So as I’ve worked through creating this series for National Preparedness Month, I’ve had to ask myself some questions – What things were the most important to me? What things did I use the most? Are there things that I think could be the difference between life and death that everyone should know. I’ve also spent some time considering how people lived before us. What kinds of things did they need to know to survive? After going through all of that, I’ve boiled everything down into three main categories – survival, homesteading, and life skills. Let’s dive in.
Survival
1.) Learn how to start a fire
I wrote a whole article just on different ways to start a fire. It even has several videos on different ways to start a fire.
2.) Learn how to shoot and clean a gun.
If you don’t own a gun, then that’s the first thing that you need to do. Last year a police officer from California wrote an article for me on how to choose your first handgun. But once you have your first handgun, you need to learn to shoot it and clean it. You can search online for classes near you locally. But when it comes to cleaning a handgun, here’s a video.
3.) Learn how to be aware of your surroundings
Situational awareness is something that just about anyone can develop. There are three different levels of situational awareness.
First, being aware of the elements in any given situation. This is simply learning to observe what’s around you. Take a trip to a new park and sit down. Take some time to really observe your surroundings and click some pictures using your phone. Then stop looking around, put down your phone and write down what you saw in the greatest detail that you can remember. Then 24 hours later, sit down and do the exact same thing while you’re sitting at home or someplace other than the park. Use the greatest detail that you can.
Second, you need to understand the current situation. Start learning not just to observe your situation, but to also read the situation. What just happened to cause what you’re seeing now?
Third, understand possible futures that can come from the given situation. So this takes things a step in the opposite direction. Instead of saying, “How did we get to where we are now?” You need to ask, “What’s going to happen next based upon what I’m seeing?” It’s like playing chess. You make moves to your pieces, not only based upon your objective but also based upon what you believe your opponent is going to do next.
Want more on this? I’ve written more on it here.
4.) Learn how to be a gray man. 
Do you know the concept of a gray man? According to Selco, “it is staying uninteresting or simply looking and acting like most of the people around you in a particular moment.” Selco lived through the Balkan wars during a SHTF situation. He understands what it means to be a gray man. Blending in, not calling attention to yourself, no matter where you are or what you are doing. I love that he uses the phrase “staying uninteresting.”
This also carries through to how you treat your house as well. Selco had an excellent article about defending your house using the gray man principle.
Homesteading
5.) Learn how to grow a garden
If things turn difficult, you’ll need to know how to feed your family. The best way to do that will be to grow your own food and to create your own grocery store. This also allows you to customize the food to meet your family’s wants and needs. Does your family love broccoli, you can learn to grow it. Do you use tomato products? Grow a bunch of tomato plants and learn to make your own tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, pizza sauce. It’s so simple!
6.) Learn how to cook from scratch
Making your own tomato sauce or pizza sauce could sound so hard, but in all honesty, It is so incredibly simple! Cooking from scratch is just as much of an art as it is a science, but that doesn’t mean that it’s hard. If you don’t know how to cook from scratch NOW is the time to learn. It is NOT as hard to learn as you think. About fifteen years ago, I stumbled across a website that I immediately fell head over heels in love with, and it taught me to cook from scratch. I’ve made bread, noodles, bagels, English muffins, yogurt, kefir, water kefir, cheese, queso, and so many other things. Wardee over at Traditional Cooking School will teach you things step by step if you don’t know how to cook from scratch.
7.) Learn how to use a canner 
When you cook from scratch you can take what you’ve made, and in many cases, you can preserve it using a canner. There are two types of canners out there – Pressure canners and Water-Bath canners. Water-bath canners allow you to can high acid foods – like most fruits and sometimes tomatoes – though not always. You can make and preserve jams and jellies from your fruit bushes and trees. I’ve made strawberry jam, blueberry jam, and apple sauce and apple butter. They are all incredibly simple to make, and the principle holds true for most jams like blackberry, fig, boysenberry, elderberry, and others.
Pressure canners are needed to can low acid foods – like vegetables and meats. You can pressure can straight veggies or meat. You can also combine ingredients into stews and can those. If you combine ingredients, make sure that you stick to a canning recipe. If you don’t get the right amount of pressure to kill all the bacteria, you can kill your family. By sticking to an approved recipe you should be able to guarantee the safety of the foods that you can.
Don’t know how to can? I have a friend who teaches people to exactly how to do that! Her name is Melissa Norris and she runs the Pioneering Today Academy, but she has a FREE canning course that you can find here.
Life Skills
8.) Learn how to listen to your gut
In today’s ‘scientific’ Western mindset, we easily dismiss listening to our gut. If there’s no empirical evidence that what we’re feeling is the way to go, why should we trust our instincts or intuition?
But when the normal veneer of life is stripped away and things get rough, we’re going to need to know how to listen to our gut, and as with almost everything else on this list, that skill will already need to be honed in order for us to use it effectively when we need to.
So how do you learn to listen to your gut? I found an excellent article by Forbes that addresses exactly that.
9.) Learn how to Negotiate
Learning how to negotiate will both benefit you now and later. If your financial situation has changed and you desperately need a raise, learning how to negotiate will absolutely help you in that situation. If we ever get to the point where we need to barter for goods and services, negotiating will help you get the best deal while still blessing the other party. Negotiating is an art, that again needs to be practiced now so that we will have the skills now and later if and when we need them?
So how do you negotiate so that you get what you need while also being a blessing to the other person or group involved? This is an amazing article that walks you through what you need to understand and learn in order to successfully negotiate.
10.) Learn how to Do CPR and Basic First Aid
There is so much to CPR that it could be an entire series of articles, but I’ve found a FREE CPR course here. If you aren’t CPR certified, you can take their course and earn a certification, but you will need to pay for the certification. That being said, it’s about the best prices for a CPR certification that I’ve seen, and I’ve organized CPR classes before.
11.) Learn how to sharpen a knife, ax, or another sharp implement
We live in such a ‘throw-away’ society. Something breaks, you throw it away and get a new one. A pair of scissors gets dull, you throw them away and get a new one. A shirt gets a small hole in it, you donate it to Goodwill or Salvation Army and get a new one, right? Well, what happens if we have a repeat of the great depression? What if you have to make do with what you have? There may come a time when buying something new just isn’t a possibility.
Well, learning how to sharpen a knife, ax, or another implement could be a skill that you need to have in order to do the things that you need to do to keep your family safe. So how do you go about sharpening an ax? Here’s a video.
What About You?
Are you new to preparedness? What beginning skills do you think that you need to know in order to survive that aren’t listed here? Are you an experienced prepper? Is there anything that you’d suggest adding to this list? Share with us in the comments, so that we can all be better prepared.
Together lets Love, Learn, Practice, Overcome
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