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Here is another way to look at and understand Functional and Situational Awareness
The first step you need to do to increase your situational awareness is assess in full your surroundings. Make the time to look around and take full account of all situations around you. Keep in mind, different environments will present and require from you, different levels of focus in order to maintain a higher level of awareness. Urban, Suburban and Rural areas will each present different types of people as well as different types of situations. Being able to quickly identify your environment you’re in puts you in a better position to identify possible risks. Remember this; no one is ever really safe. We have no control over when an individual will commit a crime against us.
Knowledge, education and experience leads to wisdom. Asking questions, taking classes, practicing, experiencing active learning and time all increase your levels of wisdom. Utilizing the knowledge and wisdom of people who practice life preservation techniques daily is the fastest way you will gain wisdom when developing your own self-defense skill sets.
What action are you going to take when you need to? This is the moment when you decide to fight back. There CANNOT be any hesitation from this point forward. Once you decide to take action, you must do so with unprecedented, courage, speed, accuracy and power. All your prior training now comes into play. You will always be under the element of an assailant’s surprise, however, how quickly you can respond to an attack, determines how quickly you can escape the situation.
What resources are available for you to gain skills necessary to protect yourself. Where and how are you going to gain the self-defense knowledge and skill sets you need to defend against an attack? There are all kinds of resources available to us these days between on-line training, books, DVD’s and countless training facilities. With so much knowledge available, you need to be explicit in what you are seeking to learn. Make sure the training and instructors align with what you are seeking.
You should always know your exit point. If you’re in a restaurant, shopping mall, movie theatre, coffee shop, library or subway, and something goes wrong, you want to know where your exits are. Always scan for additional exits whenever you enter a building or place of business. Know where they are, so you can move immediately to those exits in the effect an attack of some sort breaks out.
Heaven forbid anyone ever falls prey to an attack. If you have spent time training and developing defensive skill sets, then you have a very strong ability to ward off an attack. This is why you need Progressive Defense Tactics to show you streetwise defensive and offensive techniques that will create the mindset you need to survive life-threatening situations.
Escaping an attack and staying alive is your number one goal. Studying and understanding an assailant’s mind, training and developing fighting skills, teaches you to respond quickly to an attack, ultimately helping you escape. An attack all takes place in seconds so the quicker you can respond to the threat the faster you can escape.
Your perception of what is happening at that moment, in the environment you are in. Strengthening your situational and functional awareness improves your ability to escape or mitigate the danger presented by people or scenarios that could potentially cause you or those around you harm.
Being safe is all that anyone wants. “Safety” is a relative term and depending on where you are it can have a very different meaning. You always have to assess what “safe” is at that moment in time. Safety may not always mean being out of danger but being out of immediate danger. Study, training and practice with the PDT method will increase your ability to asses and improve your situational awareness.
Additional: There are essentially four different levels of situational awareness:
Condition white – Everything in your surroundings is ok and you’re not paying attention. Most people live in this state
Condition yellow – You are aware of your surroundings and are scanning for potential threats but not being paranoid.
Condition orange – Your senses are alarmed and your intuition is telling you something is wrong. You are now in a “ready for action state of mind”, while still scanning for the threat.
Condition red – The threat looks like it is about to happen and you are now ready to go, whether you are drawing a weapon or empty hand.
Trained individuals are rarely in condition white mode. They are usually in yellow.