When most people think about cultivating survival skills, they think of things you can do lost out in the wilderness to meet your most basic needs of food, water, and shelter. Yes, all of those things are important. However, surviving through tough situations isn’t just about knowing how to make a fire or create a lean-to. It’s about learning how to master your emotions, particularly fear. Being stuck in a survival situation can be incredibly frightening. And if you don’t learn to master fear, it will master you. People can sometimes get paralyzed by fear and that’s a deadly mistake.
But learning how to overcome fear isn’t just for survival in the wilderness, it’s a skill applicable to every day life. We get thrown stressful, intense situations on a regular basis. Whether it’s dealing with health issues, children, job situations, new deadlines for a project, and on the list goes. Anxiety can spark up due to any of these. But if you can learn to keep calm in a bad situation, you’ve just given yourself the psychological edge to overcome any challenges that enter your path.
The Survival University Says:
When people think of fear in the wilderness, they often imagine extreme situations—like being face-to-face with a bear or getting lost miles from civilization. And yeah, those are real fears. But in reality, the more common fears people face when they sign up for one of our courses are much quieter. Jess Caldwell, one of our primary instructors, has a unique way of tapping into this. Jess often leads mindfulness and Wild Women’s River Retreats, where her participants are faced with fears they didn’t even know they had—like the discomfort of silence, the isolation of the woods, or simply being in an environment where the usual comforts of home aren’t available. For many, these fears are harder to overcome than physical challenges.
An example of how we push mental limits in our courses comes from our navigation instructor, Matt Boger. Matt, a former Army Ranger, doesn’t just teach you how to read a map or use a compass. He puts those skills to the test by having students navigate long distances through rugged, unfamiliar terrain, during our Advanced Navigation Course. While his instruction gives participants the tools they need to find their way, it’s still a mentally taxing experience. The fear of getting lost is very real, even when you have the skills to prevent it. For many, the scariest part is not knowing exactly what’s up ahead. Matt pushes his students to trust in their abilities, walking them through the process step by step, but ultimately leaving them to figure out the path on their own. These moments are powerful. Students find themselves out there in the wilderness, with nothing but their compass and the knowledge Matt has drilled into them in our Basic Navigation Course, feeling the fear creep in as the distance grows. The terrain is unforgiving, often rocky and dense with foliage, and the sensation of being truly on your own sets in.
Survival situations or training in simulated situations, will help you shed fear and develop a new mindset. When you are actively training for survival, it will help you answer questions like “Can I really do this?” “What if I fall?” And getting the answers to those questions will build up your confidence and increase your chances of surviving. And then, when you’re back in civilization and your boss gives you that huge, new project that’s definitely going to push your skills to the limit, you can draw on that same confidence to conquer the day.
What’s the best way to overcome your fears? It’s confront them head-to-head. In psychology there’s a tool for treatment known as “exposure therapy.” Your doctor will gradually increase your exposure to what you fear until you become desensitized to it and it longer produces anxiety. You might still be scared of it, but it won’t have as deep of a hold on your mind.
Setting yourself up to go on a survival retreat is a great way to face many of your fears to feel the exhilaration when you conquer them. If you’ve never tried one of these events, look into it. It might change your life.
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