Michigan Personal Protection Tip:
Elevate Active Awareness To Situational Awareness
Most people who have consciously made the effort to take on a more active role in their personal protection know that "active awareness" of the immediate environment is key to being able quickly recognize potential threats.Active awareness stresses knowing where you are located, identifying other people around you, and monitoring the environment for any changes. A higher level of awareness - known as situational awareness - can greatly assist a person's aim of remaining safe.
Situational awareness requires a person to hypothesize what actions or tasks performed by others in a given location are expected and then identifying anyone deviating from those characteristics. In my Personal Protection Class, I describe the process as one the games featured on the "Sesame Street" children's show: "One of These Things."
In that game, children were shown four pictures. Three of the pictures were either similar or linked logically together. In contrast, the fourth picture did not relate to the aforementioned three pictures. From a personal protection context, imagine that a "safety conscious" visitor was planning a trip to a gas station.
As you probably know, gas stations are very dangerous places to be situated. If that visitor wanted to be as safe as possible, he would first imagine all of the expected behaviors of people at a gas station: driving into a bay, leaving a bay, walking to the cashier's stand, paying the cashier, filling a tire with air, cleaning trash from a car, wiping a windshield, and etc.
Then he would start looking for people who were not engaged in those aforementioned actions. You see, people do not randomly go to gas stations. Everyone there is present for a reason. The only positive reasons for a person to be at a gas station is to engage in expected tasks congruent to being at a gas station.
Alternatively, everyone else present at a gas station is there for potentially bad reasons. Those people, above all others, should be monitored during your visit to ensure that a threat does not materialize.
In closing, active awareness is a great tool to have in your personal protection toolkit, however, situational awareness is better.
For more personal protection tips, visit our site - Legally Armed In Detroit - over the Internet: http://www.legallyarmedindetroit.com/
About The Author
Rick Ector is a National Rifle Association credentialed Firearms Trainer, who provides Michigan CCW Class training in Detroit for students at his firearms school - Rick's Firearm Academy of Detroit. Ector is a recognized expert in firearm safety and has been featured extensively in the national and local media: Associated Press, UPI, NRAnews, Guns Digest, Tactical-Life, The Truth About Guns, The Politics Daily, Fox News Detroit, The Detroit News, The Detroit Examiner, WJLB, WGPR, and the UrbanShooterPodcast.
For more info about free shooting lessons for women and Michigan CCW Classes, please contact:
Rick's Firearm Academy of Detroit
Web: http://www.detroitccw.com.
Email: info@detroitccw.com
Phone: 313.733.74
If this information was useful for you, would you please make a small recurring donation to support this site?
I do most of my blogging and article writing in coffee shops because there are too many distractions at home.
No comments:
Post a Comment