You can significantly mitigate risk by integrating continuous threat assessment and evasion strategies into your daily routines before a confrontation occurs. Effective personal safety relies on consistent situational awareness, basic planning before-hand, common sense decision-making, and simple environmental assessment.
Key Takeaways
- Maintain Situational Awareness: Make “Active Scanning” part of your daily routine to establish environmental baselines, monitor viable exits, and identify immediate “safe harbours” (secure locations for retreat).
- Always Choose Evasion over Confrontation: Establish clear verbal boundaries early. Treat disengagement, de-escalation, and safe extraction as the primary objectives, utilizing physical force only as a last, proportionate resort.
- Pre-Plan Your Responses: Define and rehearse specific verbal and physical tactics for common threat scenarios (e.g., boundary violations, being followed, blocked exits) to ensure decisive action under acute stress.
- Ensure Operational Readiness: Make sure your phone is charged and travel routes are mapped prior to departure.
- Know your “Post-Incident” Protocols: Establish immediate post-conflict steps, including checking for physical/psychological injury, securing a safe location, and notifying appropriate authorities.
Introduction
Personal Safety and Self-Protection isn’t something you switch on when something goes wrong. It’s something you practice before you need it. It’s something you build into your normal routine. And while most self-defence focuses on what happens during an attack, effective personal safety begins with what happens before a confrontation.
Fortunately, you don’t need specialist equipment, a martial arts background or hours of training to start developing that process.
All you need is to build on your existing reactions and instincts.
Here are 10 things you can do tonight to improve your personal safety.
1. Make Active Scanning a Natural Reflex
Situational awareness is built on using your senses, instincts and assessment of the environment to make informed decisions about the situation you’re in. Active Scanning is the bedrock of this awareness.
In typical Krav Maga training, scanning is most often applied immediately after the post-conflict stage.
Scanning is something you already do naturally, the difference is making it a conscious, active process.
The exercise
- From the moment you start your day, pay attention to what is in front of you, behind you and around you.
- When you walk to your car, drive to work, go for lunch, enter a shop or sit in a pub, continually assess your immediate environment.
- Ask yourself:
- What can I see?
- What can I hear?
- What seems commonplace, familiar?
- What stands out, feels out of place, unfamiliar?
- Then start looking at the environment more specifically:
- Where is the nearest exit?
- How far away is it?
- Is your route to it clear?
- Are there physical obstructions or hazards?
- Where is your nearest point of safety?
- Your car?
- A public building?
- Your home?
- How would you get there?
- Is it accessible?
- What happens if your preferred route isn’t available?
Apply Active Scanning to familiar environments first. Your home, your workplace, your regular route, your local supermarket. Over time, you’ll develop a better understanding of what feels normal in those environments. Then you’ll be better positioned to notice when something isn’t.
That is the real value of Active Scanning; it helps establish a baseline as once you know what normal looks like, changes become easier to recognise and being conscious of changes in familiar circumstances helps to improve your scanning ability in environments that are new.
2. Know Your Exits
How often do you walk into a building without noticing how you would get out? Making your exits part of your environmental awareness increases your safety.
The exercise
Next time you enter a restaurant, pub, cinema, hotel, workplace, sports hall or unfamiliar building, take a few seconds to identify the exits. Position yourself so that the exit is always in your immediate vision.
Also consider that your nearest exit might not be your best exit. Could it become blocked if there was a crisis? If you could not reach it, are there improvised shields (chairs, tables, stools) that could be used to defend yourself?
And finally, when you reach your exit, what next?
3. Identify your Safe Harbour
An exit gets you away from a situation but could land you in another. A “safe harbour” is your destination where you can assume you’re as safe as possible. This may be your home, your car, a public building, perhaps even a neighbour or residence that can provide you safety.
If someone is following you, for example, simply walking faster may not solve the problem. If a physical confrontation takes place, your goal will first and foremost be to make your aggressor unable or unwilling to continue their assault, giving you the opportunity to escape, but ensuring a successful exit is only the means to and end of reaching safe harbour where further conflict or attack can be avoided.
The exercise
When you’re travelling somewhere unfamiliar, identify potential safe harbours before you need them. Agree with those you are travelling with where you will meet in case of separation.
Safe harbour locations should provide a combination of:
- Physical security
- Communications
- Lighting
- Controlled access
Your objective is to identify somewhere that gives you more options, more control and more safety than the environment you’re leaving.
4. Leave Your Safety Zone Prepared
Before the next time you leaving home, consider what you actually need for the journey ahead.
Personal safety starts in your home and good preparation before you step out of your front door.
The exercise
Run through the following checks:
- Is your phone charged?
- Do you have enough battery to make an emergency call?
- Do you have your keys readily accessible?
- Do you know how you’re getting home?
- Have you considered what happens if your transport fails?
- Are you wearing clothing and footwear that allows you to move comfortably?
We’re not trying to turn your everyday life into a tactical operation, we’re trying to reduce problems that can be avoided with basic planning. If your phone is dead, your route home is unknown and you’re completely reliant on somebody else for transport, you’ve reduced your options before anything has happened.
5. Define Your Personal Safety Strategy
Your ‘strategy’ for dealing with confrontation only needs to build on your natural instincts with simple considerations that can apply to the majority of circumstances. Because while avoidance might always be the preferable choice, but cannot be relied on. Answering the following questions provides a clear and actionable approach regardless of the specific tactics that may be required at the time.
The exercise
Ask yourself:
- What will I do if I feel uncomfortable?
- What will I do if someone ignores my boundaries?
- What will I do if someone follows me?
- What will I do if someone becomes verbally aggressive?
- What will I do if they block my exit?
- What will I do if the situation becomes physical?
There isn’t one correct answer for everyone and every situation, but it’s important to plan a baseline response to situations that could occur, so you’re not thinking about this for the first time if and when an incident happens.
| Question | Example answer / tactics |
|---|---|
| What will I do if I feel uncomfortable? | Create space, exit the scene, seek safety with others |
| What will I do if someone ignores my boundaries? | Create space, step back, explain politely but firmly they are too close, raise hands |
| What will I do if someone follows me? | Get your phone and prepare to record the incident. Recording the stranger may in itself enourage them to leave you alone. If safe / necessary to do so, challenge the person following, explain firmly you feel threatened and tell them to stop following you. |
| What will I do if someone becomes verbally aggressive? | Remain calm, keep and maintain distance. Prepare to exit the scene. Explain calmly that you wont continue talking with the individual if they continue to speak to you as they are. Avoid telling them what to do, but tell them what you will do if they continue, or tell them you will not continue talking to them and will be leaving.Position your hands so they are above your waist and able to react appropriately should the situation call for defensive or combative reactions. |
| What will I do if they block my exit? | Remain calm, but stand tall, instruct them to move. Say ““Move away from the exit. You have no right to prevent me from leaving. Keeping me here against my will is unlawful. Move now.” |
| What will I do if the situation becomes physical? | Use verbal and physical tactics as proportionate to the problem. |
Remember, your strategy should reflect the environment, the people involved and the circumstances. UK law is on your side, but your responses need to be justified in that you had a genuine and honestly held belief that you were in danger of attack, and that your response was proportionate to the problem and was defensive in nature.
Having thought through these decisions beforehand, you can make it much easier to act decisively when stress and adrenaline cloud your judgement.
6. Practice Setting Boundaries
Personal safety includes what and how you communicate to other to set your boundaries. People often tolerate behaviour they are uncomfortable with because they don’t want to appear rude, confrontational or difficult, while others often appear stand-offish even when that is not their intent. How you define boundaries with your body language and verbal communication style can both help and hinder establishing clear boundaries.
The exercise.
Practice saying things clearly and calmly, such as:
Please step back. I don’t want you to do that. I’m leaving now.
Get used to saying these words. Again, make sure that the time you need to use them isn’t the first time you’ve said them. The objective is to communicate your position clearly and create an opportunity to disengage.
Always remember: You don’t need to justify your boundaries.
7. Don’t Confuse Confidence With Confrontation
While establishing confidence is important for establishing boundaries, not appearing like a target doesn’t always means being willing to stand your ground or use physical force to control the situation. Sometimes the most confident decision you can make is to leave.
Many confrontations occur when one or more of the involved parties refuse to back down, concede ground or simply leave.
While we often talk about self-defence in terms of problem / solution, it’s important to remember that your personal safety isn’t a competition, and if there is an objective, it’s ultimately to get home safely. All other considerations, objectives, tactics and actions are secondary to this outcome.
The exercise
Consider a previous interaction with someone that didn’t end well. An argument that you could have walked away from. Was there an opportunity to end the problem before it began by disengaging much earlier? By conceding the point?
Next time a similar situation occurs, try approaching it differently.
8. Think About What Happens After the Incident
Most personal safety advice stops when the immediate threat ends, but in reality, that’s only the beginning of the aftermath. If you’ve ever experienced an aggressive or violent incident, you know that the effects of the encounter can linger for days, weeks, months or even years afterward.
While dealing with the after affects are outside the scope of this article, we can and should consider what happens immediately after an incident, in what we refer to as post-incident protocols.
Having a plan after the incident is critical, because in high stress situations, when adrenaline floods our body and our heart rate can climb to extreme speeds, our capacity for rational thought diminishes and our ability to sense injury can also be affected.
The exercise
Think about the following questions and how you would answer them. The answers here are suggestions only and depend on the situation as well as your own judgement.
| Question | Example answer / Tactics |
|---|---|
| Are you injured? It’s possible you haven’t even noticed, or may not feel the effects immediately | Remain calm. Check yourself as best you can and as soon as possible ask someone to check you for injury. Remember that the effects of a violent encounter aren’t limited to just physical; they can be psychological. |
| Are you actually safe? | Get to a location that offers you the best place to decompress. |
| Who do you contact first? | Depending on the situation, this might be Ambulance, Police, a friend, a partner, family etc. Make sure your phone is up to date with emergency contacts and that you can share your location with someone who can assist you in an emergency. |
| Do you know where you are?Do you know or can recall where the incident took place? | Check your location using a suitable sat nav App, make a note of it, screenshot it, use What 3 Words etc but get to safety immediately. |
| Do you need to or have you reported what happened? | If in doubt, call the Police on 101. if serious dial 999.Take action as quickly as possible so details are still fresh. |
| What do you need to do to “reset”? | Never underestimate the effect of confrontations, especially a verbally or physically violent one. Take steps to decompress, reflect, repair and recover. Seek advice and don’t suffer in silence; speaking to friend, family and even professionals can prevent after-effects from lingering. |
Think of the answers to these questions as your own post-conflict protocols.
Knowing the basic steps you would take after a serious incident can prevent confusion when you’re stressed, shaken or injured.
9. Make Personal Safety a Priority
Being aware, and vigilant, knowing how to escape a situation if you need to, defining your own boundaries and having a plan of action isn’t being paranoid, it’s being prepared.
Putting into place the suggestions in this article will take less time that reading it
10. Start Practicing Tonight
Spend five minutes practising Active Scanning. Where are your exits? What’s your nearest point of safety? What route would you take to get there? What could restrict your movement? What environmental features could help you create distance or escape?
Then do the same thing tomorrow. And the next day. Apply it to familiar environments. Then unfamiliar environments. Eventually, this stops being something you consciously have to remember.
About the Defensive Fitness Academy
At DFA, we teach practical personal safety and self-defence based on awareness, decision-making, communication, physical capability and realistic scenarios.
