Many of our you fine folks of the FPA who read what I write and view our videos have heard me say a number of times that you need to develop strategies for self-reliance. Many of you who are proactive have written me to see exactly what I mean by that. In this article today I am going to share with you the all-important fundamentals of what I mean by “Self-Reliance Strategies.”
Self-Reliance is the word I choose to you use more than “survival” or “preparedness” training. Self-Reliance is a proactive rather than reactive approach that couples itself with on-going and daily habit forming measures. The typical preparedness or survival adherent typically (certainly but not always) will gather gear and some training and then sit and wait for an event. Self-reliance, in my opinion, is an active, daily style of living in which you are regularly and constantly looking for ways to rely less on others and more on yourself. I break it down in to four distinct sections when considering it as an overall strategy.
Mindset
If you do your own research into survival incidents that ended in success you will nearly always read of the person involved having a proper mindset. One in which something encouraged them to stay alive no matter what. This involved many things but the biggest is ego and awareness. If you are in control of your own ego and you are more situationally aware, you can avoid most situations of this nature. There must also be inside of you a ‘force’ that spurns you on in difficult times. Some things in life force us to be put here mentally. Things like divorce, loss of job, death of a family member can be traumatic and something inside of us helps us to survive it. Whatever that is, you will need to tap into it to develop a solid strategy to get through tough times.
Skills
You definitely need to regularly practice your skills. This includes the hard skills like firebuilding, shelter building, water and food procurement and the plethora of skills that are needed to simply survive. You need to practice your skills with little to no gear, in all types of weather and assuming you have injuries. These are the things that can easily make an accomplished self-reliant person into a mess of stressed out person.
Tactics
Tactics is just a sexy word for strategically working with others. The term notes the use of military or weapons related strategies to most, but that is not always the need. Simply learning how to develop yourself as a leader and good communicator are good tactics for self-reliance. The cases of people going at it solo are not numerous. Explorers and frontiersman who accomplished much on their own were extraordinary. In today’s industrialized society where nearly everything that keeps us alive comes from someone else, including our heat, and food, learning how to work well with others is a necessity.
Gear
We have talked on numerous occasions about the need for gear to assist you in being more self-reliant. I am advocate for those are just starting out to have as much gear as you need. As you get further along you should begin to take items away from your gear list and practice without them. In this manner, you teach yourself to not be gear dependent.
The strategy of all this is the connected nature by which each of these are required to develop a self-reliance puzzle for you. We all know people who focus on one or more of these aspects but forego the others. If you, or I, want to actually become more self-reliant then we must engage in utilizing all four in concert with the others.
