Situational awareness is essentially the practice of being alert to whatever is going on in your immediate environmement. From a self-defense perspective, this refers to the practice of actively observing and interpreting the behavior of all the people in your immediate environment in order to anticipate danger. However, situational awareness is practiced in many areas of life. For example, in my second book, Doctor’s Partner: The Self-Empowered Patient, I describe how to be on the lookout for some of the most common errors made by doctors, nurses, and other personel. When receiving medical treatments, maintaining situational awareness can save you from medical mistakes of various types.
For the purpose of the Peaceful Warrior Woman course that I teach, it is about staying safe from human predators. This includes things like observing a person’s hands to see if he or she is holding a weapon and noticing if the person keeps patting a certain spot on the body where a weapon may be concealed.
Although the Peaceful Warrior Woman page is specific to women, this web page is for both men and women.
Most people are terrible at practicing situational awareness, partly because they are so distracted most of the time and partly because they form conclusions about those around them based on irrelevant things, such as race, nationality, economic status, religion, clothing, facial hair, tattoos, piercings, and the type of vehicle someone drives. Those things are based on propaganda that infuses every society and blocks the ability to observe the type of subtle behavior that could actually serve as a warning of real potential danger. People profile each other in that way because they mistakenly believe it helps them know who is safe to be around, but it only creates fear and paranoia, while distracting their attention from what really matters—observable behavior. Xenophobia is orthogonal to situational awareness.
Situational Awareness should not be confused with paranoia. People who believe in conspiracy theories are paranoid and out of touch with reality. Whereas situational awareness is a practice of having full appreciation for your surroundings from moment to moment, leading to a feeling of greater aliveness. Situational awareness is about curiosity and attention to the observable behavior of those around you.
Observe how you and others communicate with dogs. Dogs are much easier to communicate with than humans because the words spoken by humans commonly contradict what their body language is saying. Watch how people approach someone else’s dog. They’ll ask the owner the dog’s name, gender, and breed in order to get to know the dog. Meanwhile the dog is already communicating a great deal including whether it is safe to be around though its body language. And the dog already knows whether you are safe for it to be around by your body language.
Once you are able to effectively read the body language of dogs, you will become more skilled at reading the body language of people. People’s body language and other nonverbal communication will tell you all you need to know about whether someone is safe to be around.