Be Safe - Growing Safety Awareness for Accident Prevention in Dangerous Occupations

The book, Be Safe, is the culmination of over twenty years of research to find the missing links in the chain of events that lead to accidents. It reveals the human limitations, that degrade our awareness for work-place hazards and create accidents every year within cloaks of anonymity. Human limitations have this cloak of anonymity because safety programs fail to cover some common aspects of human behavior and sensory restrictions we all possess. We don't try to understand the sources producing human errors, because we view human errors as a normal part of life. We don't believe anything can be done to reduce human errors, so we remain focused on the actions that proceed each accident. We choose to focus on actions because they are easily analyzed and critiqued. After accident investigations, action steps are then suggested for preventing future accidents. What if our actions are not really the weakest link in the chain of events causing accidents? What if the weakest links are hidden within various obstructions created by our biology, evolution, and learned lessons. When the sources of our most debilitating weaknesses, go unrecognized, they are free to interrupt and distort delicate mental processes that control all of our actions. What if there are offensive ways to grow a craftsman's understanding of his own inherent limitations and build compensation strategies that can be used every day. This training could heighten self-awareness for hazards within the work environments and give each person the self-control to ensure behaviors that foster teamwork and emotional stability. It is my contention that these abilities can be improved just like any other skill set, but they can also atrophy from nonuse. Our level of awareness determines if we are taking deliberate cognitive actions, or merely robotically moving within thought-induced daydreams. It is difficult to diagnose accidents as resulting from biological, evolutionary, or mental errors when we don't routinely have enough understanding of the mind to diagnose anything with any accuracy. We need to study the inner workings of our minds to understand the repetitive processes that produce all of our outcomes. We will understand the power contained within our minds to remain focused and aware of existing hazards, and how to deliberately enhance these abilities. This is a book about accident prevention; however, eliminating accidents is only possible by understanding the greatest safety device we possess, which is our minds. We have always had the offensive power within ourselves to eliminate accidents, but the needed information was lost among an overabundance of misinformation which confused our full understanding. In the future this will no longer be the case! Be Safe!