Training and steps for increasing personal safety
Lifestyle
- Consider cost-benefit analysis when making decisions on what to do and where to go.
- Is the risk of harm less than the potential benefit you may get from engaging a certain behavior or going to a certain place.
- Think about the people you allow in your life:
- Are you hanging out with quality people?
- Do you hang out with low-life criminals?
- Do you hang out with people who do drugs or engage in dangerous actives?
- Avoid crazy, rowdy people who like to cause trouble or get into fights and altercations.
- Where do you hang out?
- Wherever lots of alcohol is served, there is greater chance of violence and crime.
- At most bars, drug use and drug dealing is taking place and violence is more likely to occur.
- Avoid dangerous parts of town.
- Avoid places where violence happens or is likely to happen.
Attitude
- We all get mad and have pet peeves that annoy us.
- Train our attitude and control our tempers.
- Learn how not to react to things that usually annoys us.
- Start small with minor things that annoy you and learn to handle them rationally and calmly.
- Then, move to larger issues that annoy you and learn to handle them, stop reacting in anger to these things.
- Learn to identify what sets you off emotionally and learn to react with reason instead of emotion.
- This helps you to control your anger and temper.
- What do you gain from losing your temper?
- People like you less.
- Also, you may throw a fit with someone who ends up assaulting you, even knifing you!
- You can get seriously hurt because of your bad temper.
- Learn to control your anger and temper, and these attitude changes can help keep you safer by avoiding unnecessary confrontation.
Awareness
- Some mental exercises for training awareness:
- When you enter a room, mentally look around and pick out a primary and secondary escape route.
- Glance around at how people are dressed (don’t stare and don’t lock eyes) and notice how they are dressed and relate that to the weather that day.
- A person wearing a puffy coat or trench coat on a warm day is curious.
- Is the person dressed appropriately, and if not, what might that mean?
- Make notes of ambush points or blind corners wherever you are walking or in rooms you are.
- Avoid these ambush points as you are walking down the street.
- Make notes on possible hiding places in rooms or where you are walking.
- Notice people:
- If they are flushed they may be angry.
- If they are pale, they may be in an adrenal state and ready to fight or attack.
- Pay attention to yourself:
- Reflect on your body and its condition, what are your aches and pains.
- This helps train you to be aware of yourself
- Pay attention to things around you and enjoy the beautiful, nice things and pay attention to the curious things that don’t seem right.
