How to Decide Which Survival Skills to Focus on First

woman in the wilderness

Let’s start it off with basic skills, the things every survivor and prepper will need to learn to survive the chaos. If you haven’t decided whether you are going to bug-in or bug-out yet here is a breakdown that might help in that decision process!

Bugging Out
Orienteering, or navigating, is the basic skill you need to get yourself to your bug-out location. Depending on what kind of terrain you’re navigating, this skill could vary.
Map reading, compass reading and creation, and navigating by the stars, will likely all be essentials. If your bug out position is further than a few hours away, you will likely need to know how to create shelters and fires as well.
Bugging In
When you’re bugging in your house is your castle, and suddenly the parts of your castle that the government maintains will fall to you. Largely this means shutting off your waste disposal and water systems, to rely on your storage or systems you can maintain all yourself.
Other basic house maintenance skills are a top priority too. Lastly, you’ll need to know how to defend your property from the people who may know be flooding past in their quest to bug-out.

Equipment
While you shouldn’t solely rely on gear, you should have the skill to properly use and repair it. For most gear, this means practice. For very specific gear, like fire extinguishers, this means taking the time to read the instructions a few times, until you can recall the knowledge reliably.
The basic equipment most preppers rely on to bug-out (or just on a day-to-day basis) is their car, so its useful to know how they work and how to perform maintenance and basic repairs.
Water
Perhaps the single most important survival knowledge is how to make a water filter, knowing which water to collect from, and knowing how to safely store your water. If you have a well, this means understanding how it works and how to fix it.
Food
The most basic skills for food are knowing how to store food, how to assess if your stored foods are still safe, how to cook your stored foods, and how to ration them. Rationing is actually a very important skill, although it is often overlooked.
There are, of course, so many other relevant food skills to learn, but it’s more important to have the skills to make the most of your stored foods before you learn how to keep adding to that store. This way, you can survive short-term SHTF events, even before you’ve mastered hunting or foraging.
Health
It’s not just first aid and CPR that you need to learn. An essential health skill which is often overlooked is basic physical fitness. Without that, you’re slow, vulnerable, more likely to fall ill, and less efficient at getting your survival tasks done.
Communications
Don’t even start thinking about a HAM radio yet. That’s complicated and not near as important as learning how to better communicate with people face-to-face. It is essential to know how to negotiate with your neighbors, and to de-escalate a violent or angry intruder or ally.

And one of the last and most important factors is your mindset. No matter what happens in an “end of days” scenario — it is going to be torturous for you and your family. Still, if you are an agreeable unit, calm, and keeping your minds on the situation to follow – using all your skills as they should be applied – this can go a very long way in making a collapse bearable.

To learn more, including a process called the Timeline Method, go over to Backdoor Survival. We are all in this together but it will be up to you and yours to focus on your skills and how and when to use them properly!


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