Creating personal safety awareness is more than being conscious that you could be assaulted. It’s more than acknowledging you need to take actions to secure yourself. It’s NOT investing all your time looking out for prospective threats. Creating personal safety awareness knowledge is discovering when to improve your understanding about your environment. It’s understanding when to be prepared to defend yourself (whether that be using a defense spray, tazer or self defense fighting moves) and when to actually defend yourself.
The key to personal safety awareness is focus. As we go about our daily lives we tend to focus on whatever is most important to us at the moment. Creating personal safety awareness is nothing more than discovering when to pay attention to our well being For example, when you’ve just left the movie theater with a date, your focus is likely on the movie plot you watched or anticipating the rest of the day. This is the way we normally think and act. The issue is that we live in a progressively more dangerous environment, which makes us much more susceptible to attack by the various threats on the street.
Developing personal safety awareness is nothing more than learning to pay attention and focus on safety at the times when we are vulnerable. Usually it’s when we’re jogging alone, strolling alone, or doing anything that isolates us from others. Train yourself to think consciously about your individual security when your alone and get used to concentrating on what and who is around you or prospective threats to your safety.
A common situation is the walk from the retail store to the car in the parking lot. Don’t allow yourself to focus on your packages or a phone conversation or fumbling for your keys. Instead, concentrate on the people around you as you leave the store. Is anyone behind you? Turn and look. Is someone following behind you? Is anyone congregating near your car? These circumstances present potential dangers that you must be conscious of.
Most of us are conditioned to keep to ourselves, to “mind our own business”. We shy away from eye contact because it’s not polite to stare. Unfortunately, this is exactly what you have to do. Condition yourself to look at your surroundings and the individuals around you. Make eye contact. What are they wearing? Which way are they walking? How many people are in that group? Are you in danger? Are you alone? Are you a likely target? Is there anyone behind you?
Most of the time personal assaults or attacks happen as a complete surprise to the victim. In some cases, a surprise attack is inevitable. But in way too many circumstances victims are surprised because they’re not aware of their environment. The victim usually says something like, “they came from nowhere.” No they didn’t! The attackers came from somewhere the victim just did not see where. Empower yourself to develop your personal safety awareness!