A few years back I wrote a very controversial article for the Personal Defense Network titled "The Myth of Situational Awareness", wherein I pointed out that situational awareness — a sort of holy grail for some in the self defense world — isn't the magic cloak of invincibility it's often made out to be.
...While those risks are still being processed (at a less-than-conscious level), and your brain is capable of bringing anything it feels is immediately threatening up to your level of awareness, allowing that to happen forces you into a reactive mode.
...Instead of trying to figure out how to increase your awareness (which you really can't), I think it's a much better use of your time and resources to learn how to best use the awareness you have: learn what you need to look at and how to use your brain's pattern matching ability to help classify what you're seeing.
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