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Awareness & Self-Defense

What is Awareness?
Awareness is the ability to "read" people and situations and anticipate the probability of violence before it happens. It is knowing what to look for and taking the time to notice safety-related aspects of what is happening around you.

Awareness is not about being fearful or paranoid. It is a relaxed state of alertness that you can incorporate into your character. It is neither desirable, nor necessary, to go about life hectically scanning your surroundings for the boogey man around every corner. Your level of awareness should be appropriate to the circumstances you are in.

Some circumstances call for a greater degree of awareness than others. Obviously, you would want to be more aware when walking alone to your car at night than when shopping in a crowded mall with friends.

What is Successful Self-Defense?
How you define success determines the strategies you implement to achieve it. Many people confuse the ability to defend themselves with the ability to fight. If your image of successful self-defense is fighting off an assailant, your solution will be directed at learning physical techniques. You would be missing the point.

Success in self-defense is not winning a fight but avoiding it. The ultimate success in self-defense is when nothing to happens! If that's not possible, consider this philosophy: If you can't prevent it, avoid it. If you can't avoid it, defuse it. If you can't defuse it, escape. If you can't escape, you may have to fight your way out of the situation. If you do have to fight, it will be as a last resort, not a first. Does this philosophy influence your success strategies?

Knowing What to Look For
There are three primary aspects of awareness.
• Knowing what to pay attention to.
• Paying attention to safety-related details.
• Matching the degree of your awareness to your circumstances.

Points to Remember
• Your ability to recognize a dangerous person or situation makes you safer.
• Awareness is knowing what to look for and training yourself to pay attention.
• The ultimate success in self-defense is when nothing happens!
• The earlier you recognize a potential problem, the more options you have to resolve it.
• Detecting and recognizing danger is based on accurate mental maps.

How Can I Use This Information?
How can you use this information in your own personal safety strategy? Here are some examples of activities and exercises that will improve your awareness.

Accept full responsibility for your safety.
Unless you take full responsibility for your safety and make it a priority, you are less likely to detect and recognize danger cues. You are more likely to be selected as a target.

Identify situations in your own life requiring a higher level of vigilance.
You can't be totally aware all of the time, nor do you have to be. Identify times and situations in your own life where a higher degree of vigilance is merited. When out jogging alone? When commuting to and from work? When staying in a strange city? When out socializing at the bar?

Build and refine your self-defense understanding by continuous learning.
If personal safety is important to you, read books and articles about it, take self-defense courses, etc. You may not want to join a self-defense club or spend all of your waking hours studying self-defense. You don't have to. However, don't read a single book or take a single course and consider yourself "finished". Make an effort to periodically review what you know and continuously build on what you've learned.

Analyze the news.
Analyze news events to familiarize yourself with criminal patterns and factors, which contribute to violent crimes. Apply the questions who, what, when, where, why and how to these incidents and use your acquired knowledge to stay out of the news yourself!

Practice observations skills.
Pre-determine specific things to look for as you go about your day-to-day activities. For example, when going shopping make a "game" of spotting as many tall, dark haired men with a moustache as you can. Next time look for something else. Consider the fact that "playing" awareness games makes you appear more observant to a predator who may be evaluating you as a potential target.

Establish self-defense habits.
If you knew you were going to be attacked the next time you went to work you just wouldn't go. The truth of the matter is that you never know when you may be targeted as a potential victim. Assaults happen at all times of the day and in all types of setting and situations. The only effective self-defense strategies are those that you build into your day-to-day behavior. They become unconscious habits by repetition and consistency.

What are good self defense habits?
For some suggestions - click here.

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