Protect yourself by learning how to trust — and act on — your instincts with the “empowering” #1 bestseller from personal safety expert Gavin de Becker (Boston Globe). A carjacker lurking in a shopping mall parking lot. An abusive husband pounding on the door. A disgruntled employee brandishing a gun. These days, no one is safe from the specter of violence. But according to Gavin de Becker, everyone can feel safer, act safer, be safer — if they learn how to listen to their own sixth sense about danger.De Becker has made a career of protecting people and predicting violent behavior. His firm handles security for many of the leading figures in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and his computerized risk-assessment system helps analyze threats to members of Congress and the Supreme Court. Now, in this unprecedented guide, de Becker shares his expertise with everyone. Covering all the dangerous situations people typically face — street crime, domestic abuse, violence in the workplace — de Becker provides real-life examples and offers specific advice on restraining orders, self-defense, and more. But the key to self-protection, he demonstrates, is learning how to trust our own intuitions. For everyone who’s ever felt threatened, this book is essential reading.
Gavin de Becker
February 9, 2021
400 pages
English
978-0316235778
File Size: 31 MB
Available File Formats: PDF AZW3 DOCX EPUB MOBI TXT or Kindle audiobook Audio CD(Several files can be converted to each other)
Language: English, Francais, Italiano, Espanol, Deutsch, chinese
“A how-to book that reads like a thriller…provocative…empowering.”―Boston Globe”De Becker has a lot to say about crime and the fear of crime, and he says it persuasively…His blend of empathy, reassurance, and common sense wows readers.”―Newsweek”The Gift of Fear offers the gift of survival. Read it.”―Linden Gross, author of To Have or to Harm“Superb and compelling, bringing into focus the complexity of human response to real or perceived danger. De Becker redefines the parameters of fear and challenges the basis of a fear response. This book is for everyone who has ever feared.”―Ann Wolpert Burgess, Professor of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania“This book can save your life…It should be read by everyone who wants to triumph over fear.”―Scott Gordon, former Chairman of the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council“The ability to protect oneself from violent behavior, largely through one’s own intuition, is the central premise of de Becker’s book—thus, fear is a gift. The book taps the anxieties of an era.”―New York Times“Gavin de Becker’s book is the first to explain that our powers of intuition are the best protection we have against violence.”―Daniel M. Petrocelli, lead counsel for plaintiffs in Fred Goldman v. O. J. Simpson“A tour de force…Riveting, instructive, a book that dissects the phenomenon of violence, unravels its mysteries, and shows us how to prevail.”―Erika Holzer, author of Eye for an Eye“Should be required reading for women and their loved ones. It offers potentially life-saving information in a style that is compelling. It is by far the best book I have read on how to handle violence, and I recommend it to one and all.”―Theresa Saldana, actress and founder of Victims for Victims“Gavin de Becker’s brilliant insights and encyclopedic familiarity with the minds of criminals have made powerful contributions to the successful prosecution of many cases, including mine, and now he shares that knowledge with his readers.”―Marcia Clark, prosecutor <div id="
Years ago, I had a strange encounter. My car was stalled in heavy traffic, I pushed it onto a side street (I’m a guy) and tried to restart it. A guy showed up (older and slender) offering help. I refused his help but the hung around trying anyway. Said he saw me and had his wife drop him off to assist and she’d be back in a minute. She never came back for him. I got the car started and felt obligated to give the guy a lift, he lived two streets over.When he got in the car, I suddenly felt DANGER radiating at me from the passenger seat. It actually felt like a heat lamp burning my skin, a physical presence I’d never felt before or since. I went to FULL RED ALERT, and was on edge until I got him to his house. I let him out with the car in reverse and my foot ready to stomp the gas. He held his hand out for a shake I didn’t feel like, but we’re trained to BE POLITE so I took it. This wussy looking guy had a grip like iron. As I left, the danger feeling stopped and I eventually forgot about it.Fast forward to finding this book. As I read it, that incident came back to mind. I realized he had lied repeatedly and tried to manipulate me, taking advantage of my society-trained compulsion to be “nice” to a pushy stranger. My subconscious noticed all the things I ignored, added them up and decided he was trouble. Bigger trouble than I’d ever met and it made damn sure I paid attention.And that’s exactly what this book teaches you to do. LISTEN to your instincts and OBEY them, don’t endanger yourself to “be polite” to someone who makes you nervous. That danger signal may have saved my life, and I’m not an easy target.I have bought, loaned and given away at least ten copies of this book. Everyone thanks me profusely and passes it on to someone else they care about. Get it for you, get it for a loved one. Get it for the women in your life, who are unfortunately preferred targets for criminals. Ignore the second half, it’s all about workplace and profiling. But the first half could save your life, or that of someone you love. BUY IT NOW.
This book was so hard to read. The writing is boring and I found myself screening through the pages and skipping entire chapters. Furthermore, it was published in 1998 and has not been updated. A lot of the examples (stalkers, or other dangerous situations) included people sending, receiving mail. Like snail mail! Who receives regular letters anymore??? No mention of the Web, email, forums, how it can be used to find info about us. How to be careful with the people we encounter online, dating websites…The world has changed a lot in the past 20 years. The dangers or the way we should be using our intuition or protect ourselves have changed and evolved. But this book has not evolved or being updated at all.
I spent 20 years on the streets in local law enforcement. I always felt that the Temporary Restraining Orders (TRO) we served on stalkers and spousal abusers were as worthless, in most cases, as the paper they were written on. Usually they simply served as a salve to sooth our justice system’s guilt over unwillingness or inability to take strong and immediate action, or develop alternative solutions. As Gavin de Becker so aptly points out, when it comes to committed stalkers and abusers, not only are they not afraid of a piece of paper, it incents them to even a higher degree of activity and perhaps violence. The author makes an excellent case that we should be much more judicious in evaluating such cases against a threat matrix and respond in different ways depending on the nature of the threat.I also greatly appreciate the author’s discussion of the origins of fear and how important it has been in allowing mankind to develop. In addition to the twenty years I spent in law enforcement, I am also a Certified Body Language trainer and teach the power of nonverbal communication. As research has shown, what we call women’s intuition is in reality the fact that women, on average, are far better at picking up nonverbal cues than men. That “intuition” was absolutely essential for the females of our species to survive in a very hostile world, where they were of slighter stature and needed to quickly detect threats around them. As the primary caregiver to children they also needed to be able to effectively interpret the cues and needs of infants and small children before spoken language.One interesting study involved showing short film clips with the sound turned off to groups of men and women. Women scored an incredible 87% accuracy in evaluating the situation shown in the video. Afraid guys we only scored 42%. fMRI scans reveal women use 14-16 regions of their brains during communication, while men only 4-6 areas (most women probably would dispute giving us that much credit-:)In modern society, in the interest of being “polite”, we often suppress our natural intuition, our gut feelings. Back in my police career we didn’t even have a term called Body Language. We only knew it as “street-smarts”. One of my great fears has to do with my beautiful wife’s suppression of her natural intuition around strangers, in the interest of being polite and non-judgemental. The nature of my our respective careers requires us to live in a dense urban area, surrounded by all sorts of threats. Dark parking lots, underground garages, elevators and streets filled with street people and drug addicts. While our building is very secure, once you are on the streets it’s a whole different ball game. She has terrific intuition when she uses it. She is like a perfectly honed tuning fork when she is willing to trust her intuition, but due to her kind and trusting nature, she often suppresses it in the interest of being all-inclusive and accepting.Gavin de Becker’s loud message to women, Trust your gut, Don’t suppress your intuition, Don’t worry about hurting some stranger’s feelings is a powerful one. It is my hope that my wife and every woman will be willing to read the book, reflect on all the powerful stories in The Gift of Fear, including the author’s personal story.
I found this book disappointing. The main tenet is that we all have inbuilt intuition when we are at risk of violence and that we should listen to that intuition to protect ourselves. I think it’s common sense that this is partially true but I think De Becker exaggerates the extent of this intuition. As evidence he recounts a number of victim’s stories, unfortunately he makes no effort to explore if this is merely hindsight bias. *After* a traumatic event it’s easy to think back at all the ways it could have been different and find significance in mere coincidences.Instead of buying this book and wading through his self-promotion you could just tell yourself “be more alert in dangerous situations and act if you feel threatened” the end result is the same….
Everything I read was simply common sense. Every page is a variant of the same mantra: If he gives you a weird feeling, listen to your gut and get out of there. And yes, that’s a ‘he’, because it seems like most of the book is aimed at men as the assailants in the forms of murderers, rapists etc. Don’t waste your time reading this, I read the first 20 pages and was unenlightened, and further disappointed by the lack of progress. If only this was grounds for a refund.
This book was recommended to me and I can thoroughly recommend it too. It gives a very interesting insight into using your intuition in everyday life and how fear can be a gift because it’s telling you something very important but also how not to let it rule your life. Although all the examples are USA based it’s still very relevant to the UK. I’ve taken De Becker’s advise onboard and now feel more confident in uncomfortable situations. There’s an excellent chapter on how to recognise controlling and possibly violent people that is the ultimate checklist for anyone who’s in a questionable relationship
This is one of the most influential books I have read and is one of a triplet of books that I recommend to anyone who deals with people in difficult situations on a regular basis such as coppers, medics, and mental health workers. The other two books are: Meditations On Violence by Rory Miller and The Games People Play by Eric Berne.The premise of the book, in a nutshell, is: trust your instincts. The author takes you through the way your brain processes threats and the fact that, to your brain, it’s a binary matter – stay or get the hell out of there. It doesn’t consider that you need to know the ins and outs of why there is a threat, you just need to know that’s the situation is dangerous and you need to do something about it. It highlights how the analytical part of your brain is too slow and by the time you realise why you are in danger it could be too late. The author takes the reader through a number of scenarios where the victim’s life is saved by trusting their instincts and then breaks them down so that you can see what the warning signs were – warning signs missed by the conscious mind but picked up by the subconscious.From there, the book takes the subject of risk very wide and includes advice on how to deal with obsessive people and stalkers and details their mindsets.There is far too much to go into in an Amazon review but suffice to say The Gift of Fear provides an excellent guide to the psychology of people you would be better off avoiding and why, if you get a bad feeling about a person or a situation, you are probably right.The Gift of Fear is highly readable. De Becker makes frequent use of anecdotes to highlight his principles and this prevents the book from becoming too bogged down in technical detail. I have read this book about four times now and I refer back to parts of it frequently. I do not consider myself to be particularly academic so most people should not find it to be too hard going. It is a solid, practical guide to risk, how to spot it, and why understanding what the risk is, is something best considered afterwards from a safe distance. It’s extremely useful for keeping yourself safe but also provides a number of principles that can be used to advise others.
It is a very useful book though towards the last chapters it becomes a bit boring. Also it overemphasizes how the employees can be dangerous for the companies and co-workers but it overlooks the fact that the employers can also be dangerous to the employees – bullying from managers is quite common and dangerous. I recommend the book though.
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