an individual first aid kit, IFAK is what they're called, that the military uses. And essentially that's what you're doing is you're preparing for a bad situation and the ability to control bleeding.

And if you don't have time to go to a class, look it up on YouTube. It's pretty simple to put a tourniquet on somebody, including yourself. Understand some first aid concepts. Best case scenario, run by the local fire station and say, hey, I got this stuff. Can you guys show me real quick how to use it? Or go by the local hospital to say, where can I take a class on this?

Or talk to your doctor and see what they have to say. You're interested in helping yourself, helping others in a bad situation. It might be you. It might be part of your family. It might be one of your clients or just a complete stranger that you're doing the right thing for. Understand first aid, get CPR, first aid certified. American Red Cross does that, as well as a whole bunch of other organizations. So some things to keep in mind. Awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, and response. And of course, understand first aid. That's it.

That's it, man. Simple. Yes. Hey, would you recommend like when someone's in an open house, is it common for maybe someone to bring a friend or like, you know, if you're sitting in a house all day by yourself and just people are coming by, is it beneficial to have a buddy there with you to? Great question, Mark. There's always safety in numbers. Yeah.

Always. And when something starts happening where maybe you have a person that comes in that's creepy or something like that, don't sit together. Don't stay together. It's like saying, all right, all the victims huddle in the corner. We don't want that. If something's going on, split up. One of you go out front, go to your car, and call the other on the phone and say,

everything cool? What's going on? And also, it's interesting because you can virtually have a friend with you as well. Just put in a, you know, an earbud, you know, your headphones or your Bluetooth or whatever for your phone and dial somebody up. You don't even need to be talking to them. They just need to know what's going on so that they can hear what's happening and they can call for help if they need to. There's a number of other apps that, you know, obviously you could load on your phone or smart device or something like that.

But yes, taking another person to an open house, always great. Great idea. There is safety in numbers. Awesome. I think this was very beneficial, especially for agent safety month. Yeah, it is agent safety month, right? September. And how awesome is it that our CEO is a ex-SWAT expert? Well, hey, personal safety, the concepts are universal. Yeah. They are universal. If we're just, you know, we function on those two first principles, awareness and avoidance,

we won't put ourselves in these bad situations. We'll notice things. We'll functionally be safer, but we'll also do better business because we will notice more about our surroundings. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for listening to today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.