A Simple Trick To Avoid Being Robbed
Robbery is a real-life, everyday threat to normal people like you and me. Whether you leave home to go to work or whether stay occupied at home, there is always the potential for someone to steal from you.
Fortunately, at least when you are out and about, there is a simple way to reduce your likelihood of being robbed: Situational awareness. Now, we’ve talked about situational awareness before (in articles like this one), and we can’t overemphasize how important this skill is for your safety. But you may not have realized how useful this skill is in keeping you from getting robbed.
Of course, the reason that situational awareness is useful in preventing a robbery is the same reason that situational awareness is important for safety: if you see it, you can more often avoid it, and, even if you can’t avoid it, you are more likely to be able to respond quickly and appropriately to the situation.
With that in mind, a writer going by the name of Rich M gives us some advice on how to develop situational awareness:
To start with, we must make a decision to become more aware — not a wishy-washy decision, but a firm one. That, in and of itself, will make a huge difference, simply because we’ll be thinking about the need to be aware. We’ll open our eyes and start looking around us, just because we know that we should.
Still, that isn’t enough. It’s just a start. Building situational awareness requires practice. We’ve got to train our mind to pay attention to what our eyes are seeing. So, we need to develop a series of exercises, which will help us to see. Things like:
- Make a habit of knowing how many people are within 100 feet of you, where they are and what they are doing.
- Count the number of cars of a particular color as you drive somewhere.
- Look at what a co-worker wears to work every day and try to remember it. See how many days’ worth of attire you can recall, and if you can recall the last time they wore a particular shirt or outfit.
- Learn what cars your neighbors drive. Then, make it a habit to look for new or different cars, every time you step out of your home. Look for patterns, to see if certain cars show up at certain times.
Once you are more aware, it’s time to start putting that awareness to use. Start looking at people to see what they are doing and try to evaluate how much of a threat they are. Use a scale from one to 10, with one being no threat at all and 10 meaning it’s time to draw a gun to protect yourself. Rate each person, even if there are many people around you. Then, keep track of those with a higher score, updating your score as you go.
Ultimately, that’s what situational awareness is all about — finding threats. Once it becomes a habit, it will help you in countless ways.
So, there you have it, practical reasons to develop situational awareness and practical steps to develop that situational awareness. If you take the time to develop that skill, you will find that you keep you and your family safer and your possessions more secure. And keeping safe and secure is a huge part of what survival in any kind of dangerous situation is about.
