Situational Awareness Training

Why is Situational Awareness Important

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.

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.

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.

With situational awareness, it’s 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 and if not learn from what you are observing and try to improve your people-watching skills.

Teaching Situational Awareness

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.

This is an important skill for kids to learn, whether they are needing to observe their surroundings to prevent a kidnapping or dog attack – or even, unfortunately, a school shooting 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.

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.