Skills Over Kit

Prepping isn’t just about making sure you have stores and supplies etc. It is about having skills too. Think about it like hardware and software.

The “hardware” is all the kit, stores, and bits of equipment included in your prepping. The “software” is the knowledge, skills, and familiarity that you bring to the party so that all the hardware is put to good use.

If you don’t know how, when, and where to use all that precious kit you’ve assembled – or rely on the gear alone to do the job for you – you’re setting yourself up for a massive failure. At the end of the day, skills will always trump kit.

So, let’s take a closer look at what we mean by skills over kit – and focus our particular attention on the first of those.

Skills

We’ve already made the point that unless you know how, when, and where to use some of that kit you’ve been carefully putting by in the event of an emergency or disaster, it’s going to be useless come the day.

Of course, some of your hardware is going to be essential – in our piece on bug out bags on the 9^th of April, we listed some of the supplies likely to keep you going through the initial 72 hours of any emergency. These fall into the main groups of food, water, fire-starting kit, and materials for making a shelter.

Even the use of basic kit such as this relies on you being familiar with it and having practiced in advance – will you know how to use that flint to start a fire, for instance, or how best to put together the materials intended to make your shelter?

Software development

Knowing how to use your survival kit is one thing, but it is not the whole answer to developing your software skills and talent.

The prepper’s software is not just about the technical knowledge of how to use stuff – though that is important – but relies also on your attitudes, approach, and behaviour. It is your philosophy towards prepping if you like.

A list of proficiencies and understandings – software, in other words – that preppers should aim to develop is suggested on the American website Amplified Being on the 23^rd of April. The list includes:

• the purely technical skills you might need to develop to use some of your survival gear and devices;

• a physical fitness and poise that enables you to stay calm, order your thoughts, and act with intelligence and purpose under duress;

• some legal knowledge and understanding about the possession, carrying, and use of weapons – the position in the UK with respect to knives, for instance, is summed up on the official website;

• but your software development as a prepper also needs to include many less tangible and technical skills – which we also outlined in a recent blog about personal safety and spatial awareness;

• those spatial awareness skills will help you develop a keen sense not only of the importance of paying attention to your surroundings but how to pay that close attention;

• those powers of observation and awareness may help you spot threats before you encounter them face to face and will develop your ability to detect potential assaults or acts of violence from others in the crowd;

• informing all of this may be your knowledge not only of what action to take and how to take it but – critically – the timing of just when to take it.

Where to develop your skills

As you’ve probably gathered, a lot of what we have been talking about are questions related to your approach to prepping and the mindset you can develop. They are about drawing on your inner strengths and resources as much as your access to survival tools and equipment.

But that’s not to say there is no place for some degree of more obvious, practical training – such as that provided by the increasingly wide network of survival and bushcraft skills now offered through various courses throughout the UK.

We’ve discussed before some of the skills you might pick up and develop on this type of survival and bushcraft course.

These might include the technical skills themselves but – equally important – the ability to challenge and test yourself, to develop an appreciation of working in collaboration with others, and the kind of life skills you are likely to find universally valuable wherever you happen to be, whatever your surroundings.