It’s our last Phase of the Let’s Get Prepared! Challenge! In our last week, we’re going to be looking at how we can improve our own knowledge and skills to help us in the event we need them, for a temporary or a longer-term situation created by an emergency or disaster.
On Day 26, we’re going to talk about how to take an inventory of what you know, and what you might want to know. This will help you as you read through posts during the rest of the week, and develop your own “Build Your Skills” plan.
This week, we’re going to explore lists of skills, things you do know, things you might want to learn, and may even things you’ve never even thought of, or couldn’t imagine needing. (We’re just going to list, not educate, this week.)
Some will be geared towards basic skills to get by for a couple of days if you need it, following a disaster or an emergency.
Some, however, will be more under the category of “what if things really changed, and you had to live very differently….” You might know this kind of vision of the future under some of the more common names:
- Living Off the Grid
- SHTF (Sh*t Hits The Fan)
- Zombie Apocalypse
- TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It)
- When Things Go Pear-Shaped
- Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria (Thank you, Ghostbusters…)
You’ll hear people who spend time thinking about this in real detail as Preppers, Survivalists, or Homesteaders.
The purpose of this week is NOT to encourage you to be one of those, nor is it to spend a lot of time thinking about the end of civilization as we know it. It is about helping you think about how prepared you’d like to be, and what steps you want to take, in order to survive using your brain, not just what’s in your emergency kit.
What we do want to focus on is how we might all learn some skills that could help us, if we need them. We’ll focus the next three days on:
- Health and Safety Skills and Knowledge
- Food and Water Skills and Knowledge
- Other Household and Survival Skills and Knowledge
Each day, I’ll share some “you should definitely know” and “you might be interested to learn”, and you can make some decisions based on your own prospect of the future and what you might need. You’re bound to find at least one item on each list that you can say, “Yeah, I should look into that one.”
But don’t forget, you already KNOW things. Maybe you even know things you can teach others. So the place to start with the “Build Your Skills” Phase is to take stock of what you already think you may be good at (you, or anyone in your home), to start your foundation.
Today’s challenge:
First place to start: Inventory what you DO know! What are some skills you think you could rely upon if you needed to? Start your “Build Your Skills” week with assessing what you already have for strengths.
Join in the conversation over at the Clever Girl Organizing Challenge Facebook Group to learn from and to teach others as we all take on the Let’s Get Prepared! Challenge!
Reminder: Our goal here is to take steps towards improvement. The content in these posts is designed to inspire thinking, not fear.