SafeTalk with SafeStart

S12Ep 8 Story Series: Self-Triggering Safety in Everyday Life

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Ever found yourself chuckling after a near-miss that could've turned sour? Imagine realizing that the key to safety might just be a mental 'nudge' you give yourself, at the right time. Discover how to master this lifesaving self-triggering technique, all while enjoying a good chuckle at life's quirky teaching moments.

Host: Tim Page-Bottorff
Guest: Jeremy Hyde 

Tim Page-Bottorff:

Hey, welcome back to our story series here on SafeT alk with SafeS tart. I am Tim Page- Bottorff, and joining me today is fellow consultant Jeremy Hyde. Hey, Jeremy, hey, welcome back, my friend.

Jeremy Hyde:

Welcome. Thank you so much, man hey for sure.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

It's our pleasure and love to have you. But before we begin this series, I just want to give everybody a quick reminder on how to use this podcast. You know our guests will share their story with us and then I'll instruct all of you when to pause and then discuss this locally with your group. Then, when you come back, we'll add our two cents and do a state to error pattern review. So, Jeremy, why don't you take it away?

Jeremy Hyde:

Good sir, Thank you, man. Yeah, you bet. So this goes back about 2012 to my first public workshop that I'd ever attended. So I'd I'd been a student of SafeS tart already before that. I just hadn't attended a workshop to become a trainer, so went down to Seattle. It was in February, if I recall correctly, and that sticks out in my memory because I remember coming home and it was midwinter here in Calgary.

Jeremy Hyde:

So at the time my wife and I we lived in an apartment building, and the reason that this is important is that the landlord of the apartment building was really bad at his job. He would show up like two weeks after the snow fell to shovel and put some salt down or some gravel down, and of course by then it was already too late. It was well-packed, super slippery and icy, right. So on this one particular day I'm getting ready to go to work and I'm running a little bit behind, but I figure I can make it up on the road to the office. So I grabbed my computer bag, I grab my lunch bag and I head out the front door of the apartment and as I step my first step, really onto the first step there, I basically both feet come out from under me, I step onto the ice and both feet come out from under me. I slam down onto the staircase. There I'm kind of laying there cussing to myself like a pretzel and I collect my things and off I go. And I mean, really at this point nothing was really hurt other than my ego, you know, and I just wanted to.

Jeremy Hyde:

I did the old, you know the traditional look around, make sure nobody saw me fall that sort of thing, and that was pretty much the most important thing to me at the time, right? So get up, gather my things I walked in my car, throw everything kind of out of frustration in the back seat and then get in the vehicle and off I go. And I make it like five minutes down the road when I start to smell strawberries really strongly and it's not like like natural strawberry smell, it was like a synthetic strawberry smell and I was kind of like what on earth is that? So I'm looking around the car for a clue, trying to figure out what's going on. And then I look over in the backseat and out of my right eye I catch this pink streak across the upholstery in the backseat, kind of like a pink streak. What on earth is that man? So I start to think to myself and all of a sudden ding the light bulb goes off.

Jeremy Hyde:

I realized what had happened when I had fallen on the front step. I landed on my lunch bag and popped the container of strawberry yogurt that I had in the lunch bag. And now it's all over the back of my jacket which I'm rubbing into the driver's seat. And then, when I threw the bag into the back seat, it sprayed all over the upholstery of the back seat as well. So I'm driving along, my back is sore, I'm running late for work and now all I'm thinking about is having to spend a few hundred dollars getting this thing clean, right, I know, because if you, you know what happens when you mix dairy, heat and fabric, right?

Tim Page-Bottorff:

it starts to get a little gnarly in there eventually.

Jeremy Hyde:

So I, you know, I, that's all I'm thinking about. And I come to this really interesting corner on my commute where, basically, I have to make a right-hand turn and then I'm immediately going to change lanes to the inside lane because the turning lane is backed up for a full block because everybody's getting ready to turn right at the following intersection. I know I don't need to turn right, I'm proceeding straight through, so I'm going to go right into the inside lane and then carry on past everybody. Well, Tim, basically at this point I was able to use this powerful skill that we call self-triggering for the first time.

Jeremy Hyde:

I came around the corner, I recognized that I wasn't thinking about what I needed to be thinking about. My head was up with thinking about the upholstery, thinking about being late for work, thinking about the sore back, and just as I did that, I self-triggered eyes, mind back on the task, just in time for a vehicle who was tired of waiting in the line. He, without a signal, pulled out in front of me and I was able to come through a stop just inches from his bumper. So, you know, I carried on to work. I got to the parking lot a couple minutes later and I realized, man, you know, that was incredible. That just saved me several thousand dollars. That quick little skill there that I had learned and used saved me several thousand dollars. In addition, possibly injury to myself as well as injury to the other guy as well.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

Yeah, I'll tell you what. There's a bunch of stuff to unpack here, but you know what? You had your lunch packed up in a lunchbox and your yogurt was in there. So your yogurt saved your life, right, or did it?

Jeremy Hyde:

Yeah, in a way it did, it really did yeah.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

A little bit of a joke there, all right, so we're going to unpack this together as a group and just in just a moment I'm going to ask you guys to hit the pause button. And before we do, I want you to remember you've got two players here. One. You've got, obviously Jeremy and his story, and then you've got the landlord, who wasn't very responsive, so which could have been a big contributing factor to the frustration. But also, at the same time, there could be two different state to error patterns here, one for Jeremy, one for the landlord. We'll unpack both when you get done reviewing it, but let's just talk about Jeremy for now, and I'm just going to hit the pause button for all of you. So in just a moment I'll say hit pause, and then we'll come right back. So Jeremy and I will be sitting here waiting for you when you're done, and so go ahead, hit the pause button and we'll be right here. We're back.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

So, Jeremy, I just thinking about our team that's out there, all the folks that are listening to this story, I hope all of you out there. You actually discuss the lazy and the possibly cheap landlord, and so, while Jeremy actually could have a great case of maybe suing this person. I also hope you quickly concluded that you can't always count on the other human to look out for your safety. And years and years and years ago, Larry and he put it in his books and he says it out loud only you can do the looking and the thinking for yourself. So let's talk about next steps here and I'm going to use step as an acronym. And so, Jeremy, let's talk with our listeners about the next step, which is let's discuss the state- to- error pattern. So what did you come up with, Jeremy, in terms of the state- to- error pattern?

Jeremy Hyde:

Well, for myself I certainly saw some frustration there, you know, after the fall and you know having to deal with the poor landlord and his behavior. There was obviously some rushing to start with, really, and that kind of kicked things off, and then of course you really had the complacency bringing it home and ultimately that led to eyes and mind on the way and ultimately that that led to eyes and mind on the way.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

So we've got frustration, complacency and you were running a little bit of late, so maybe a little bit of rushing as well. So we've got three states. They're all packed up into two critical errors. And you said eyes and mind not on task and unfortunately you did slip on the ice. So we've got a little bit of balance, traction and grip, all right.

Jeremy Hyde:

Did you look to see if anybody saw you fall? I did, yeah, just to make sure you know. That's the classic. You got to check out. Make sure nobody saw you embarrass yourself.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

All right, so you're left with CERT number two, which is analyzing the small stuff. So let's go ahead and analyze this and figure out what critical error reduction techniques at the moment you could have used.

Jeremy Hyde:

Well, I certainly could have used the self-trigger technique. There was the frustration and the rushing there to self-trigger on. Additionally, there's also the hazardous energy of driving in rush hour traffic that I could have self-triggered on there as well. Right, and then I would say the look or sorry. Work on habits. In particular, move your eyes before you move your hands people out of your car. Uh, look for that line of fire potential as well that's good.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

I would also add look for balance, traction and grip things.

Jeremy Hyde:

Oh I keep forgetting about the fall, it's okay.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

And I also have to add would you, would you have worn ice cleats out the front door?

Jeremy Hyde:

yeah, yeah, and so that's a great question. Because of this incident and because of that landlord, I now have ice cleats in my PPE repertoire.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

Well, we've only got one element left in the story, and of course that's number four, the fourth element of a great story. How could this have been worse?

Jeremy Hyde:

Well, man you know, had I not been able to self-trigger coming around the corner, I most certainly would have slammed into the back end of that fellow's vehicle as he pulled out in front of me, and with that there would have been damage to my vehicle and his vehicle likely in the tens of thousands of dollars, and potentially some injury to himself as well as me. So you know there's a lot that could have gone wrong. There are a lot that could have been worse.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

That's right Now. You mentioned earlier that this is the first time that you could have self-triggered. I would like to ask I know your story doesn't end here, but you know the drive afterwards and once you actually included that element, yeah, finish the rest of the story for us in terms of what was going on in your mind at that moment where you actually self-triggered?

Jeremy Hyde:

To me, it was all about just recognizing the power of the concepts. I'd already bought into them. I understood them, I got them, but I hadn't had that real-world realization of how effective and powerful they can be. And and to me, you know, being able to use that in in the moment to prevent an incident like that just reinforced everything I just learned.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

So 10 years ago you said 2012, right, I want to make sure I got that thing Right. So now it's been 10 years, and would you actually classify this your first SafeStart aha moment?

Jeremy Hyde:

It was, yes, absolutely. So I had, like I said, I was a student of Safe Start before this, but you know, I guess I never really had that aha moment until this particular time.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

All right. So that's fascinating to me, and because it was your first self-triggering technique, that kind of leads us to this concept of anticipating errors, maybe in other people.

Jeremy Hyde:

That kind of leads us to this concept of anticipating errors, maybe in other people. Yeah, absolutely yeah. And, and you know, I mean coming around that corner, making that right-hand turn, knowing full well that there's that queue of traffic there and that there's likely somebody in that queue who's experiencing the States as well, right, potentially some rushing and frustration, just like me, which of course, would would lead them to to make an error like pulling into traffic without signaling.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

Yeah, which puts you right in the line of fire.

Jeremy Hyde:

Absolutely.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

All right. So when you're able to assess whether conditions are right and to kind of put up your guard for other people's mistakes that possibly could get you hurt, man, I'll tell you what. To me, as we're in my Star Wars room, that's some really good Jedi mind trick stuff, I think, Jeremy. So I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today.

Jeremy Hyde:

Great. Thanks so much, Tim, for having me again, buddy.

Tim Page-Bottorff:

Yeah, for sure. I really love having you on, Jeremy and, on behalf of Jeremy and the entire Safe Talk team, thanks so much for being with us. And remember you can't control the other person, the other human, but you can anticipate when they're going to be likely to make a mistake that might get you hurt and you can identify, or at least when you know, the state to error pattern in them. And so, on behalf of the team, I'm Tim Page-Bottorff for Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'll see you down the road.