The Cooper Color Codes are individual levels of situation awareness and can be used as an application in our daily lives (especially when living internationally). It allows us to increase our mental preparedness to be aware of our surroundings while having the appropriate level of mental alertness to differentiate between threats.
Reliant would like everyone living internationally to always be in the YELLOW state of mind where you are prepared and alert and aware of your surroundings and who is around you. This allows you to see a threat and respond to it appropriately and escalate your mindset internally to ORANGE (alert to probably danger and ready to take action). You can perform analysis in your mind to decide if it is a threat or not. If all is not normal, then you can make a conscious decision to remain in ORANGE or escalate to RED where you would take action to avoid the situation or evacuate. This would then probably lead you to a level 3 Crisis Communication Level where you would then reach out to the Crisis Management Team (Crisis Reporting for International Incident).
The reason we encourage everyone to be in the YELLOW state is that those that are in the WHITE state (unprepared and unready) tend to go straight to the BLACK state during a crisis where they panic and are paralyzed. If you are constantly in a YELLOW state of mind, then you are able to respond during a crisis and make quick, informed decisions, and respond appropriately to the crisis at hand. You will likely go from WHITE to BLACK if you don’t choose to go to YELLOW first.
Never ignore doubts or intuitions. In some situations, stress can be a good thing. We need an appropriate amount of stress to motivate us on a daily basis. However, the freeze (BLACK on the color code) happens when our fight or flight system gets overloaded from an unhealthy amount of stress, and we will not be able to respond appropriately. Talking and Breathing helps stop from going straight to the BLACK and keeps in in ORANGE/RED. Condition BLACK leaves us helpless to respond in any way. Sometimes this is a blessing in that we completely forget a traumatic event. But this should not be our default strategy.
See also Surveillance Strategies
