Today we have a talk that is fresh on our minds, Situational Awareness.
If you have seen any news as of late, you have seen a lot of unrest and tragedies. This last week, we had a scare at our local school. It was just that, only a scare but it did bring up some questions for us.
We are glad to report that there was no actual danger, only a scare. The school officials acted quickly, everyone followed the safety procedures and kept it together. The local authority’s response was fast and very appreciated. Things were fine, everyone was fine. The school staff and parents were grateful to know their kids are safe and things are in place to be sure they stay safe.
But this “only a scare” got us thinking about “What If” and how we can improve our current processes for handling things like this. One of the biggest ways to protect yourself and your family is to have good Situational Awareness. This is good for any situation natural or man-made.
1. Situational Awareness is for Safety and Survival
Situational awareness is often what determines whether you stay safe or put yourself at risk in a variety of situations. These range from everyday activities to survival events. It’s a concept where you train yourself to be aware at any given moment of what’s going on around you so that you can predict behavior and anticipate threats or dangers that you need to avoid.
When getting into Situational Awareness there are several things that you need to keep in mind:
Some of these are natural disaster situations or man-made events. This is a skill that you not only want to master yourself but teach your family to adopt. Situational awareness is something many people have never cultivated, especially in a world where everyone walks around distracted by their phone, unaware of sounds because they have their earbuds on, or just lost in their own world.
A prime example of this is a person jogging. Many if not most people like to jog with earbuds in so that they can listen to music while they jog. Although you may well benefit from soothing or feel-good music it makes you deaf to the sounds around you. A jogger listening to music may not hear someone coming up behind them.
If a jogger is so wrapped up in their own head they may not see the person sitting in the car waiting on the side of the road ahead of them.
Another example of this would be a hiker lost on a trail in the woods. They have to stay aware of the terrain they’re standing on so they don’t fall off a cliff. They need to be aware of predators like bears or cougars. They also have to stay alert about the weather and even other hikers.
These examples may sound extreme but they can and have happened.
Situational Awareness is something you need whether you’re in the wilderness alone or in the city with your entire family. Once you gain the skill, you’ll be thankful that you avoided precarious situations this far in life.
2. Fundamental Lessons of Situational Awareness
If you watch the news any given day, you’ll see moments in peoples’ lives when they failed to be aware of their surroundings.
People in New York walking while on their phones and getting hit upside the head.
Hikers trotting along on a trail without any way to protect themselves and encountering a grizzly.
Diners trying to enjoy a meal when a gunman bursts into a restaurant from behind them – the stories go on and on.
The basic thing you need to know about situational awareness is that you should always be in the mode of gathering information so you can process it. Everything may look perfectly normal, but if you study things carefully, you’ll be aware of small issues that may or may not be something you need to avoid.
A. Three Stages of Situational Awareness and the OODA Loop
1. Perception
Situational awareness comes in three stages, starting with perception. This is when you’re using all of your senses to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
2. Comprehension
Comprehension is next, and this is where you spot patterns or relationships between people, and your mind starts to put things together.
3. Prepping in Your Head
For phase three prepping in your head. Here, you’re quickly playing out possible scenarios in your head, considering the risks you’re facing, and making a plan to carry out. This is all done in an instant, not for hours at a time.
An Alternative Method is:
OODA Loop ( Observe, Orient, Decide, Act )
You can also use what’s known as the OODA Loop. This is where you observe your surroundings, orient yourself with a mental snapshot of the situation, decide what you’ll do, and to act on your decisions.
The decision could be to move to a slightly different area of a room that allows for a quick escape or retreat to somewhere else entirely until the threat (whether it’s a human, tornado, or something else) passes.
B. Honing Your Situational Awareness Skills
Don’t beat yourself up if you realize that you have been lacking situational awareness for years. This is something that was probably only briefly mentioned to you a few times by your parents when you were a teenager, but it’s not a skill that is drilled into our heads in school.
Luckily, this is a skill that you can cultivate on your own, so let’s look at some various things you can do to help you and your family learn it…
While you may think situational awareness is all based on eyesight or sound, it’s much deeper than that. It is a brain-based capability where you have to use your cognitive assessment to quickly scan and analyze the scene unfolding in front of you and make a determination of how you should proceed.
Yes, your senses will take in the information, but it’s your brain and your emotional intelligence that will process the information and help you make a decision that is not only rooted in facts but also your intuition.
You have to understand certain techniques to help you learn how to observe better. This is something you can practice when out in public. Focus on specific details about the location and people you’re around, both up close and farther away.
1. Practice listening
Practice listening in on conversations and making a mental note of behaviors and emotions other people are exhibiting. Are they agitated? Nervous? Angry or happy?
You can do the same with animals to determine if they’re docile or in predator mode. The behavior of a mother animal protecting her young is similar in action to anger but it has very different motivations.
2. Mental Mapping
As you observe, make a mental map of your surroundings. Pay attention to major things like buildings or landmarks, but also exits and pathways. Anytime you are in an unfamiliar location, the first thing you want to do is make note of your surroundings.
Another thing that will be helpful is to practice spotting any type of pattern. This might be something to do with crowd behavior, for example. If you are at a fun event, pay attention to the normal flow of the crowd so that you’ll know which escape path is going to be less busy in the event of an emergency.
3. Cooper Color Code System
You can also learn the Cooper Color Code System, where you start categorizing different levels of alertness. This is something you can share with your loved ones so that they know what level they need to be on in different situations.
They should never be in a white code, where they are fully unaware or tuned out of what’s going on. We have seen many people on their phones or with earbuds in and they never see or hear anything going on around them. They are totally oblivious to their surroundings.
Instead, you want them to be in a yellow zone where they are relaxed but aware of everything taking place. They have a working knowledge of their surroundings. They can react quickly and with the proper info if the need should arise.
This can also be escalated into an orange, red, or black code if something were to happen.
With an orange code, they are aware of potential threats and ready to act if necessary. They are keeping an eye on what could be something but that has not yet become an issue.
A red code has them taking action on high alert and actively engaged to respond. They are actually doing something about an active danger. They have formulated a plan and they are acting on it to secure a threat or to keep themselves and others safe.
You also don’t want them at the other end of the spectrum, which is a black code. This is where they are fully frozen or panicked and in a state of shock because they are caught off guard and cannot respond mentally or physically to the threat. Here is where you have the screaming, running, and pretty much hysteria. This is not good for anyone in any situation. It does not help you and it will not keep you safe.
In our family, we are at code yellow at all times when at home. We are all using our situational awareness skills. We are taking in the sights, sounds, and feel of the area and the activities around us. Basically, this is “keeping an eye out”.
Once we leave the farm, the code automatically changes to orange. The MAN has taught the kids to do this when they are out of our safety zone, the farm. Even the kids can be aware of things going on around them and help keep the family safe.
4. Technology-Based Tools
There are some instinctive and technology-based tools you can use to help you learn how to be more situationally aware. Technology is fine and can be very helpful, but it may not always be available to you.
You want to practice with and without it. The type of technology that can come in handy might include radio gadgets where you can communicate with others, GPS devices that can help you navigate away from any type of danger, and even things like night vision goggles that help you in situations where your visual sense is compromised.
5. Manual Practice
It’s important that you practice being situationally aware without technology, too. This might mean simply observing your surroundings and making note of landmarks or natural water formations.
It can also include keeping track of where the sun is rising and setting or is located during the day. You can even use the stars at night for navigational directions. Make sure that if you are using technology, such as a GPS device, that you also have a backup gadget like a compass or map to help you navigate a situation in the event that your technology fails.
C. Practice Scenarios for Situational Awareness
1. Disaster Scenarios
You never want to be caught off guard and you have to learn how to be situationally aware in an event that you have never been in before. It’s hard for you to practice things like disaster scenarios if they’re not happening, but you can pretend and make plans on how you would react if you are caught in a disaster scenario such as a wildfire, shooting scenario, or other threat.
2. Different Locations and Threats
You want to make sure that you are practicing in different locations, for different types of threats, and even based on encountering different types of weather or obstacles like terrain that could cause you to make a split-second decision based on what you are observing and analyzing.
3. Make a Plan for Each
You might want to make a plan for situational awareness in your suburban or urban location. You need to know what kind of vulnerabilities are around you and what the community is like so that you can navigate events and deter unsavory behavior.
Practice being immersed in different levels of crowds, whether it’s sparse or fully packed locations. Navigate different structures to see how easy it is for you to take an escape route quickly and easily.
4. Situational Awareness in the Wilderness
You also want to practice situational awareness in the wilderness in case you have to bug out. You never want to be complacent just because you have escaped a city environment and assume you are alone in a remote location.
It’s important that you practice not only situational awareness as an individual but also as a group because one person making a mistake could have dire consequences for everyone.
In a wilderness environment, you’ll want to be situationally aware of any natural hazards, the weather, wildlife, and even humans that you may encounter that could be hostile to your own group.
Don’t forget that in times like this, you might be facing other threats that are self-imposed. You have to be aware of your own physical and emotional state so that you can recognize when your judgment is beginning to be impaired, which might require sleep, food, water, or some sort of self-soothing.
D. Effective Training for Situational Awareness
1. Make Special Times to Practice
You may want to make special practice time that you set aside for training, such as in the scenarios listed above. But this should really be a daily exercise, whether you are sitting at a desk at work or out to dinner with your family.
You want to have an instinctive heightened sense of observation at all times. This doesn’t mean that you live in fear, but that you are continually practicing a mindful approach to observing your surroundings in real-life situations that you are in every day.
You might even think to yourself about a what-if or worst-case scenario while you are out and about. What if an earthquake happened in the middle of dinner and you wanted to escape the building but there was a large crowd all heading to the front door?
These are things you can have your children and your spouse practice as well. The key is not to make people worry but to feel empowered about how they would respond in a critical situation.
2. Have a Plan B and Practice It
It’s important that you also practice having a Plan B in place. You don’t want to have tunnel vision where you are so stuck on one scenario that you can’t see any other options because this can be detrimental to you in a real-life event.
When you begin practicing this on a regular basis, you’ll notice that your stress level decreases and you are able to observe and react with a level head. You might want to practice deep breathing so that you can quickly use that skill whenever necessary.
3. Add Physical Training
You also might discover in your training that you need to incorporate some sort of physical exercise to help you in ways that you may have to react to a threat. This might be climbing something or jumping from one place to another, and if you are not physically prepared, you’ll have to think of a different way to handle it.
Situational awareness is a skill that you always want to be learning from. For example, if you are having dinner out and you mentally observe your surroundings and try to predict the behavior of others, see if you predicted things correctly to learn from what you are observing and try to improve your people-watching skills.
E. The Best Way to Teach Situational Awareness to Others
Whether you live alone or with others, this is a skill that you may want to teach your friends and family or even your coworkers. It’s something that you can train for as a group, where you teach children and adults alike how to practice being aware.
1. Teaching Kids
This is an important skill for kids to learn, whether they need to observe their surroundings to prevent a kidnapping or dog attack – or even, unfortunately, a school event or natural disaster.
It’s important that you give them the knowledge about how to be situationally aware without scaring anyone, whether they are young or old. Sometimes it helps to do role-playing where you simulate a scenario like a weather emergency and have everyone work individually and as a team to make good decisions.
2. Teaching Adults
You may want to approach people that you work with, the school, or even your church and open the dialogue with others about safety and awareness that can serve as a protective layer for everyone in the community.
Situational awareness is not about adopting a worried mindset. Instead, it delivers peace of mind because you always feel confident that you are not going to be caught off guard and unprepared.
3. Zombie Apocalypse
When thinking about Situational Awareness consider the Zombie Apocalypse, not that we are expecting real zombies. But when you go into a building think if a zombie hoard comes how do I secure this building? If you walk into a room, if a zombie outbreak happens in this room, think how do I get out of this room quickly and safely? And of course, how do I protect my family?
Another thing to consider is weapons. When you first walk into a room scan the area and locate anything that could be used as a weapon if need be. Not just normal things like knives, or ball bats but things that could be put to use as a weapon. A sturdy broom handle, a fire extinguisher, or an umbrella will all do for defense if you need it. Think about the things that are around you in a room or on the desk you sit at. What could you use if you had to?
The TV series The Walking Dead, now several series, has made many people start thinking about Situational Awareness and how they would do in that kind of world.
We know this is a far-fetched scenario and we are not trying to scare anyone, just trying to get you thinking about your Situational Awareness.
Believe us, we know, that with church, school, band, football, farming, gardening, pets, and life in general, there is never enough time. But it is important for you and your family to know what your Situational Awareness level is and what to do to improve it.
Yes, we know, this sounds like a lot of work, and keeping on alert all the time would be very tiring. But what price would you put on your family’s safety, how much time would you spend to be sure your family is safe? Do not start all of these things at the same time, you go one step at a time. Take one of these topics and start with that. It does not matter which one you pick but pick one and work on that. When you have that first thing worked into your daily habits, then start on another one.
In no time you will be doing these things by habit. Obviously, you want to concentrate on relevant topics first. If you are going camping, look at Situational Awareness in the Wilderness. If you are not in the woods then you may want to strengthen your other Situational Awareness skills before you start on Situational Awareness in the Wilderness. Be logical about things, do not try to cram it all in at once. You are not likely to remember all the details if you rush. This is not to say just take your time and go with the flow.
Working on your Situational Awareness skills is a lifetime commitment. Go at your own pace so that you can learn and remember these skills and put them to use in your everyday life. It does no good to speed read a book, throw it away, and forget everything you read.
We hope you have gotten some useful info from this talk about Situational Awareness. Please think it over and start working on your Situational Awareness skills. You ever know when you may need these skills to keep you or your family safe in a crisis situation, from an environmental danger or a man-made one.
If you are interested in other talks similar to this please see the ones below.
Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.
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