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 in 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.

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.

An 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 weather and even other hikers.

This 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.

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 phone 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.

Situational awareness comes in three stages, starting with perception. This is when you’re using your senses to see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Comprehension is next, and this is where you spot patterns or relationships between people, and your mind starts to put things together.

For phase three, you’re quickly playing out possible scenarios in your head and considering the risks you’re facing, making a plan to carry out. This is all done in an instant, not for hours at a time.

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 the 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 retreating to somewhere else entirely until the threat (whether it’s a human, tornado, or something else) passes.

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.

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.

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 patterns. 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.

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. Instead, you want them to be in a yellow zone where they are relaxed but aware of everything taking place.

This can also be escalated into an orange, red, or black code if something were to arise. With an orange code, they are aware of potential threats and ready to act if necessary. A red code has them taking action on high alert and actively engaged to respond.

You also don’t want them at the other end of the spectrum, which is a black code 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.

There are some instinctive and technology based tools you can use to help you with learning 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.

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.

Practice Scenarios for Situational Awareness

You never want to be caught off guard and having 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.

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.

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.

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 about 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.

Effective Training for Situational Awareness

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.

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.

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.

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