Whenever I teach, I like to use examples that are close to everyday life… Today, I’ll go back to my past as a banker: in that past life, I worked fighting various bank fraud but I’ll focus more particularly on the time I spent in anti-money laundering.

Let me explain: regulations vary from bank to bank and from country to country but generally speaking, tellers are trained to pick up irregular patterns in a customer’s activity.

For example: A customer on welfare suddenly walks in looking to deposit an unusually high amount of cash and the teller can see regular electronic government deposits into his account, some red flags will be raised as this is a spike in an otherwise normal pattern.

Our eyes and brains work the same way: Your eyes will not pick up on normal movement as this is something they see day in day out and in regular occurrence.

To further elaborate on this example, try the following: Stand on a busy street corner for 5 minutes and try to mentally count how many people you see that are looking at their phones. Alternatively you can also try to count the number of people you see passing by that are smoking a cigarette.

Easy? No. And why is that? Because these are gestures and movements and patterns that we see in everyday life on a regular basis often several times a day. As such the CPU we have between our ears has 24 images to process and analyse each and every second and your brain will be dismissing and deleting what is not considered to be unusual.

In that sense, your brain and eyes act very much like the banking system does: They have to go through hundreds of operations and they need to pick up those that appear to be unusual. Of course some can slip through their defenses, some will be picked up. Going back to the previously-mentioned example of the street corner counting either phones of cigarettes, should you see somebody walk by wearing a giant chicken suit, you’re very likely to remember later that day.

By keeping your training movements (strikes etc.) as normal as possible, you too can successfully slip through the the “bank teller” training that human eyesight possesses.

Another aspect of keeping movements normal is that when panic kicks in, these are movements that will be fired off first by your brain. By keeping your movements as normal as as simple as possible, you get the double benefit of having them fire off automatically but also having them have more chance of slipping through the eyesight defenses of your partner.

And whatever you do, laundering money is bad…unless were talking about a twenty you forgot in your jeans pockets on laundry day.

Happy training