New Year’s resolutions are tricky things to do correctly, and most people tend to give up on them pretty quickly.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. In a helpful article in Forbes, life coach Rosie Guagliardo helps identify some of the challenges with keeping on resolutions. Overall, she emphasizes the need to fully understand why we are making our resolutions and why the goals are important to us.

Perhaps surprisingly, less than 10 percent of people who make resolutions manage to stick with them a whole year. Part of the problem, according to Guagliardo, comes from the fact that we tend to make resolutions on specific measurable goals, like losing a certain amount of weight.

Instead, we need to think about what outcomes we really value. Are we trying to lose weight? Or feel healthier and have more energy? If it’s really the latter, then that needs to be our resolution.

She argues that situating our resolutions in deeply desired outcomes, rather than superficial goals, makes us actually motivated to accomplish them. It may even lead us to realize the superficial goals, like weight loss, as a path towards our more desired outcomes.

As a concerted resolution strategy, Guagliardo recommends selecting three desired outcomes. For each, she recommends actions that will realize each, urging us to specifically schedule time for these actions. This will foster a sense of ritualized behavior, where the regularity increases our commitment.

Of course this does not mean that setbacks won’t happen. However, within this framework, she provides a series of cognitive steps that can help manage these. Namely, we need to verify whether we are having setbacks because we really don’t want the outcome we claim to.

She urges us to think critically about whether this is an outcome we really want. Is it an actual desire or some form of obligation? The latter will be much harder to stick with. It might help to take a moment to visualize the outcome and to think about whether we would prefer to live that way.

This sort of visualization may also involve us thinking about the outcome as a preparation. Maybe we don’t care that much about having more energy as such but are excited at the idea that this would allow us to realize a certain ambition that requires more energy, like taking up dance or hiking more.

However, it’s important to realize that in a busy time, we may simply not feel that we have the energy to accomplish any of these tasks.

It might then be helpful to partner up with someone who has similar goals. This can help keep us on track. Moreover, situating our desires in a goal based in happiness can also help encourage us to keep going, even if it seems hard.

Hopefully these are some helpful tips for all of you. You might also want to review our blog from a couple years ago that helps outline some tips for making resolutions in the first place.

Regardless, we wish you luck and a very happy 2019!

By Dr. David Matsumoto

As the target article mentions, many security measures can and should be put in place in a multi-layer approach to comprehensive security. Security professionals should consider as many different possibilities as possible in order to provide maximum security in order to harden targets. Hardening targets lessens the possibility of being attacked in the first place and makes responses to attacks when they happen more effective. Hardening targets also helps prevent attacks from happening because perpetrators often choose softer targets. All such measures contribute to being what is known as “left of bang” – assessing threats and mitigating them before an incident occurs.

Many (but not all) of the possible layers of security to consider involve the assessment of behavior. These can include the behaviors of attackers as they are actively engaged in committing a malicious act, as they deceive security personnel about their intent, or as they cover their operational tracks and personal security concerns. Thus, the assessment of behavioral indicators becomes of utmost importance in these aspects of security.

But the incorporation of behavioral assessment of threats begs the question of exactly which behaviors to assess. And where can security professionals turn in order to find these behaviors? For us the answer to these and similar questions is simple – security professionals should rely on validated behavioral indicators.

What does “validated” mean? In science, there are many types of validation. For our work in the security field, two types of validation are the most important. One involves the use of carefully constructed experiments that isolate specific behaviors that are consistently and accurately related to mental states related to threats. Laboratory-based, experimental validation is important because these are the only types of efforts that can isolate specific behaviors and their associations with meaningful mental states underlying threat and malicious intent.

But experimentally based, laboratory research is not the only type of validation that is required. What is also required are field validation efforts, in which operators trained in the specific behavioral indicators generated from laboratory research actually use those indicators in the field and document their utility.

We believe that both of these types of validation are important. Some behaviors may be experimentally validated in the laboratory but of no utility in the field. Other behaviors may catch an operator’s eye and suggest to him or her that they “work.” (And there have been many books and other media of former operators claiming they have the goods on THE indicators.) But those potential indicators should really be tested in controlled studies.

One good example is gaze aversion. Many security professionals, and laypersons around the world, believe that people avert their gaze – don’t look you in the eye – when they are lying to you. But this is a myth. Many studies have actually tested this specific behavior, and the vast majority of them have not found and empirical support for this claim. Consequently, training security professionals to be on the alert for gaze aversion in security interviews can be misleading, with potentially deadly consequences.

Our training solutions powered by Humintell rely only on validated behavioral indicators of threat – indicators validated not only in controlled experimental research but also in field use by actual operators whom we have trained. The training solutions we provide are unique because we bridge both worlds – state-of-the-art research and real world, practical experience. We employ both world-renowned scientists and security personnel with decades of experience. It is this unique combination of science and practice that can help us help security professionals be ahead of the curve in identifying threats and mitigating them, keeping them left of bang.

This article originally appeared on https://parminc.com/2018/05/14/threat-assessment-and-management-for-venue-security-the-importance-of-validated-threat-indicators/