The personal safety skill every woman already has — and needs to pass on to her daughter
Stephen McFadden/Unsplash
Kelly Sayre has spent nearly a decade teaching women that the most powerful safety tool they have isn't in their purse. It's already working.
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Most of us have a version of the safety checklist. Keys ready before you reach the car. Phone put away on the walk to the parking garage. Volume low on the trail run, AirPods switched to transparency so you can hear what’s around you. Mace somewhere accessible. Maybe a personal alarm on your keychain, a self-defense class years ago and a vague awareness that you should probably take another one.
We do these things because we’ve absorbed, over a lifetime, a particular message about women’s safety. The world is dangerous, bad things happen, and our job is to be ready to respond when they do. What almost no one teaches us is how to read the situation before it becomes one. We’re rarely told how to catch the signal that something is off before it has a chance to escalate. And we’re often hard pressed to trust ourselves enough to act on it.
That gap is exactly what Kelly Sayre built a career around filling.
Sayre is a Minnesota-based safety expert, founder of The Diamond Arrow Group, and author of the bestselling Sharp Women. She is a certified threat assessment professional, a member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, and has trained executives at Fortune 50 companies including Walt Disney and Coca-Cola. Her approach centers on something that doesn’t require a class or a weapon or any particular level of physical fitness. It requires paying attention — and then trusting what you notice.
Her entry point into this work came when her kids were small. She signed up for a women’s self-defense class, spent four hours hitting and kicking and feeling capable, and then heard the instructor say something that stopped her cold. Predators don’t target women they think will fight back, he explained. They look for someone they perceive as weaker. So the last thing you want is to get into a physical altercation. What you need is situational awareness. And then he said goodbye.
“My brain did a full stop,” Sayre told me. “We spent the entire class on skills I’m supposed to avoid using. The skills I’m supposed to use 99.9% of the time? He didn’t mention them at all.”
She started asking questions. She found that almost no one was teaching this material specifically for women. She eventually built a business around it.
The skill you already have
Situational awareness, as Sayre defines it, is using all of your senses and your intuition to notice when something feels off in your environment, understanding what that signal means for your safety, and then acting on it. That’s a clinical way of describing something most women already do — instinctively, imperfectly, and then often talk themselves out of.
Sayre draws a careful distinction between worry and intuition. Worry is manufactured, she explains. It’s the spiral of what-ifs, the anxiety about things that haven’t happened yet. Intuition is different. It’s biological, always running, always responding to something real. A smell, a sound, a shift in the energy of a room. It flags the thing that’s different from what you’d expect. Of course, different doesn’t always mean dangerous. Sometimes it’s just the neighbor mowing for the first time this season. But when it does mean something, it means it for a reason.
“Intuition is not a prankster. It’s always in response to something, and it always has your best interests in mind.” — Kelly Sayre
Women, Sayre points out, are exceptionally good at reading these signals. We track microexpressions. We de-escalate. We notice when the temperature of a room changes before anyone has said a word. We do this constantly for the people around us. What we haven’t been taught is how to direct it toward ourselves.
“We’ve never been taught to use those skills for our own personal safety,” she says. “Only for caretaking.”
The reason we override the signals, she argues, isn’t because we’re bad at reading them. It’s because we’ve spent years being taught to distrust them. To not make a fuss. To give people the benefit of the doubt. To stay somewhere uncomfortable because leaving would be rude. To cater to the comfort of others at the cost of our own. We learn this young, and we carry it for a long time.
Closer to home
When we talk about women’s safety, the conversation tends to default to strangers. The dark parking lot. The walk home alone. And those situations are real. But the harder, less discussed reality is that most of the danger women face comes from people already in their lives — not from the unknown person across the street, but from the familiar one across the dinner table or the conference room or the group chat.
This is where situational awareness becomes less about scanning your surroundings and more about paying attention to patterns of behavior over time. Sayre is clear that the situations most likely to turn dangerous rarely announce themselves. They start with something small, like a joke that goes a little too far. Or someone stands slightly too close, or makes a comment that makes you uncomfortable and then gets explained away. The question isn’t whether to give someone the benefit of the doubt the first time. The question is what you do the second time it happens. And the third.
“Someone with no ill intentions, when you call out a boundary, will almost always feel awful,” Sayre says. “They’ll apologize, back off, course-correct. It’s the person who keeps pushing who’s telling you something.”
This applies, she’s quick to add, everywhere — not just in dating. In friend groups, where we extend automatic trust to anyone in our social circle without asking whether they’ve individually earned it. In workplaces, where power dynamics make it harder to name what’s wrong out loud. At home, in relationships that start with small tests and escalate slowly enough that the escalation is hard to see while you’re inside it.
The data on this is sobering, even if it isn’t surprising to most women who’ve thought about it. A study covering 25 years of cases found that the vast majority of violence against women is committed not by strangers but by people the women already knew. That’s not an argument for distrust or isolation. It’s an argument for paying attention to behavior and doing so consistently, early, and without apologizing for what you notice.
What this means for our daughters
I have a teenage daughter. I have also been that girl, standing somewhere I didn’t want to be, smiling through discomfort because I didn’t feel entitled to walk away. Most women I know have a version of that story.
A generation ago, the message was clear. Hug your relatives, don’t make waves, don’t be difficult. Many of us grew up absorbing that script whether we knew it or not. And while a lot of moms today are actively working to undo it — teaching our daughters that no is a complete sentence, that their discomfort matters, that they don’t owe anyone physical affection — Sayre argues the work isn’t finished. “All girls are born sharp,” she says. “But over time, through social norms and social contracts, that edge gets dull. Like any knife that gets used without sharpening. We’re not broken. We simply need sharpening.”
The antidote, she says, isn’t a self-defense class or a list of rules. It’s a relationship with your daughter where she can come back from a bad call and talk it through without shame. Where the debrief isn’t you should have known better but what did we learn, and nothing happened, so it’s still a win. It’s important she understands that trusting her gut is not the same as being paranoid, and that walking away from something that feels wrong is not the same as being rude. (And truthfully, sometimes rude isn’t the worst thing.)
The simplest place to start
Honing our intuition is undeniably the most effective way to protect ourselves. But that’s a long game, and I was curious if she had any more tactical suggestions. She didn’t hesitate to offer something quite simple. Pay attention in transition areas. The small moments of movement between one place and another, like from car to store, lobby to street, gym to parking lot, are the moments we’re most likely to be on our phones, mentally already somewhere else. And these, she says, are exactly the moments to look up.
“I don’t care if you’re looking for birds or checking for cute guys,” she says. “Just stay off your phone. Look around. What people with bad intentions are looking for is someone who’s not paying attention. Simply having your head up and scanning — that alone deters an enormous amount.”
It sounds almost too simple. (However, I’ve listened to enough murder podcasts to know this is sound advice.) But Sayre’s larger point is that most of this does. The skills aren’t complicated. They’re just underused, underpracticed, and undertrusted. Why? Because we’ve spent so long being told our instincts were too much, our reactions overblown, our discomfort something to manage quietly rather than act on.
Eye contact is part of it too. Sayre recommends making it, not aggressively or anything, just enough to signal that you’re present and aware. To say, “I see you” without saying a word. For women who find direct eye contact with a stranger uncomfortable, she has a practical workaround: look at their eyebrows. Close enough that they can’t tell the difference, and it still conveys the same thing.
There’s a study Sayre cites often, from the 1980s, one I also learned about in the one self-defense class I’ve ever taken. Researchers showed footage of pedestrians on a Manhattan street to people who had been convicted of crimes and asked them who they would target. They all chose the same people. Not always the most distracted. The people who didn’t look like they took up space.
Most women know exactly what that looks like. A lot of us have done it. The work, Sayre says, is learning to stop — not by performing confidence, but by building it. Knowing yourself well enough that when the signal comes, you hear it. And trusting yourself enough to move.
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