Mindfulness
It is important to note that situational awareness — being aware of one's surroundings and identifying potential threats and dangerous situations — is more of a mindset or a soft skill than a hard skill. Because of this, situational awareness is not something reserved for agencies that are highly trained in preparedness and response. Our hope is to foster a desire and the discipline to have a higher level of awareness, enabling us to respond better and faster whenever we are faced with a potential threat.
The primary element in establishing this mindset is first to recognize that threats exist. Ignorance or denial of a threat makes a person's chances of quickly recognizing an emerging threat and avoiding it highly unlikely. Bad things do happen. Apathy, denial, and complacency can be deadly.
A second important element of the proper mindset is understanding the need to take responsibility for one's own security. We all need to look out for ourselves, families, neighbors, and others in our community.
Another important facet of this mindset is learning to trust your "gut" or intuition. Many times a person's subconscious can notice subtle signs of danger that the conscious mind has difficulty quantifying or articulating. You may have felt this before or heard people say, “I had a bad feeling about it or “something just did not feel right” Was there ever a time that you chose to ignore that? How did it end up? Trusting your gut and avoiding a potentially dangerous situation may cause you a bit of inconvenience but ignoring such feelings can lead to serious trouble.
The discipline part of practicing situational awareness refers to the conscious effort required to pay attention to gut feelings and to surrounding events even while you are busy and distracted. At such times obvious hostile activity can go unnoticed, so individuals need to learn to be observant even while doing other things. Keep your mind and your thoughts “in check”. When you are situationally aware and mindful, you will be able to proactively anticipate threats and keep your emotions “in check” in order to manage the impact of the stress on your body enabling you to make better decisions and bounce back (resilience) in stressful situations. This can be compared to preparing for a physical challenge such as mountain climbing, the better you prepare, the easier the climb and the summit.
John Darwin and Alec Melling from Sheffield Hallam University talk about the what and the how in their paper on Situational Awareness and Mindfulness. Once we are aware of what is happening, mindfulness keeps us at the moment enabling us to assess the problem at hand and react appropriately, rather than relying on past experience. Old situations and old information are biases that may not lead to the most desirable outcome. Mindfulness introduces conscious thinking in SA and prevents unconscious or “old habits” from surfacing. Mindfulness opens us up to consider new information when thinking ahead, anticipating what may happen, and making high-quality decisions.
We established that Situational awareness is a mental skill and not a hard skill. Let’s spend a moment to focus on identifying what level is ideal at a given time. The body and mind both require rest, so we have to spend several hours each day at the comatose level while asleep. When we are sitting at home watching a movie or reading a book, it is perfectly fine to operate in the tuned-out mode. However, some people will attempt to maintain the tuned-out mode in decidedly inappropriate environments (e.g., when they are out on the street at night or when they are driving), or they have the mindset that “nothing bad is going to happen to me”, regardless of the situation. The mentality of, "That couldn't happen to me” leads to the mindset that there is no need to watch for it, no need to be alert. This might result in us being tuned out to any potential threats.
The basic level of situational awareness that should be practiced most of the time is relaxed awareness, a state of mind that can be maintained indefinitely without all the stress and fatigue associated with focused awareness or high alert. Relaxed awareness is not tiring, and it allows you to enjoy life while rewarding you with an effective level of personal security.
When you are in an area where there is potential danger (which, in reality, is almost anywhere), you should go through most of the day in a state of relaxed awareness. This way, if you spot something out of the ordinary that could be a threat, you can "dial-up" to a state of focused awareness and take a careful look at that potential threat. If the possible threat proves to be harmless or is simply a false alarm, you can dial back down into relaxed awareness and continue on your way. If, on the other hand, the potential threat becomes a probable threat, seeing it in advance allows you to take action to avoid it. This could mean that you don’t need to elevate to high alert, since you avoided the problem at an early stage.