You often hear a lot about EDC gear, in the preparedness and concealed carry communities it’s a hot topic but what you don’t often hear about is the skillsets that must accompany this gear to fully realize it’s potential. Gear can be lost or stolen but knowledge is always with you, where ever you go.
While some skillsets are heavily gear focused, others require no gear at all. Even without gear, having those skill-sets that are gear focused, will give you more options and allow you to improvise more fluidly when you don’t have those tools at your disposal.
Situational Awareness
Situational awareness or the art of paying attention seems to be slipping away from most people these days. I see people every day walking around with their head down in their phone or their headphones on not seeing or hearing anything going on around them. I routinely see people looking down at their phones walking through intersections without even looking up to see if there is traffic coming. This lack of awareness is very troubling, to say the least.
If the gazelle was more focused on grazing and never looked up to check its surroundings, there wouldn’t be too many gazelles left, the lions would have themselves an all you can eat frenzy.
What does situational awareness do for you? It keeps you out of trouble. It allows you to identify situations and threats before they become a problem. It gives you time to problem solve when those situations and threats cannot be avoided.
Fitness
I know what your thinking, your thinking that fitness is not a skillset, I beg to differ, let me use an example; anyone can tie a knot right? But can they tie effective knots for the different applications needed for a given situation? Both physical and mental fitness are similar, anyone can go to the gym and lift weights but without knowing the proper technique and the proper program to achieve their specific goals, they are more likely to become injured and not achieve their goals.
Physical fitness, when structured correctly, will also improve your mental fitness/toughness. How you ask. When you learn to push past goals that you once thought were not possible you learn that you can always lift more or run farther.
“It Always Seems Impossible Until It Is Done”
Nelson Mandela
When you push through the pain, you learn something about yourself, it is not something that you can explain to someone, you have to experience it. When you get to a point where the pain is too much, you can’t push out one more rep, you can’t take one more step and then you push out three more reps or run one more mile, then you will begin to understand.
Your next question will probably be; How is this “skill” applied to EDC? Easy, strong people are harder to kill, whether the perpetrator is a person, nature or circumstance, the stronger you are physically and mentally the more likely you are to overcome the obstacles in your path.
Medical
Another set of skills that everyone should know; basic trauma and first aid. These life-saving skills are easy to learn and maintain and provide a great service to you, your family and those around you.
These type of skills should be taught in school, they should be taught just like fire drills but as of now, they are not yet taken with the seriousness that it deserves, so it’s up to you to learn these skills yourself and to teach them to you own family.
Self-Defense
When it comes to self-defense, the very first thing you need to do is develop the first three skillsets I discuss in this article; Situational Awareness, Fitness, and Medical, as these can all play a significant role in determining the outcome of a self-defense encounter.
De-escalation
The first self-defense skill to learn is de-escalation aka verbal jujitsu. Learning to avoid a fight is just as important as knowing how to fight. Being able to talk your way out of a conflict, can save you a lot of grief.
Hand To Hand
Most self-defense encounters will be at “bad breath” distances with little or no warning, so having some understanding of how to fight is very important. Learning an MMA style of fighting can very beneficial as many altercations start standing up but at some point can find their way to the ground. So having both stand up skills and ground skill will improve your odds of success.
Self-Defense Tools
Another way to increase your odds of a successful self-defense encounter is to employ some sort of force multiplier, aka self-defense tool. These are almost essential when dealing with more than one attacker. Self-defense tools include but are not limited to pepper spray, knives, kubatons and firearms.
All of these self-defense tools require some sort of training to safely and effectively use. Whatever tools you chose to utilize be sure to learn the skills necessary to protect yourself and your family.
Knot Tying
Knot tying has both daily and emergency applications, you can use one type of knot to secure a load in the back of your truck or you can use another type of knot to tether yourself to a tree to perform a rescue on a turbulent river.
If you don’t know much about knots let me tell you, there are as many types of knots as there are stars in the sky, well not quite but sometimes it sure seems like it. Learning them all would take a lot of time and energy and with all the other skillsets to learn and practice it makes sense to just learn and practice a hand full of the most commonly used knots. My personal favorites are the Bowline, Taut-Line Hitch, Prusik, Double Sheet Bend, and a Trucker’s Hitch.
Basic Map Navigation
With smartphones giving us the information of the world at our fingertips and evermore reliable GPS guiding us where we want to go, the art of reading and using a paper map has gone by the wayside. The only problem is that phone batteries go dead and GPS signals aren’t always reliable either. Being a Generation X’er we did not have cell phones with Google Maps or Garmin GPS navigation, we had maps. It wasn’t until the 2000s when I worked as a tow truck operator that I even started using GPS navigation but even then the maps were not always right and reliability was still an issue, so I always carried paper maps of the cities and states that I operated in.
As a prepper, I am always thinking about what systems I rely on and what I would do if any of those systems were to fail. In the case of GPS based road and land navigation, I have to consider the possibility that it is going to fail when I need it most. That is why I always have paper maps and the ability to utilize those maps and you should too.
Lock Picking
Lock picking and lock bypassing for this discussion will be considered one, in the same, we are gaining access into something or somewhere. Now I do need to preface this discussion by saying that picking or bypassing locks without permission would be considered breaking and entering or at the very least trespassing. So ensure that you have permission or just cause (fear of life or limb) before continuing.
Lock picking is a skill set that does require some patience to become proficient at and also requires practice to maintain that proficiency. To be really good at picking a variety of locks, lock picking will quickly become a bit of a hobby.
Fire Starting
You may be wondering why fire starting would be listed as an EDC skill, it’s not like you are likely to find the need to start a fire all of a sudden during your daily life. Although this is true, making and controlling fire has been an important skillset for tens of thousands of years. It has allowed the human race to survive and thrive in an unforgiving world.
In an emergency situation starting a fire may mean the difference between living or freezing to death or signaling search parties of your location or never being found. Even though it is not a skill you will use very often, it is a vitally important skill to know.
Parting Thoughts
Knowledge is power, it can’t be taken from you, it can’t be lost, it can’t be broken and you always have it with you everywhere you go. Go learn these skills and take them with you everywhere you go and they will serve you well.
After you gain some skills, head on over and checked out some of my recommended gear here