I came across this video, liked it and thought I would share it.. Personally this is something try to train every time I am out, just out of habit ie. observation and retaining details of people and places, walking wide on corners, checking surroundings and covering pin when using ATM's ect. Almost a game now TBH. What are peoples thoughts on the video and how do you personally try to hone your own situational awareness,? In my time training Krav Maga they did do a variety of drills to promote situational awareness some of which were actually pretty good but it is something we should be doing regardless on our own on a daily basis.
The video covers a lot of what I self taught to deal with frequent conflict/incidents in my teens, and early 20s. I haven't had anything like this taught in marital arts classes, but discussions with fellow students outside of class and in our personal training we would agree on these concepts. It's a good training tool that I have found to help me pick up on events quickly. My Dad explained similar to me in advanced motor cycle observing; you practice taking in every bit of information actively, over time it becomes second nature and whilst that occurs you are also able to make more detailed observations and predictions, similar to the fighter pilot in the video. I expect that the observations can be refined in some ways, i.e. if you are looking for potential threats you take in information on such body language and discount passive behaviour, whereas a robber looking for a victim would use the same basis of skill to primarily observe passive behaviour of un observant people and subcobsciously discount others. I expect there is other ways to refine it, if someone is looking to sell something, or maybe just determine someone to get directions. I expect you can cover multiple agendas, but my initial thought is if your focus is on one then you may discount the others, which is probably something else to take into account.
Only ever seen this talked and explained about within Krav, due to the SD angle they promote, One thing I note that I do is I try to reverse engineer a situation if one arises so see where I went wrong and what I missed and how I could of avoided/de-escalated the situation, so it turns into a training tool and helps identify and avoid any future scenarios. Your analogy of the Motorcycle awareness is a good one as you are taking in many factors at the same time i.e. other traffic, speed and distance, pedestrians ect. I think awareness skills in an SD context are the same i.e. posture, behaviour, Environment i.e. busy and well lit/Dark & isolated, potential escape/avoid routes and like driving the more you train to observe these, the easier it gets.
The Japanese koryu arts refer to this as zanshin, and push it as a normal state to be achieved. The general idea (each art is a little bit different in any given idea) is that a person should be constantly cognizant of everything around them as a matter of course, without focusing on any single thing. To focus on a single thing is to lose most of your sense of everything else. There are a number of exercises that I was taught to be able to expand your awareness of your surroundings, but a good many of them just come as part of the training. Peter Boylan wrote an interesting article on zanshin from a classical Japanese martial artist's perspective a while back ... Awareness, Zanshin, or just plain Paying Attention
Removing fake friends from my life. Most attacks actually come from people in your social circle. I had friends talk trash behind my back so i had to cut them out of my life. Fake friends are more dangerous than real enemies.
It sounds like you had a bitter experience, which doesn't constitute towards most attacks except in your own life. In my lifetime I have had more dangerous attacks to myself and friends from strangers than from friends, or close people who dislike me. Unless you count the large number of friends who line up to strangle me several times a week, I'd consider that might miss weigh the statistics.
If this is true then there's probably something wrong with you or you are spectacularly bad at picking people to associate with.
Although a caveat to that is that assaults on women are often committed by people they know or have interacted with previously.
Spoken like a true child of the suburbs, where the daily struggle involves people being mean to you rather than simply trying to survive. Not that this is a bad thing, far from it. However, it does mean that you have no frame of reference when you discuss self defense or situational awareness. The first part of gaining wisdom is trying to understand just how much you don't actually know.
Focus one thing and see only it, focus on nothing and see all things not only applies to situational awareness but also actual combat. There are things that are static and there are things that are in motion. A static target is easy to connect with when focusing only on it but becomes more difficult to connect with once it becomes in motion. When trying to connect with a target in motion when focusing on only it, the mind can sometimes interpret it as a static target and try to connect with it and miss because the target has moved on to another place because, well, its in motion. When seeing something but not looking directly at it, the mind has a natural way of timing a target in motion and connecting with it. I don't know why, for the sake of a better word, this phenomenon happens, because I can't explain how the mind has the ability to do this, but it does.
