self protection part 2

This part will be about, "situational awareness" and a couple excercises that can help increase it for you. First off, what is situational awareness? in essence, it is being aware of your surroundings, but it requires knowing what to look for. When people are trying to just be aware of their surroundings, they end up trying to absorb every sound, color, smell, etc. This leads to a tangled mess of data, something the great Bruce Lee was not very fond of. What would be more usefull is smaller amounts of data but well organized and put to use properly.

For example, going to work in the morning, when you get to your car, did you notice the strange new vehicle parked near your apartment? no, one thing you can do is when you are walking to your car take a quick mental note of the surrounding vehicles makes, models, color, and look at the license plate. Don't try to memorize all of them, cause it wont happen unless you are Jason Bourne. But after repetition you will get a feel of what vehicles are new and may be suspicious.

Here is an exercise my grandpa taught me, when you walk up to your car take a mental snapshot of the overall vehicle, then mentally "zoom" in to a more specific part of the vehicle, for example, the grill, then zoom again to the logo on the front, this gives you an organized way to look and observe vehicles, and will make it easier for you to spot makes and models of vehicles that may have been involved in your mugging or break in.

Do the same thing when approaching the side of the car. Zoom in to the reflection on the paint or the window, this will help you be more capable of spotting reflective surfaces thus helping your situational awareness. Experiment with this, zoom to the door, then the door handle, then to a speck of dirt on the handle.

Do the same with people, you see the person, identify their build, height, skin tone, then zoom to their upper body, note their hair style, and color, shirt color, eye color. Zoom to their shirt, the to a button or pocket on the shirt. Do this at the shooting range, and it can help increase your accuracy because you won't just be shooting at a torso, you will be aiming at a small spot on the torso. You will find yourself noticing more tattoos, scars etc.. giving you a better description of your would be attackers if you needed to give such information to an officer, or maybe you will identify a threat before it happens.

This is turning out to be longer than I thought so I will continue with part three.