Trust Your Gut
“I knew there was something off about him.” How many times have you had that thought? How many times have you just had this bad feeling about a person but you couldn’t quite pin down the reason for it?
Then, more often than not, you found out later that your suspicion was justified. We sometimes call this intuition. It is something we grasp or know without conscious thought.
Trust Signals
Quite often, our subconscious picks up on little clues and signals without us realizing it. Our brain interprets these indicators and renders a decision seemingly out of nowhere.
We experience this in many areas of our lives, from narrowly avoiding a traffic accident to making a snap judgment of the young person at the front door asking for our child. We might not be correct 100% of the time, of course. That young man might actually be a very polite, nice, and thoughtful person but the lip piercing and bright green hair threw us off.
I’ve often said that bugging out should be considered your last option in the vast majority of likely scenarios. How do you know when it is time to beat feet? Pay attention to that little voice in the back of your head. If you get a niggling feeling that you really need to be elsewhere, grab your kit and head for your planned bug out location.
Intuition Isn’t Panic
Please note, there is a difference between intuition and blind panic. Learn to listen to that little voice but don’t give it full control. Don’t let your decisions in a crisis be made by emotions. Think it through.
The point is this. Listen to your gut. Pay attention to your instincts. Your subconscious is trying to tell you something and odds are pretty good that whatever it is saying is important.
About the author
Jim Cobb is a well known freelance author on survival and other topics.
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Ultimately “one’s gut” is based upon perceptions that someone is “like me” or “not like me”. The more similarities that one senses in a stranger the greater likelihood that some form of teamwork will be possible or personally satisfying. That alone is enought to monitor one’s gut.
Still, one’s gut can be flawed by all sorts of thingsl And most people know how to “fake it” and present an acting part of oneself, sort of as a trial personality shown to another.
In an inexperienced person, trusting your gut is often exactly what Radarphos describes. Like me or not like me. You can be very wrong with both.
I grew up in Detroit, and was in law enforcement for many years after that. After that kind of background, you do develop a good “gut” on people. I learned early that the “like me/not like me” method just didn’t work accurately enough.It also helped that I spent six-years on active duty in the Marines and traveled to various foreign locations (Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, Okinawa, Philippines and more later while in the Air Guard, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Belgium, France, and more),
The more experience you have dealing with good folks and dirtbags, regardless of their ethnicity/nationality/culture, the better you can develop your gut.