Situational Awareness Building Exercises

Whether being ready to protect yourself or your loved ones every day, or volunteering on your church security team, developing keen situational awareness should be priority #1. Think of being situationally aware not as being paranoid, but as being aware-anoid!

[ Read SemperVerus articles on the topic of SITUATIONAL AWARENESS ]

In fact, “THE Primary Factor in self-protection/self-defense is situational awareness,” says Mark Hatmaker in his article, Warrior Awareness Drills.

[ Read the SemperVerus article, A Simple Chart for Situational Awareness ]

One way to sharpen your situational awareness into a consistent ironclad habit is to consciously and intentionally routinize it everywhere you go, wherever you are, all the time; turn it into a moment-by-moment personal sport.

[ Read the SemperVerus article, Live Life Left of Bang ]

Hatmaker says, “A useful practice to return awareness/alertness to the fore is to gamify your awareness, that is, to use a series of specific awareness/alertness drills on a revolving basis that allow you to keep your mind a bit above the day-to-day routine while also making a bit of a game out of what may save your life.”

[ Read the SemperVerus article, Self-Defense and Church Security: Make Scanning Your Priority ]

In his article, he offers three drills to improve your “eyesight:”

Drill 1

    Whether in an urban or a natural setting, live as if you are a hunted man, a targeted woman, a person on someone’s Kill List.

  • Know who or what is behind you.
  • Look into the faces of the people around you; are they the one who hunts you?
  • Look at the hands of all around you—is the method of your demise in any hand?
  • Keep to the edges of trails or sidewalks; only confident or foolhardy animals cross open ground.
  • Treat all security cameras as tools to locate you. Avert your face when passing by or beneath them.
  • Treat all birds as possible drones.
  • In short, live with eyes wide open, mind alert. Live as if you are being stalked.
  • At the end of the exercise ask yourself what you learned from this bit of role play.

[ Read the SemperVerus article, Situational Awareness: What Do You See? ]

Drill 2

    Today, find all the reflective surfaces that you can. See what those reflections hold.

  • Find the trees in the windows of your home.
  • See the glint of the semi-truck in the window of a passing car.
  • See the rippled reflection of the sky or yourself in a puddle of water.
  • See the surroundings of the restaurant in the beverage glass before you.
  • See the reflections of the road in the heat haze on the highway in front of you.
  • See the distorted you in the corneas of the person you are speaking to.
  • The only reflection to pay no attention to—that of any mirror.
  • Find any and all reflections—and mark how many surfaces provide mirror images.

[ Read the SemperVerus article, Situational Awareness: What Are You NOT Seeing? ]

Drill 3

    Take 3/Find 5: Select a 15-minute period in your day to execute this drill.

  • Take three steps, stop and list [verbally if possible] 5 distinct things in your environment that you can physically sense. These can be things you see, sounds you hear, scents, tastes on the wind, a breeze on the skin.
  • Take three more steps, stop and repeat cataloging 5 more things. Do not repeat anything in any of your prior inventory.
  • Continue until the ¼ hour is completed with no repetition of what you noticed.

Read Hatmaker’s full article here.

[ Get the SemperVerus booklet, The Case for Biblical Self-Defense ]

Invite SemperVerus® to present its 5 life-changing success-generating components—prepare, aware, be, know, do—to your organization to inspire and motivate your members.

Join the SemperVerus Brotherhood™!