Situational awareness literally means to be constantly aware of your situation. Now in terms of security, it means to be constantly aware of your security situation and identifying potential threats and dangerous scenarios. This sounds a bit stressing to be aware of risks and danger all the time, specially if you live in a high risk level neighborhood or city.

So we want to focus on how to achieve this awareness in a relaxed way.

Situational awareness is more a state of mind than a learned skill. This is important not only for security agents and corporations, but also and most important for individuals to learn how to identify criminal behavior and other dangerous threats around them so they can react accurately and defend themselves and others.

First step to acquire this state of mind is to accept that threats and danger exist.

Second step is to accept that each individual is responsible for its own security, so trusting ones intuition is crucial. In most cases, people ignore their intuition and get injured or involved in a risky situation. Individuals need to be observant while occupied with other things. Nobody will care more for your safety than yourself.

Government and authorities can’t protect every citizen all the time.

People have 5 levels of awareness:

Turned out, is when you are being distracted by several factors like noise, thoughts, music, cell phone texts, conversations, etc. and aren’t 100% aware of what you are doing. Like when driving and you are so distracted you dont even know how you got there.

Relaxed awareness is when you are a little aware of dangerous situations but at the same time you manage to have a conversation or work on your computer, or even drive a car and listen to music, but being aware of risky curves or bumps.

Now focused awareness is the opposite of the last one. In this state you have to be 100% aware of what you are doing or else you can literally die. Like when driving at night and there is a very dangerous thunder storm, you can’t be distracted for even a second as your life depends on your full awareness. This situation is very stressful and tiring because it demands prolonged and total concentration.

High alerts or adrenaline rush is a state of mind you live when you face a near death experience and your life depends on your immediate reaction. In fact, that adrenaline rush you get when in this situation maybe the one who makes you react in such a way that you safe yourself. You can be riding your bike down a real steep path and your going very fast. Suddenly your tire explodes and you feel that high alert were you have to control the bike until you find a way to jump off safely.

Last but not least is comatose awareness. As the Word implies, individuals are so petrified by the dangerous situation they are in that they get petrified and can’t react to safe themselves. This is what most people know as total panic and its the most dangerous state of mind in situational awareness. People who reach this state of mind freeze and simply stop.

¿After explaining each level, the question that pops out is which is the right level of situational awareness? Its very difficult to change mental states quiclkly and so why EP Agents and military personnel receive a lot of training on situational wareness. Also, a constant state of stress and adrenaline is not healthy for the mind and so it hampers security. With this in mind, relaxed awareness is the ideal set of mind that should be practiced by all individuals as it keeps body and mind helathy and provides an afficent leve lof personal security.

3 steps for risk management delivery

While keeping a relaxed awareness, people can encounter a dangerous situation or threat and escalate to a focused awareness and manage or control the situation appropriately and also managing to protect themselves and others around, avoiding a problem at its early stage.

It is only obvious that when individuals find themselves in not planned high risk level situation like trapped in an explosion, terrorist attack or natural disaster for instance, their situational awareness does have to jump from the releaxed level to focused or high alert levels to be able to react in a positive way and safe themselves.

When traveling to remote countries, always plan for the worst.