Recognize, respect, and utilize all your innate human powers to feel more safe and secure. Your safety and security depends on you.

Life is uncertain and riddled with risks. But, even if it’s impossible to fully guarantee your safety, you can still reduce the risks and improve your ability to stand up to them.

Safety and Security Is a Woman’s Issue

As an Energy Healer and Spiritual Life Coach, I often hear my female clients, friends, and others say they restrain themselves at times because they:

• are concerned for their safety,
• think they can’t do anything about the unpleasant or harmful situation,
• believe they have no control,
• are afraid of how others will react to their actions, or
• don’t want to upset someone.

Unfortunately, I’m not surprised by this. Most women, myself included, feel this way sometimes, if not often, or even constantly. Perhaps you too feel this way.

Nevertheless, you and nearly every woman can do more to increase safety and security. It may require extra self-resourcing by tapping into the self or enhancing specific capabilities, but it’s possible.

The truth is, that women typically have far more resources than they acknowledge or use. For example, all human beings (women too) are born with magnificent potential. But, as a girl develops, experiences, and learns she molds her perceptions, adjusts her expectations, and prioritizes her options and actions. She may ignore some of her strengths and miss opportunities.

Here, we’ll revisit some innate capacities of every woman, consider how they can be used more effectively, and appreciate how they can offer more safety and security.

Self-Reliance – Owning Your Safety and Security

Like many women of my generation, I had sexism, misogyny, and double standards drilled into my head. It was the ethos of my family, community, school, and even friends.

However, as I formed who I wanted to be, I realized I had to stand up for myself, be independent, and challenge the status quo. Through this process, I eventually realized that I couldn’t depend on those who were also my most significant threat.

From that point until today, I’ve invested in myself, in characteristics and skills that support my independence and ability to achieve and maintain my safety and security, allowing me to fulfill my dreams.

At times I was a bit of a warrior (an Amazon), but mostly I’ve shifted my outlook, mindset, priorities, and strategies. Today, I feel more competent (even fierce) when facing challenges and hardships. These shifts led to opportunities and my ability to choose what’s right for me.

Building your skills can do the same for you. For some, safety issues are more complex, intense, or deep-seated. Seeking assistance from others is a good option, but it does not preclude this type of investment in yourself.

Finally, adopting a “be a better human” approach is not about paranoia, constant suspicion, or manhating. It’s about caring and believing in yourself and your right to be happy as you fulfill the life you choose for yourself.

It’s about building capacity, forming healthy self-resourceful habits, and seamlessly setting the stage for you to show up as yourself to do what you want without a lot of baggage.

12 Basic Human Skills to Feel Safer and More Secure

Developing and using your whole mind, body, and spirit helps you know yourself, trust yourself, notice more opportunities, and take confident action. Start with these twelve basic human skills.

The first nine skills are about knowing and relying on yourself. The final three skills relate to accessing additional external knowledge and information related to safety, security, and protection.

After reviewing the list, you can find more detailed information on each skill by searching my Mind, Body, Spirit Blog using appropriate keywords.

1.  Ground and Center Yourself

Focus, stability, and strength require good grounding and centering. Grounding helps you maintain focus and stand up for yourself. Centering, on the other hand, gives you clarity, conviction, and determination. With both, you can hold your ground and effectively advocate for yourself.

Both are important if you want to feel safe and secure.

From a mind-body-spirit point of view, grounding and centering require a balanced and strong Root Chakra or Muladhara, the lesser-known Earth Star Chakra.

You can become more grounded and centered simply by breathing a specific way. Take several long, slow inhales and exhales visualizing sending your exhaled breath down your legs and into the Earth. This can be done anywhere at any time.

In addition, when needed, practice yoga asanas such as goddess and tree pose (see image). They connect you and your life force to gravity and Earth’s energy. Afterward, you’ll feel more solid, steady, and present within yourself.

2.  Untangle Your Emotions

Most people don’t realize that feelings aren’t emotions. Conflating thoughts with felt senses leads to what people often refer to as tangled emotions. Thus, how feelings and emotions differ can critically impact your mindset, outlook, current state of mind, and problem-solving aptitude.

Emotions are biochemical responses that cue you or your body to respond to a change. They are objective and authentic. Some signals are imperceptible, but plenty can be sensed with intent and attention.

Feelings are thoughts about emotions, the sensations inside your body, the current environment or situation, past experiences, and habitual thinking and beliefs.

Because they are thoughts, feelings can be accurate and reasonable or inaccurate and unreasonable.

To untangle your emotions, you need to separate them from your feelings by sensing what they are. You do this by turning your attention inward and focusing on the sensations you perceive (See my Blog post on how to untangle emotions). Greater clarity and authenticity give you more confidence, commitment, and follow-through.

3.  Let Go of Inauthentic Thoughts

From a subtle energy approach, limiting beliefs are closely associated with imbalanced Solar Plexus and Crown Chakras. However, all energy centers of the chakra system contribute to thought creation.

To identify limiting thoughts, listen for words and phrases like “should,” “must,” “ought to,” “need to,” “everybody,” and “nobody.” This type of language signals beliefs you might assume are facts and immutable, even though they might not be.

Three examples of limiting beliefs are: “I don’t have time, “I can’t do that,” and I’m not worthy.”(See my 60 examples of limiting beliefs post for a larger sample).

When you are curious and question thoughts and beliefs, you become aware of additional interpretations and new possibilities. You have more freedom. This reflection offers many new options and greater clarity and conviction.

Numerous practices can help you implement this. See my Mind, Body, Spirit Blog post and my short workshop on changing limiting beliefs. Identifying authentic thoughts and releasing limiting beliefs are essential elements of my Spiritual Life Coaching approach.

4.  Tap Into Your Head- Brain, Heart-Brain, and Gut-Brain

While it’s common to think of the mind as subsumed in the physical brain, the entire body contributes to the contents and capacities of your whole mind or embodied mind.

An increasingly accepted notion is that three parts of your body contribute to your whole brain: the head, heart, and gut. Each contributes to your perception and understanding in its unique way.

In addition, you have intuitive capacities whether or not you avail yourself of them. Because of cultural biases toward this innate human faculty, people typically need to learn how to access it. The same can be said for the ability to work with heart-brain and gut-brain.

See my Blog post on three ways to get to know your body-brain.

5.  Define and Maintain Authentic Boundaries

A key to your safety and security is the establishment of authentic well-defined and maintained boundaries. Put simply, boundaries act as “… an invisible line that defines acceptable behavior…” (Wellness Center, University of Illinois, Chicago).

When you know your boundaries and your degree of flexibility about them based on the person and situation, you gain significant clarity about your appropriate interpretation and actions in different social situations. This clarity strengthens your social and emotional intelligence.

6.  Listen to and Care for Your Body

Learn how your body communicates to you. Your body is constantly sending you signals. These can be internal felt senses, movements, postures, or expressions.

For example, your shoulders rise when your boundaries are threatened. Or, you feel a lump in your throat when you speak or act inauthentically. Some signals are typical across all human beings, others are unique to you. In either case, you need to pay attention, learn what they are, and respect them. Using body communication is what I refer to as “living from the inside out.”

7.  Check Your Language and Tone

Does your choice of words, the tone you use, and your posture reflect the persona you want to convey?  For example are you in that moment in the role of a leader, competent colleague, parent, authority figure, co-partner, or someone else?

Observe yourself with people and in situations where you typically feel insecure or threatened. Write down your observations. Then write a description of your archetype of that persona. Go back to your observations and circle where the two descriptions are consistent. Pull out and make a list of your observations that are inconsistent with your archetype. Develop strategies to change how you present yourself in the future.

Be compassionate with yourself. Try not to judge. Simply pick a characteristic you can work on and move forward.

8. Use Communication Skills

Learning good communication and language skills for different types of people and situations can help you navigate and resolve difficult situations where your safety is concerned. These skills will also help you engage in non-threatening situations as well.

Two good tools are non-violent communication and a book entitled Taking the War Out of Words.

In addition, learn de-escalation language and strategies and familiarize yourself with other cultures’ norms.

9.  Talk With, Learn From, and Share Among Your Circle of Friends and Family

Talk about your safety and security concerns with supportive family, friends, and coworkers. You’ll learn alternative and new strategies by sharing your concerns with these people. Because they are familiar with you, they can help you choose new strategies and approaches that suit you best.

10. Learn New Skills For Your Protection

There are numerous skills you can learn for protection. Depending on your situation and personal feelings, select which skills are appropriate. Make sure to keep your skills up-to-date.

Some Protection Skills to Consider

• Situational awareness
• Safety information and precautions when headed into new situations including new places and travel
• Victimology
• Personal defense such as martial arts, street moves, etc
• Cybersecurity and protection of personal data
• Legal rights related to a threatening situation at work, home, or other venue

11.  Know When to Seek Help

Ask for help if needed, but be discerning about the advice and assistance. People can have their ideas about how you should or shouldn’t show up in a given situation or how capable you are. Their ideas may not match your own concerning who you are or who you are becoming.

You’re the best person to gauge when you need help, although, the opinions of people close to you or who you spend time with can also be helpful, even when it feels uncomfortable to talk about it.

12.  Create a Life-Long Habit of Honing and Using Your Skills

Through continued practice and experience, you’ll develop and habituate to using these human tools. Your tools, in turn, will orient you to atune to your inner strengths, trust yourself, garner more agency, and self-actualize.

Everyone needs some support from others sometimes. Nonetheless, regarding day-to-day living, you’ll have your tools. You’ll be self-resourced. And, you’ll know when to seek help. You’ll feel more decisive, confident, committed, and free as a result.

Even if you can’t eliminate all threats, you can reduce them. You can lessen the stress, anxiety, and fear. Furthermore, you can reduce the pain from the consequences of actual and potential dangers.