Self-Awareness And Resilience Training

Did you see it coming? You don’t have to predict every twist and turn in detail. But stay self-aware and resilient. That way, you’ll develop the kind of open mind that’s more likely to let you see what’s coming. And – as with everything – but better prepared you are, the better you’re likely to cope with whatever fate, fortune, nature, or manmade emergency throws at you.

Self-awareness

Our Beginners Guide to Self-Awareness explained how that ability to anticipate what is likely to happen – and you only need to predict a broad range of possible outcomes – will help you face the world and strengthen your defences against the worst it can deliver.

That critical connection between self-awareness and your ability to protect yourself is something we looked at in more detail in our Beginners Guide To Self-Protection.

Allied to those qualities of self-awareness, there is also something that we’ll call resilience. Resilience is related to a finely tuned self-awareness and the ability to defend yourself in any situation. Resilience can be summed up as your ability to bounce back from any apparently adverse situation and to come out fighting fit once again.

Resilience

So, what is it likely to take to train yourself to be able to bounce back from any challenge or adversity? There’s a fair bit of research that’s already gone into the answer – and the findings can be summed up in a concept called the “Five Pillars of Resilience. These break down the essential qualities you’ll be looking for, as follows:

1. Self-awareness

• there you go, we’ve already talked about the importance of that awareness that tells you just what’s going on around you – or more to the point perhaps, what might be about to happen;

• it’s not just an awareness of situations and potential situations, of course, but about yourself – it’s self-awareness;

• that means knowing as much as possible about yourself – your motivations, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses, together with a knowledge of how others around you are likely to see and know you;

• further reading: Working On Your Situational Awareness

2. Self-care

• self-care is different from self-awareness because it is likely to require positive, physical action – or a set of actions – on your part;

• it’s more or less just as it says, namely the ability to take care of yourself in any situation, however hard-pressed you might be – requiring a combination of knowledge about what is healthy, strengthening, and good for you and the determination to put those things into action;

3. Mindfulness

• mindfulness might have gained itself a bit of a bad press recently – in the same way as other fads and fashions with fancy names also seem to gather bad press;

• at its simplest, mindfulness is just being conscious or aware of something – a situation, a potential development, other people;

• to be truly and fully conscious of something, though, might take a bit of concentration and practice – and that’s where this third pillar of resilience comes in – developing your mindfulness is training your concentration on the situations, people, and events that matter most;

• mindfulness, you could say, is about always being able to see the wood for the trees – because you’ve trained your mind to concentrate on whatever’s most important;

• further reading: Guide To Staying Safe In Hotels

4. Purpose

• this is about understanding what motivates you;

• as a prepper, why are you looking to strive and thrive in any situation rather than just surrender to your fate, let’s say;

• your motivation comes from your inner sense of purpose – it might be a commitment or loyalty to your family or friends, for instance, it might be to a local or community organisation, it might even be to a religious faith – but it’s that sense of purpose that lets you know you are a part of something bigger than yourself;

5. Relationships

• the final pillar of reliance is one that supports each of the other four – the importance of your relationships with other people;

• it’s a well-worn cliché to say that no man is an island but when you’re up against it and facing the challenges of some natural or manmade disaster, your positive relationships with others around you could make or break your chances of surviving and thriving.

Understanding how these five pillars interact and interconnect with one another will help you see the strength of the relationship between your own self-awareness and your resilience – or ability not just to face up to the events that any emergency might throw at you but to positively bounce back, take them in your stride, and move on to the next challenge.

We have seen how self-awareness and resilience are interconnected – if you want a fancy term for that, you could say that they are two elements that make up a holistic approach to prepping. The two are connected – and together they make something greater than each one separately.

Self-awareness and resilience training

Although it may be simple human nature to have a degree of both self-awareness and resilience, you cannot rely on any such instinctive notions if you want to prepare properly for any eventuality.

There are skills associated with both. And like any other skill, you’ll get better only with practice. So be prepared to put some effort into training yourself to become more self-aware and to appreciate the strength that greater resilience will bring you.

By tackling that training in a more or less continuous fashion, you’ll not only be laying firmer foundations for your experience as a prepper but will also be able to manage better the stresses and strains of normal, everyday life. Through self-awareness and resilience training, you’ll get to figure out far more clearly just what it is you are prepping for – and why.

Summary

If these few words have carried one message above all others it is that certain mental skills, capacities, and strengths are just as valuable to the serious prepper as your physical preparedness – and that strength and purpose of mind are far more important than any amount of expensive, specialist survival gear or equipment.

Good prepping is made up of many elements, all of which are interconnected and interrelated in one way or another. Underlying them all are these particular twins – self-awareness and resilience – that together give you the right frame of mind in which to approach your prepping.

Practised together, self-awareness and resilience will give you the mental stamina you hadn’t realised you might need when you are truly up against the challenges of some emergency or disaster.

Further reading:

Road Rage, Car Jacking And Situational Awareness In Your Car