As a responsible legal gun owner, what is the one primary skill that stands above all others?
Situational Awareness.
What is Situational Awareness?
Simply put, situational awareness is knowing what is going on around us and how it relates to us. It involves drawing a kind of mental map that helps us understand where we are, what surrounds us, what is happening, and how it all relates to us.
Situational awareness is especially important in settings where your brain is receiving a lot of information, and any resulting decisions – good or bad – can lead to serious consequences.
The tricky part of situational awareness is that there are safe spaces in dangerous places and dangerous spaces in safe places. It’s our responsibility to know the location and conditions in each case. Sometimes, situational awareness can be done remotely before you even arrive in a new place.
In other words, try to know before you go, because going into unfamiliar areas without understanding at least a little bit about the environment puts us at unnecessary risk.
The Benefits of Situational Awareness
With all of the technological distractions around today, it’s all too easy to live life essentially unaware. However, we have the power to lead a much more fulfilling life when we are more aware.
Increased situational awareness allows us to predict the people, places, and processes that expose us to risk, ideally in time to affect the outcome. Being situationally aware is extremely helpful for us to decide:
- Do we need to use force?
- If we are forced to use force, how can we best explain our actions criminally civilly, and socially? Why did we take the action we took with the risk presented?
Keys to Situational Awareness
Using force in any form against another human is a serious matter. Without proper awareness it is easy to under or overreact. So what are some keys to being more aware?
- Know what to look for
- Know when enough is enough to make a decision, even with potentially incomplete information
- Have some sort of pre-planned response to searching and identifying your area of responsibility that takes the least amount of mental energy
While we may not know when, where, how, or why a crisis may come into our area of responsibility, we know this: we don’t rise to the level of our expectations but rather, fall to the lowest level of our training.
If you enjoyed this preview and are interested in learning more about situational awareness and how to better use it to your advantage when responding in a crisis, sign up for the Concealed Coalition membership today! We have this full course and many more available for you to better equip yourself to protect what matters most.
