Personal Safety Tips So You Can Feel Safer Now.

Are you feeling unsafe during these unsettling times?

Here, you’ll learn some simple, and effective, personal safety tips to help you be safer during this time of increased safety risks.

Hi! I’m Mike Corwin and for over 10 years, I’ve helped individuals, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies keep safe from violence.

Relying on others to keep you safe can be a huge mistake. They may get there too late, or not at all. Besides there’s no reason to rely on others. YOU can keep yourself safe.

I’ve got a great guide you can use to get started being safer right now. This guide focuses on teaching you how to recognize, and avoid, a safety threat before it’s too late. You can download your free guide by clicking here.

What is Personal Safety

Personal safety has four distinct components. Situational awareness, de-escalation, changing the dynamics of an attack, and self-defense.

By implementing a few elements from each of the four, you’ll quickly improve your safety.

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is the ability to read and interpret the environment around you including the people within it. It allows you to identify safety threats BEFORE you encounter them, so that you can quickly develop a plan, or exit strategy, in order to avoid them.

When it comes to your safety there is no skill more important for you to master than situational awareness. It’s the only skill that allows you to completely avoid engaging with a potential threat.

How to Implement Situational Awareness Into Your Daily Life

Here’s how to quickly implement it into your daily life.

At each location that you go to during your day, describe to yourself, everything that you see or hear. People, buildings, shrubbery, cars, entrances, exits, and lighting. All of these physical elements relate to your safety. They can serve as hiding places, as obstructions, and as a means for someone who’s a safety threat to approach you.

To test how well you are observing these things, take out your phone or camera, and while videoing the area around you, describe what you see or hear on camera, and then compare what you described to what is depicted on the video.

Once you’ve done that a few times, start describing the different ways you can exit from the area. Include in your description the route you’d take, about how many steps it will take, and any possible obstructions that can prevent you from taking that route. This is how you quickly learn to develop an exit strategy.

Make sure to describe multiple exit routes, and any obstacles that can prevent you from following that path to safety. Now, identify which is your primary route, and which are your back ups.

Once you’ve automated this process it’s critical to listen to your instincts. You are genetically programmed to flight or fight. If your instincts are signaling fear. Listen. And immediately look for your way out. Respect your instinct. It can save you.

Always focus on where potential threats can come from, and where you need to go to get away from that threat.

De-Escalation

De-escalation is key to your safety. Being able to take a tense situation, and calm it before it spirals into violence, is a huge safety win.

Any time you encounter a threat, make sure that you breathe normally. It can be hard to focus on your breathing under stress.

But, holding your breath during a stressful encounter, decreases the oxygen to your brain, and makes it harder for you to think, and react verbally or physically.

You’ve got to quickly determine if de-escalation is possible. That’s best done by reading his body language. If he closes distance on you, coils his body by tensing it, focuses his eye contact on you, or suddenly stops talking, he may be in attack mode, so de-escalation won’t work.

De-escalation works by redirecting a potential attacker’s thoughts away from harming you. You do that through a combination of active listening, and by forcing him to speak more. The more someone talks, the less they are able to engage in a physical action including violence.

Active listening is key to de-escalation. It’s essentially, paraphrasing back what he says, while identifying the driving emotion behind what he says such as anger, or fear. For example, “I see that your angry about ___
and then paraphrase back what he said.

Doing so shows him you’re hearing him- most people want to be heard. And it makes him listen to what you are saying. If he has to listen to you he’s not attacking you. The more you get him talking, the more he’ll calm down.

A couple of quick points. Never try to de-escalate from a sitting position. It’s too difficult to defend yourself if you have to do so. When you stand up, bring your hands up, palms facing towards him, finger tips just below eye height. It’s like signaling to him to calm down.

I call this the safe stance, and it’s the best way to stand for de-escalation, and for self-defense.

Changing the Dynamics of an Attack

Attackers have a plan. Even if they formulate it just a second or two before attacking. And that plan typically involves launching the attack when they think you can’t defend against it.

As a result, most attacks are over in 7 seconds. And that’s it for you.

So your safety depends on you taking away the attacker’s initial advantage that comes from his sudden attack. And to do it as quickly as possible. Doing so forces him to recalibrate and when he recalibrates, you create opportunity. Either to exit quickly, or to defend yourself.

I call this changing the dynamics of an attack. You can do so by keeping his initial attack from landing and putting you on the ground. Or by creating obstacles that he has to navigate in order to advance on you. The goal is force him to respond to your actions so he has to come up with a plan b.

Changing the dynamics of an attack is part self-defense, like blocking a punch, and counter striking even if it misses. We call that a distraction technique because he still has to respond to it. And changing the dynamics of an attack can also include using the environment around you to disrupt his plan. Like using a table or a car as a barrier.

As you force him to respond to your actions you momentarily put him on the defensive and interrupt his plan of attack. In doing so you’ve given yourself a better chance to keep safer than if you didn’t change the dynamics.

Self-Defense

Once you’ve taken away his advantage, you still may have to defend yourself. And when it comes to self-defense, the more basic and simple the better.

Self-defense isn’t fighting. It’s creating an opportunity to stop the attack long enough to exit safely. So banish any ideas that you’ll need to fight the attacker.

To protect yourself properly, and to be able to strike or grab, you need to be in the safe stance.

With an unarmed attacker your hands need to be up protecting your head. Most likely you’ll be dealing with a right hand punch. From the safe stance you can steer that punch out of harms way before it strikes you, and be in close enough to counter strike.

If you’re dealing with an armed attacker, you still need to be in the safe stance, but your hands need to match the weapon height, which means for them to be at the same height as the weapon.

Your goal if facing a weapon is to gain control of it so it can’t be used against you repeatedly.

With a knife that means controlling the hand/wrist juncture. With a firearm, that means controlling the barrel of the gun. With an impact weapon it means controlling his arm which controls the weapon.

To do this, you have to be in close. Very close. Yeah, that’s scary, but it’s your only chance.

So while it’s counterintuitive get in close and stay in close. Don’t back up when the attack starts. Sooner or later you’re going to encounter an obstacle, which is acts like a second attacker limiting your movement.

Staying in close jams your attacker taking away his power. Especially on a punch, or if he’s swinging a weapon like a baseball bat or tire iron.

Here’s the other thing to know about self-defense. Don’t stop until you can exit safely. You have to keep striking, or holding until that opportunity arises. And then just go.

If you liked what you’ve learned here, download my FREE safety guide. It’s chock full of tips you can start implementing right now. Just click here to download.