Situational awareness
But it’s also a skill that can and should be developed for reasons outside of personal defense and safety.
Situational awareness is really just another word for mindfulness,
and developing mine has made me more cognizant of what’s going on around me and
in my daily activities, which in turn has helped me make better decisions in all aspects of my life.
I’ve spent months researching and talking to experts in the tactical field about the nature of situational awareness,
and below you’ll find one of the most complete primers out there on how to gain this important skill.
While the focus is primarily on developing your situational awareness to prevent or survive a violent attack,
the principles discussed can also help hone your powers of observation in all areas of your life.
How to Develop Situational Awareness
Many of the resources out there on situational awareness say it can be cultivated by generally keeping tabs on your surroundings
— “checking your six” and “keeping your back to the wall.”
This definition isn’t wrong.
That’s exactly what situational awareness is: knowing what’s going on by scanning your environment.
What exactly am I looking for? How do I know if I’m paying attention to the right things? Are there behaviors or warning signs of an imminent threat that I should know about?
Today we’re going to start by discussing the general principles of increasing your observational abilities, and then dive deeper into situational awareness itself to answer these important questions.
Observe + Orient = Situational Awareness
The thing that helped me finally understand situational awareness was framing it within the OODA Loop. here’s the CliffsNotes version:
The OODA Loop is a learning system and decision-making process that was first laid out by Air Force fighter pilot and
But how can we become better observers so that we can improve our situational awareness?
And how should we orient ourselves so that we observe the right things and understand the context for what we’re seeing?
Observe: Stay in Condition Yellow