Your prepper mentality will do more to keep you safe than all the gear, food, and weapons in the world. This episode features former CIA Clandestine Services Case Officer, Doug Patteson, of IngloriousAmateurs.com. Doug brings a wealth of knowledge and experience into play as he helps you improve your everyday prepper mentality to become more safe, secure, and prepared.

Focus on the Prepper Mentality Basics

The prepper mentality basics apply whether you’re an expert with tons of experience, or a new person just figuring out preparedness. Experts, such as professional athletes, etc., regularly work on the basics to improve their high-level efforts. Improving yourself requires focus, dedication, and realism. It just doesn’t happen on its own.

People must first determine what risks they are facing by doing a personal risk, threat, and vulnerability assessment. That can be as simple as asking yourself what you are doing, what are you protecting, what are you protecting it with and what are you protecting it from.

Target-Proofing

You can’t make yourself target-proof. Target-proofing is making yourself invulnerable, which isn’t 100% possible. What you can do is make yourself a less desirable target. This is achieved by making yourself a harder, more difficult target.

Criminals are, by their nature, lazy. Rather than work and do the usual grind, they choose to prey upon others. When preying on others, they want to get the easiest bang for their buck. Therefore, if by your actions, you present a more difficult target they are likely to avoid you and opt for an easier mark.

Situational Awareness Is Essential to Your Prepper Mentality

To make yourself a more difficult target, you can focus on your situational awareness. This starts with your prepper mentality and its focus on awareness. You should assess what possible threats are within your immediate environment.

Start by asking yourself how you could handle each of those threats. Determine the areas in which you’re less secure and more secure. Think about what you can do to strengthen yourself and your situation.

Ask Others for Their Opinions

When working to determine your vulnerabilities, engage others. Ask your friends, your spouse, or join social networking groups and find out what others think. Asking for others to weigh in helps develop your plan into a better course of action. Ask them what makes you seem like a good target for a criminal and do what you can to minimize that. Don't forget to find out what you're doing right, too!

It’s necessary to be deliberate in how you face the day when working to maximize your prepper mentality. You should make a conscious effort to approach each day with a fresh mindset. Going about your day on autopilot and not paying attention is a recipe for trouble.

Take Deliberate Action to Increase Your Prepper Mentality

Taking deliberate action in your daily life consists of a few steps.

The first step is recognizing that we live in a hostile world.

Secondly, you need to understand that all of us have the potential to be the target of a predator.

Third, affirm to yourself that you don’t want to be a target, so you have to recognize steps one and two, and approach your day differently as a result.

Finally, evaluate how you want to approach the day differently, so you reduce the likelihood of a threat affecting you.

Take these steps when entering new settings and situations.

Get Over the Fear of Offending People

One of the most significant mindset challenges that impact your safety is overcoming the fear of offending others. If something inside of you is telling you that you’re in a lousy situation, listen to it. Your intuition, instinct, etc., is usually right. However, many people are afraid that if they listen to their intuition and act accordingly, they’ll offend someone.