What's Next?
The impact of Situational Awareness in our lives depends on our ability to make It an instrumental part of our thought process. When we intentionally make it a habitual part of how we view situations as they unfold we may gain the ability to become more proactive rather than reactive. Increasing awareness of any type can lead to opportunities that might have been overlooked. It has been said, what we are not aware of controls us, what we become aware of might allow a greater degree of control.
- There is a school of thought that all challenges bring opportunities. Granted, we may face challenges that might be beyond our control with little in the way of opportunity. However, we postulate that situational awareness is often the gateway to opportunity.
Our recommendations for you:
- Create your own exercises to practice the concepts learned in this introductory training into situational awareness using various scenarios (personal, family or community)
- Develop a line of questions you feel you need to know.
- Determine your sources of accurate, reliable, and timely information.
- Determine the frequency of updating your situational awareness.
- Determine who needs to be involved in developing and implementing your strategic plan.
- Determine reliable sources of information.
- Determine how your plan will be communicated and implemented if normal communication modes are not available.
- Determine the intervals to refresh/update your situational awareness.
Note: For personal crisis (non-emergency or life-threatening) you need to list the known facts and give thought to what you need to know, but don’t
As a suggested exercise, use the current COVID-19 situation and consider:
- Who are you relying on for information and guidance?
- Where are you getting your information from?
- How reliable and up to date are your sources?
- What steps can you or are you taking to validate your sources?
- What precautionary measures will you take as a result of an individual or family response?
- What precautionary measures will you take as the nation reopens?
- Are you confident that you have all the information you require to make the best decisions for you and your family?
- What else do you want to know that you don’t know?
- Are you aware of all the areas you need situational awareness? Physically, Mentally, Emotionally, Spiritually, Financially, Relationally, etc.
Always ask, “What am I missing? Or What else?
In order to increase situational awareness, you must choose to act on accurate and timely information.
It does no good to know what is going on around you if you are not willing or able to take appropriate action.
Mindfulness, Empathetic Listening, and much more are included in-depth in our Emotional Intelligence can help to increase your ability to increase situational awareness, because our decisions, analysis, and actions/responses have a greater influence than we are aware.