Why Choose The CP Journal? A Letter to Prospective Students
In the Spring of 2008 I was between deployments to Iraq and, in the interim, I was on my way to an eight-hour class given by a former police officer about how “Combat Policing” could help us while deployed. The premise was very enticing – there are a lot of similarities between law enforcement skills and fighting a counter-insurgency fight, so I expected there to be a lot that we could learn from someone who spent their entire career trying to separate the criminals from the crowd. I, along with pretty much everyone else in the class, was excited to see what we could learn from this guy.
Eight hours later, I couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. I had just sat through a full day of looking at fuzzy, out of focus pictures, and being asked what we saw in the picture that should have alerted the Marines to something being wrong. The pictures had no context, no backstory, and it was never quite clear what we were missing or even supposed to be looking for. On every picture, the presenter told us not the method behind finding the anomaly, but instead simply told us what he saw or what we should be seeing, and why he was a great cop because he identified the problem. I walked away not sure if I was supposed to be scared because without “22 years of experience as a law enforcement officer” I was doomed when we deployed again, or if I should be pissed that I just wasted eight hours of my time when I could have doing some actual training with my Marines.
I know I’m not the only one who has sat through seminars similar to this, where you get told how to envision success and think like a winner and every other intangible “technique” that has contributed to someone’s success. These seminars are not helpful or beneficial. If I go to a seminar, I want to learn how to do something that I couldn’t do before. That is helpful.
I will never give a class where the only takeaway is that the students are not able to do the task themselves. We don’t teach for the sake of lecturing. We don’t want to tell a student that they only way they could ever reasonably do what we do is to continuously hire us for more information with no end in sight.
That is our competitive advantage. That is what sets us apart as a company. When we teach, we strive to create understanding in the mind of a student and empower them with concrete and tangible takeaways that they can immediately use and benefit from after a course. We are realistic and realize that we aren’t going to create experts after a single seminar, whether it is a one-day or a ten-day long course, which is why we provide extensive follow-on materials. We lay the foundation for behavioral analysis that provides an immediate benefit as well as provide the follow on resources necessary to continue learning. This is what sets us apart.
What happens after the fact, and after the course is complete, is arguably even more important that the course itself. To explain how we accomplish this, let me use a single topic from a course – finding a person displaying the cues from the “Uncomfortable Cluster.” A person acting “Uncomfortably” often stands out from the baseline and shows they have perceived someone or something as potentially threatening. After a seminar, it is reasonable for a student to not only be able to identify the cluster, but also pick up on maybe four or five cues that would lead you to assess someone as Uncomfortable. Because this is an important observation and provides a great deal of insight into a person’s state of mind, if a student wanted to learn more about this, we have The CP Journal to support their efforts. Here are some examples of what a student would be able to find in The CP Journal to access follow-up information….
They can see a video about why Dominant people can make someone exhibit Uncomfortable cues
They can see pictures of Pacifying Behavior and how that leads you to assess someone as Uncomfortable
They can read an article about what indicators make up the Uncomfortable Cluster
They can read a free article about how to apply these observations in a multitude of settings (the boardroom, the battlefield and the bar)
They can learn about what causes this type of behavior by understanding the human brain and how it drives our freeze, flight, or fight response
-And They can read a book review of Joe Navarro’s book What Every Body Is Saying and see that we recommend it and that it has more information about Uncomfortable Cues
We offer all of these different options because we know not everyone is going to have the same motivation or put in the same effort to learn this material. We don’t expect people to learn in the same way or at the same pace. Some people would rather watch videos while others would rather read a book. Some may only want to practice once or twice a week, while others may want to spend the time to learn a little bit more every day. We make all of these options and resources available to our students so that they can learn in the way that they prefer.
It should be a company’s choice if a consultant comes in for only one project or multiple projects, not determined by the consultant’s inability to pass the skills on to the organization. We give all of these free resources away because a person should have the ability to learn how to read people if they want to and not spend their time searching for the information. There might have been a time where it was acceptable to bring in a consultant only to have them tell you what you can’t do, but that time has passed. We offer the ability to bring The CP Journal in to educate your organization, so that the benefit provided by a deeper understanding of human behavior becomes a resident capability. This way your company has the power, not the consultant.
Our goal is simple: to provide everything needed to empower you and to gain the information that you need to make smart, informed decisions. You will get an immediate benefit with tangible gains and access to the content you need to get to the next level. If you’d like to learn more, contact us so that we can learn how to best support you. Thanks and I look forward to working with you.
Patrick Van Horne
Founder and CEO