Safety Strategies for Families

By Mark Spencer

About the Author

It is my experience that many people lack some basic common-sense safety knowledge. Often we, including our children, feel overwhelmed from our busy work, social and extra curricular actives and obligations. The question we all need to ask ourselves is, 'Have we taken the time and necessary precautions and measures to insure our and our family's personal safety?' Even though the majority of people are decent law-abiding citizens, their still is and always will be that element in society that compromises our personal safety that we need to prepare against.

If we take a position of 'THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO ME', we are kidding ourselves and being very naïve. The fact is that a bad situation can happen tany one of us and we need to be prepared for any 'What If' scenarios. Now this doesn't mean we live in a fear-based state of mind. Quite the contrary, I believe that with education, safety strategies and safety products, we can better prepare ourselves for the unexpected. For example; although we don't plan on having a flat tire, we are prepared just in case we do by carrying a spare in our trunk. Simply because we are carrying a spare tire, we need not live in a constant state of fear or dwell on having a flat each and every time we drive somewhere. A spare tire is simply a safety strategy for a 'What If' scenario if we get a flat. The spare tire analogy is a great example for the basis of our program's safety strategies. They are simply a 'tool' that we add to our 'Safety Toolbox' that empowers us and helps to stack the odds in our favor against unexpected emergencies.

Our greatest and most valuable safety gift is our intuition or 'gut' feeling. We must ALWAYS listen to a gut feeling, never trying to logic it out for any reason, no matter how contradictory our feeling may seem. Our intuition is always right. We need to become more adept at noticing details about someone that we get a bad feeling about and understand why we have that feeling by putting a face on it. Your gut tells you something is not right about a person. Next, you become conscious of the details: his posturing, his loitering behavior, the way he is sizing people up, his body tension, the way he clutches his fist, his stare, etc. You should never delay in employing a safety strategy for your protection, especially based on a gut feeling. When you honor it and carry out your safety strategy, your intuition will be confirmed about how and why you had this feeling.

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