Here we have seven habits that can help you to become not just better survivalists and preppers, but better humans.
Let’s get to it.
Habit 1. Take charge of your life
You are responsible for your own life and well-being. Take charge of yourself and don’t rely on external circumstances that you don’t control. The government can’t possibly save everyone during a major disaster. Taking charge means learning to think and live for yourself. If you rely on anyone else for your psychological and physical well being you are setting yourself up to be let down.
This doesn’t mean that you need to go 100% self-sufficiency, and dry your own meet, go off the grid, and only use natural materials for your house. No. What this means is that you rely only on yourself to get things done.
Being self-autonomous means that you dot depend on anything or anyone else other than yourself to see you through.
Habit 2. Prioritize
Some things that you need to do are going to be more important for your short and long-term survival goals than others. Learning how to prioritize is one of the most important skills you can learn. Prioritizing will turbo-charge your survivalist your prepping efforts by making your activities more effective.
This is also one of the most difficult things to actually implement. With so many things grabbing our attention its easy to lose sight of what is important.
Knowing what to do, when to do it and when not to, is something that is is a constant practice.
Habit 3. Plan, Practice, and Adapt
You need to create your survival plan in your head before you can ever hope to implement it. Don’t forget to write the plan down. Practice the plan and then adjust and modify it accordingly. The same goes for your survival kits. Your BOB, EDC gear, vehicle kit, and home kit should always be a work in progress. There is always room for improvement.
A good plan is only as good as your ability to follow it. We often can think and write till the cows come home, but when it actually comes to doing, when it comes down to actually putting the pedal to the metal and implementing everything that we have planned, we often falter.
When we implement our survival strategy, being able to adapt to the circumstances, and not get caught in the ideation side of things is important. The best survival advice might be turn out to be totally wrong depending on the circumstances.
Survival knowledge is only so good as its ability to make you able to be flexible with what is happening.
Habit 4. Operate in a State of Relaxed Awareness
Relaxed awareness is a state of mind rather than a skill, much like when you are performing an action without thinking. It is the state of awareness that moves and responds fluidly. Often when you know the movement of something so well, you do not need to mentally tell yourself what you need to do. What can happen then, is that you are more able to respond to what’s happening around you. Although your attention is on what you are doing, you are open to all the other movements, sights, and sounds that are happening around you.
Operating in a state of relaxed awareness when you are out and about will quicken your reaction times. It will also help lessen the chances of you panicking and diving into the worst possible awareness level for surviving an emergency: comatose.
Operating from a relaxed state of awareness is as simple as noticing what you are doing, as well as what else is happening around you.
Habit 5. Sharpen your Skill Set
A finely tuned skill set is a valuable survival asset. Learning new skills, whatever that may be, will help to keep you more able to respond to the conditions around you.
Learning skills that will help you transition from survival to sustainability are even more important in some ways than emergency response. Being able to survive in the wilderness for 3 days is great, but what about the rest of your life? Learning trade skills, how to plant a garden, or skin game are things that will have a broader impact on your life in the long run.
Learning emergency survival skills is incredibly important, as they just might save your life, though learning how to live is just as important as learning how to survive.
Habit 6. Be Prepared
This may seem like an obvious habit, one that we have all likely heard before. The ole’ Boy Scout slogan of always be prepared.
Preparation is more than just having the right gear, it's a mindset that comes when you are able to plan, assess and respond to what's happening in front of you.
Habit 7. Just Do It
It can be pretty easy to overthink, read, and research… everything that we never actually get around to doing the thing that we are studying. Especially when it comes to prepping and survival stuff, if you don’t actually do it, you really then haven’t ‘learned’ anything. Unlike college where you can get by through reading books the night before and then regurgitating it all down on paper the next day when it comes to actual survival stuff, it just doesn’t work that way.
The idea of a thing is not the thing. Thinking about doing something is very different than actually doing it. There is a level of motor neurons that come into play when you begin to actually act something out that allows you to live what know in a way that is different than just thinking what you know.
No amount of knowledge is going to save you. Only doing it can.
