Mindset

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How To Be As Scary As Hell In Less Than 5 Seconds

May 14, 2022 / 36 Comments

I can teach you how to be as scary as hell in less than five seconds. Truth. Here’s how I learned. How I Learned To Be As Scary As Hell As a new college graduate, I toiled for five long years in the underbelly of public education: the middle school. Although I loved my job and students, I was a mere seven or eight years older than some of my students and more than a few inches shorter. Every student …

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How to Live a Quiet Life in a Very Loud World

January 17, 2022 / 1 Comment

Living a quiet life in a very loud world sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Peaceful, calm, tranquil. I’d love to live there. Instead, I only seem to visit occasionally. Sometimes it’s just me waving at a quiet life as I zoom past. My phone beeps and chirps and rings and vibrates and sometimes talks to me. And with every sound, I hop to attention to see what it is that I can’t live without knowing AT. THAT. MOMENT. That’s me. My …

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sad woman sitting on rock, how to comfort someone who has lost it all

How to Comfort Someone Who Has Just Lost Everything

January 31, 2022 / 12 Comments

Everything was lost. Ruined by tainted floodwater, with no hope of salvage. I drove by my friend’s beautiful home that Hurricane Harvey ravaged and stared at what was left, piled high outside on his front yard. It wasn’t my own personal loss. Yet, I felt very deep sorrow all the same. I wasn’t there when a convoy of dump trucks arrived to unceremoniously load up ruined carpet, furniture, flooring, toys, and mementos and drive away, as though the remnants of …

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Personality and Prepping: How to Boost Survival Savvy

April 15, 2021 / 2 Comments

Until the COVID-19 lockdowns, I never thought about how my personality and prepping were related. Although dismayed by the lockdowns, I was ecstatic my overbooked schedule was suddenly wiped clean. Perhaps I could finally recover from my perpetual people hangover. This sounded wonderful to an introvert like myself. Contrast that with my 80-year-old friend who is ecstatic because a recent fall means she now has an excuse to leave her home for physical therapy. The lengthy drought of in-person interaction …

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Survival Mindset: Your most important piece of survival gear

February 10, 2021 / 2 Comments

The campfire was long out. The coffee pot had no magic brew bubbling in its belly. Normally I would awake to a roaring fire and hot coffee courtesy of my early-rising husband, but not today. Today for the first time, he’d gone fishing, and all that greeted me this overcast morning was a cold, empty campsite. My husband relishes cooking and fire duties when we’re camping, and I’m happy to enjoy a little pampering while I’m roughing it. But my …

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The 16-Second Survival Breath

February 10, 2021 / 24 Comments

When I think about it, I still get a queasy feeling in my stomach from a scenario several years ago when I was forced to put into practice survival breathing. It was a sunny day in Baltimore, and I was returning home from a business trip. I had passed through security with flying colors, of course, and was browsing the selection of breakfast sandwiches at a kiosk when I heard the unfamiliar, sudden sound of blaring sirens. In less than …

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Make the Most of Your Shelter-in-Place Days

April 3, 2022 / Leave a Comment

If you’re starting to feel a little bit stir-crazy at home right now, especially if your kids are out of school due to the pandemic, you aren’t alone. I can totally relate as someone who has been working from home for more than 2 decades. If you shelter in place for any reason, you need a plan to use this time productively. Whenever you have a lot of time on your hands, it’s easy to get fidgety, irritable, and with …

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How to Shelter in Place Without Going Crazy

May 27, 2020 / 10 Comments

There’s nothing like the word “pandemic” or “Ebola” to get people to finally pay attention to preparedness. When you have a well stocked pantry with enough food to last at least a couple of months, stored water and an effective way to purify tap water, if need be, plenty of cleaning and sanitation supplies, and the knowledge and skills to use them, you are likely not panicking at all. If anything, you’re looking around to see if there’s anything you …

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The Unthinkable - Who Survives when Disaster Strikes and Why?

10 Survival Lessons from The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why

May 29, 2020 / 4 Comments

“Once a disaster begins, people who have some familiarity with their disaster personalities have an advantage.” Do you know your disaster personality? Survival lessons from The Unthinkable help teach everyday people about their disaster personality, among other survival lessons. We have seen with our own eyes or on the news the unthinkable scenarios of terrorist attacks, earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis. Is there a way to know how you personally would react in these situations? How can you train yourself to give …

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lessons from deep survival

7 Survival Lessons from Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why

May 28, 2020 / 5 Comments

“Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we’re going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don’t defeat death, they come to terms with it.” Why do some people survive and others perish after experiencing the same set of circumstances? Why do some people walk out of a jungle after a plane crash and others sit and die? Author Laurence Gonzales digs deep into these questions and …

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