30 Days, 30 Ways: Day 5

30 Days, 30 Ways: Day 5

Reading Time: 2 minutes

survival-skillsThe challenge for today’s 30 Days task is to summarise your own personal resilience, with points being allocated as follows:

1 Pt:  Share with us some of the ways you believe you and your family are resilient.  List or show us some clever ideas you have come up with.

3 Pts:   Don’t be afraid to share what you did if it could help someone else along the way also. Make a 30-60 Sec video demo to showing how you did it.

The prompts for the challenge included: Do you have a garden? Can your own foods? Have a cargo bike? Or have creative solutions for transportation, food and dealing with human waste?

For me though, it’s not so much about the gadgets, bunkers or survival skills. Sure, I wouldn’t refuse help from Bear Grylls if things got really bad, but does that mean I need to be him? The LEGO Movie had some sage advice for us all “Everything is cool when you’re part of a team” but not everyone in the team has to be the hunter gatherer!

Whilst I agree that some sensible steps like a grab bag and a couple of days of food can be handy, for me, personal resilience is more about

  • Information and Awareness – as a product of working in emergency management I have a very good understanding of both the risks and the planned responses, I therefore understand the risks that could impact me
  • Options – there are many options open to me, if there is a problem affecting my home I have friends I can stay with, if there is a problem affecting my work I have the ability to work from home, if there is a problem affecting the train I can get the bus…making more options available to more people increases their resilience
  • Cushioning – none of us can prevent emergencies from happening but we can reduce their impact. For that reason I checked my exposure to flood risk before moving into my house, I have insurance and a contingency fund, and I (try to) eat healthily.

The first two factors enable improvisation. The third element provides a time window where I can determine whether improvisation is required. Together the combination of all three means my focus isn’t just on responding once something bad does happen, but trying to mitigate potential impact in advance.

Maybe I’d feel differently if were exposed to more risk. Or maybe the rationale behind the gadgets and bunkers just hasn’t been clearly articulated to me. Either way, if I were to make a video about my own resilience, it wouldn’t be much of a ‘show and tell’.

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