What Do We Mean When We Say That?

It’s a Saturday night and you’ve just settled down on the couch for a restful evening in. Your daughter sits down beside you and asks if she can take the car to go and meet up with some friends at a restaurant. You ask what her plans are for the night, where she’ll be, who she’ll be with, when she plans to be home and if her phone is fully charged. After you gather all the intel to slightly settle your worry, and just as she walks out the door with keys in hand, you say, “I love you. Be safe.”

And then she closes the door and you wonder if she’ll do what’s necessary to keep herself safe from harm, so she can return home the same as she left. You think about what you said – were they the right words to get the message across? Did she consume them and think about them, or was she too excited to get out the door? You’d run circles in your mind all night long if you didn’t reassure yourself that there is no silver bullet – no perfect, foolproof way to convey (in few words) the importance of safety.

But maybe, if we think more about what we mean when we say, “be safe”, and what our thoughts should be when we hear it, we would get a whole lot more out of it. Because, it’s fine and dandy to tell someone to be safe – but we all need to know what is needed from us to accomplish safety for ourselves and others.

So how do we be safe? The quality of our safety is decided by our behaviour. How we act and the choices we make, from situation to situation, will decide the level of risk we expose ourselves to. But then the question becomes, what moulds our behaviour? How do we ensure our loved ones behave in a safe and risk averse manner?

How people interact with the world will be decided by their beliefs, attitudes and practices. By ensuring your children are able to identify potential and actual hazards, and how to be proactive in addressing those hazards, you will better prepare them to ensure they do not place themselves in harm’s way. We should all be having these conversations around the dinner table, so our loved ones are immersed in a culture of awareness for safety.

And, just as we should be having these conversations in our living rooms at home, we should be doing the same in our boardrooms and on our shop floors at work. At the end of each module in our Safety Culture 100 Online Course, it states our slogan – “Work Safe – Stay Safe”. We are all responsible for ensuring these words mean something. Let’s make these words resonate by embodying the beliefs, attitudes and practices of a strong Safety Culture. Whether at work, or in our daily lives, we all want to ensure we can say “I love you” to our loved ones at the end of each day.