Survival Situational Awareness: Many people think that the term survival applies to major disasters like a boat sinking, a hurricane, an earthquake, or even a famine.
But everyday life needs survival skills as well, as the city streets are often referred to as a jungle.
Knowing what to do when you are alone, walking to different destinations or enjoying a day at the beach or park is part of surviving the urban jungle.
Knowing how to do survival situational awareness correctly is arming yourself with some unique, subtle, and handy self-defense techniques.
Keep reading to find out more on this important topic.
What is Survival Situational Awareness?
Sounds like a mouthful and gives off the essence that this is complicated and hard to understand.
However, if you break the sentence down, you will see how easy it is to understand and grasp what you are to do.
The first word, survival tells you that you need skills or already have the skills to survive different tragic events that come your way.
The term situational simply refers to those times those events take place.
They are not going to happen every day and some you may never see but knowing what to do in those situations will help you or help you help others.
The final term just means you know those situations can take place.
Not that they will but they are a possibility.
Being aware of your surroundings is one step to total survival situational awareness.
When you put all those terms together it is saying that you know what is going on around you, you know the possible implications, and you know what to do when they do take place.
That is easy to understand.
Who can do Survival Situational Awareness?
The key to this training is that you do not have to be a professional law enforcement officer, nurse, or even a fireman to have these skills.
You can be trained by these and other professionals to be ready to handle these different emergency situations when they arise.
While there are professionals who can do this work, they can’t be everywhere problems take place.
Having trained people who know what to do helps stop bad things from taking place.
You can be a housewife a husband, a businessman, a shopkeeper, or simply someone going to a sporting event or concert.
Anyone can be trained in survival situational awareness.
It makes you and those around you safer.
Plus, you can use these skills just about anywhere you go, especially if your destination is a crowded one in a public area.
Your new skills can help law enforcement capture the criminals quicker as well as get them off the street.
Then as word spreads that the people know how to handle these difficult events, the crimes may stop or move to another area.
The more people who learn these skills, the safer your neighborhood becomes.
That makes life a lot more interesting and better for everyone.
Why is this Training Important
The most important aspect of this training is that it helps keep you from being a victim of a crime.
It won’t erase all crime and you may eventually be a victim but the training makes it harder for a criminal to make you a victim.
In other words, if you practice situational awareness, you act differently.
You keep your head up looking around to see who is nearby or hiding in the shadows.
You keep your keys in your hand and not in your purse.
Those few seconds that are spent looking for your keys are a vulnerable time for you and a great opening for a criminal.
Then you wait till you are in your car before you check your email or Facebook posts.
Survival situational awareness means self-protection as well as protection for your children.
Assuming something is safe is not survival situational awareness.
It is making yourself vulnerable to criminals who look for people who assume they are safe.
More Reasons
Another example of the importance of this training is as follow.
If you are walking with a lot of money from your home to your car, business or store to your car, or even from your car to the bank, how you walk tells criminals how much money you have on you.
Body language tips them off so if you act and walk nervously, you are making yourself a target.
You know how much money you are carrying and if you walk like you are carrying a lot, everyone will know that information as well.
In survival situational awareness, you know you can be a target when you carry lots of cash on you so you walk like you do not have any money on you.
That walk sends a message to everyone that it is useless to rob you as they think you have no money with you.
The actions you need to take are simple and you just need to remember to do them at those times.
Examples of Survival Situational Awareness
#1. Keep your keys in your hand when going to your car at all times
#2. Watch your surroundings to see who is nearby and learn to judge their movements
#3. Watch for their body language, eye contact, posture, stride
#4. See the charging dog and face them.
Look the dog in the eye and that is enough to keep them away
#5. Change your route when you see someone who may be shady or acting suspiciously
#6. Keep your nose out of your phone- this is difficult for some people to do but if you don’t you are making yourself vulnerable to attacks
#7. At playgrounds or parks look for those people loitering around.
They may be innocent so you need to learn to analyze what you see correctly before pushing the panic button.
#8. Carry a whistle or other noise-making device just in case.
#9. Watch for ambush spots.
Always a favorite trick of criminals as you can’t defend yourself and they can trap you easily.
Why You Need to Practice These Skills
This is not paranoia in action as you do not have to be afraid to practice survival situational awareness.
You can relax and still practice this key self-defense strategy.
Enjoy your time outside, just be aware of what is going on around you and make sure you can interpret the actions of other correctly.
You do not want to hassle innocent people.
This is a skill that needs to be developed
There is a lot of data that your eyes are bringing to your mind.
Plus, it is a lot of data that is being processed by your mind.
This is the risky part of practicing survival situational awareness.
It is easy for beginners to make a mistake and accuse the wrong people.
While these can and do happen, you need to develop your awareness skills so that they do not happen that often.
Here are Some Areas you need to Work on if you Want to Keep Yourself Safer
- Be aware of your surroundings- casual looks are okay
- Take notice of those people around you and what they are doing
- Make mental notes of entry and exits points- you may need to use them yourself
- Learn to analyze the data properly- prediction development helps but it is not always going to be accurate as new data is always appearing that needs to be analyzed
- Practice awareness all the time and teach your children to do it as well
- Trust your instincts- 9 times out of 10 you may be right so do not let one mistake stop you from using survival situational awareness
Survival situational awareness is a lot like driving a car except you are doing it when you are most vulnerable- when you are walking.
You need to be aware of hidden dangers so you can take the right actions to avoid an accident or worse.
Just like you keep an eye on cars around you, even when you are parked, you need to do the same with people.
You never know what they will or can do.
What Survival Situational Awareness is Not
This is not superpowers that keep you and others around you safe from harm.
Unfortunately, these techniques will not completely stop you from being a victim.
There will be situations well beyond your sight and control that will take place.
Those events need a different set of survival skills.
Or the criminal doesn’t care what you are doing and they will take their moment when it comes up.
But you can keep those times to a minimum when you practice the right skills.
Final Words
The good thing about using survival situational awareness is that most people will not know you are doing it.
The key to this ability is that you are avoiding potential trouble before you walk into it.
To avoid being a victim, you move away so the criminal does not get the opportunity to attack you.
This is just like martial arts training.
Originally posted 2022-09-11 09:38:17.
