Do you know dog facts 101 for preppers who want to include dogs in their prepping plan? Have you ever thought about all of the preparedness stuff that you buy, store away for an emergency, then hardly ever touch again? If you’re like most of us, we have shelves, closets, garages, or even more stuffed…

Originally published 7/28/2018. Updated 10/11/21.

I want to start this post, How Do Phone Scams Work? Avoid Becoming a Victim, off with a little trivia.

So, here's your question. What costs 1 out of every 3 American adults an average of $502 each, totaling $29.8 billion per year?

The answer is phone scams.

How Do Phone Scams Work? Well Enough to Bilk $29.8 Billion Out of People!

Yep, phone scams cost the United States over $29.8 billion every year. Worldwide, the amount of money lost on phone scams is just crazy. Now, what is worse is that phone scams are on the rise, and phone scammers are attempting to become more sophisticated.

So, in this podcast, which you can listen to above, I’m going to play you the actual phone scam message that was left for me twice in the past few weeks. That will help you educate others on how to spot these scams and avoid becoming a victim.

Now, as I said, I’ve been targeted at least twice in the past several weeks by phone scams. Usually, if you have good situational awareness going on and are alert, you’ll be able to spot a phone scam when the scumbag scammers target you. But it helps when you understand - how do phone scams work?

 

Your Phone Rings - Mr. Phone Fraud is Calling

You look down and wonder, “What’s the unknown number that’s calling me?” Hmmm, you don’t know, but don’t want to miss an urgent call, so you answer. That’s the call I received earlier this week. The fact is phone scams are increasing. Not only are phone scams on the rise, but they’re becoming such a problem tha

t the law enforcement community now issues warnings about them regularly.

So, what’s the answer? No matter how cool it would be, we can’t give up our phones and start communicating telepathically with one another. Maybe we can start using carrier pigeons, or with the new technology, carrier drones?

Then again, maybe it’s just easier to adjust our mindset and learn how to defend ourselves against the criminals who prey on the good nature of others.

The #1 Thing to Do When a Scammer Calls

Relax.

The first thing you need to do is relax. Criminals, in this case, the phone scammers, bank on the fact that nervous people tend not to be as cautious as relaxed people. One of the first things to remember when you're considering "how do phone scams work?" is that they're going to try to make you nervous and add a sense of urgency to their scam.

So, if someone calls you with what at first sounds to be bad news, relax and avoid getting upset and sucked into the scam. Think about it like this: if a stranger called you and politely asked for $500, what are the chances you’d give it to them? That’s why the phone scammers try to make the call sound urgent or an emergency.

An excellent way to shift your mindset to help you relax when answering the phone is to accept that any incoming call could be someone committing phone fraud. With that, the likelihood of a call

 being a scam goes up exponentially if the person on the other end asks you for personally identifiable information, also known as PII.

How Do Phone Scams Work? They Want Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Often, when asking for your PII, phone scammers will add in that sense of urgency to make you nervous with the hope you’ll give up your information. Also, the person committing phone fraud may ask you to confirm some information that they know, as in when a company representative will ask you to provide the last four of your social security number for security reasons. It’s always good to remember that it’s easy to be manipulated, so you have to pay attention and maintain your situational awareness.

How do phone scams work if you mistakenly give your PII to the scammer? They can use it for things like opening bank accounts, applying for loans and credit cards, renting property, purchasing cars, etc.,

Have you ever looked at prepping tips through the eye of Sun Tzu and The Art of War? The wisdom of that book can apply to many different scenarios, including prepping. This post will discuss prepping tips that are a repeating theme in Sun Tzu's, The Art of War.

If you’ve been prepping for more than two minutes, you probably know that there are a lot of resources, especially books, available to help with our readiness and preparedness. Let me ask you, though, when it comes to books and preparedness, what do you think is the best guide out there?

Well, while it’s open for debate, I believe one of the best books to help with the prepping mindset is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Why The Art of War Has the Best Prepping Tips

Now, if you haven’t heard of Sun Tzu and The Art of War, you have some reading to do. That’s because The Art of War is one of, if not the, oldest, surviving manuscripts on military strategy. Not only is it one of the oldest, but it is arguably the most influential book on warfare ever written. It is so useful that The Art of War is no longer just a book on war strategy but is also sold as a self-help book, an aid to prepping tips, used in business by corporate leaders, and is required reading across a variety of topics and courses.

The Art of War Prepping Tips Apply Across the Board

These lessons and others like them that are found in the Art of War not only apply to our prepping when things go wrong, but they also lay out an excellent roadmap for how we can approach difficult situations and our daily lives in general.

#1) Situational Awareness

“If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.” ~Sun Tzu

Prepare in advance

Train and do your research about whatever you're dealing with ahead of time. Remember, train to a standard, not to time or other artificial definition of success. When you do, you'll get to where you want to be much faster than if you hadn't.

Know and understand you and your enemy’s capabilities and limitations. When you know and understand yourself and the opposition, you'll be better prepared to overcome any obstacles.

Be honest when evaluating yourself and others. Honesty is the only real way to know if you're capable of something or not. Remember, you don't need to impress people. Just be excellent at what you do, honest and humble, and you'll be all set to go.

Stay Observant

As Westerners, we tend to be easily distracted and not pay attention as well as we should. Just think about distracted drivers, people on the phone walking into poles, and worse. We need to focus and pay attention.

While focusing is good, hyper-focus can be wrong. Don’t become hyper-focused. Hyper-focused can distract you from seeing the bigger picture or noticing small things that matter.

Utilize all of your senses, including your subconscious. We all know to use our sense of sight, hearing, and others, but many of us forget to use our instincts and minds-eye to help protect us. Instinct is perhaps the most essential and useful skill for us to master.

Listen to Your Instincts.

If something looks, feels, or seems wrong, it probably is. Avoid letting personal and cultural bias inhibit your instincts. Instinct doesn't know the culture and political correctness. So, don't let yourself become weighed down when responding to warnings from your instincts.

Talk your feelings or thoughts through with others. When you do, you'll help the feeling sink in that your instincts are probably right.

2) Be the Gray Man

“Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.” ~Sun Tzu

Don’t stand out

Mentally commit NOT to stand out. If a person wants to stand out, they will.

This article is on how to coach others to be a prepper. If you listened to last week’s episode #57, “How to Convince Someone to Prepare,” you’ll know that I touched on a couple of things to do when working on getting a friend or relative into being prepared. One of those “to-dos” is coaching others on how to be a prepper.

So, let me ask all of you, have you ever been coached or studied how to coach someone? I don’t mean sports coaching. I mean coaching people to improve their lives.

If you have, then you already know how powerful and successful coaching can be. And when it comes to preparedness, a good coaching strategy combined with a useful technique can make a difference in helping people overcome the preparedness roadblocks that face us all.

Coaching Is a Great Way to Help Others Learn How to Be a Prepper

Now, when it comes to coaching, I do know a thing or two. First, I know how incredibly effective coaching can be because I have been coached on numerous occasions. Shoot, I’m in a coaching program right now that is seriously blowing my mind. The second reason I know coaching is excellent is that I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to coach many people myself.

Now, why is coaching so awesome? Coaching is excellent because, when done right, it can be one of the most effective methods of helping someone to accomplish something they would have otherwise struggled with or failed at entirely.

The part of this that gets awesome is as you master the steps to convince someone to prepare, and as you combine those steps with a competent coaching strategy, you set yourself and those you’re coaching up for success. You're not just convincing them to prepare. You're helping them to learn how to be a prepper.

I mean, seriously, when it comes to preparedness, not getting your family and friends on board with your prepping is one of the most common and frustrating problems that many of us as preppers face. Now, wouldn’t it be great if you get the mental tools and techniques to get your loved ones on board with preparedness? Just think how much easier and more enjoyable your preparations will be.

Coaching versus Teaching

Coaching people on how to be a prepper is a handy way to help them get on board with preparedness, develop their skills and abilities, and, here’s an important one, enhance their performance. Yes, coaching and teaching may seem the same, but there are significant differences. One fundamental difference is that as a teacher, the focus is on you, your knowledge, experience, and style of presenting the information. On the other hand, a coach focuses on the student.

I want to go over the differences between coaching and teaching because I’m going to help you learn some strategies to incorporate coaching into your preparedness mindset. Then, as you become better at coaching, you’ll be able to use your new coaching skills to help square away other preppers and hopefully soon-to-be preppers. The great thing about this is that your coaching skills will take you so much farther than just convincing people to prepare, which is essential. Instead, not only will you be able to convince other people to prepare, but when they run into challenges as they prepare, you’ll be able to help walk them through those challenges as well.

Teaching Is Instructor-Focused.

Teaching is very impersonal, while coaching is very personal. This level of involvement is why, oftentimes, it costs much more to hire a coach than it does to hire a teacher.

An example of teaching is when you sign-up for a usually lower-priced online course. The course is short, by the numbers, with relatively no interaction between yourself, other people in the course, and the instructor. Basically, you pay for the course, and shortly after, you get access to the training. The training often consists of several pre-recorded videos, self-paced PowerPoint presentations,

This episode is on how to coach emergency preparedness. If you listened to last week’s episode #57, “How to Convince Someone to Prepare” you’ll know that I touched on a couple of things to do when working to get a friend or relative into being prepared. One of those “to-dos” is coaching. So, let me…

How many of you know people who are totally opposed to preparedness? Are you frustrated with trying to convince them to be prepared for emergencies? Do you know people, maybe family and friends, the minute you speak about preparedness, shut you down and don’t want to hear about it? If you’re like most preppers, you have your hand up, nodding that you’ve run into that exact or a very similar situation.

Lots of Preppers Want to Know How to Convince Others to Be Prepared for Emergencies

With that… oh wait, I’m sorry, go ahead and put your hands down. Now, with that, I want to give you some tools that should give you some techniques and strategies to help you get your non-preparedness-minded family and friends on board.

Now, these tools and strategies are not rocket science, nor are they difficult to use. They take a little practice, a tweak to your mindset, and you’ll be all set. These tools are not new. Instead, they’re tried, tested, and proven to work and will be excellent additions to your Mind4Survial.

One of the most common complaints I hear from fellow preppers is that their family and friends won’t get on board with preparedness. So, all too often, many of us are stuck preparing on our own. Some of you not only have to prepare on your own, but you must do so in secret.

While I’ve never experienced that, I can sympathize with how difficult it must be having to hide such an essential aspect of your life. Heck, even if you don’t have to prepare in secret, preparing by yourself when your friends and loved ones don’t see the point or poke at you, stinks.

So, because this is such a big issue with preppers, I decided to dedicate this episode to arming you with some strategies and techniques to help make your prepper life a little easier. I think you’ll find it interesting, and if you follow some of the steps here, you may see that you are no longer an army of one.

We’re going to cover a number of ideas on how to convince someone to be prepared for emergencies. The main topics we’re going to go over to make that happen are:

five reasons people don’t prepare

how to win friends and influence people

some of the do’s and don’ts of convincing people to be prepared for emergencies

Let's get started.

How to Convince Someone to be Prepared for Emergencies

Alright, so we’ve all heard about or have experienced it when people, mainly family and friends, don’t want anything to do with preparing, and they shut us down whenever we bring it up.

Well, why do they shut you down? Sometimes we need to look at things from the other person's point of view. When we do, we may find ways to gain inroads to helping them understand why preparedness is so important.

When it comes to figuring out how to get other people to be prepared for emergencies, we often find ourselves frustrated, irritated, and unable to get people to understand how important preparedness is. Well, when it comes to convincing others to prepare, we need to follow a few things.

The Importance of Communication

First, we need to understand that we can’t talk over, preach, or try to browbeat people into preparedness just because we know it’s essential. They need to come to the idea through their thought processes, and that's what you can help with.

Next, we need to know the reasons, or in this case, the excuses people use as a reason why they don’t prepare. Once we understand why a person doesn’t want to prepare, we can then begin forming a strategy for getting them across the preparedness finish line.

Lastly, we need to understand how to interact with people to encourage them to want to become prepared. We need to use a mindset that incorporates techniques that make the person you are trying to convince to prepare into a like-minded ally, rather than an anti-prepper who is in line to become the next disaster victim we hear about o...

One discussion that often heats a prepper conversation is what you should be on your bug-out bag packing list. Most often, it’s one opinion versus another, then another, and so on until the conversation melts down.

Pretty much everyone has a different idea of the perfect bug-out bag packing list. Today I want to share ten items you may want to include.

Why Are These Items on the Bug Out Bag Packing List?

The items on this bug-out bag packing list aren’t just my opinion. These items are the result of polling many awesome people within the Mind4Survival Facebook group.

When it comes to bug-out bags (and many things within our preparedness community), opinions are like flashlights. Everyone has one - or in many of our cases, a dozen or more. Am I right!? Give me a big Hoo-Yeah, if you’re a flashlight hoarder like me!

Because so many people have different opinions about what should be in a bug-out bag, I decided to ask the Mind4Survival Facebook group what they thought. Then, I took the answers and compared the commonalities between the lists, ranking the most included items. When it was all said and done, we ended up with a list of ten basic items that should be the foundation of all bug-out bags, plus a few other items that just missed making the top ten list.

Let's look at the top 10 bug-out bag items that everyone should include and why those items are important. Plus, I’m going to cover some of the runner-ups that are definitely worth a look if you have space. And finally, we’re going to go over the difference between the foundational “must-have items” in your bug-out bag and the optional nice to have’s that we all need to consider when preparing for our individual situations.

The Top 10 Items for Your Bug Out Bag Packing List

Water Filter / Purification

Flash Light / Head Lamp

IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit)

Fire Starting Kit

Food for 72 Hours

Water in a Single-Walled Metal Container

Firearm or Other Personal Defense Item

Knife with Sharpening Stone

Shelter or Tarp with cordage

Rain Gear

BONUS: Tie for #11: Cash / Credit & Debit Card / USB stick w/ important documents

Bug Out Bag Foundational “Must Have” Items

The ten items here, are in my opinion, the items that every bug out bag packing list should have. With proper practice and training, everyone can do really well in difficult situations with just these items. Heck, think of the show Alone and what the contestants achieve with just a few simple items.

Remember, though; I mentioned practice and training. As Vince Lombardi said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” So, practice, train, think, and prepare yourself to use the gear you have to survive when the odds are stacked against you.

Bug Out Bag Personal “Must Have” Items

Once you pack your “Must Have” items, you should then pack the items that are “Must Haves” specific to your situation.

Perhaps you have a medical condition that requires you to pack medications. Maybe you have children to think about so, and you need to pack certain things for them. Basically, whatever you absolutely need to survive, goes in the bag next.

Don’t forget to take your environment into account and prepare for specific problems to you, your location, and your situation.

Bug Out Bag “Nice to Have” Items

With all of the foundation “Must Have” and Personal “Must Have” items packed, you can then pack gear that is “Nice to Have.” For example, now is when you pack the items that didn’t make the list, such as a memory stick with important documents on it, a battery bank, solar charger, emergency radio, or even some candy.

This is the point at which you personalize your bag to fit your needs and wants. Remember, when packing the “Nice to Haves,” do not go overboard.

Have you ever wondered how to develop good situational awareness habits to turn the skills that you practice every day into good preparedness habits? Well, I recently heard from one of the Mind4Survival Facebook group members, Steve Devillier, who had a question about situational awareness. More specifically, Steve asked a really good question about how…

One of the things I hear many people struggling with is their situational awareness. Well, now, for people like us who are into preparedness, we all know that there is little room for failure when it comes to situational awareness. So, in this post, I’m going to work on helping all of us improve our…

What is the emergency alert system? Some residents of Salem, Oregon, found out a couple of years ago, and they also learned that it doesn't always have the desired effect.

Now, if you’re like me, it's somewhat satisfying when something happens that shows that all of our crazy prepping efforts aren’t so crazy after all.

Now, it’s important to note that I (and hopefully all of you) don’t find enjoyment in others' failure to prepare or when adversity knocks them on their butt. With that, though, the incident I want to talk about is just one more example of why it is SO GOOD to be a prepper. Because as we all know, it’s not a matter of if something happens. It’s a matter of when.

In 2018, an incident in Salem, Oregon, with their emergency alert system reinforced just how right you are and how wrong all of the prepping naysayers are. This is a great example to point to when people call you crazy or share with those on the fence about becoming better prepared.

First, what is the emergency alert system?

You may be wondering, what IS the emergency alert system? It is a national warning system that the FCC approved in 1994 and rolled out in 1997 on a national basis. This replaced the Emergency Broadcast System (Remember those "tests" they ran every night on television around midnight, letting us know this was ONLY a test, but if it had been an actual emergency, bla bla bla?) For the 80s nostalgia of it:

Today, national, state, or local governments can use the emergency alert system on a national, state, or local level. Ready.gov explains:

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national public warning system that allows the president to address the American people within 10 minutes during a national emergency. The alerts are sent through broadcasters, satellite digital audio services, direct broadcast satellite providers, cable television systems and wireless cable systems.

The EAS may also be used by state and local authorities to deliver important emergency information such as weather information, imminent threats, AMBER alerts and local incident information targeted to specific areas.

The president has sole responsibility for determining when the national-level EAS will be activated. FEMA is responsible for national-level EAS tests and exercises.

The EAS is also used when all other means of alerting the public are unavailable.

There are also wireless emergency alerts that go directly to geographically targeted, compatible cellphones.

What could possibly be bad about that?

If you are just now finding out what is the emergency alert system, you may be wondering what could be wrong with a system that immediately lets a wide swath of the population know that a crisis is imminent or a child has gone missing.

Well...usually nothing.

But when it goes wrong, it does so in a spectacular fashion.

Right, Hawaii?

Earlier in 2018, Hawaii residents received the horrifying message that a ballistic missile was inbound and that they should seek shelter immediately. The messaged ended chillingly, with the words, THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

Well, it wasn't a drill. It was a boo-boo—a really HUGE one. Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper covered the incident with multiple updates. The entire thing turned out to be a false alarm. While people were literally shoving their children into the sewer systems to try and protect them, praying for forgiveness, and devolving into hysteria, the entire thing had happened when someone had goofed, hit the wrong button, and sent out the warning by mistake.

And that's not the only time an emergency warning system alert went wrong.

Just a few months later, Salem, Oregon residents, were able to relate to a not so well thought out emergency alert notification that said simply, "Civil Emergency" and "Prepare for Action."

Salem's residents had absolutely NO idea what type ...